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Ooh là là, there’s an election about to take place in the land of cheese and everyone’s commenting about it as if North Korea suddenly decided to go democratic. French elections are like the cancan: always the same, with high kicks and hopes for smaller parties ending like the dance, doing splits on the floor and the usual suspects back in power.

Tensions were intensified after the attack and rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl by boys her age, boys The New York Times and other media failed to identify. What I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar is the three boys aged 12 and 13 are Muslims, born in France and brainwashed since birth. Muslim outrages against French institutions, churches, and synagogues take place as regularly as the Tour de France, yet so politically correct is France no one as yet (that I’m aware of) has named the three perpetrators as Muslims.

And yet something I cannot put my finger on is bothering me. The slaughter in Gaza has Muslims the world over up in arms. The largest Jewish community in Western Europe is in France. The extreme left leads a coalition that has condemned the slaughter in Gaza, while the right, led by Marine Le Pen, is now Israel’s greatest supporter. Switch over to the Big Bagel for a moment, where a pro-Israel group has just sunk $14.5 million in a campaign to dethrone a black congressman whose views on Israeli bombardment of Gaza were deemed immoderate.

Almost 15 million big ones have flooded the TV channels against an obscure congressman of the Bronx–Long Island constituency who was quite moderate in his criticisms of the Israeli overkill. Filling television screens, stuffing mailboxes, and clogging telephone lines, AIPAC and other pro-Israeli groups are using the same approach elsewhere. The message to politicians everywhere in the United States is as follows: Being pro-Israel is not just a wise policy, it’s also smart politics that will keep you in Congress.

Now I ask you, dear readers. What kind of democracy is it when an extremely rich minority can spend enough moola to actually impose its will on the many? If I go any further it will be called anti-Semitism, or better yet pro-Nazi. The irony is that the congressman the Jews are after, Jamaal Bowman, is not very smart—having been caught red-handed opening a fire door and triggering the alarms in order to stop a vote in the House recently. His great sin was to demand Uncle Sam stop sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel to drop on Gaza. Bowman does not have much money coming his way, and he is as likely to be reelected as I am to win a Pulitzer for this article, but such are the joys of standing up for what one believes.

And now back to the land of cheese and why did I bring in Bowman and AIPAC and all that dreary money stuff? Unlike in America, where the Israeli lobby, AIPAC, and the Anti-Defamation League are always alert where anti-Semitism is concerned, France is a Catholic country that has a rather so-so past with her Jewish citizens: Dreyfus and Vichy are the first to come to mind. The place of Jews in French society has emerged as a prominent theme in the election because of the once falsely accused as anti-Semitic National Rally party of Marine Le Pen—her father made an unfortunate remark very long ago that always comes up the moment the party is mentioned—whose anti-immigrant position lies at the core of its growing popularity. Le Pen now backs Israel since the Hamas attack of October 7.

I’ll get to what is bothering me in a second, but first the left. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed is vehement in its denunciation of Israel’s military occupation in Gaza, and he has—correctly, in my opinion—called it genocide. So, here we have the right wing cheering the Israelis on, and the left calling them cold-blooded killers. Mélenchon went further when he accused the Jewish president of the National Assembly of “camping out in Tel Aviv.”

Then, out of the blue, three boys rape a Jewish girl and the headlines dominate the politicians and their squabbling. And poor Taki begins to suspect that somebody somewhere put those boys up to no good as the pro-Arab left is shown as breeding monsters who rape 12-year-olds. Otherwise, everything is topsy-turvy. An anti-Semitic left and a nationalist populist right is a brand-new twist in French politics.

Ironically, none of the above seems to work. The right coming out as pro-Israel has only drawn catcalls from the organizations that represent the 450,000 Jews in France. I could have told Marine and saved her the trouble. Will a French Jew ever vote for the right? By siding with the Israeli bullies who are killing Palestinians nonstop with American weapons, the right is digging its own grave. When the identity of the three boys becomes known, as well as their religion, things might clear up a bit, but in the meantime, if you live in France, keep your 12-year-old daughter at home, as there are two weeks to go.