Le Pen's Holocaust Comments Spark Outrage; France Still Struggling with High Youth Unemployment
GORANI: Welcome back, everybody. A new development there in southern Israel. Israel is saying that it is going close border crossing between southern Israel and Egypt at Taba until Passover, so just about until mid-April, because of some sort of ISIS threat, they're saying, directed at Israel. You see it there on the map, the southern part of Israel where it connects to Egypt there in northern Sinai. So that is going to be crossed for about a week -- closed, I should say, for about a week. All right. Let's turn our attention from the Middle East to France and those controversial remarks by Marine Le Pen with some historical revisionism, refusing to acknowledge the French government's responsibility in the deportation of some Jewish children during World War II. Melissa Bell joins me now live from Paris with more reaction to that. So she said this over the weekend. Today is Monday. What are people talking about? What's been the reaction in France to all of this?</s>MELISSA BELL, CNN PARIS CORRESPONDENT: Hala, there's been a great deal of reaction. What we're talking about is 1942. You have to cast your mind back to when the French government from G.C., the collaborationist government, decided to deport from France some 13,000 French Jews, including, Hala, thousands of French children. Now, over the course of the last few decades, successive French presidents have recognized that this was something that the French state needed to apologize for, Jacques Chirac and all of the presidents that succeeded him. That Marine Le Pen has been drawn into sort of a revisionist theory of this is surprising at this stage and, of course, is drawing reaction from all of her opponents in this very volatile, very competitive, very uncertain presidential race. Until now, she's really tried to put a huge amount of space between herself and her father, going so far as to expel Jean-Marie Le Pen, the man who founded the party that she now leads back in 1972, precisely because he had been accused of denying the Holocaust. He described the gas chambers as a footnote of history. Now, Marine Le Pen has not gone that far. But to doubt that the French state, the French government, was responsible for the deportation of those Jews in 1942 has, of course, proved hugely controversial and is a massive blow to her campaign. She was, in a sense, drawn into this controversy with less than two weeks to go before the French presidential election. Now, for her die-hard supporters, one of the strengths that she has is that she has these voters, Hala, who are going to vote for her whatever. She has one of the most solid groups of voters in the election. It is those undecided that she's been trying to reach that we'll have trouble with what she's had to say over the course of the weekend.</s>GORANI: Right, we'll see if that has an impact. All right. I know you have some reporting from the French suburbs where there is a lot of disaffection, lots of sort of economic depression, high unemployment as well. In just a few weeks before this crucial election, it's kind of interesting to take the temperature there of what's going on in that part of France. Tell us more about what you saw.</s>BELL: Well, it is important to take the temperature there, Hala, because it is one of the main problems facing France, that in France's urban centers, you have these huge French satellite towns that are essentially disenfranchised, that have huge levels of unemployment, that consider themselves sort of outside of French society. How is the French election going down there, especially when with less than two weeks to go before the first round of voting, we have historically very high numbers of people who have yet to make up their minds, hence the volatility in this election? So we went out to have a look at what the people in what the French call the banlieues had to think about what was happening.</s>BELL (voice-over): Far from the glamour of Paris, this is what the French call the banlieues, suburban towns made up of tower blocks that are synonymous with poverty, crime and exclusion, and where unemployment is twice as high as other parts of France. Our journey begins in Gennevilliers, then further out to Argenteuil, and finally on to distant Grigny.</s>HASSAN BEN M'BAREK, PRESIDENT, BANLIEUES RESPECT (through translator): Public authorities are partly responsible for what has happened in the French banlieues these last 20 or 30 years. They're just reaping what they sowed.</s>BELL (voice-over): Hassan Ben M'Barek is our guide. He spent 30 years trying to get successive governments to help the banlieues. Here in Gennevilliers, social housing was put up in the early 1970s. Hassan shows us a spot where a tower block once stood. It was pulled down to make the area less fortress like, but, Frederic, who's lived here all his life, says it still feels like a jail.</s>FREDERIC ROBIN, RESIDENT (through translator): They put bars everywhere. We're in cages, you've seen how it is. So our freedom has been restricted, and we've abandoned the young people. We must give hope to the young people, to give them a goal in life. I am 51 years old this year, what's my purpose in life? I don't have one, I have no goal. My goal is to survive. That's not a goal, it's an obligation. You have to survive.</s>BELL (voice-over): A little further out of Paris, about a 20-minute drive, lies Argenteuil. It was made famous by Nicolas Sarkozy back in 2005.</s>NICOLAS SARKOZY, FORMER PRESIDENT OF FRANCE (through translator): You've had enough, haven't you? You've had enough of this scum. Well, we're going to get rid of them.</s>BELL (voice-over): Just days later, the deaths of two teenagers who've been running from police would set the banlieues alight. Sarkozy's use of the word "scum" would not be forgotten. Twelve years on, the relationship between the police and locals here in Argenteuil remains tense.</s>DJENNA DIARRASSOUBA, RESIDENT (through translator): Instead of calming everyone down, the police gets confrontational. They insult and hit, and it doesn't calm the situation at all.</s>BELL (voice-over): Grigny is further out still, about a 45-minute drive from Paris. Hassan says it's all been forgotten altogether.</s>M'BAREK (through translator): We have problems of delinquency. And the public authorities have not carried out any actions, whether it's do with urban planning or social care to try and address all the problems that exist inside.</s>BELL (voice-over): As we arrive, so too do riot police and their helicopter. Locals tell us they come every day.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): When the cameras are gone, they corner us. They insult us, they charge us. Respect is a two-way street. If they give us no respect, we do not respect them.</s>BELL (voice-over): CNN reached out to the police to get their response, but they declined to comment. The young here complain that they see too many policemen and despite the selection period, too few politicians.</s>GOLO DIARRA, RESIDENT (through translator): They go to centers for the disabled. They visit farms. They visit places that mean nothing at all. Why don't they come to our neighborhoods? We're not animals. If tomorrow, a guy participating in the election came here, I would love it. Just to see him, to speak to him, to say, sir, we are here at the Grand Borne. This is how it is. That would be amazing, but that'll never happen.</s>BELL (voice-over): All of those we spoke to in Grigny said they would voting but many explained, with little real hope of change.</s>BELL: It is a reminder, Hala, all those many issues that the next president of France will have to deal with and yet, issues that really have yet to become part of the presidential election with so little time to go. These are young people who really feel that these candidates really have yet to reach out to them and offer them any hope for the future, Hala.</s>GORANI: OK. Thanks very much, Melissa Bell, in Paris. Quick break, we'll be right back.