"I am laghing at it" said Alexandre del Valle to his detractors

- From all the geopoliticians, you are the one who is most attacked. What do you think is the motive for the harassment of which you are an object?

I think, with no intention to be cocky, that because my writings are serious and well documented they disturb various powerful and often self-excluding circles. Also, because I am a politically committed and, at the same time, independent researcher I am able to research and hit in many directions and thus I disappoint the “Manicheans” who want to classify people in terms of black and white.

I have a number of real enemies! These enemies – be they avowed or not – include all those from the Left who are pro-Islamist and pro-Arab, those from the extreme Left, extreme anti-Zionist Right and from pro-Islamist diplomatic and politically correct circles. None of them can prove that I am wrong or that I show the West's vulnerability in the face of the radical Islamist and terrorist onslaught in an excessively dark light. Therefore, they have no other choice but to make me look like a dangerous manipulator or an extremist with an evil past or with alleged shady friendships.

But what is important is that my conscience is calm and my writings speak for myself. They contain no hatred, no discourse opposed to humanism which is dear to me, and no distortion of facts. One cannot forgive me in particular for leaving the originally pro-Gaullist, anti-American and independent political persuasion for a liberal pro-American and pro-Israeli one yet capable of criticizing the mistakes of the USA.

One refuses to believe that a researcher can be a member of a political party – UMP (Popular Movement Union) of Nicolas Sarkozy – and, at the same time, remain independent. One also blames me for having as my guides or friends unclassifiable and liberal people such as Bat Ye'Or, Jean-Pierre Peroncel-Hugoz, ou Pierre-Marie Gallois who, twenty years ago, were the first to raise the alarm and analyze the danger of Islamist totalitarianism against the West.

One cannot forgive me for criticizing Islam yet, contrary to some “Islamophobes”, not rejecting it entirely. On the contrary, I propose a liberal and progressive alternative to the Arabo-Muslim world which is represented by anti-fundamentalist Muslims like the great Tinisian intellectual Mezri Haddad, the Franco-Algerian Rachid Kaci with whom I created the liberal Right in the Popular Movement Union , the former minister of the Shah Houchang Nahavandi, the Iranian dissident Kaveh Mohsseini and many other Muslims such as Abdelwahhab Medeb, Souheib Bencheikh or Mohammed Charfi, all of whom denounce “the disease of Islam”.

Lastly, one cannot forgive me for getting a little “too much” publicity in the media after the September 11 attacks. Nor can one forgive me for having denounced - in Le Figaro, on TV and radio - the new Western and European “Munich” in the face of Islamist fascism: and then for having denounced the phenomenon of dhimmitude which has gradually been befalling the declining – psychologically as well as demographically – countries of Europe which seem to be sinking into a condition which Bat Ye'Or has described as Eurabia.

- Haven't you endangered your position by speaking in discussions and at book fairs frequented by people of the extreme right professing “the language of hate”?

No, neither in my own eyes nor in the eyes of the great Shoah fighters and survivors nor in those of the Nazi hunters who shaped me and confided in me and who know that by having been with them and having talked to them I learned a great deal about the totalitarian movements.

As for the people professing the “language of hate”, I do not consider them my friends and I condemn their extremist ideas in my books. If I had been able to initiate a generously documented geopolitical thesis about the reds-browns-greens (extreme Left, different forms of fascism and Islamism) and then contribute to a better analysis of the forms of the new dangers for the Judeo-Christian West, it was mainly because I had entered their territory: in Lebanon, in Africa, in Latin America and because, apart from learning more professionalism and pragmatism, I had got witness accounts, interviews etc.

- Your opponents blame you for having intellectual affinity with Alain Griotteray. Could you tell us something about it?

Let's recall the facts: recently the authors of an anti-Zionist defamatory publication blaming the Jews for the so-called takeover bids accused me of having been once placed and promoted in the Le Figaro and within the RPR-UDF( former ruling right wing party) by Alain Griotteray, a man who had dared to publish a book about a moderate right. Griotteray is said to have advocated an alliance of all the kinds of the Right for the sake of fighting the Left. This allows my enemies to identify me with the radical Right.

As for Griotteray, never ever did he make any alliance with the National Front of Le Pen but he had in fact always been one of the greatest defenders of Israel in France and a zealous fighter against anti-Semitism. Griotteray was the creator of the first great network of the resistance fighters in France in 1940 and this was during the time when the Communist preachers of morality took up the propaganda of the Third Reich in the name of the Hitler-Stalin alliance.

- What is the fight that you are carrying?

A fight for the defense of the fragile model of our society, because open societies like ours cannot survive unless we defend them in terms of territory, people and ideology. One of my major references is Karl Popper and his historical work: The Open Society and its Enemies.

As a matter of fact I think that the enemies of the free world are the said reds-browns-greens who are totalitarian, anti-Western, antidemocratic, anti-liberal, anti-Christian, pathologically anti-American and anti-Jewish and who are, therefore, linked and interconnected with each other through the same old hatreds.

- Why out of a sudden do you worry about the Jewish condition without having, as far as I know, any roots in the Jewish community?

Many more things than you could suspect make me close to that community! I never proclaimed it by shouting from the rooftops, like most professional manipulators and hijackers of the Jewish memory like to do it but today I feel I should make it public in order to prevent my detractors from having any suspicions and to disprove their theories of the Jewish plot and Jewish infiltration.

First of all, what makes me close to that community is the fact that since my young age, and due to my “pied noirs” background, as well as due to my original surname which sounds “Jewish”, I have suffered anti-Semitism.

Secondly, the fact that in 1999 I married an Argentine Jewish woman of Ashkenazi background whose family had been affected by the Ukrainian and Polish pogroms and the Shoah.

I would like to add here the for many years now I have been attending Jewish holidays more than the Christian holidays and that I married into that community through my new family and that it is a community which is, moreover, the most directly and most obsessively affected and targeted by the red-brown-green totalitarianisms which I have been studying and fighting against for years.

Finally, I must say that never before have I been attacked so much by the media as since the time when I started defending Israel and the French Jews – victims of the red-brown-green totalitarianism…I am, therefore, both a direct and indirect victim of anti-Semitism.

- What would you say to those who accuse you of being the Trojan Horse of the National Front?

I am laughing at them. Why? Because those who really know the extreme Right and my views should know that Le Pen considers me an Israeli agent; and the National Front as well as GRECE (Organization for the Studies and Research of the European Civilization)*, the new Right, and almost all of the extreme Right hate me and challenge my thesis which, in their view, is not only “Zionist” but also addresses the need to build a “republican” Islam and to achieve the integration of the immigrants.

I have been working for it together with Rachid Kaci, Mezri Haddad, Kaveh Mohsseini, Jbil Kebir and many other French moderate Muslims who are hated by the extreme Right as much as by the Islamists. It must be known that immigrants as well as those non-fundamentalist Muslims are for me my brothers and full compatriots like all the French of all origins as long as, using Nicolas Sarkozy's words, they observe the laws of the Republic and the respect of the French flag.

- What do you think of the politics of the unilateral of the lat Israeli governments? What do you think could be its geopolitical impact on the region?

I always thought that Ariel Sharon with whom it originated was a strategic and geopolitical genius. The future will show if it was politically right or geopolitically wrong…

(1) David Reinharc is an editor and journalist. Serge Lukasiewicz teaches at the Bar-Illan University.
(2) See: The Jerusalem Post (French edition, nr 771)

* GRECE – neo-pagan and extreme right wing organization