LE PEN: "JEWS WILL HAVE TO CHOOSE"

Our pick to win the French Presidential election this year, Marine Le Pen has told French Jews that they will no longer be able to have both French and Israeli passports, but will have to choose just one. 

The Front National contender told France 2 TV that if elected, she would stop French citizens holding on to citizenship in a non-European country. When asked about French citizens with dual Israeli citizenship she responded: "Israel isn't a member of the European Union, and doesn't consider itself as such," meaning a big "Non" to dual Israeli-French citizenship.

As part of an ambitious drive to create a new civic nationalist identity that embraces people of different racial and cultural backgrounds, Le Pen wants people to identify as "French" and do away with religious symbols in public. 

This is her somewhat naïve but politically presentable strategy for dealing with the deep divisions created in France by decades of irresponsible multiculturalism. 

For this reason she also supports a ban on various types of clothing connected to religious, racial, and ethnic cultural identity, such as Muslim hijabs and Jewish yarmulkes. 

In an interview with Israel’s Channel 2, Le Pen said the yarmulke, also known as the kippah, the distinctive Jewish skullcap, will have to go.

"Honestly, the dangerous situation in which Jews in France live is such that those who walk with a kippah are in any case a minority because they are afraid,” Le Pen said. “But I mainly think the struggle against radical Islam should be a joint struggle and everyone should say, ‘There, we are sacrificing something.'"

France has around 500,000 Jews, mostly descended from North African Jews rather than Ashkenazi Jews. In recent years, as France has become increasingly Islamicized, the number of French Jews resettling in Israel has increased. There are now around 200,000 "French" Jews living in Israel.