Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and essayist. Every week, he deciphers the news for FigaroVox.
This week, several Insoumis deputies, such as Mathilde Panot and Thomas Portes, posted tweets accusing the far right of having orchestrated raids on Wednesday evening in many cities in France.
The next day, the newspaper
Liberation
adopted the same posture and title on the front page
"Extreme right: Blue night, Brown plague"
, accompanied by an image illustrating this night of apocalypse and the following subtext:
"Paris, Lyon, Nantes, Nice... After the France-Morocco match on Wednesday evening, several cities were the scene of racist attacks.
Sign of a rise in power of identity and ultraviolent small groups.
On page two, we find the same rhetoric with the title
“The night of the great surge”
, followed by the editorial whose remarks may seem greatly exaggerated:
"Even in our worst nightmares, we did not think we should devote an editorial to events that evoke dark times in history"
.
On page three, the daily suggests what dramatic events it could be, since it is written there:
"Following attempts at violent demonstrations against Moroccan supporters, left-wing personalities such as Marine Tondelier or Mathilde Panot have denounced what could be likened to ratonnades”
.
Throughout the issue, Liberation refuses to qualify these accusations, which are based on only one concrete fact: the police arrest in Paris, as a preventive measure, of some forty ultra-right activists who were preparing, it seems, to do battle on the Champs-Élysées.
While amateur videos of that night are circulating everywhere on the internet, the daily's journalists have however brought almost no visual support to the facts they describe.
And few other newspapers reported racist abuses that night.
It is clear that if such a punitive expedition had been led by the extreme right, the media resonance would have been 15 times greater.
Gilles-William Goldnadel
As for the violence and degradation committed by Moroccan supporters and the 266 arrests that same night, Liberation mentions very little about it.
I will quote
Le Figaro
:
“In Montpellier, inter-community tensions between Travelers and North Africans have been escalating since Wednesday, after the end of the France-Morocco football match.
That evening, a 14-year-old boy was run over by a car.
A group of about twenty young people had surrounded a white Citroën C 4 and tried to tear off a French flag found in the vehicle.
The driver then rushed off before turning around and fatally crushing a 14-year-old minor of North African origin.
This individual on the run would come from the community of Travelers.
According to our information, the apartment of the passenger of the vehicle involved in the fatal accident was broken into and ransacked overnight from Thursday to Friday.
This man, beaten up just after the incident, has since been hospitalized.
“
Allah Akbar!
”
or even:
“
We will n..... your mothers the gypsies
”
.
A first punitive expedition at the initiative of the North African community would have taken place on Thursday morning.
»
Read alsoWorld Cup: the driver who killed a teenager in Montpellier "identified" but actively sought
Why has the media left remained silent this time?
Not out of aversion to travellers, but because this event refers to the racism that immigrant communities can show (the whole of the gypsy community being held accountable for the tragedy that happened to poor little Aymen), which takes them out of their simple martyr posture.
It should, however, be noted that certain left-wing newspapers have spoken about it, but by dismissing the aggressors and the attacked back to back by the evocation of a
"misunderstanding between communities"
.
It is clear that if such a punitive expedition had been led by the extreme right, the media resonance would have been 15 times greater.
If the media concealment of certain facts has become common, such silence around an event of such gravity leaves me absolutely flabbergasted.
And this front page is all the more astounding since these same newspapers were the first to denounce
“political and media appropriation”
during the Lola affair.
