By analogy, if we were to develop a soccer team, then we would not invite basketball and volleyball players to the try outs. We would invite soccer players to apply.

There was no reason to label us as anti-Semitic.

My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks.

Everyone sees drama from his own perspective.

There wasn’t anti-Semitism in France.

Political rivals attacked me. I was savagely beaten. I was kicked in the face and I lost my eye as a result.

For some the most terrible aspect of it was the deportations, while for others it was the leveling bombings or the mass deaths by starvation and cold.

What’s surprising is that the people who fought against torture here are the communists.

The government would have preferred not to take a stand, but the constant presence of the Israeli-Arab conflict on our television screens made it an issue that could no longer be avoided.

France was an occupied country, a country that surrendered and was left without the right to choose.

When Joan D’ Arc was asked by her judges why as a Christian she did not love the British, she answered that she did love them, but she loved British in their country. In the...

The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives.

However, the wind only changes the picture temporarily, the substrate remains the same and sooner or later the same picture surfaces once again.

When two drivers curse each other on the road, and one of them happens to be a Jew, you can’t define that as anti-Semitism.

The suffering caused by the terrorists is the real torture.

I do not know one person in the National Front who committed even the most minor hostile act against a Jewish person or Jewish property.

I’m not saying that the gas chambers didn’t exist. I couldn’t see them myself.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.

As for me, even though I have been accused of anti-Semitism countless times, no one has ever heard me make anti-Semitic statements or engage in anti-Semitic behavior.

I have said and I repeat, at the risk of being sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War.

If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and...

You cannot speak on behalf of a nation when you have no mandate to do so.

After all, you’re not exactly a nation like all the other nations. You are unique, if only because you are such an ancient people, and because of the way you are spread all over the...

I’m always suspicious of people who repent of other people’s sins.

In my speeches, I always condemned communism, national-socialism and fascism.

Millions also perished in the Chinese camps, and there have been terrible genocides in Cambodia and Vietnam.

An ancient dictum says that when Zeus wanted to destroy someone, he would first drive him mad.

The Vichy government was under occupation and carried out the orders of the German occupier.

In recent years – before the intifada – there were three or four incidents of anti-Semitism a year, and that’s out of 18 million crimes and violations of the law.

In my judgement, there is a basic popular sympathy for Israel in France, but the demonstrative sympathy tends to go to the other side.

An isolated incident can always happen.

There is an Islamic population in France, most of which comes from the North African countries.

In the terrible tragedy of the war there was a unique fact: the deportation and murder of Jews and resistance fighters by the Nazis.

The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims.

But, in all honesty, anti-Semitism in France has always remained on a minimal level, at the verbal level only. It never went as far as pogroms.

There just are people, organizations, that need an adversary and they want the public to believe that this adversary is dangerous.

It’s a taboo subject that is protected by legal and criminal law, and the only opinion one can express about it is that allowed by law.

The result is that you are now experiencing what we experienced in the war in Algeria: The Israeli government says that it is a victim of terrorist activity, but this activity is less visible than...