New slip-up by President Kaïs Saïed regarding a supposed “Zionist” influence in Tunisia. During a ministerial meeting on Monday, discussions focused in particular on storm “Daniel” which, after devastating Greece and Turkey in early September, sowed chaos in Libya, killing thousands of people. The head of state expressed his reservations about the choice of name given to the meteorological phenomenon, whose Hebrew origin he deplores.
“Have they not thought about the meaning of the name Daniel? He’s a Hebrew prophet!” protested the head of state, referring to the prophet of the 7th and 6th centuries BC. “This demonstrates that the Zionist movement has infiltrated and completely altered intellectual thought, moving it into a state of total intellectual coma… from Daniel to Abraham,” the president continued.
Following this outing by the Head of State, the Tunisian electronic newspaper Business News recalled in a “fact checking” article that the naming of storms today depends on a list of feminine or masculine names arranged alphabetically. Six-year cycles were established, providing 21 common names from A to W, with the exception of Q and U – rather poor in first names.
In 2005, a record year, the list was completely used up to the Greek letter Zêta, explained Le Figaro in an article on the subject. “Thus, contrary to the declarations of the President of the Republic, the name chosen for the storm in Libya has nothing to do with the Zionist movement,” concludes the Business News media.
The extract from the ministerial meeting caused several Internet users to react on Twitter. “New conspiratorial delirium
Kaïs Saïed is not his first outing about a so-called “Zionist” threat. In January 2021, the Tunisian president published a clip on his Facebook page in which he mentioned Jews as the cause of the country’s instability. The president, notoriously anti-Zionist, also considers that normalization with Israel would be the “supreme betrayal”.
Last May, after the terrorist attack at the synagogue in Djerba, a Tunisian island inhabited by the Jewish community, the president assured that Tunisia was a country of “tolerance and coexistence”, but refused to characterize this attack as anti-Semitic. Faced with the reproach made to him, Kaïs Saïed assured “to distinguish between Judaism and Zionism”, but added that he rejected any “normalization” with Israel in the name of the “tragedy of the Palestinian people”.