Date: Tue, 7 May 2002 10:50:17 -0700
From: sharps@centerlynx.com ("Andreasen")
Subject: FW: Liberte, Egalite, Judeophobie
To: Vin_Suprynowicz@reviewjournal.com ( "Vin Suprynowicz \"), citizen@mindspring.com ("J. J. Johnson" )
I guess now that the election is a done-deal....this will be the Nostradamus
prediction to watch for...
as French behaviors get worse the attitude towards America will get worse.
Liz
-----Original Message-----
From: Zeev
Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2002 5:33 AM
Subject: Liberte, Egalite, Judeophobie
Liberte, Egalite, Judeophobie
Why Le Pen is the least of France's problems.
by Christopher Caldwell
05/06/2002, Volume 007, Issue 33
STRASBOURG, FRANCE
The atmosphere of the first round of France's presidential election was
captured by candidate Francois Bayrou's visit to Strasbourg on April 9.
Bayrou, who represents Valery Giscard d'Estaing's center-right Union of
French Democracy (UDF), was scheduled to visit a new mayoral sub-office on
Strasbourg's outskirts with the city's elegant, Berkeley-educated UDF mayor,
Fabienne Keller. Bayrou got hung up campaigning in another city. While
Keller waited for him, she was surrounded by a mob of jeunes des
bnlieues--or "suburban youth." This is the euphemism the French use for
residents of the crime-infested ring of high-rise housing projects (HLMs)
that were built on the outskirts of all French cities in the 1960s and '70s.
The "youth," all of them beurs, or Muslims of North African descent, were
staging an orchestrated protest against Bayrou, who as education minister in
the mid-1990s had opposed letting Muslim girls wear the hijab, the Muslim
headscarf, to public schools. But Keller was a convenient stand-in. They
shouted insults and obscenities at her, one of them threatening (according
to an account I was too embarrassed to ask the mayor to confirm specifically
when I interviewed her days later) to take a razor to her private parts.
When Bayrou arrived, the two went inside for meetings, and the crowd began
to pelt the new building with stones, and howl what was really on their
minds. First, "Why did you ban the headscarf!" And second, "F-- off! We
don't want to live anymore in a country that has Jews in it!"
Bayrou emerged from the building while the stones were still flying and told
the mob, "Talk about Jews that way today, and you may find people talking
about young Muslims the same way tomorrow." At some point during Bayrou's
visit, an 11-year-old boy jostled up against him and tried to pick his
pocket. Bayrou, heedless that the cameras were running, slapped the kid in
the face.
Politicians of the left tried to make hay of the incident, using it to paint
Bayrou as some kind of fogey, and themselves as hip to the country's new and
"vibrant" youth culture. "Heck, I live in the suburbs, and no one's ever
tried to pick my pockets," said Communist party presidential candidate
Robert Hue. "Me neither," added Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, also
running for president. The French public didn't see it that way. The more
the Bayrou slap played on national television, the higher Bayrou's poll
numbers rose--as he was seen as willing to support an assertion of authority
against the country's lawless youths. He merged from deep in the pack of 16
presidential candidates to finish a respectable fourth place, just behind
Lionel Jospin. To the extent that he mentioned crime at all (and he never
did, preferring the euphemism insecurite), Jospin evinced a la-di-da
attitude that dropped him to third place and ended his political career.
As French students by the hundreds of thousands stage protest marches across
the country, pretty much the entire world knows the result of the first
round of the French election. Jacques Chirac, the conservative sitting
president, goes into a runoff on May 5 against not Jospin but Jean-Marie Le
Pen, leader of the country's fascistic National Front. Le Pen has built his
career mimicking the oratory of the rightists who collaborated with Nazi
Germany in World War II. He has been a consistent foe of immigration and a
practitioner of nudge-nudge, wink-wink cracks against Jews. In the past
decade he has added rage against America and the global economy to his
oratorical repertory. He is a goon and a gangster, but he had little need to
raise divisive issues in the first round. France now has 4,244 crimes per
100,000 residents annually, according to European Union statistics, making
it a higher-crime society than even the long-belittled United States. During
a week when the top story on tabloid TV was the bloody beating of an
80-year-old man in sleepy Orleans by a gang of beurs who had invaded his
house, Le Pen focused, as did Chirac, on the dramatic upsurge in violence
over the past decade.
