Emmanual Macron has slammed Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu for “unacceptable and stupid” comments they made about the French riots.
Over the last week, France has witnessed large-scale riots and unrest as protests calling for education reform and action on wealth inequality spiralled out of control.
Unsurprisingly, a section of right-wing voices have decided this is all down to immigration.
One of those to jump to this conclusion was Donald Trump, who said at a campaign rally: “Paris is going to be a Muslim city very soon.”
In a post on Truth Social last weekend, he wrote: “France is burning! The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country.”
Trump then told the media on Monday that French president Macron “should have closed his borders a long time ago.”
Meanwhile, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces elections soon, claimed that France has been hit by an “invasion of extremist Islam,” the Guardian reports.
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Whilst Macron has condemned the violence in French cities, he has also slapped down claims that immigration and Islam is responsible for the unrest.
He told reporters: “There has been a foreign manipulation of information since then, and that has led to some unacceptable and stupid comment from many foreign leaders.”
Macron later said on a trip to Qatar that the US president was “among them,” CNN reports.
He continued: “We’ve seen AI images that show scenes that never happened in France. There are people who have stated that we were invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false.”
Leaving little doubt about who he was referring to, Macron took aim at those “in the middle of election campaigns, whether here in the region or on the other side of the Atlantic” for “spreading narratives that certain circles are clearly trying to promote.”
Macron said some were “using our country for their own political campaigns”, adding: “And we don’t need that. We already have difficulties to deal with.”