[Peace-discuss] Sarko the Sayan?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The French president visits DC this week to continue his audition to 
replace Tony Blair as Bush's poodle.  The following story has not been 
mentioned so far as I can find in the US media. --CGE]

	French President Accused of
	Working for Israeli Intelligence
	By Gamal Nkrumah
	11/04/07 Al-Ahram

As if his marital challenges were not enough cause for concern, "Sarco 
the Sayan" has suddenly emerged as the most infamous accolade of French 
President Nicolas Sarkozy. The influential French daily Le Figaro last 
week revealed that the French leader once worked for -- and perhaps 
still does, it hinted -- Israeli intelligence as a sayan (Hebrew for 
helper), one of the thousands of Jewish citizens of countries other than 
Israel who cooperate with the katsas (Mossad case-officers).

A letter dispatched to French police officials late last winter -- long 
before the presidential election but somehow kept secret -- revealed 
that Sarkozy was recruited as an Israeli spy. The French police is 
currently investigating documents concerning Sarkozy's alleged espionage 
activities on behalf of Mossad, which Le Figaro claims dated as far back 
as 1983. According to the author of the message, in 1978, Israeli prime 
minister Menachem Begin ordered the infiltration of the French ruling 
Gaullist Party, Union pour un Mouvement Populaire. Originally targeted 
were Patrick Balkany, Patrick Devedjian and Pierre Lellouche. In 1983, 
they recruited the "young and promising" Sarkozy, the "fourth man".

Ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky describes how sayanim function in By 
Way Of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer. They are 
usually reached through relatives in Israel. An Israeli with a relative 
in France, for instance, might be asked to draft a letter saying the 
person bearing the letter represents an organisation whose main goal is 
to help save Jewish people in the Diaspora. Could the French relative 
help in any way? They perform many different roles. A car sayan, for 
example, running a rental car agency, could help the Mossad rent a car 
without having to complete the usual documentation. An apartment sayan 
would find accommodation without raising suspicions, a bank sayan could 
fund someone in the middle of the night if needs be, a doctor sayan 
would treat a bullet wound without reporting it to the police.

And, a political sayan? It's rather obvious what this could mean. The 
sayanim are a pool of people at the ready who will keep quiet about 
their actions out of loyalty to "the cause", a non-risk recruitment 
system that draws from the millions of Jewish people outside Israel.

Such talk sends chills down spines, especially Arab and Muslim ones. 
Indeed, the revelation did not go unnoticed in Arab capitals or come as 
much of a surprise. Paris can be a sunny place for shady people. When it 
comes to intelligence gathering on behalf of Israel, a question mark is 
immediately raised on the moral calibre of the person in question. But, 
how does this scandal influence France's foreign and domestic politics?

It is of symbolic significance that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert 
was on a state visit to France in the immediate aftermath of Le Figaro's 
exposé -- ostensibly to discuss Iran's nuclear agenda and the 
Palestinian question. Proud and prickly France under its supposedly 
savvy new president hopes to play a more prominent role in the 
perplexing world of Middle Eastern politics. On Monday, Sarkozy flew to 
Morocco, the ancestral home of many of France's Jewry, soon after his 
Mossad connection was made public. There is no clear evidence that the 
revelation is to make France any more unpopular in the Arab world than 
it already is, especially not in official circles.

On the domestic front, however, there are many conflicting 
considerations. The Jews of France now display a touch of the vapours, 
in sharp contrast to the conceited triumphalism with which they greeted 
his election: "we are persuaded that the new president will continue 
eradicating anti-Israeli resistance," Sammy Ghozlan, president of the 
Jewish Community of Paris pontificated soon after Sarkozy's election. 
France is home to 500,000 Jews, mostly Sephardic Jews originally from 
North Africa and Mediterranean countries.

Sarkozy's own maternal grandfather Aron Mallah, hailed from Salonika, 
Greece, and is said to have exercised considerable influence on his 
grandson. Even though raised as a Roman Catholic, "Sarkozy played a 
critical role in moving the French government to do what is necessary to 
address the ill winds that threaten the largest Jewish community in 
Western Europe," noted David Harris, the executive director of the 
American Jewish Committee. Sarkozy, after all, was a political product 
of the predominantly Jewish elite neighbourhood of Neuilly-sur-Seine, 
where he long served as mayor.