But while crime was what brought voters to the polls, France has an even
more ominous problem: a wave of attacks and threats against the country's
700,000 Jews that is unprecedented in the last half century of European
history. It includes what Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center describes as "the largest onslaught against European synagogues and
Jewish schools since Kristallnacht" in 1938. What is surprising and
confusing in all of this is that the "new anti-Semitism" in France is a
phenomenon of the left. It has practically nothing to do with Le Pen. In
fact, its most dangerous practitioners are to be found among the very crowds
thronging the streets to protest him.
"IN PARIS AS IN GAZA--INTIFADA!"
The outbreak began in September 2000, in the days after Palestinians
launched the "second intifada" against Israel. The first attacks included
firebombings of synagogues in Paris, Villepinte, Creil, Lyons, Ulis (badly
damaged), and Trappes (burned to the ground), and other Jewish buildings
(high schools, kosher restarants) throughout France; desecrations of
synagogues and cemeteries; widespread stonings of Jews leaving Sabbath
worship, death threats, bomb threats, and Nazi and Islamist graffiti of
every description: swastikas, "Hitler was right," "F-- Your Mother, Jews"
(Nique ta mere les juifs--a slogan so commonplace that it now appears more
usually as NTM les juifs), "Death to the Jews," and "In Paris as in
Gaza--Intifada!"
Such slogans, particularly the last, now get chanted routinely at
pro-Palestinian rallies in Paris and elsewhere. (As do hymns to Osama bin
Laden, according to reports of last October's pro-Palestinian march in
Paris.) Anti-Jewish violence has indeed tracked the progress of the
intifada, rising during violent periods in the Middle East and falling
during truces. There was also a spike after September 11; on the following
Sabbath alone, worshippers were stoned at synagogues in Clichy,
Garges-les-Gonesse, and Massy; gangs sought to storm a synagogue in
Villepinte; and shots were fird outside a Jewish association in Paris. But
if it has slowed at times, the cascade of such incidents has never stopped,
even for a week, in the last 19 months. At the turn of this year, the League
of French Jewish Students and the watchdog agency SOS Racism compiled a list
of 406 such incidents.
After Israel's attack on terrorist camps in Jenin and elsewhere, the
violence exploded to unheard-of proportions. Over Passover weekend last
month, a bomb was found in a cemetery in Schiltigheim, outside Strasbour,
and three synagogues were burned. The authorities seemed to be waking up.
While it took 12 days for any national official to even comment on the
October 2000 attacks, this time the Ministry of the Interior issued a report
showing 395 anti-Jewish incidents in the first half of April alone. Almost
two-thirds of these involved graffiti, but the others were more serious,
including 16 physical assaults and 14 more firebombings. The Wiesenthal
Center circulated an advisory urging Jewish travelers to France to exercise
"extreme caution."
What has been most shocking to the Jews of France is that the political
class of their country, which has an anti-racism establishment to rival any
in the world, has been largely silent about their plight. When a Jewish
cemetery was defiled at Carpentras in May 1990, and right-wing extremists
were (wrongly) suspected of the misdeed, there was a mass demonstration in
Paris. Between a quarter and a half million people marched, and President
Francois Mitterrand marched with them--the only demonstration he attended in
his presidency.
Yet Jacques Chirac recently announced in front of Israeli foreign minister
Shimon Peres that "There is no anti-Semitism and no anti-Semites in France."
Every French politician interviewed for this article said pretty much the
same. Strasbourg mayor Fabienne Keller says: "There is no significant
anti-Semitism." Her deputy mayor Robert Grossmann says: "There is no active
anti-Semitism." How can they say this with a straight face?
