Soccer star Nicolas Anelka said in an interview Friday that the Jewish wife of French Prime Minister Manuel Valls influenced the politician to oppose the quenelle salute.
Anelka, who was fired last week from his British soccer team for performing the gesture in December, made the charges in an interview by the French edition of the Metronews daily.
Valls, who was recently nominated prime minister, called the quenelle salute “a gesture of hatred .., an anti-Semitic gesture” at a press conference in January, when he was still interior minister. But Anelka and his friend Dieudonne M’bala M’bala –the gesture’s inventor and the owner of seven convictions for inciting racial hatred against Jews — say it’s merely anti-establishment.
“He’s not so bad,” Anelka told Metronews of Valls. “I think he was under the influence of his wife on this quenelle issue.”
