How the State Blinds Itself to Foreign Interference

Xenia Fedorova, a Russian commentator appearing on CNews and other media outlets within the Bolloré Group, has become the target of an intense hostile press campaign in recent days. Her crime, as Causeur reports, appears to be nothing more than being Russian and offering a perspective sympathetic to the Kremlin on French television.

State-aligned media outlets, led by Le Monde, are demanding that French authorities revoke Fedorova’s residency permit and deport her to Moscow. The irony, according to the publication, is that these same voices routinely denounce xenophobia while targeting a foreign journalist whose only offense is contradicting the official narrative on the Ukraine conflict.

Qatar’s Visible Hand in French Affairs

The same critics who find Fedorova’s presence intolerable remain conspicuously silent about Qatari influence in France, Causeur observes. The Gulf emirate owns Paris Saint-Germain football club and the Al Jazeera network, which broadcasts in France. Until recently, Qatar openly protected and financed Hamas, the organization responsible for the October 7 anti-Jewish pogrom.

During Saturday’s PSG-Arsenal final, supporters of the Paris club brandished Palestinian flags and banners reading “Free Palestine” and “Stop genocide in Gaza,” slogans endorsed by both Qatar and the far-left France Unbowed party. That same evening in Paris and other cities, rioters and looters staged scenes reminiscent of intifadas, attacking security forces and attempting to break into residential buildings. One video captured a rioter holding a mortar and declaring it was intended for Jews.

The following day, President Emmanuel Macron received the football team at the Élysée Palace, where players prominently displayed “Qatar” in capital letters across their jerseys. According to Causeur, never has foreign interference been more visible than during this scene at the heart of the French Republic. Yet no mainstream commentator expressed concern about this promotion of a foreign state within the machinery of government, nor about the possible responsibility of PSG’s owner for the orgy of violence perpetrated by members of what the publication terms the “new France,” consisting primarily of North African and sub-Saharan African immigrants.

Double Standards on Foreign Influence

While Putin’s Russia is certainly worthy of criticism, it had nothing to do with the scenes of pre-civil war that humiliated the French state in the eyes of the world, the publication notes. The assaults against police and gendarmerie, which resulted in 178 injured officers, were not carried out by ordinary hooligans or idle troublemakers. The confrontations were led by young people predominantly from a counter-society united by the insidious teaching of hatred toward France and its history.

Foreign interference in France is undeniably real, Causeur acknowledges. Worse still, there are domestic enemies. But this fifth column maintains ideological ties with Qatar, Algeria, and Islamism more broadly. Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has become an instrument of this infiltration. Bally Bagayoko, the France Unbowed mayor of Saint-Denis, was greeted on election night with chants of “We are all children of Gaza.”

French diplomacy remains silent in the face of the emirate’s ambiguities and the Algerian dictatorship, recently denounced by writer Boualem Sansal in his latest book. Yet the same diplomatic establishment does not spare its criticism of Putin or Israel in its war against Islamist totalitarianism.

Manufactured Outrage

In this context of state submission to conquering foreign forces, treating Xenia Fedorova as a threat to stability is absurd, according to the analysis. While Qatar openly displays its influence at the highest levels of French government and Algerian-linked networks operate with impunity, authorities and media outlets fixate on a single Russian journalist whose presence on television apparently represents an unbearable challenge to approved narratives.

The double standard reveals that concern over foreign interference is highly selective, applied vigorously against voices that challenge Western establishment positions on Ukraine while ignoring far more tangible and consequential forms of foreign influence that actively undermine French security and social cohesion.

With information from Causeur