NOT YOUR FATHER'S NAZISM
One innocent explanaton would be that French society has suited up to do
battle with the anti-Semitism of 70 years ago, and simply doesn't recognize
any other kind. The new anti-Semites are not German-speaking
militarists--who were conquered. They are not Catholic
traditionalists--whose anti-Semitism rested on doctrines no longer asserted
by Catholicism, which, in any case, is a religion the French no longer
practice. As such, the French lack the imagination to see that the new
anti-Semites--who are primarily radical Muslims--are anti-Semites at all.
"Your father's Nazism is dead," says the political scientist Alexandre Del
Valle. "It exists in the heads of three or four alcoholic skinheads." In
other words, the new anti-Semitism is not coming from the right.
"The danger that looms over the Jewish community is not the danger that
threatened us before," says Gilles William Goldnadel, author of an acute
study of recent anti-Semitism, The New Breviary of Hatred. Goldnadel told a
crowd at a B'nai B'rith Center inParis's sixth arrondissement a few nights
before the election, "Worry about the right has turned out to be a decoy--in
the military sense--to distract us from the real danger. French anti-racists
have been parsing the tiniest dictum of Le Pen, while Jewish blood has been
spilled by the left in Athens, Istanbul, Rome, Vienna, and Paris."
(Particularly by Palestinian terrorists.) There are indications that the
government, too, is looking at the wrong target. By the turn of this year,
60 people had been questionedfor the hundreds of acts of intimidation.
"Only 5 were subject to legal proceedings, being far Right," according to a
report prepared by Shimon Samuels of the Wiesenthal Center. "As if the
others were not really anti-Semitic and their exactions not just as
serious."
There's another way that French politicians can deny that what they are
dealing with is an outbreak of anti-Semitism. That is, in the philosopher
Pierre-Andre Taguieff's memorable phrase, to "dissolve the anti-Jewish acts
in a rising tide of delinquency." French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine
told the Wiesenthal Center last June that the anti-Jewish acts were a matter
of "suburban hooliganism." (He continues to hold that view.) The French
ambassador to Israel, Jacques Huntzinger, called them "only part of the
general violence manifested by marginal youth in France."
Since France's foreign policy has for the past half decade been built around
its role as a force that would "tame" or "bridle" Anglo-Saxon capitalism, it
was clearly an embarrassment that the country was unable to bridle
anti-Semitic violence in its own backyard. Ignoring anti-Semitism has the
advantage of allowing French politicians to proceed as if nothing has
happened. In the first weeks of April, while the worst acts of aggression
were occurring, Socialist culture minister Catherine Tasca led a march
against the "threat" emanating from Italy's conservative prime minister
Silvio Berlusconi, and Jospin warned that Berlusconi could serve as a model
for his rival Chirac. (Jospin'ssuggestions for stopping the actual
anti-Semitism, meanwhile, went no further than a generalized crime
initiative, the highlight of which was a proposal to reduce the number of
shotguns a hunter could legally own from 12 to 6.) In the course of the
campaign, only 3 of the 16 candidates--Bayrou, the free-marketer Alain
Madelin, and the centrist Corinne LePage--condemned the acts
unconditionally.
And this unwillingness to call a spade a spade trickled down. The three boys
who burned the synagogue at Montpellier--identified as "Morad," "Jamel," and
"Hakim"--denied being anti-Semites, and so did those around them. Everyone
interviewed about them in the news was content to call them "classic
delinquents." The prosecutor described them as "like a lot of petty
delinquents, animated by a spirit of revenge, who try to ennoble their
excesses by using a political discourse." This seems to apply to all
synagogue-burners, if we're to believe the representative from the local
office of the mutual-aid society Cimade, who said, "In Montpellier--as in
[the synagogue-burning at] N mes--more and more kids from the projects are
identifying the victimization of the Palestinians with their own. It's a
simplistic thing, it's not really an ideology."
This would seem to be immunity on grounds of animality--or at least on
grounds of ignorance. Such an understanding appalls Goldnadel.
