Office of France's Macron targeted in antisemitic attack 36 hours before election

An Emmanuel Macron elections branch in Normandy was covered with antisemitic scrawls in an attack against the En Marche! leader a mere few days before the last round of elections in France.

By JOY BERNARD
Updated: MAY 6, 2017 03:10
EMMANUEL MACRON talks with residents during a presidential campaign visit yesterday in Bagneres de Bigorre, France. (photo credit: REUTERS)
EMMANUEL MACRON talks with residents during a presidential campaign visit yesterday in Bagneres de Bigorre, France.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Emmanuel Macron, leader of French political party En Marche! and the centrist contender running against Right-wing Marine Le Pen in the tight race for presidency that will be determined on Sunday's elections, came under an antisemitic attack once more this Friday.
A picture circulating on Twitter Friday evening showed the entrance to a Macron campaign branch in Normandy covered with antisemitic slogans and slander. Macron's face, gracing the entrance to the branch in a poster calling on voters to pick him in the elections that have sparked a heated debate in and outside of France, was covered with threatening Xs.
Some of the obscenities, scrawled in menacing red marker, included insults such as: "pedophile" (referencing Macron's wife, who is his senior by two decades),"Israel= Mossad de Rothschild" (a nod at the famed Jewish family whose name has become synonymous with the antisemitic portrayal of rich, conspiring Jews that also mocks Macron's past as an investment banker at the French Banque Rotschild), ''Sioniste'' (French for Zionist, unmistakably used as an insult) and 'the 20 most shocking extracts of the Talmud.'
Macron visits Paris holocaust memorial (credit: REUTERS)
Macron is not Jewish but is an avid supporter of the Jewish state.

Friday's attack is the latest in a series of antisemitic assaults on the 39-year-old Macron, the youngest candidate in the history of French presidential elections. 
Just this February Francois Fillon's conservative Republicans party took to Twitter to bash their political rival, posting a caricature of Macron in which he was depicted in a stereotypical antisemitic manner: Macron's nose was painted into an exaggerated hook, he was pictured clad in a suit, top hat and red sickle with which he was cutting a cigar.
The tweet and the attached cartoon were removed from the party's official Twitter handle and Fillon subsequently issued an apology, but the tweet gained a lot of traction worldwide and the party was criticized for the inappropriate and explicitly antisemitic insult.
Fillon said in his apology that he understood that the caricature "evoked the images of a dark period of our history and exploited an ideology," referencing the antisemitic propaganda prevalent in France during World War II when the country's Vichy government collaborated with the Nazis and their deportation and extermination of Jews.
Reuters contributed to this report.