I missed the significance of this story when scrolling headlines yesterday. From the Associated Press (AP),
France moves to bar US Ambassador Charles Kushner from direct government access.
Based on the headline, I thought it was just some anti-Trump pettiness. It goes much deeper. The AP reports,
France’s top diplomat Monday requested that U.S. Ambassador Charles Kushner no longer be allowed direct access to members of the French government after he skipped a meeting to discuss comments by the Trump administration over the beating death of a far-right activist.
You will rccall the incident earlier this month where a half-dozen far-left antifa thugs beat to death an (alleged) “far-right” activist on the streets of Lyon. One of the thugs was employed by the national parliament at the time.
So what was in the offensive “comment”?
Kushner had been summoned following a statement by the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, which posted on X that “reports, corroborated by the French Minister of the Interior, that Quentin Deranque was killed by left-wing militants, should concern us all.”
Yes, it should concern us all. Here are the full contents of the post on X,
Reports, corroborated by the French Minister of the Interior, that Quentin Deranque was killed by left-wing militants, should concern us all. Violent radical leftism is on the rise and its role in Quentin Deranque’s death demonstrates the threat it poses to public safety. We will continue to monitor the situation and expect to see the perpetrators of violence brought to justice.
Again, what’s the problem? The surface compliant from the French government is that the U.S. State Department was making an ideological political point out of an obviously political act of left-wing violence.
What’s really going on? The answer lies in the “punishment” meted out for the “crime.”
The real French complaint appears to lie in the words “Minister of the Interior,” “threat,” and “on the rise.” It seems that the State Department has given away what the French consider to be a state secret: that internal left-wing terrorism is out of control in mainland France.
The French Foreign Ministry called in the Ambassador to receive a scolding, which he declined to attend. Cutting off “direct access” to. members of the national government appears to be an effort to keep their own minister of the interior from leaking more “state secrets.”
I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.