"Delinquents?" he asks. "All anti-Semitic thugs are delinquents. Who do they
think was burning down Jews' houses on the Russian steppes a hundred years
ago? Disgruntled architects?" And with immunity comes impunity. In January,
the young men who had vandalized a synagogue in Creteil, outside Paris, were
convicted of "general violence" and given a sentence of three
months--suspended.
BENLADENISATION DES BANLIEUES
The Jewish attacks--it should be plain by now--are the work of the Muslim
minority in France. Let no one doubt the delinquency, though. These
neighborhoods are becoming single-race areas, inhabited by North African
immigrants and their second- and third-generation descendants. They are
zones of drug-dealing, political apathy, unemployment (which stands over 35
percent in such places), and violence. Hence law-enforcement agents, mayors,
and politicians refer to the most violent among them as zones de non-droit
("lawless areas"), where even the police won't go, except maybe in daylight
hours to remove a body. Public powers are resisted with force, and not just
the police, who have been targeted for killing by organized "anti-cop
brigades." Even firemen, long a beloved class of public servants in France,
have been assaulted in housing projects surrounding Paris.
Law enforcement is under-equipped to handle such a challenge. France is
supposed to be "the most policed country in Europe," with 130,000
officers--but most of those, thanks largely to a strong union, are employed
in administrative or non-beat tasks, with only 10,000 or so available for
duty at any given time. According to an expose in Le Point this spring,
units from chilly Normandy are even detailed to the C te d'Azur to help
"reinforce" the beaches there. When police do succeed in making arrests,
liberal judges often set criminals free, and 37 percent of sentences passed
are not even carried out, according to Andre-Michel Ventre,
secretary-general of the police chiefs' union.
In fact, it would be accurate to describe "suburban" as the French
equivalent of the American adjective "inner-city," except for one
difference. France's HLMs and other "sensitive neighborhoods" have become
missionary fields for professional re-islamisateurs--proselytizers, usually
financed by Saudi Arabia (which occasionally uses Algerian foundations as a
pass-through for its funding) or Iran, and sometimes by fundamentalist
groups in London. These seek to woo young people of Islamic background to a
radical political understanding of Islam.
It is such proselytizing that has led to what French people call la
benladenisation des banlieues, the most famous alumnus of which is Zacarias
Moussaoui. But he's not alone. The "Arab" suicide bomber who--to protest
Arab countries' "preventing their people from launching jihad against the
Jews"--blew up a truck full of explosives in front of a synagogue in Tunisia
on April 11, killing a dozen German tourists and six others, was a
Franco-Tunisian named Nizar Nawar. His family lives in Lyons, where his
uncle, too, was arrested in connection with the attack. One of the four
terrorists on trial for trying to blow up Strasbourg's synagogue last year
has long lived in France. September 11 saw West Bank-style rejoicing
incidents in some Arab neighborhoods. There was also a spectacular terrorist
incident a week before. On September 2 in the town of Beziers, a hoodlum
named Safir Bghouia attacked a group of police with a shoulder-held rocket
launcher, phoned in death threats to local officials, machine-gunned the
local police constabulary, and executed the town's deputy mayor, before he
himself was shot dead the next day, dressed in white and howling that he was
a "son of Allah."
With London its only rival, Paris is the media and intellectual capital of
the Arab world, much as Miami is capital of the Hispanic world. As a result,
beyond terrorism, the weight of fundamentalist Islam--and the anti-Semitism
that goes along with it--is making itself felt in ordinary French life.
According to the literary scholar Eric Marty, one professor of literature at
the University of Paris was unable to teach the works of Primo Levi
(including the Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man), because his Arab students
booed him out of the classroom. "Kenza," a young beurette who was on the
French reality-TV show Loft Story (a sort of NC-17-rated equivalent of
Survivor), complains that she got kicked off the show last season because
"television is controlled by the Jews." A friend of mine was working out at
his gym near Strasbourg and got to talking with a friendly beur about
British prime minister Tony Blair. "Don't believe anything Blair says," the
man told my friend. "Don't you know his real name is actually Bloch?" (Bloch
is a common Alsatian Jewish surname.)
