France expels Algerian diplomats in tit-for-tat decision as their feud deepens
France said Wednesday it will expel Algerian diplomats in response to Algeria's decision to do the same, escalating a diplomatic standoff.
The Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs said in a statement it had summoned Algerian officials to inform them of the decision, describing it as 'strict reciprocity' after 15 French officials were expelled from Algiers on Sunday.
France did not say how many Algerians holding diplomatic passports had been expelled. It called on Algerian authorities to 'demonstrate responsibility and to return to a demanding and constructive dialogue that had been initiated by our authorities, in the interest of both countries.'
The measures are the latest sign of deteriorating relations between France and Algeria. They go against a 2013 deal allowing individuals with diplomatic passports to travel between the countries without needing visas.
Algeria said it expelled French officials on Sunday because France had broken procedures, including in how it assigned new diplomats to replace a different set that were expelled last month.
Despite economic ties and security cooperation, France and Algeria for decades have clashed over issues ranging from immigration to the painful legacy of French colonialism.
Tensions flared last year when France shifted its longstanding position and backed Morocco 's plan for sovereignty over disputed Western Sahara. Algeria views the Morocco-controlled territory as Africa's last colony and supports the pro-independence Polisario Front materially and politically.
The tensions jeopardize more than $12 billion in annual bilateral trade and could create hurdles for the hundreds of thousands of Algerian-born residents of France who travel between the countries.
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Telegraph
9 hours ago
- Telegraph
The middle-class student activists motivated by ‘privilege guilt'
From chants to 'Globalise the Intifada' on the leafy campuses of New England to anti-colonial vandalism in 700-year-old Oxbridge colleges, the more prestigious the university, the more amenable it seems to anti-West radicalism. Last week, Sciences Po – the Paris university that serves as a finishing school for France's elite – was accused of being 'ruined by woke radicals' in a book by a Le Figaro journalist. Similar accusations are made against Harvard, Yale and Columbia in the United States and Oxford and Cambridge in Britain. Trans rights, climate change, and Black Lives Matter have all been sources of fierce student protest in recent years. But nothing appears to have radicalised elite students more than the war in Gaza. Israel's response to the attack by Hamas on October 7 has emerged as the principal motivation for protests by some of the highest-status students in the world – those who supposedly work to the highest standards and expect to reap the rewards of their privilege as future, highly-paid leaders in business, politics, and law. A disproportionate number of students at elite universities are also from middle-class backgrounds. In 2023, one in three successful Oxford applicants and a quarter of successful Cambridge applicants came from private schools. 'There is a paradox at the heart of this,' says historian and former Oxford professor David Abulafia, who has criticised the excesses of woke ideology in our culture. 'The protesters are obsessed with entitlement and ideas like how evil whiteness is, but of course, most of them are entitled and the vast majority are white. The positions they take are full of contradictions.' It is not a coincidence that some of the most privileged students are adopting these positions, says Abulafia. 'There is an embarrassment about being in a privileged situation. People want to appear to reject characteristics they themselves have and the only way they seem to be able to deal with these characteristics is to side with those who are critical of them.' Columbia University in New York has become the epicentre of student radicalism over the Gaza conflict, with the tents of the 'Gaza Solidarity Encampment' appearing in April last year. This climaxed with the occupation of Hamilton Hall, brought to an end by riot police and the arrest of more than 100 people. Last month, police in helmets streamed into the university to remove a group of mask-clad protesters, some of whom had written 'Columbia will burn' across pictures. Four days after the Hamas attack on Israel, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee released a statement that students 'hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence'. It was co-signed by 33 student groups. Protests have flared at Harvard and fellow Ivy League giant Yale ever since. In April this year at Yale, some 200 keffiyeh-wearing protesters chanted, 'We will honour all our martyrs.' With the protests have come complaints by Jewish students that they have been made to feel unsafe and intimidated by rising anti-Semitism. This pattern of radical protest by students at elite