Libert?, Egalit?, Jud?ophobie
Caldwell, Christopher
Liberté, Egalité, Judéophobie Why 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...
...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...
...Finkielkraut has for years railed against the dangers of political correctness and the lazy thinking of France's anti-racism movement...
...He noted that his opinions were fairly generally held...
...Taking a pizza delivery with one car and turning it into a big company—that sort of thing...
...gangs sought to storm a synagogue in Villepinte...
...why not Nigeria...
...There was also a spectacular terrorist incident a week before...
...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...
...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...
...Abbé Pierre, a popular priest who became a national hero, lamented in 1991 that "Jews, the victims, have become the executioners...
...And this unwillingness to call a spade a spade trickled down...
...It can liberate guilty, decadent Europeans from a horrible moral albatross...
...But he's not alone...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...I defy anyone to find a single line in any of my work that is anti-Semitic," said Boniface in an interview...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...To the extent that he mentioned crime at all (and he never did, preferring the euphemism insécurité), Jospin evinced a la-di-da attitude that dropped him to third place and ended his political career...
...Heck, I live in the suburbs, and no one's ever tried to pick my pockets," said Communist party presidential candidate Robert Hue...
...Let no one doubt the delinquency, though...
...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...
...All anti-Semitic thugs are delinquents...
...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...
...It is a hybrid of apocalyptic Islam and pre-Nazi Western anti-Semitism of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion type...
...On April 6, pro-Palestinian marches were held across the country...
...desecrations of synagogues and cemeteries...
...They decided also to march against the anti-Semitic attacks of the preceding days...
...There are indications that the government, too, is looking at the wrong target...
...In fact, its most dangerous practitioners are to be found among the very crowds thronging the streets to protest him...
...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...
...They use Israel to place the Jews in the camp of the oppressors...
...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...
...Ignoring anti-Semitism has the advantage of allowing French politicians to proceed as if nothing has happened...
...And yet "the problems of the Middle East," as Jospin calls them, are all that France wants to think about...
...Not Your Father's Nazism One innocent explanation 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...
...Over Passover weekend last month, a bomb was found in a cemetery in Schiltigheim, outside Strasbourg, and three synagogues were burned...
...His writings often seemed merely a necessary means of saving a political movement from sloppy thinking...
...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...
...We did one, the Jews did one...
...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...
...Bayrou got hung up campaigning in another city...
...Her deputy mayor Robert Grossmann says: "There is no active anti-Semitism...
...That is, in the philosopher Pierre-André Taguïeff's memorable phrase, to "dissolve the anti-Jewish acts in a rising tide of delinquency...
...It may, indeed, be a logical contradiction...
...And with immunity comes impunity...
...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...
...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...
...Le Pen has built his career mimicking the oratory of the rightists who collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II...
...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...
...Muslims may number as many as 8 million, but only half are citizens...
...on the following Sabbath alone, worshippers were stoned at synagogues in Clichy, Garges-lès-Gonesse, and Massy...
...The three boys who burned the synagogue at Mont-pellier—identified as "Morad," "Jamel," and "Hakim"— denied being anti-Semites, and so did those around them...
...But now that that movement is "raising a war machine against the Jews in the name of the excluded," such work seems much more important...
...My students have changed their opinion, too," he said...
...The echo of the "Letters to a German Friend" that Albert Camus had written in 1943 and 1944 was not lost on Jewish readers...
...Your father's Nazism is dead," says the political scientist Alexandre Del Valle...
...Everyone interviewed about them in the news was content to call them "classic delinquents...
...Indeed, the town's deputy mayor used the occasion to publicly revile the Sharon government and was met by jeers from the audience...
...Anti-Jewish violence has indeed tracked the progress of the intifada, rising during violent periods in the Middle East and falling during truces...
...Don't you know his real name is actually Bloch...
...Every French politician interviewed for this article said pretty much the same...
...What...
...Jospin's suggestions 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 candi-dates—Bayrou, the free-marketer Alain Madelin, and the centrist Corinne LePage—condemned the acts unconditionally...
...Bayrou, heedless that the cameras were running, slapped the kid in the face...
...There's another way that French politicians can deny that what they are dealing with is an outbreak of anti-Semitism...
...government's terrorist blacklist...
...The most commonly held sign—"Synagogues brûlés, république en danger"—gave the message that the interests of France and its Jewish community were pretty much identical...
...Me neither," added Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, also running for president...
...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...
...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...
...During a week when the top story on tabloid TV was the bloody beating of an 80-year-old man in sleepy Orléans 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...
...And others are seeking to make Islam more open to all Muslims, and more transparent in its sources of funding...
...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...
...One of the four terrorists on trial for trying to blow up Strasbourg's synagogue last year has long lived in France...
...Taguieff's book is brilliant, and extraordinarily well sourced, and will convince any reader who is not already dug in on Middle Eastern questions...
...Goldnadel told a crowd at a B'nai B'rith Center in Paris'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...
...Such an understanding appalls Goldnadel...
...Unfortunately, that kind of Islam is going to have to be invented, since it has never existed in 1,300 years...
...That, of course, is the great obstacle to this discourse of Jews-as-victimizers: The Jews have been through rather a lot...
...Who do they think was burning down Jews' houses on the Russian steppes a hundred years ago...
...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...
...The new anti-Semites are not German-speaking mil-itarists—who were conquered...
...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...
...They're the only ones who have the American-style careers we need," he says...
...How can they say this with a straight face...
...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...
...they can give you an answer that stops just this side of anti-Semitism...
...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...
...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...
...In the past decade he has added rage against America and the global economy to his oratorical repertory...
...They're Semites themselves...
...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...
