Left leader hoping for big electoral gains will throw France’s weight behind journalist stitched up by UK and US
French left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon will immediately give French citizenship – and a medal – to imprisoned journalist Julian Assange if Mélenchon becomes French PM after tomorrow’s elections.
The UK’s notorious Home Secretary Priti Patel – sacked from an earlier ministerial role by then-PM Theresa May after attending off-book meetings with the Israeli regime about diverting aid funding to the military and who after being found guilty of multiple counts of bullying caused the government to have to pay a substantial sum to a civil servant because of bullying – ruled this week that Assange can be extradited to the US, where the government wants to imprison him for life for exposing murders by the US military.
A court had previously supported the US extradition request, even though the American case had imploded after its main witness admitted that he had lied about everything – an admission largely ignored by the UK ‘mainstream’ medi. Assange remains in high-security prison for doing his job, while the damage done to journalism and democracy by imprisoning a journalist for doing journalism has apparently caused Patel not a second’s pause in giving the US government what it wants, despite opposition even from Tory MPs to the extradition.
But Mélenchon has said he will intervene immediately on the journalist’s behalf:
If I am prime minister on Monday, Mr Julian Assange, I believe he has submitted the request, will be naturalised as French and we will ask that he be evacuated to his new home.
Mélenchon also said that he would award Assange a decoration in recognition of his services to democracy and journalism in holding governments to account for their and their agents’ actions.
The extradition of Julian Assange is one of the most shameful episodes in a long and dark period of Tory government. Even more shameful is the fact that the Establishment-friendly Keir Starmer, supposedly a Labour leader, has never spoken in support of Assange or against the danger to democracy that his extradition represents. On the contrary, as Director of Public Prosecutions Starmer promised the US that autistic hacker Gary McKinnon would be extradited and was reportedly furious and embarrassed that then-Home Secretary Theresa May stepped in to block the move.
Mélenchon’s party is forecast to make considerable parliamentary gains on Sunday. His declaration gives a taste of how much healthier the UK would have been had Keir Starmer and his faction not sabotaged two successive general elections when Jeremy Corbyn was party leader.
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