In her latest column, RTL journalist Ventura noted on Thursday, May 23, how the student union had multiplied controversies, from the hijab worn by one of its presidents to the holding of decolonial summer camps, as well as the disregard shown for the unhealthy excitement around the fire of Notre-Dame.
These instances, says Ventura, show that the Union Nationale des Etudiants de France (UNEF) has been taken over by an anti-white lobby. UNEF is the largest representative student union in the country, but has been gradually turning into a “small communitarian group of anti-whites”.
The journalist presented listeners with a “small anthology of the arsenal” of the leftist union. “At the time of the fire of Notre-Dame, we find for example on Twitter messages of students or officials of the UNEF who say: ‘I do not care about Notre-Dame, because I do not care of the history of France’,” she said, alluding the comments about the cathedral’s frame being simple “pieces of wood”.
“You love the French identity too much, it’s your delusion little whites,” she quoted the remarks made by the vice-president of the Lille branch of the union. In Haute-Vienne, another UNEF member said they did “not respect the symbols and values of France” and called “whites pitiful”.
Alba Ventura also evoked UNEF’s efforts to ban a play last month, Les Suppliantes d’Eschyle, “on the grounds that some of the characters wore black masks” . The director was “accused of caricaturing black people,” says the journalist, adding that their “decolonial summer internships do not allow whites” and at the meetings of the national office, whites and blacks “do not mix”.
For Alba Ventura, these examples are symptomatic of the bias of this union, which wanted to be “secular, republican, feminist”, and had invested heavily in “an ideological racial struggle”.
Fearing that UNEF has become “a cult,” the journalist finally called on “the illustrious members” to “denounce” this untenable situation. As a reminder, some 86 union representatives already resigned on May 19.
Ventura works for Europe’s largest broadcaster, which includes RTL Television in Germany, M6 in France, the RTL channels in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Croatia, Hungary and Antena 3 in Spain. RTL Group’s families of TV channels are either the number one or number two in eight European countries.
The Group’s flagship radio station is RTL in France, and it also owns or has interests in other stations in France, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Luxembourg.
🔵 La journaliste Alba Ventura (RTL) dénonce le racisme anti-Blancs présent au sein du syndicat UNEF: « c’est devenu un groupuscule communautariste anti-Blancs ». Notre association @OLRA_asso renouvelle son appel à l’arrêt immédiat des subventions publiques à ce syndicat 🔵 pic.twitter.com/EGAPeqOxpi
— Association OLRA (@OLRA_asso) May 23, 2019
The support given by the student union to one of its representatives wearing the Islamic veil has brought to light the internal contradictions in the French left.
For Bruno Julliard, former president, interviewed by Marianne , the Islamic veil “tramples on decades of feminist struggle” and signals “patriarchal bigotry and sexism”. The current president of the student union, Lilâ Le Bas, said such insinuations are inappropriate: “It’s serious,” she wrote on Twitter in defense of Maryam Pougetoux, “to insinuate that a Muslim woman veiled can not be feminist.”
In 2010, the presence of a veiled candidate, Ilham Moussaïd on the list of Olivier Besancenot’s New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) in regional elections in the Vaucluse had given rise to two months of controversy. The frank disapproval of Martine Aubry (PS) and those more nuanced, by Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Left Party) or Benoît Hamon had announced the nascent divide.
The veiled candidate had been withdrawn but the spokesman of the NPA denounced “a nauseating and Islamophobic climate that has become unbearable”.
Erwan Seznec, a journalist and author of the Black Book of Trade Unions, 2016 says: “In general, the issue of Islam acts as a revelation of the state of strength or weakness of an organisation. Only a few organisations have made some courageous decisions. […] The others are overwhelmed …”
In its desperate search for the “oppressed minority”, UNEF has reached such a degree of mental confinement that the contradiction between their progressive creed and the wearing of the Islamic veil, their anti-racism and the workshops forbidden to whites, have become too problematic. “There is also the fact that they are terribly bad,” says a university professor in Paris. “The intellectual limits of these young people are frightening…”
UNEF has always maintained close ties with the Socialist Party, although the union has always been more left-wing than the party.
Fashionable struggles against the “white male” as a common enemy, is rife within the union. At the university elections in March, in Orleans, the list supported by the Moslem Students of France, made a breakthrough that no one had seen coming.
On the Facebook page of the local branch of the association, half of the comments ended with a ritual formula: “The wave is coming.” The wave has indeed arrived.