Rima Hassan Arrested, a French Ship Passes Hormuz Blockade, and Macron Courts Japan & Korea
An MEP faces terrorism apologia charges, a French vessel navigates the Iran-controlled strait, and Emmanuel Macron returns from Tokyo and Seoul with sixty new agreements in hand.
👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.
If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.
This week
🇮🇷French ship passes through Strait of Hormuz
🧑⚖️MEP Rima Hassan arrested for terrorism apologia
🇯🇵🇰🇷Macron scores wins across Japan and Korea
🇮🇷French ship passes through Strait of Hormuz
So, to kick the week off: this week saw a ship pass through the Strait of Hormuz, potentially the first in the five weeks of the American-Iran war, and it happened to be a French-owned ship.
Now, while we don’t know exactly how this occurred or whether any discussions happened between the Quai d’Orsay and the Iranian regime, which is unlikely but not impossible, the reality is that this does fit into what Iran has said outside of any deals.
In public releases, Iran has claimed that “any non-hostile vessels” could use the waterway, and with Emmanuel Macron having consistently said that France would not be dragged into Donald Trump’s war, but would instead take part in any peaceful efforts to open the strait, and aside from this, focus on defending French assets in the region, it’s very likely that this has led to French ships being left alone by the Iranian regime and their allies.
What we do know for sure is that any ships successfully passing through the Strait have to sail “unusually close” to shore and go to extra lengths to prove their safety as they travel through the Iran-approved corridor.
Whether this will do much to stem the incoming oil crisis is anyone’s question, however.
🧑⚖️MEP Rima Hassan arrested for terrorism apologia
Rima Hassan is an MEP whom many people know for her almost exclusive focus on the Israel-Palestine war, her high level of activity across Europe and the Middle East, and her participation in several pro-Palestine flotillas.
She is also known for taking inflammatory political positions, having stated that the October 7th attacks were “legitimate”, reportedly participating in a pro-Hamas rally, being the target of aggressive harassment campaigns, doxxing her harassers, being doxxed herself, and being targeted with death and rape threats.
So, this recent news of her police summons finds its place fairly well within the La France Insoumise MEP’s story.
On the 2nd of April, Rima Hassan was taken into custody as part of an investigation into “apology for terrorism”, linked to a tweet she made referring to the 1972 Lod Airport Massacre.
For those who don’t know: the Lod Airport Massacre was a mass shooting, committed by the Japanese Red Army, that led to the death of 26 innocents and injuries to 70 more. This included 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico.
In the above tweet, which was apparently rapidly deleted, Rima Hassan quotes one of the survivors, Kōzō Okamoto:
“I dedicated my youth to the Palestinian cause. As long as there is oppression, resistance will not only be a right, but a duty.”
Now, the simple fact is that Rima Hassan is someone who has made her entire career revolve around the Israel-Palestine conflict, and very likely knew exactly who she was quoting and what he did, so it’s very hard to believe Hassan wasn’t aware of what she was doing. On top of this, she quickly deleted the tweet after receiving her police summons.
But the story takes an even stranger turn.
Rima Hassan apparently turned up at the second judicial police district in Paris with a small amount of synthetic drugs in her bag, which will add a further step to this judicial act.
In response to all of this, Rima Hassan has gone on the offensive, claiming that she is the “subject of real judicial and political harassment because of and exclusively because of my political opinions.” She also claims that she was carrying two pieces of CBD in her bag for medical purposes, with one appearing to have traces of synthetic drugs, and her lawyer followed this by stating that a urine test had been completed and showed no drug use.
She also went to Twitter to defend herself with a series of posts laying out her side of the argument:
Now, following this situation, Rima Hassan has two pending court hearings for “public apology for a crime or misdemeanour” and “public and direct provocation without effect to commit a crime or misdemeanour.”
However, the problem is that this situation will simply continue, and nothing will change the incredibly divisive nature of Rima Hassan’s political practices, which we need to remember are those of an MEP for La France Insoumise, the far-left party known for engaging in violent rhetoric and aggressive populism.
Nor will this change the extremely violent reaction that this behaviour receives from the far-right, as seen during the most recent far-right protests of a Hassan event in Lyon that led to fights between two extremist groups and then the lynching of Quentin Deranque.
Unfortunately, we’ve reached a stage in French politics where many actors will go out of their way to be as polemical as possible, as aggressive as possible, discredit any attempts to hold them to societal or legal standards, and create discord because, quite simply, it works.
Whether we’re talking about the far-left or the far-right, things will only get worse as we head into the Presidential elections in just over a year, which is exactly why we need to stay vigilant as societies, continue to defend sensible, coherent discussions around explosive political discussions and situations, and as extreme as this may sound to some, defend rule of law in our countries to ensure that people don’t encourage violence or discord.
This must, of course, include space for legitimate discussion and critique of states like Israel, especially with political initiatives such as their new death penalty law ringing alarm bells globally.
🇯🇵🇰🇷Macron scores wins across Japan and Korea
To finish up the week, President Emmanuel Macron wrapped up a four-day visit to Japan and South Korea, strengthening ties between France and the two Asian powers, and securing meaningful progress toward his goal of creating a wider coalition of middle powers.
The trip ran from 31 March to 3 April, framed around the G7 summit Macron is hosting in Évian this coming June, and came at a moment of Trump-fuelled chaos. With the US war against Iran having almost entirely shut down the Strait of Hormuz and sending energy prices surging, all of Washington’s allies have been asking themselves whether they can actually rely on the Americans.
This question has given Macron a strong opening to pursue his signature efforts to achieve “strategic autonomy” and build a “coalition of independents,” including countries like Brazil, India, and Canada, united by a shared commitment to international law and diplomacy.
He made this argument everywhere: in front of business leaders, to global journalists, alongside Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, and to students at Yonsei University in Seoul, who received him with enthusiasm more commonly associated with K-pop acts.
And this seems to have worked.
In Japan, the two sides signed around sixty agreements covering civil nuclear energy, space cooperation, and rare earths, with a 2+2 meeting between foreign and defence ministers producing a commitment to expand joint military exercises.
In South Korea, Macron’s first-ever visit marked the 140th anniversary of bilateral relations, and with the rise of South Korea’s defence industry, which has been signing contracts across Europe since the start of the war in Ukraine, the meeting was clearly long overdue and very well timed.
Macron also used the trip to position France and Europe as predictable, rules-based partners for Asian states, a pointed contrast with a US administration that launched a war in the Middle East without consulting allies.
And while America is now paying the price for the instability wrought by Donald Trump, France and Europe appear to be benefiting from their reliability and stability.
Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:
And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:
Proportional parlamentarianism and lottery for the choice of Supreme Court justices shall be a global platform for centrists.
Are we moderates? Then we shall fight “winner takes all” in económics and politics.