Exposing the Rise of Judeophobia

...Taguieff knows the literature of radical Islam well and quotes it liberally...

...The political-religious project they are determinedly advancing by terror, he cautions, is not only totalitarian in nature but seeks nothing less than "conquest and domination," and "might well prove to be the Communism of the 21 st century...

...Taguieff expertly dissects the thinking of the most aggressive anti- Jewish Muslims...

...Much of it sees the Jews as "a people in the way and democratic culture [as] a poison...

...Sentiments of this kind help to define the transnational reality of political Islam and are the ideological underpinnings of violent actions on a global scale...

...A leading scholar at France's prestigious National Center for Scientific Research, Taguieff is the author of several wellregarded books on nationalism and racism...

...The "criminal Zionist state" is a target of choice but, as the author demonstrates, "the criminalization of Israel has gone hand in hand with the criminalization of the whole West...

...France also has Europe's largest Jewish population, estimated at about 600,000...

...Zionism is a form of colonialism, imperialism and racism...

...TAGUIEFF CAREFULLY distinguishes between classical Islam and today's militant "Islamism," driven by "ideological fanaticism...

...Like the old anti-Semitism, the new "Judeophobia," as he prefers to call it, embodies a "total hatred" of Jews "as endowed with a malign essence...

...the Dreyfus affair and the Vichy regime—long widely discredited and considered safely dormant, if not altogether extinguished...

...He devotes the major part of his book, however, to analyzing the role they play within the Muslim world, where they have become pervasive and evidently shape the thinking of tens of millions of people...

...Taguieff's detailed exposure of the political culture that has given rise to Judeophobia is therefore indispensable...

...Taguieffpresents an array of evidence that shows these views are now normative among people on the far Right and the extreme Left...

...Relations between the two groups were generally free of major problems until the past few years, when Jews became the targets of more abusive rhetoric and violent incidents than at any time since the end of World War II...

...It thus has a larger Muslim population than Lebanon, Libya and most of the states in the Arabian peninsula...

...Hence, in the new lexicon of Judeophobia, currently fashionable among French and other European intellectuals, "antiZionism" is not to be denounced as a form of anti-Semitism but embraced as a virtue by all right-thinking people...

...France is currently home to over 6 million Muslims, the vast majority of them Arabs from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria...

...When he first published his book in 2002, this fearsome prospect was broadly denied and is still to be fully credited—and not only in France...

...They are symptomatic, though, of a new awareness in France that the country has some serious related problems—including a virulent anti-Semitism, frequently under the guise of anti-Zionism...

...The "Zionism" endlessly excoriated by the "anti-Zionists" is a construct, or useful ideological fiction, he correctly notes...

...Moreover, those who are thought to be allied with Israel are also guilty and may be attacked at will...

...become the scene of such ostensively racist eruptions...

...Yet as distressing as those assaults have been, "the real content of 'antiZionism,'" Taguieff warns, "is an exterminatory Judeophobia...

...The most extreme proponents of this view, like the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, regularly call for a holy war against both Jewish and Christian infidels wherever they are to be found...

...To many American observers, both developments are disquieting and baffling...

...Adherents of the latter, he maintains, are basically at war with the modern, secularist cultures of the West, whose primary agents—identified as America and the Jews—are said to form a "crusader-Zionist alliance" that faithful Muslims have a religious duty to oppose...

...To illustrate, Taguieff quotes Jordanian Minister of Social Affairs Emile Algohri: "It is our firm belief that there is no difference at all between Jews and Zionists...

...The sense of uncertainty and vulnerability awakened in Jews recalls, however imperfectly, shameful episodes from the French past—i.e...

...It is this turn of events that Taguieff sets out to document and explain...

...The targets of the "anti-Zionists" are "less and less 'Zionism' or 'Zionists' and more and more Jews as such...

...Why, some ask, has the nation of Libert...

...Although his is not the first study to explore the new anti-Semitism, it is the best informed and most cogently argued...

...Recently, too, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of Paris to decry another disturbing phenomenon: resurgent anti-Semitism...

...All are guilty, although the most guilty are the "Zionists" and those who support the alleged evil that is the "Zionist state...

...Risingfrom the Muck: The New AntiSemitism in Europe, a highly readable, albeit unfortunately titled, translation of Pierre-André Taguieff's La nouvelle judéophobie, clarifies the troubling situation with admirable precision...

...Fraternit...

...Reviewed by Alvin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English...

...Small wonder, then, that France, worried about the values of French republicanism being at risk, has introduced measures meant to counter the threat of militant Islam...

...The policies that have provoked Muslim anger go against the American social paradigm of multiculturalism, which not only accommodates but encourages the public expression of minority views and practices...

...The rationale that supports such violence goes like this: "Jews are all more or less crypto-Zionists...

...Therefore Jews are colonialists, imperialists and racists, whether overt or covert...

...In Risingfrom the Muck he brings all of his impressive intellectual powers to bear on exposing an uncomfortable truth most Europeans are aware of, but relatively few are prepared to publicly acknowledge: The return of antiSemitism to the Continent parallels the growth of political Islam within the burgeoning Muslim communities of Europe...

...Neo-Nazis and others on the Right have been involved to some degree, but the bulk of these attacks have been initiated by Muslims, some of them incited by militant antiZionist Islamic preachers...

...Taguieff further points out that these by now well entrenched political clichés have reconstituted "an anti-Jewish vision of the world...

...Nevertheless, a necessary antidote to the destructive effects of antiSemitism is knowledge of its precise sources and ultimate objectives...

...galit...

...The desecrations of Jewish cemeteries and war monuments this spring were merely the latest in a series of violent attacks on individual Jews and their institutions that have taken place across France during the past threeand-a-half years...

...Scores of arson attacks against synagogues and Jewish schools across Europe and the daily harassment and sometimes beatings of Jews are expressions of the new hostility...

...More controversially, the government has banned the wearing of religious headscarves in public schools...

...director, Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts, Indiana University Over the past year French officials have detained and sometimes deported dozens of radical Muslim clerics...

...Taguieff is convinced the jihadists have to be taken seriously...

...Preachments expressing these views are standard Islamist fare and, in one form or another, reach people in the often disaffected Muslim communities of Europe...

...They have helped to create "a wave of Judeophobia unprecedented in scale or intensity in the post-Nazi period...

...All Jews are Zionists and all Zionists are Jews, and anyone who thinks otherwise is not thinking logically...

...We consider world Jewry our adversary and enemy, as we do imperialism and all the pro-Jewish powers...

...These and other steps (see "Growing Up Muslim in France," NL, March/April) have prompted many in the country's sizable immigrant Muslim communities to mount angry demonstrations denouncing actions they consider to be anti-Islamic...

...To them, "Israel is inherently culpable, the only nation-state guilty by its mere existence," he observes...

...How effective the ban on radical imams and religious headscarves in schools will be in this regard remains to be seen...