"I'm not gay, but the Yellow Vests are anti-Semitic." That's not what Macron said openly of course, but the timeline worked that way.
The proposition was an attempt to slur the Yellow Vests, and to create a long-running distraction.
The resolution - not a law, but one step short of it - would be passed in December. What I found interesting was the huge amount of media coverage on it in December" after, not before, it was passed. I covered it before: it was mostly French Jews fighting against it, because it obviously unjustly makes all Jews responsible for the crimes of Israel. I've seen studies that half of European Jews are anti-Zionist. Of course, confusing anti-Semitism with the political, colonialist, segregationist project of Zionism is something nobody involved in politics should be dumb enough to confuse, but Macron did.
At the February 16th Yellow Vest march far-right ideologue Alain Finkielkraut was not welcomed, and called a "dirty Zionist". This created much media uproar, despite the latter being 100% accurate. The Yellow Vests marched against anti-Semitism on February 19.
Combined with the looming Benalla scandal, anti-Semitism was a very useful distraction for Macron at the time. It was undoubtedly instrumentalized by France's extremely powerful pro-Zionist lobby.
It gave me a chance to dust off a term I created during the Charlie Hebdo protests: 21st century France as a new "Holy Secular Empire".
Feb 27 - Council of Europe urges France to stop rubber bullet use
Does anyone care about the Council of Europe, or any pan-European institution, really? Of course not, but it was notable that any major organization condemned France back then.
For example, Human Rights Watch issued just a single condemnation of French police brutality in 2019 - against ecological protesters, not the Yellow Vests. Reports on Venezuela, Hong Kong, Syria - their reports are innumerable and their hypocrisy crystal-clear.
Five hundred critical injuries at this point; unions and France's Human Rights League estimated that 10,000 rubber bullets had been fired at Yellow Vests. Most journalists in France still euphemistically calling rubber bullets "flash balls" or, even worse, "defense ball launchers", which obviously assumes that the protester is always the aggressor.
Mar 6 - UN: 'full investigation' of brutality against Yellow Vests
The UN Human Rights chief properly recognized that, "The Yellow Vests have been protesting what they see as exclusion from economic rights and participation in public affairs."
France totally ignored this, of course. The prime minister said the UN chief lacked the "full picture", but he obviously summed up the heart of the matter.
However, ignoring condemnations of their police is what France does - French police have been condemned for police brutality over and over by the UN and top NGOs for many years.
During the labor code rollback protests in 2016 at least 4,000 protesters were arrested, with well over 1,000 people hurt by police in Paris alone, according to Amnesty International. Extrapolate those numbers nationwide. I covered all those demonstrations too - it's why I always said that I perceived that the Yellow Vests were only 15-20% more violent than France's "normal" violent demonstrations. Only the Yellow Vests ever graffiti-tagged the Arc de Triomphe, sure, but that was just a huge propaganda victory for the Vesters.
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