universities is mirrored in Britain. One of the Just Stop Oil activists accused of defacing Stonehenge last April, Niamh Lynch, 22, was an Oxford student. Lynch denies the charges against her and, at a hearing in January, asked for her trial not to clash with her university exams this summer. It has been set for October. In 2023, Daniel Knorr, a 21-year-old biochemistry undergraduate, allegedly sprayed the Radcliffe Camera Building in Oxford with orange paint in protest at the university's links with fossil fuel companies. He has pleaded not guilty and his trial will take place in August. Chiara Sarti, a PhD student at King's College, Cambridge, sprayed her own college building with orange paint in 2023 and in March last year, an unidentified member of Palestine Action (it's still not known whether they attended the university) knifed and defaced a painting of Lord Balfour in Trinity College, Cambridge, for his part in the creation of the state of Israel. In January, members of Oxford Action for Palestine seized the Radcliffe Camera Building. The group said it had renamed it the Khalida Jarrar Library, after the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a proscribed terror group. Meanwhile, Phoebe Plummer – who was convicted of defacing Van Gogh's Sunflowers at the National Gallery in 2022 – studied at Manchester University having attended a £50,000-a-year boarding school in Ascot. Douglas Headley, a professor of philosophy of religion, has worked at Cambridge's divinity faculty for almost three decades, since 1996. In that time, the university has seen protests ranging from large-scale demonstrations on the Iraq War and student fees, to the recent acts of vandalism by Just Stop Oil and pro-Palestinian activists. In March, the High Court granted Cambridge an injunction preventing protesters from disrupting graduation events. On Friday Trinity and St John's Colleges sought fresh injunctions against pro-Palestinian demonstrators as a result of an encampment set up on their land over the previous weekend. 'For young people, a cocktail of radicalism within a secure environment is unbelievably attractive,' says Hedley. 'The ideologically driven self-hatred and hatred of the country is the core of this problem.' Is it possible that the privilege actually increases the students' urge to be more radical? What motivates their keenness to rubbish the heritage from which they have benefitted more than anyone, and where does their moral certainty come from? 'Some privileged young people understand they have had access to things that others do not,' explains Paul Glynn, clinical director at Klearminds therapy group, who has worked with students on issues of privilege. 'The key emotions are guilt and shame. Guilt is an activating emotion – it's about making amends or a correction. Shame can be isolating. A student can often deny or avoid exposing their privilege to others.' 'Privilege can result in 'overcompensation', where students experiencing guilt align themselves with causes that make them feel like they have a less privileged identity,' adds Glynn. When students chant 'Globalise the Intifada' on campus, it's an expression of an overtly binary view of the world, an expression that can be linked to their privilege. 'Certainty is attractive,' says Glynn. 'Most of these issues are complex, but we don't like that so let's make it good or evil.' 'What strikes me is the lack of knowledge among students,' says Abulafia. 'With the Gaza/Israel example there is a complete ignorance about the historical context. They don't really seem to be interested.' The anti-Vietnam marches of the 1960s were an attempt to stop a war which had direct consequences for American students, with a chance that you, your friends or family members could be drafted to fight and die on the other side of the world. The current protests have grown in a hothouse of identity politics – in which protesters' views on Gaza are part of a broader world view that tends to encompass critical race theory, extreme trans rights and anti-capitalist activism. Through this lens, Israel is perceived to be a white colonising state and therefore bears the sins of all colonialists, with its associations of racism, apartheid and exploitation. As Abulafia highlights, in many cases, the students appear to be rejecting the world that got them to such colleges in the first place. If they are told the system is bad, they must be bad too. Assumptions about colonialism in higher education that sprang from Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism and the influence of French intellectuals such as Michel Foucault have contributed to the notion of a hierarchy of oppression, from which students can judge who and what deserves the most sympathy. Katharine Birbalsingh, a leading headteacher who advocates for freedom of speech, suggests that the problem starts at school – specifically private school classrooms – where the connection between privilege and guilt is first made. 'It seems obvious there is a relationship between what you might call 'woke' culture and privilege,' says Birbalsingh. 