“Richard Ferrand, likely future minister of Macron, finances the hatred of the Jews,” claimed www.dreuz.info on April 25. This site, which claims to be “conservative, Christian and pro-Israel”, denounced the funding granted by the deputy of Finistère “with its 2016 parliamentary reserve” to the France Palestine Solidarity Association (AFPS), labelling the association as both “anti-Zionist” and “anti-Semitic “.

Although the AFPS criticizes Israeli policy, it does not contest Israel’s right to exist, and the donation made by the secretary-general of En Marche!, to the amount of 2,000 euros, concerns only one humanitarian project carried out by the association founded in France in May 2001.

To support its accusations of anti-Zionism, www.dreuz.info noted that the AFPS supported the call for a boycott of Israeli products by the BDS movement (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions), declared illegal by the French justice system, and accused of “complacency towards Hamas”.

It fails, however, to specify that the AFPS is part of the National Collective for a Just and Sustainable Peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

In its statutes, the AFPS further states that its purpose is “to work for the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East based on the recognition of the national rights of the Palestinian people on the basis of international law” .

Richard Ferrand, the right-hand man of Emmanuel Macron, reacted on his blog on March 26, 2017, soon after the rumor appeared in other publications.

“I donated € 2,000 of ‘my’ parliamentary reserve to support a project of providing equipment for a class of girls in the camp of El Aroub in Palestine,” he said in his post: “To finish a rumor from the fachosphere “.

“This territory is twinned with the commune of Carhaix located in my electoral district (I live in Motreff, the village immediately next door) .The project was carried by the central Brittany branch of the France-Palestine Association, through its head Jean-Pierre Jeudy, honorary mayor, retired professor, as well as with various people involved in local community life,” he added.

“I think this campaign might produce some surprises : even minorities refuse to obey the imposed order!” In a video posted with this message on the Facebook page “We love France“, a man shouts to a crowd of French people originating from the Democratic Republic of Congo: “We are going to vote“, and the crowd replies: “Le Pen”, after booing the names of politicians François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy. But the video is not linked to the current presidential election: it’s from a demonstration on January 21st, 2012, the year in which the last presidential election took place, and the man with the megaphone today says that he had only wanted to be provocative.

The demonstration took place in Paris one month after Congolese president Joseph Kabila won a vote in 2011 – a result contested by the leader of the opposition, Etienne Tshisekedi. “It was like an inter-generational march: there were a lot of children. And even though the French election was in May, this meeting had nothing to do with politics at the start”, said one of the demonstration’s organisers, Youyou Muntu Musi (spokesperson for the RD Congo France collective), to a journalist of Les Observateurs de France 24, a media partner of CrossCheck. Indeed many children do appear in another video of the demonstration (scroll to approximately 2.35 minutes).

The man rousing the crowd with the megaphone is Francis Mondombo. At the time he was a member of a group opposed to Joseph Kabila, the ‘Resistant Fighters of Congo’. “When I shouted that (regarding Le Pen), it was just a provocation”, he told a journalist of Les Observateurs. “It was a warning, in order to criticize the fact that traditional parties didn’t want to take a position on French Africa and what was happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo [the reelection of Joseph Kabila]. It was as if I had said something like “If you don’t respect us, we’re going to vote for extreme political parties…At that time, some friends had blamed me for playing along with the Front National. But it was just to get a message across. Moreover, I didn’t vote for the Front National. With retrospect, when I see how this video is now going viral, I deeply regret those words”.