Jean-Marie Le Pen “regrets” that President Jacques Chirac acknowledged the French government’s responsibility for deporting French Jews during the Holocaust. In an interview published Sunday in Le Parisian, the extreme right-wing candidate in France’s presidential elections said, “Chirac was the only president to do it. Not even [Francois] Mitterrand did it.”Early in his presidency, Chirac won the Jewish community’s admiration for recognizing the Vichy government’s responsibility for deporting Jews during the Holocaust.Asked about how the Holocaust is being taught to French high school students, Le Pen answered: “I’d rather not talk about this. Last time I did, expressing myself moderately, it cost me” some $250,000. “These debates are not part of the democratic freedom of expression principle.”In 1987, Le Pen was sentenced to a $250,000 fine for claiming that the gas chambers “were only a small detail in history.”
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