June 2002

Liberte, Egalite, Judeophobie
Le Pen is the least of France's problems

By Christopher Caldwell

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 centre-right Union of French Democracy (UDF), was scheduled to visit a new mayoral sub-office with the city’s elegant, Berkeley-educated UDF mayor, Fabienne Keller. Bayrou got hung up campaigning. While Keller waited for him, she was surrounded by a mob of jeunes des banlieues—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 to take a razor to her private parts. When Bayrou arrived, the two went inside, 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. 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. He emerged from deep in the pack of 16 presidential candidates to finish a respectable fourth place, just behind Socialist PM Lionel Jospin.

Le Pen: the new antisemitism has little to do with him

As French students by the hundreds of thousands staged protest marches across the country, pretty much the entire world knew the result of the first round of the French election. Jacques Chirac, the conservative sitting president, went 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. 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. 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. What is surprising and confusing in all of this is that the "new antisemitism" 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 that thronged the streets to protest him.

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 restaurants) 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. 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 fired outside a Jewish association in Paris. After Israel’s attack on terrorist camps in Jenin and elsewhere, the violence exploded to unheard-of proportions. Over Passover weekend in early April, a bomb was found in a cemetery in Schiltigheim, outside Strasbourg, 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.

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 François Mitterrand marched with them.

Jacques Chirac: "There is no antisemitism in France"

Yet Jacques Chirac recently announced in front of Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres that "There is no antisemitism and no antisemites in France." Every French politician interviewed for this article said pretty much the same. Strasbourg mayor Fabienne Keller says: "There is no significant antisemitism." Her deputy mayor Robert Grossmann says: "There is no active antisemitism." How can they say this with a straight face?

One innocent explanation would be that French society has suited up to do battle with the antisemitism of 70 years ago, and simply doesn’t recognise any other kind.

"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 antisemitism, The New Breviary of Hatred. Goldnadel told a crowd at a B’nai B’rith Centre in Paris’s sixth arrondissement a few nights before the election, "Worry about the right has turned out to be a decoy ... 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 questioned for 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 Centre. "As if the others were not really antisemitic."

There’s another way that French politicians can deny that what they are dealing with is an outbreak of antisemitism. 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 Centre 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."

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 antisemites, and so did those around them. Everyone interviewed about them in the news was content to call them "classic delinquents." 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] Nimes—more and more kids from the projects are identifying the victimisation of the Palestinians with their own. It’s a simplistic thing, it’s not really an ideology."

Such an understanding appalls Goldnadel. "Delinquents?" he asks. "All antisemitic 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 vandalised a synagogue in Creteil, outside Paris, were convicted of "general violence" and given a sentence of three months—suspended.

The Jewish attacks—it should be plain by now—are the work of the Muslim minority in France. These neighbourhoods 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.

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 have become missionary fields for professional re-islamisateurs—proselytisers, usually financed by Saudi Arabia 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 proselytising that has led to what French people call la binladenisation des banlieues, the most famous alumnus of which is Zacarias Moussaoui. But he’s not alone. The "Arab" suicide bomber who 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. September 11 saw West Bank-style rejoicing incidents in some Arab neighbourhoods. On September 2 in the town of Beziers, a hoodlum named Safir Bghouia attacked a group of police with a shoulder-held rocket launcher, 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. As a result, beyond terrorism, the weight of fundamentalist Islam—and the antisemitism 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.

Which brings us to the real reason the French don’t think they have a problem with antisemitism, and the reason they’re wrong.

Pierre-Andre Taguieff, director of research at the Centre 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 antisemitism rests is largely imported. It is a hybrid of apocalyptic Islam and pre-Nazi Western antisemitism of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion type.

Front Nationale supporters march in Paris

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 antisemitism 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. The French sympathise 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 hang-out 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. 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-globalisation movement.". If you ask them why, of all the dozen conflicts the Muslim world is waging against the civilisations 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 antisemitism. 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-victimisers: The Jews have been through rather a lot. And that is why denial, or at least minimisation, of the Holocaust is an indispensable part of the ideology.

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.

Jose Bove: From McDonalds to Middle East politics

France has laws against Holocaust denial, but they can be violated in spirit with impunity. Such a violation was committed by Jose Bove in the first days of April, after he was expelled from Israel following a visit to Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. Bove, who rose to fame for vandalising a McDonald’s in southern France as a protest against American influence, is not merely the informal leader of the younger French left, and the guiding spirit of many of the anti-Le Pen protests that raged in Paris; he is also the most charismatic leader of the anti-globalisation movement in the world.

It was thus alarming to see Bove 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 antisemitism 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. For anyone who inhabits Western culture, the Holocaust made that culture a much more painful place to inhabit. To be human is to wish it had never happened. But it did. If there’s a will-to-antisemitism in Western culture—as there probably is—then the Arab style of Judeophobia, which is an antisemitism 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. 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.

You can see the attractive force in such an ideology. Author Alexandre Del Valle fears that antisemitism 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 centre-left opinion weekly Le Nouvel Observateur says, "The antisemitism 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 Le Pen 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.

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 organised, but it will be a counterweight, and it will soon be numerically preponderant, if it is not already."

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 Coordinated 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 behaviour of a foreign country. This attitude was given a witty shorthand—bonifacisme—in the Jewish press, which condemned it as a form of antisemitism.

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."

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 antisemitism 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 sympathisers," noted Shimon Samuels of the Wiesenthal Centre. "Indeed, the town’s deputy mayor used the occasion to publicly revile the Sharon government.")

"Traditionally," Alain Finkielkraut wrote in the Jewish monthly L’Arche, "antisemites are those French who worship their identity and love one another against the Jews. Contemporary antisemitism 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 in the camp of the oppressors. You have a sort of league between antisemitic Islamism and self-disparagement."

The French left has thoroughly assimilated the lessons of World War II. Maybe too thoroughly. After fantasising 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 Vichy-style antisemitism 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 in their country who think pretty much as the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade does. 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 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. Republished from The Weekly Standard, by permission. © The Weekly Standard, all rights reserved.

Copyright © AIJAC 2002
Last Updated 29 May, 2002