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[The European Conservative] Georges Bensoussan, Radical Jew
Cancelled for denouncing Arab anti-Semitism, Bensoussan’s publicized trial has crystallized a larger malady that ails France’s intellectual life.
For a nation that collaborated in the Holocaust without being its ultimate perpetrator, France does a lot on remembrance policy — and rightly so. Schoolchildren are first taught the gruesome facts about the extermination of Europe’s Jews as early as age 11, and twice more in increasingly greater detail at ages 15 and 18 — oftentimes by survivors themselves in the occasional all-school lecture, or in school trips to the camps in Poland. To every France-based living orphan of Jewish wartime deportees from France, the country has been paying a generous pension since 1946, to the annual tune of €36.5 million in 2020. To say nothing of the additional €60 million paid in reparations to US-based deportee relatives who couldn’t benefit from the same policy until the two countries reached a bilateral agreement in 2015. Another €16 million is expended annually in reparations for the goods confiscated from Jews by the Vichy regime. Paris’ Shoah Memorial — an austere-looking complex on the right bank’s Marais district that officiates as the country’s official Holocaust Museum — runs on an annual budget of another €16 million.
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