That is not the whole story of Arabo-Muslim France, of course. Claude
Imbert, editor of Le Point, admits that French immigration was badly handled
under the Socialist presidency of Francois Mitterrand, but remains "a
resolute partisan of immigration." He notes that beurs are among France's
most dynamic entrepreneurs. "They're the only ones who have the
American-style careers we need," he says. "Taking a pizza delivery with one
car and turning it into a big company--that sort of thing." There are others
who have courageously stood up against the Islamist wave, like Rachid Kaci,
a mayoral aide in Sannois who appeared at a Jewish colloquium east of Paris
in mid-April to say, "You have my total solidarity to fight by your side
against this new fascism." Kaci urges an Islam cut off from foreign
influences, following somewhat the message of Tunisian novelist Abdelwahab
Meddeb's cri de coeur, The Sickness of Islam.
And others are seeking to make Islam more open to all Muslims, and more
transparent in its sources of funding. That includes Strasbourg's mayor
Fabienne Keller, who has put on hold a hard-line, Saudi-sponsored mosque
project that was approved by the outgoing Socialist mayor (and Jospin's
culture minister) Catherine Trautmann, despite the involvement of
foundations that now appear on the U.S. government's terrorist blacklist. In
general, France is seeking to create an Islam that is in harmony with the
country's secular traditions, which is wholly admirable. Unfortunately, that
kind of Islam is going to have to be invented, since it has never existed in
1,300 years. It may, indeed, be a logical contradiction. And it is certainly
something that the more radical among France's 6 million to 9 million
Muslims--who make up close to half the population of the young in the
country's cities, and have a birthrate that outstrips that of non-Muslims by
3-to-1--have no reason to work for.
Which brings us to the real reason the French don't think they have a
problem with anti-Semitism, and the reason they're wrong.
JUDEOPHOBIE
Pierre-Andre Taguieff, director of research at the Center for the Study of
French Political Life (Cevipof), has just published a book called "The New
Judeophobia" ("La Nouvelle judeophobie, Mille et une nuits," 234 pages, 12
Euros), which lays it out. The ideology on which the new anti-Semitism rests
is largely imported. It has its roots in the anti-Western paranoia that all
Americans will recognize (without being able to explain) from the banners
carried in the Iranian revolution. It is a hybrid of apocalyptic Islam and
pre-Nazi Western anti-Semitism of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion type.
Taguieff resists the term "anti-Semitism." First, because, as Bernard Lewis
has shown, "Semitic" is a linguistic and not a racial term, allowing people
to play inane word games with what is happening in France. ("The jeunes /
Hamas / Hezbollah can't be anti-Semitic," one reads almost daily in the
French press. "They're Semites themselves!") Second, because anti-Semitism
is a racial ideology, and today's Jew-hatred is not really a racial
ideology. That is why, Taguieff argues, it is so often found in tandem with
anti-Americanism.
Taguieff's book is brilliant, and extraordinarily well sourced, and will
convince any reader who is not already dug in on Middle Eastern questions.
It has also infuriated the French intellectuals at whom it is aimed, because
Taguieff's claim is that the two pillars of the new anti-Semitism are
anti-Zionism and Holocaust denial. He's right, but this requires some
explaining.
The first infuriates the French because they are largely anti-Zionist, to
the extent that the word can be used to mean antipathetic to Israel's
interests and sympathetic to those of its enemies. Whereas Americans
sympathize with Israel in the Middle East conflict by a margin of 41-13,
according to a recent Economist poll, the French sympathize with the
Palestinians over Israel by the widest margin in Europe, 36-19. What's more,
the Middle East conflict has become an absolute obsession among the
left-wing intelligentsia, of the sort you'd have to sit in a Socialist party
hangout in Strasbourg on a Friday night to believe.
