His remarks drew angry reactions on social media. ”To dare to question the decision of the families of the Jewish victims of Toulouse who buried their dead in Israel, in the name of their French nationality, is despicable. to compare it with the family of the murderer is infamous. Zemmour’s New Order is chilling?44 wrote Philippe Meyer, president of B’nai B’rith France, on Facebook.

French controversial columnist and polemicist Eric Zemmour drew a parallel between Mohamed Merah, the Islamist terrorist who killed  three Jewish children and a teacher in the Ozar Hatorah school in 2012, and his victims, who were all buried abroad, in Algeria and Israel.

Interviewed during a show on France 2 television on Saturday night, Zemmour, who is a potential candidate for next year presidential election, was questioned by journalist Léa Salamé who read a passage from his latest book ‘’La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot’’ (France has not said its last word), evoking the anti-Semitic attack on the Jewish school.

“The family of Mohamed Merah asked to bury him in the land of his ancestors in Algeria, and it was also known that the Jewish children murdered in front of the religious school in Toulouse would be buried in Israel. Anthropologists have taught us that we are from the country where we are buried. Murderers or innocents, executioners or victims, enemies or friends, they wanted to live in France, but as for leaving their bones, they did not choose France, foreigners above all and wanting to remain so beyond death,” wrote Eric Zemmour in the book.

Asked about this passage and the parallel he draws between the burial of the executioner and that of his victims, Zemmour responded by denouncing a “defrancization of France.

“But I don’t blame anything [to those relatives who had the child victims buried in Israel]!” he said nevertheless. “I try to think rationally about a situation. […] I do not blame Mohamed Merah’s parents for wanting to bury their child in Algeria: he felt Algerian. I do not blame these people, these Jewish parents, whose children were heinously massacred… They did not belong to France. Of course they did! They felt like Israelis. That’s okay. I don’t blame them. I am saying that there is a problem for us. My parents are buried in France, they are not buried in Israel. The French tragedy is that we no longer make French people. We don’t make them in school, we don’t make them on television, we don’t make them in the dominant culture… ‘’, said the 63-year-old Zemmour who is the descendent of Berber Jews who moved from Algeria to France during the French-Algerian war in the 1950s.

His remarks drew angry reactions on social media. ”To dare to question the decision of the families of the Jewish victims of Toulouse who buried their dead in Israel, in the name of their French nationality, is despicable. to compare it with the family of the murderer is infamous. Zemmour’s New Order is chilling?44 wrote Philippe Meyer, president of B’nai B’rith France, on Facebook.

During the show, Zemmour talked about his favorite subjects: immigration, French identity, Islam and Islamism, political life.

He called for assimilation measures to be put in place in France for the Muslim community, just as there were in the past for the Jewish community. “For Muslims, it is like the French Revolution and Napoleon did with the Jews,” he said. “The famous phrase of Clermont-Tonnerre you know: ‘Everything to the Jews as individuals, nothing as a nation’, well it’s the same thing. And Napoleon added, he said to the Jews: ‘’You must consider Paris as Jerusalem.’’

A recent poll has showed Zemmour could garner eight percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election if he were to run. His candidacy could dilute the far-right vote in the first round of next April’s presidential elections, at the expense of  Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally.