92 Friday, May 2, 1986 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS The Jewish News is . . . NOTEBOOK The Khomeini Influence In Western Elections BY REV. FRANKLIN H. LITTELL Special to The Jewish News %4re / '/ / Your window to the war order a subscription or gift subscription today! ,1 1 •1111=111111111•11111111111•BIMM IMMONIMMOMMOMMIONIIMP=IIINIMINIIIIBMI•MIMIONNIIII To: The Jewish News 20300 Civic Center Dr., Suite 240 Southfield, Mi. 48076-4138 Gentlemen: Please send a (gift)subscription: NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP From: If gift state occasion , 1 year - $21 — 2 years - $39 — Out of State $23 Enclosed $ Foreign - $35 Few Americans are aware of the extent to which the recent elections in France was domi- nated by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. The media managed to pre- sent Mitterand and Fagius ver- sus Chirac in traditional ideolog- ical terms: the socialization of the economy versus nationalization, the politics of negotiation and ac- comodation vs. Gaullism, with marginal if colorful antics of right and left extremists. No one wanted to admit, either inside the country or out, that the one overriding factor was the humiliation of France by the dic- tator of a foreign nation. Yet Khomeini dominated this elec- tion the way Hitler dominated French politics in the months fol- lowing the election of Leon Blum and the Front Populaire in 1936. The image of the hostages, ac- cented night after night on TV, was working on the psyche of the electorate. French hostages were being held in Beirut by the Hez- bollah, Khomeini's fanatical Army of God, and French na- tional pride was being rubbed raw. Khomeini, who had been granted many years of safe haven in Paris away from the Shah's power, was repaying his bene- factors. Publicly he denounced the French leadership as count- ing among "the corrupt of the earth." Privately he was seeing to it that his religious zealots pro- vided the day-by-day flagellation of French national pride. Lebanon, which was a French sphere of influence from 1918 to 1946, had long had a substantial Shiite Muslim minority. But it was the sending of 600 Hezbollah fanatics to Beirut and 900 to the Bakaa region that de-stabilized the already volatile situation. The Syrian invasion of 1975-76, which turned the skirmishing of a small civil war into an interna- tional conflict of expanding mar- gins in which over 100,000 lost their lives, had been the fatal blow to Lebanese sovereignty. Lebanon, never recognized as independent, by Syria, became a jungle of competing _warlords and fiefdoms. The addition of the Hezbollah fanatics turned an al- ready explosive situation into another major conflagration. The incursion of the Iranian fanatics in the late spring of 1982, which the media did not report at the time, did not excape the notice of Israel's military watchdogs. The IDF police action in Lebanon began shortly thereafter. The French presence remained substantial after the mandate was surrendered in 1946. At the present time there are still 6,000 persons with French passports — 80 percent of them with double nationality — in Lebanon. Of these, 300 live in the greatest jeopardy in the Muslim (western) sector of Beirut. The •errorist pressure, orchestrated to. influ- ence the French election, was cal- culated by Khomeini and his entourage to afford maximum embarrassment to the govern- ment of another Western power. •. • -, per In 1981, Mitterand's Socialits took over the French govern- ment, following 23 years of con- servative regimes. Editorial writers and other intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals have been discussing the "big issues." The voters, in the meantime, were hanging on the TV reports from Lebanon, discussing the latest attempts to rescue the hos- tages from Khomeini's "Army of God." The influence of Khomeini, the most important personality in the French elections, is probably not to be measured within the major party alignments. All of those candidates have desper- ately tried to hedge their bets by calling for "national unity" and "closing ranks" on the hostage is- sue. None wants to be caught as soft on terrorism, given the French public's strong patriotic feelings and the universal moral revulsion against the kidnap- pings, abuses and killings of hos- tages held by the Arab ex- tremists. But the major parties have long been tainted by moral cow- ardice and vacillation on the ter- rorist issue: they have given aid and comfort to the PLO and thwarted actions initiated by America and West Germany to limit terrorist effectiveness. And the result has been to strengthen the National Front, a rightwing extremist party that reached close to ten' percent of the vote, and to further reduce the Com- munists — whom the voters know to be linked to the terrorist network — in number in the As- sembly. The leader of SOS-Racism, an organization formed to combat the chauvinism and racism of Le Pen's National Front, has warned that that the stunning upsurge of rightwing extremism "puts a permanent . cyst in French society, a cander threatening the healthy tissue." He is quite right. But what he might also have noted is that it was the weakness of the leadership of the center parties that accredited terrorism until that terrorism affected the lives of Frenchmen. Then the voters turned in significant number away from the leaders , in appeasement. The Fiench commentators have not failed to note the paral- lels in their situation to those be- fore the American -elections of ' 1980. In that season, Khomeini chose another Western country to humiliate: the U.S. And although the pundits talked about "conser- vatism" and "liberalism," about Democratic "social welfare" phi- losophy and Republican "private enterprise," for 444 days the fate of the hostages in Teheran domi- nated the American, political scene., Jimmy Carter's re-election chances weredamaged more than anything el$ by . the ineptitude of the attempted rescue, which seemed ; somehoW. to synibolize the uncertainties and indecisive nesp of foreigq po4y overall. • • . ;