Doesn't the citizen of a free country have a right to back whatever side he
wants in a foreign war? Of course he does. "Even among Jews," as William
Goldnadel says, "You don't have to be a self-hating Jew to view the destiny
of the Jews as living in the Diaspora." That's not Taguieff's target. What
he is talking about is "mythic anti-Zionism," which treats Zionism as
absolute evil, against which only absolute warfare can be raised. In this
understanding, Zionism constitutes not just racism but the ne plus ultra of
racism.
This is a vision that the French--particularly given the French left's
obsession with race, and their history of romantic attachments to Third
World guerrillas--are in danger of embracing. The philosopher Alain
Finkielkraut notes that, in France, "support for the Palestinian cause is
not shaken but reinforced by the indiscriminate violence of Palestinians."
In particular danger of embracing this Manichaean view of the Arab-Israel
conflict are those who support Third-Worldism, neo-communism, and
neo-leftism, whom Taguieff lumps together as the "anti-globalization
movement." The Chomskyites, . . . the people who think Empire is a good
book. If you ask them why, of all the dozen conflicts the Muslim world is
waging against the civilizations it borders on, this one obsesses them (why
not Chechnya? why not Sudan? why not Nigeria?), they can give you an answer
that stops just this side of anti-Semitism. Israel-Palestine is the one
where the "capitalist" world of the West (and, by implication, the Jews who
run it) meets the underprivileged victim peoples of the South. Jews thus get
to pay the price for the West's depredations since the Middle Ages, most of
which they were on the receiving end of.
That, of course, is the great obstacle to this discourse of
Jews-as-victimizers: The Jews have been through rather a lot. And that is
why denial, or at least minimization, of the Holocaust is an indispensable
part of the ideology. Abbe Pierre, a popular priest who became a national
hero, lamented in 1991 that "Jews, the victims, have become the
executioners." He even embraced the Stalinist-turned-Muslim-radical Roger
Garaudy when he was accused of Holocaust-denial. At a pro-Palestinian
demonstration at Les Halles in late March, marchers carried a Star of David
with a swastika over it, shouting Jihad, Jihad, Jihad. If you walk across
the pont des Invalides, you can see, in yellow print on black background, a
poster that urges that Ariel Sharon be sent to the Hague to be tried on war
crimes:
It's hard to say which is the strangest imposture in the poster: to see
"Zionism" ranked next to "Extermination" among crimes, or to see Israel
accused of doing in the West Bank what the Nazis did in France.
("Deportation"--whatever that may mean in the context of an anti-terrorist
operation in the West Bank--is a word that maintains a terrible resonance
for the Jews of France.)
At times the superimposition of Nazi German motifs on Israel takes on
aspects of a religious vision. Claude Keiflin, a political reporter for the
Dernieres Nouvelles d'Alsace who covers Middle Eastern matters for the
paper, asked me during an interview, "How could the Jewish people, after
having undergone the Holocaust, be putting numbers on the arms of their
Palestinian prisoners?"
"What? . . . You mean tattoos?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"Okay, not engraved in the skin, but, still . . ."
France has laws against Holocaust denial. The current climate shows them to
be bad laws, not just because they make free-speech heroes of those who are
basically mentally ill, but because they can be violated in spirit with
impunity. Such a violation was committed by Jose Bove in the first days of
April, when he was expelled from Israel following a visit to Yasser Arafat's
compound in Ramallah. Bove, who rose to fame for vandalizing a McDonald's in
southern France as a protest against American influence, is not merely the
informal leader of the younger Fench left, the "hero" of the Seattle riots,
and the guiding spirit of many of the anti-Le Pen protests that are now
raging in Paris; he is also the most charismatic leader of the
anti-globalization movement in the world.
It was thus alarming to see Bove, after a pro forma denunciation of
anti-Jewish violence, informing viewers of the TV channel Canal Plus that
the attacks on French synagogues were being either arranged or fabricated by
Mossad. "Who profits from the crime?" Bove asked. "The Israeli government
and its secret services have an interest in creating a certain psychosis, in
making believe that there is a climate of anti-Semitism in France, in order
to distract attention from what they are doing."