'By that I include mainly white, middle-class people. Woke ideas like 'decolonisation' and criticism of Western values are everywhere in the most exclusive private school classrooms and that feeds into universities. 'One example is outside speakers who come into private schools and imply that there is something wrong with being privileged and they point towards absolving themselves by embracing Black Lives Matter or the trans movement.' Birbalsingh recently claimed that transgender children are more likely to be 'white and privileged' and that many were searching for 'victimhood narratives', which are 'admired' in modern society. Deferring to your less privileged peers A key part of the dynamic between privilege and protest is how some students react to their less socially advantaged peers. Psychologists suggest students who are perceived to be 'marginalised' are more likely to be listened to, especially when it comes to theories around race and history. 'We have found that students from less privileged backgrounds are deferred to by more privileged ones, because the privileged students believe that the opinions and beliefs of others must be more authentic,' says Dr Helena Bunn, a member of the British Psychological Society and a director of a doctorate programme that explores social justice, oppression and privilege with students at the University of East London. 'The privileged students feel compelled to become advocates for a cause they have little personal connection to. If there is guilt about privilege, that can lead to less critical thinking. 'There can also be a sense of 'I feel I have to do something' so they follow the opinions of others who are seen to be less privileged. It can be as simple as just thinking 'something is wrong here' like a war for example, but the emotional priority is to belong to the cause.' Perhaps the most infamous example of student entitlement was recorded during the Columbia tent encampment, with the appearance of Johannah King-Slutzky as its spokesperson. King-Slutzky, a PhD English student and the daughter of psychologists, warned that students illegally occupying university property could 'die of dehydration and starvation' if they were not given supplies. The protests have raised the ire of the Trump administration, which sees the demonstrations as evidence that universities such as Columbia and Harvard are gripped by a 'woke' elite complicit in the radicalisation of their students. The US president threatened to redirect $3 billion in Harvard research grants last week, following a decision to suspend foreign students from enrolling. 'Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect,' he said. 'Globalise the Intifada' may be cosplay rebellion for some privileged students and a way of expiating guilt for others, but sceptics argue the increasing prevalence of the chant has real-world consequences. The former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss pointed to recent attacks on Jews in New York and Colorado, saying: 'It was dismissed as a metaphor and not what it always was: a demand for open season on Jewish people worldwide.' 'The elite institutions have been ideologically captured,' says Hedley. 'When I worked in the US, I noticed the universities you would assume to be the best weren't because their departments and academics were taken over by a gender and race ideology. Once you turn a university into an ideological arena, it encourages the students to express their outrage and their virtue in ways the average person outside is not going to be very impressed with.'
Telegraph
10 hours ago
- Telegraph
ITV ‘censored' Martina Navratilova for claiming boxer Imane Khelif was male
ITV has been accused of 'censoring' Martina Navratilova for stating a controversial boxer was male. Dozens of other comments were also 'hidden' from the broadcaster's X feed after it posted a story about Imane Khelif, the boxer who won a gold medal after being allowed to compete in the women's event at last year's Olympic Games. Earlier this week, Khelif was banned from women's boxing by the regulator, World Boxing. A leaked blood test showed the Olympian has male XY chromosomes. ITV later published a story headlined 'Naming Imane Khelif has caused 'immeasurable psychological damage' after the Algerian Boxing Federation complained about World Boxing's decision to name the boxer. Ms Navratilova, the nine-time Wimbledon singles champion who has campaigned for gay rights, commented: 'But a male beating the crap out of women is not too bad, apparently.' This comment was hidden by the broadcaster and reinstated only after users complained. Dozens of other comments remain hidden, even though many of them simply state that the boxer is male. Fiona McAnena, the director of campaigns at the women's rights charity Sex Matters, demanded an apology from ITV. She said: 'It's shocking that the UK's largest commercial broadcast network has censored hundreds of gender-critical comments on social media, many of them simply referring to Imane Khelif as male. 