France's Muslim minority was far from surprised by Le Figaro's 
revelations, even though some may have feigned disappointment. Others 
have been more forthright. "France is not run by Frenchmen, but by 
lackeys of the Zionist International who control the economy," lamented 
Radio Islam, of militant Islamist tendencies. When Sarkozy was France's 
minister of interior and clamped down hard on Muslim immigrants, calling 
mainly Muslim rioters "scum" in a widely-publicised interview, they 
retaliated by calling him "Sarkozy, sale juif [dirty Jew]". Obviously 
there is no love lost between the five million-strong French Muslim 
community, the largest in Western Europe, and the French president. He 
has grounds for concern. He assiduously courts the Israelis. That much 
is known.

In the scientific annals of French politics there is a cautionary tale 
of pantomime. French presidents are not always what they seem. There 
are, however, two key observations concerning Sarkozy. One, is Sarkozy's 
intention of implementing a "new social contract" between employers and 
employees, capital and labour. This smacks of Thatcherism. His 
determination to force a "cultural revolution" in the collective 
national psyche is a trifle farcical. And unprincipled to boot. He 
recently introduced legislation -- in tandem with his pension cuts, 
calling for genetic profiling of immigrants to ensure any relatives 
intending to immigrate are linked genetically. The strategy appears to 
be to soften the blow of the social security cuts by appealing to 
xenophobic racism.

The state of race relations in France is an even more muddled picture 
than the devastating caricatures by French-African comedian Dieudonne 
suggest. He is notorious for playing the part of a Hassidic Jew who 
mimics the Nazi salute. Few politicians blame their troubles on cynical 
comedians, though, and Sarkozy is no exception. His fans point accusing 
fingers at the "irresponsible press".

The real magic starts when you power Sarkozy with his ex-model wife. 
She, after all, played a part in the freeing of the Bulgarian nurses and 
a Palestinian medical doctor. She, too, is of Spanish-Jewish ancestry. 
But, that may be nothing but an insignificant aside. France, generally, 
regarded their bust-up as something of a bad joke. Unlike the Americans, 
the French do not take the private lives of their presidents terribly 
seriously. There was the late François Mitterrand, for example. Hardly 
anyone in all France raised an eyebrow when it transpired that he had an 
illegitimate daughter. The French are more concerned with the 
ideological orientation and political affiliation of their president and 
are not in the least interested in their private affairs -- at least not 
in any political sense.

The interesting twist, however, is that the contest between Cecilia and 
Nicolas Sarkozy is a comic cross between a lover's tiff and the battle 
of the sexes. It appears befuddled French voters are being forced to 
turn a blind eye to their leaders' antics. Sarkozy's divorce follows 
hard on the heels of the separation of France's first female 
presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, the "gazelle" of French politics, 
from her lifelong lover François Hollande barely a month after she lost 
the presidential race in May. Moreover, at the tender age of 19, Royal 
sued her father for his refusal to divorce her mother and pay alimony 
and child support. That was way back in 1972; barely a decade later she 
won the case against her father. Ironically, Royal's own mentor the late 
French socialist president Mitterrand was notorious for his 
extra-marital affairs, the most conspicuous being his love affair with 
Anne Pingeot and subsequent disclosure towards the end of his life that 
he fathered an illegitimate daughter Mazarine with her.

And, what of the voters? The latest hazard facing the French president 
has been his socio-economic policies. Sarkozy's showdown with the trade 
unions threatens to turn into a deciding moment for France. Foreign 
policy, too, has come under much scrutiny. France has become fanatically 
Atlanticist under the presidency of Sarkozy. Although, unlike US 
President George W Bush, Sarkozy does not make much noise about his own 
dubious religious convictions. The commonest criticism of Sarkozy is 
that he is overly conscious of his religious heritage, a trait that is 
not appreciated by the fanatically secular French political 
establishment. France is culturally the most irreligious country in 
Europe, itself the most secular and anti-religious of the world's 
continents.

For a politician acclaimed for his acumen, it is startling that Sarkozy 
has been tripped up by events he should have seen coming. His sagacity 
obviously failed him this week. Le Figaro let the cat out of the bag. 
And his wife, too, after shopping with Lyudmila Putin, the Russian first 
lady, apparently decided that she had had enough of being treated as 
"part of the furniture" and made their rift very public.

France is now in the awkward position of having no first lady. The 49- 
year-old former model, lawyer and political advisor is by no means media 
shy. "I gave Nicolas 20 years of my life," she told the popular French 
magazine Elle in a special feature which she asked for personally, 
despite the awkwardness of its timing. She had long complained of being 
politically peripheralised. Troubling as that interpretation is, it is 
in a way a consoling one for Sarkozy. He is now free to handle his 
opponents without his maverick Cecilia breathing down his neck or, on 
the contrary, disappearing at crucial moments.

Even with his personal life in tatters, Sarkozy is obliged to hoist the 
French tricoleur high in the international arena. Which flag is it to be?

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