PARIS (EJP)--- Former French Prime Minister Raymon Barre has sparked an uproar within the Jewish community after accusing “the Jewish lobby” of making “a scapegoat” of Maurice Papon, a French senior official who signed deportation orders for hundreds of Jews in the Bordeaux region during WWII.

In an interview last week with France Culture, a state-run radio station, Barre also said that “opposing the deportation of Jews had not been a matter of “major national interest.”

CRIF, the umbrella of French Jewish secular organizations, said it was “scandalized” by the comments, adding that Barre "had joined the extreme-right".

Historian and film director Claude Lanzmann accused Barre of being "an anti-Semite".

Such statements from a figure who was Prime minister are part of things which can worry the Jewish community. Joël Mergui, head of the Paris Consistoire, the umbrella organisation for religious institutions.

A senior official under the wartime Vichy government, Papon was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 1998 for his role in organising the deportation of hundreds to Nazi extermination camps.

During his six-month trial, the longest in French history, Papon came to symbolize France’s collaboration with the Nazis.

He was convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity, after the court rejected his plea that he was a civil servant following instructions from above.

He was released in 2002 on medical grounds and died last month aged 96.

Moral judgement

The radio interview initially focused on Papon’s guilt. Asked if he understands that it is possible for someone to be guilty of not disobeying, Barre said: “When you have essential responsibilities in a department, a region or even more at the national level, you don’t resign. You only resign when it is truly a question of major national interest.”

“Mr Papon became a scapegoat. I am not passing moral judgment on the attitude that one should have had with regard to the deportation of the Jews or not. But I consider that this country is fundamentally hypocritical in seeking out a few scapegoats.”

“Don’t forget that all the French personnel who went to manage the part of Germany occupied by France [after the end of WWII] consisted in large part of highly professional civil servants who needed maybe to be eliminated on a national level but were able to continue to serve the country at the international level”.

Barre added: “I want to say that on this issue I consider that the Jewish lobby – and not only with regard to me – is capable of mounting disgraceful operations and I want to say this publicly.”

Not the first time

Raymon Barre, who was Prime Minister under former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, already shocked the Jewish community at the time when reacting to a Palestinian terrorist bomb attack against a Paris synagogue in October 1980, he declared on the television: “This appalling attack was intended to hit Jews on their way to the synagogue, it has hit innocent French people who happened to be in the Rue Copernic”.

He implicitely stated that Jews are not French.

During the interview with France Culture, Barre said he doesn’t not regret his words.

“Don’t forget that in the same statement I said that the Jewish community cannot be separated from the French community. When you quote, you must quote in full. And the campaign undertaken by the Jewish lobby with the strongest links on the left came from the fact that we were in an electoral climate and this didn’t impress me and they can continue to repeat it.”

“Those who wanted to get their own back on Jews could have blown up the synagogue and Jews. But not at all, they launched a blind bomb attack and there were three French people, not Jews, that’s a fact, not Jews. And that doesn’t mean that Jews are not French,” Barre said.