'Hiding a simple truth about a major news story is a remarkable failure by a journalistic organisation. 'It's scandalous that ITV hid a reply from tennis legend Martina Navratilova, which they reinstated after an outcry. But what of the hundreds of other replies that remain censored, some of which do nothing but quote JK Rowling about the boxing row? 'ITV cannot simply dismiss this as a social media storm. Unless ITV's leadership apologises for hiding factual comments from the public, it will damage its credibility as a respected news organisation.' Khelif won a gold medal at last year's Paris Olympics after being allowed to compete in the women's event even though the boxer had previously been disqualified from the 2023 World Championships when tests indicated the presence of male chromosomes. Earlier this week, World Boxing banned Khelif from fighting against women in the Eindhoven World Cup, unless the champion underwent a sex test, which was refused. Users of the social platform X can hide responses they do not like, meaning they do not automatically appear in people's feeds. But they cannot delete them, and followers can look at hidden responses if they choose. Dozens of other commenters were hidden for stating that the boxer was male. One, Hatkeshiator, said: 'It's hardly worse than pretending to be a chick so you can beat chicks up while they fear a ban if they complain. Get a grip.' Kyle Reese, another X user, wrote: 'I think the damage his mentally-ill man inflicted on women was far greater.' Florence Jeffries said: 'He punches women. What about the harm, physical and mental, suffered by them? He knows tests have shown him to have XY chromosomes.' Another commenter with the username Spacedonkey wrote: 'ITV has proven that trans ideology is misogynistic. ITV literally wants to silence women and has hidden a post by sports icon Martina Navratilova. ITV, how low can you sink?' Rebecca Marian said: 'Sending female boxers into the ring to box against a male could have resulted in life-changing injuries or death for the women. I frankly don't give a stuff for Khelif's 'psychological damage'. He should never have been there.' A commenter called Steve wrote: 'Keep hiding the replies – you're a disgrace. The women he cheated against matter so much more than his so-called fragile mental state.' One was hidden for retweeting a comment by JK Rowling, who said: 'The media had all the evidence they needed, but chose to distort, obscure, and deflect because reality was politically inconvenient. They said Khelif was female. They were wrong. They said concerns were bigoted. They were wrong.' An ITV source claimed they used an automated moderation system, adding: 'It was initially set to a very strict moderation threshold, but has now been adjusted to be less stringent.' The broadcaster denied that comments had been selectively hidden.
Reuters
11 hours ago
- Reuters
French rabbi tells of two attacks in one week as hate crimes rise
PARIS, June 6 (Reuters) - A French rabbi was attacked on Friday for the second time in a week, he told Reuters, reflecting a broad rise in hate crimes across France that has included high-profile anti-Semitic assaults. Elie Lemmel said he was sitting at a cafe in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on Friday when he was hit in the head by a chair. "I found myself on the ground, I immediately felt blood flowing," he said. He was stunned and unsure what exactly had happened, he said, initially thinking something must have fallen from a window or roof, before it occurred to him he had been attacked. "Unfortunately, given my beard and my kippah, I suspected that was probably why, and it's such a shame," he said. Friday's incident follows another in the town of Deauville in Normandy last week, when Lemmel said he was punched in the stomach by an unknown assailant. Lemmel said he was used to "not-so-friendly looks, some unpleasant words, people passing by, spitting on the ground," but had never been physically assaulted before the two attacks. The prosecutor's office in Nanterre said it had opened an investigation into the Neuilly attack for aggravated violence and that a person was being held for questioning. It said it could not provide further details. "This act sickens us," former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal wrote on X regarding Friday's incident involving Lemmel. "Antisemitism, like all forms of hatred, is a deadly poison for our society." Last week, five Jewish institutions were sprayed with green paint in Paris. "I condemn in the strongest possible terms the anti-Semitic attack that targeted a rabbi in Neuilly today. Attacking a person because of their faith is a shame. The increase in anti-religious acts requires the mobilization of everyone," Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said in a post on X. France has seen a rise in hate crimes. Last year, police recorded an 11% rise in racist, xenophobic or antireligious crimes, according to official data published in March. The figures did not include a breakdown by attacks on different religions.
