From E.P
Published 2 hours ago, updated 45 minutes ago
Kaïs Saied is President of Tunisia. FETHI BELAID / AFP
During a ministerial meeting on September 18, the Tunisian leader deplored the “Hebrew” name for the Mediterranean hurricane, which he said was a sign that Zionism had “infiltrated and completely changed intellectual thinking.”
New gaffe from President Kaïs Saïed regarding alleged “Zionist” influence in Tunisia. A ministerial meeting on Monday focused in particular on Storm Daniel, which, after devastating Greece and Turkey in early September, wreaked havoc in Libya and killed thousands of people. The head of state expressed his reservations about the choice of name for the meteorological phenomenon, whose Hebrew origin he regrets.
“Have you not thought about the meaning of the name Daniel? He is a Hebrew prophet!” protested the head of state, referring to the prophet of the 7th and 6th centuries BC. “This shows that the Zionist movement has subverted and completely transformed intellectual thought, placing it in a state of complete intellectual coma… from Daniel to Abraham,” the president continued.
Following the head of state’s outing, the Tunisian electronic newspaper Business News recalled in a “fact-check” article that today the naming of storms is based on an alphabetically ordered list of female or male names. Six-year cycles were created that provided for 21 common names from A to W, with the exception of Q and U, which contain rather few first names.
In the record year of 2005, the list was completely used up except for the Greek letter Zêta, explained Le Figaro in an article on the subject. “So, contrary to the statements of the President of the Republic, the name chosen for the storm in Libya has nothing to do with the Zionist movement,” concludes Business News media.
Recurring attacks
The excerpt from the ministerial meeting triggered a reaction from several Internet users on Twitter. “New conspiratorial and anti-Semitic delirium of the Tunisian president,” criticized the author and activist of Tunisian origin Amine Snoussi on X, accusing the publication of “indecency that leads to thousands of deaths in Libya.”
Kaïs Saïed is not his first foray into a so-called “Zionist” threat. In January 2021, the Tunisian president posted a clip on his Facebook page in which he mentioned Jews as a cause of the country’s instability. The notoriously anti-Zionist president also considers normalization with Israel to be the “biggest betrayal.”
Last May, after the terrorist attack on the synagogue in Djerba, a Tunisian island where the Jewish community lives, the president assured that Tunisia was a country of “tolerance and coexistence”, but refused to label this attack as anti-Semitic describe. Faced with the accusations made against him, Kaïs Saïed assured that he would “distinguished between Judaism and Zionism,” but added that he rejected any “normalization” with Israel in the name of the “tragedy of the Palestinian people.”
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