Since Bove didn't actually say Jews weren't killed in the Holocaust, it may
seem excessive to some readers that B'nai B'rith accused him of
negationnisme, or Holocaust denial. But B'nai B'rith is right. They have
simply thought about the roots of Holocaust denial a bit more thoroughly
than others. For anyone who inhabits Western culture, the Holocaust made
that culture a much more painful place to inhabit--and for any reasonably
moral person, greatly narrowed the range of acceptable political behavior.
To be human is to wish it had never happened. (Those who deny that it did
may be those who can't bear to admit that it happened.) But it did. If
there's a will-to-anti-Semitism in Western culture--as there probably
is--then the Arab style of Judeophobia, which is an anti-Semitism without
the West's complexes, offers a real redemptive project to those Westerners
who are willing to embrace it. It can liberate guilty, decadent Europeans
from a horrible moral albatross. What an antidepressant! Saying there was no
such thing as the gas chambers is, of course, not respectable. But the same
purpose can be served using what Leo Strauss called the reductio ad Hitlerum
to cast the Jews as having committed crimes identical to the Nazis'. They
must be identical, of course, so the work of self-delusion can be
accomplished. We did one, the Jews did one. Now we're even-steven.
You can see the attractive force in such an ideology. Author Alexandre Del
Valle fears that anti-Semitism could also be a binding force, leading to a
"convergence of totalitarianisms," of Islamism and the Western
anti-globalist left. Elisabeth Schemla, a longtime editor at France's
center-left opinion weekly Le Nouvel Observateur who now edits the online
newsletter www.Proche-Orient.info, says, "The anti-Semitism of the left is
more dangerous than that of the right. They have power in the media, the
universities, the associations, the political class." Schemla worries that a
third of the candidates in the first round of the presidential election were
strongly motivated by the conflict in the Middle East. As such, it is not
the strong showing of LePen that is the most alarming development in the
first round of the election, but the record-high score of the three
Trotskyite parties on the hard left.
BONIFACISME
Last August, Pascal Boniface, a top foreign policy adviser to Lionel Jospin,
wrote an open "Letter to an Israeli Friend" that appeared in Le Monde. The
echo of the "Letters to a German Friend" that Albert Camus had written in
1943 and 1944 was not lost on Jewish readers. The lawyer Pierre Francois
Veil remarked that if Boniface had wanted to reach an Israeli friend, he
could have written to the Jerusalem Post. The letter was, of course,
addressed to the Jews of France, and many read a threat in its closing
lines: "In France," Boniface wrote, "should it permit too much impunity to
the Israeli government, the Jewish community could also be the loser in the
medium term. The Arab/Muslim community is certainly less organized, but it
will be a counterweight, and it will soon be numerically preponderant, if it
is not already."
"I gave my advice not because of the weight of the community but on
principle," Boniface said in an interview. The votes of the two communities
are about even. Muslims may number as many as 8 million, but only half are
citizens. Of the remaining 4 million, 2.5 million are not yet old enough to
vote, and of the 1.5 million that remain after they're taken out, over half
won't vote. But at a time when Jews were being threatened in the streets of
France, it seemed that Jews were not being lectured on electoral clout but
outright intimidated: Break your solidarity with Israel, the deal was, and
we'll leave you in peace; otherwise, you'll be lopped out of the national
community. Boniface is not alone in his opinions; the oordinated Appeal for
a Just Peace in the Middle East (CAPJPO) has asked French Jews to make a
"critique of Israeli policy." As Alain Finkielkraut noted, CAPJPO has never
asked Muslims to pressure Palestinians to stop their suicide attacks.
Boniface was soon being accused of the same thing: making Jews'--but no one
else's--membership in the national community contingent on the acceptable
behavior of a foreign country. This attitude was given a witty
shorthand--bonifacisme--in the Jewish press, which condemned it as a form of
anti-Semitism.
