"Algerian minister: Sarkozy in power thanks to Jewish lobby"

No, the above quote is not the result of the WWPD blog-post generator, but is in fact a headline in the English version of Haaretz.

Mohamed Cherif Abbas, Algeria's minister for veterans, was quoted Monday in the daily El Khabar as saying that Sarkozy was brought to power by a "Jewish lobby that has a monopoly on French industry." Abbas also mentioned Sarkozy's "roots," an apparent reference to the French president's maternal grandfather, who was Jewish.

It has that universal sound of Jewish-conspiracy theories. Then this: "In the original interview, Abbas also demanded that France repent for its past actions in Algeria."

By this he could mean colonial violence in the sense in which that's usually understood, or he could mean something else more specifically. Benjamin Stora explains it better than I ever will, but to sum up a very complicated history that is still somewhat over my head, one of France's strangest acts as Algeria's colonizer was deciding in 1870 that, what do you know, Algerian Jews are French. Algerian Muslims, not so much. Pourquoi? Pourquoi pas.