"I defy anyone to find a single line in any of my work that is
anti-Semitic," said Boniface in an interview. He noted that his opinions
were fairly generally held. "My students have changed their opinion, too,"
he said. "Twenty years ago when Israel invaded Lebanon they were evenly
divided. Now they are overwhelmingly pro-Palestine." Lionel Jospin followed
Boniface's line throughout his campaign, condemning "communitarianism" and
insisting to Jewish, though not to Arab, groups that "we must not import
into France the problems of the Middle East." But the "evenhandedness" of
Jacques Chirac on communitarian matters was almost worse. During a visit to
Paris's grand mosque the week before the vote, Chirac firmly condemned the
burning of (many) synagogues (in his own country), but assured the gathered
dignitaries that if anyone were to harm a mosque (which no one has done) or
a church (like the Church of the Nativity, in another country, where Israeli
troops had surrounded Palestinian terrorists holding hostages), it would be
equally bad.
And yet "the problems of the Middle East," as Jospin calls them, are all
that France wants to think about. It has long alarmed Jews that non-Jews are
showing up less and less at their marches. Since October 2000, they have
wondered why their fellow citizens were not marching against really existing
anti-Semitism in France, the way they used to march against the
safely-part-of-history version. ("A demonstration on 13 January 2002 of
Jewish leadership assembled in the Creteil synagogue--the latest victim of
violence--was marked by the sparseness of non-Jewish sympathizers," noted
Shimon Samuels of the Wiesenthal Center. "Indeed, the town's deputy mayor
used the occasion to publicly revile the Sharon government and was met by
jeers from the audience.")
On April 6, pro-Palestinian marches were held across the country. On April
7, the CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organizations, held a march
for Israel. They decided also to march against the anti-Semitic attacks of
the preceding days. Three of the 21 members of the CRIF board decided to
make only the second part of the march. One of those, Olivier Guland of the
Jewish Tribune, complained, "It's the first time Jewish institutions in
France have given the impression that the defense of their own interests is
not the same as the defense of the Republic's values." The most commonly
held sign--"Synagogues br les, republique en danger"--gave the message that
the interests of France and its Jewish community were pretty much identical.
But whether that's the message France will get is anybody's guess.
"Traditionally," Alain Finkielkraut wrote in the Jewish monthly L'Arche,
"anti-Semites are those French who worship their identity and love one
another against the Jews. Contemporary anti-Semitism involves French people
who don't like themselves, who have a post-national perspective, who are
shedding their 'Frenchness,' the better to identify with the poor of the
world. They use Israel to place the Jews n the camp of the oppressors. You
have a sort of league between anti-Semitic Islamism and self-disparagement,
between repudiation of another and hatred of oneself."
Finkielkraut has for years railed against the dangers of political
correctness and the lazy thinking of France's anti-racism movement. His
writings often seemed merely a necessary means of saving a political
movement from sloppy thinking. But now that that movement is "raising a war
machine against the Jews in the name of the excluded," such wok seems much
more important.
The French left has thoroughly assimilated the lessons of World War II.
Maybe too thoroughly. After fantasizing for years about how much braver than
their parents they would have been had they lived in 1938, after waiting
stylishly for years for a predictably fogey-ish, Vichy-style anti-Semitism
so they could combat it according to their anti-racist operator's manual,
they suddenly find themselves confronted with evidence that there are at
least hundreds of thousands of people n their country who think pretty much
as the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigade does, and millions more whose opinions are
anyone's guess. The French left may have idealistic reasons for placing its
sympathies with the Palestinians, but it has powerful reasons of expedience,
too. Thus far its heart lies with the side that has committed the most
violence on French soil.
The most dangerous thing about Jean-Marie Le Pen, who loathes the global
economy, distrusts the Jews, and practices gesture politics, is not that
he'll get elected. It's that he'll serve as the hate object who unites
anti-Western Islamists and anti-Western anti-globalists, who march against
him night after night over ideological differences that grow harder and
harder to discern.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.