...While Keller waited for him, she was surrounded by a mob of jeunes des banlieues—or "suburban youth...
...As Alain Finkielkraut noted, CAPJPO has never asked Muslims to pressure Palestinians to stop their suicide attacks...
...Tagui'eff resists the term "anti-Semitism...
...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...
...Second, because anti-Semitism is a racial ideology, and today's Jew-hatred is not really a racial ideology...
...The French left may have idealistic reasons for placing its sympathies with the Palestinians, but it has powerful reasons of expedience, too...
...Those who deny that it did may be those who can't bear to admit that it happened...
...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...
...That's not Taguïeff's target...
...But whether that's the message France will get is anybody's guess...
...Bové asked...
...In Paris as in Gaza—Intifada...
...he asks...
...First, "Why did you ban the headscarf...
...He emerged from deep in the pack of 16 presidential candidates to finish a respectable fourth place, just behind Lionel Jospin...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...In general, France is seeking to create an Islam that is in harmony with the country's secular traditions, which is wholly admirable...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Strasbourg mayor Fabienne Keller says: "There is no significant anti-Semitism...
...Maybe too thoroughly...
...Delinquents...
...Jacques Chirac, the conservative sitting president, goes into a runoff on May 5 against not Jospin but JeanMarie Le Pen, leader of the country's fascistic National Front...
...That is not the whole story of Arabo-Muslim France, of course...
...otherwise, you'll be lopped out of the national community...
...On September 2 in the town of Beziers, along the Belgian border, 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...
...The Chomskyites, . . . the people who think Empire is a good book...
...After Israel's attack on terrorist camps in Jenin and elsewhere, the violence exploded to unheard-of proportions...
...he is also the most charismatic leader of the anti-globalization movement in the world...
...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...
...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: SHARON À LA HAYE Invasion - Torture - Humiliation - Epuration éthnique Colonialisme - Crimes de guerre - Crimes d'état Violations du droit international - Assassinats Racisme - Profanations de lieux de culte - Massacres Extermination - Carnages - Sionisme - Injustice Crimes contre l'humanité - Déportation - Persécution ISRAEL COUPABLE Comité Francais pour la Liberté des Peuples 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...
...But if it has slowed at times, the cascade of such incidents has never stopped, even for a week, in the last 19 months...
...Kaci urges an Islam cut off from foreign influences, following somewhat the message of Tunisian novelist Abdelwa-hab Meddeb's cri de coeur, The Sickness of Islam...
...They are not Catholic tradi-tionalists—whose anti-Semitism rested on doctrines no longer asserted by Catholicism, which, in any case, is a religion the French no longer practice...
...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...
...The Wiesenthal Center circulated an advisory urging Jewish travelers to France to exercise "extreme caution...
...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...
...You can see the attractive force in such an ideology...
...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...
...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...
...Even firemen, long a beloved class of public servants in France, have been assaulted in housing projects surrounding Paris...
...The ideology on which the new anti-Semitism rests is largely imported...
...The French public didn't see it that way...
...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...
...the Coordinated Appeal for a Just Peace in the Middle East (CAPJPO) has asked French Jews to make a "critique of Israeli policy...
...I gave my advice not because of the weight of the community but on principle," Boniface said in an interview...
...We don't want to live anymore in a country that has Jews in it...
...That is why, Tagui'eff argues, it is so often found in tandem with anti-Americanism...
...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 André-Michel Ventre, secretary-general of the police chiefs' union...
...You mean tattoos...
...Claude Imbert, editor of Le Point, admits that French immigration was badly handled under the Socialist presidency of François Mitterrand, but remains "a resolute partisan of immigration...
...At times the superimposition of Nazi German motifs on Israel takes on aspects of a religious vision...
...Now we're even-steven...
...It's a simplistic thing, it's not really an ideology...
...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...
...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 January, the young men who had vandalized a synagogue in Créteil, outside Paris, were convicted of "general violence" and given a sentence of three months—suspended...
...But B'nai B'rith is right...
...The jeunes / Hamas / Hezbollah can't be anti-Semitic," one reads almost daily in the French press...
...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...
...The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut notes that, in France, "support for the Palestinian cause is not shaken but reinforced by the indiscriminate violence of Palestinians...
...Of course he does...
...Judéophobie Pierre-André Tagui'eff, 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 judéophobie, Mille et une nuits, 234 pages, 12 Euros), which lays it out...
...Don't believe anything Blair says," the man told my friend...
...In particular danger of embracing this Manichaean view of the Arab-Israel conflict are those who support Third-Worldism, neo-communism, and neo-left-ism, whom Taguïeff lumps together as the "anti-globalization movement...
...Such slogans, particularly the last, now get chanted routinely at pro-Palestinian rallies in Paris and elsewhere...
...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...
...Since Bové 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 négationnisme, or Holocaust denial...
...There was also a spike after September 11...
...These seek to woo young people of Islamic background to a radical political understanding of Islam...
...Disgruntled architects...
...why not Sudan...
...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...
...By the turn of this year, 60 people had been questioned for the hundreds of acts of intimidation...
...It was thus alarming to see Bové, 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...
...His family lives in Lyons, where his uncle, too, was arrested in connection with the attack...
...The outbreak began in September 2000, in the days after Palestinians launched the "second intifada" against Israel...
...Such a violation was committed by José Bové in the first days of April, when he was expelled from Israel following a visit to Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Almost two-thirds of these involved graffiti, but the others were more serious, including 16 physical assaults and 14 more firebombings...
...He even embraced the Stalinist-turned-Muslim-radical Roger Garaudy when he was accused of Holocaust-denial...
...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...
...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...
...They have power in the media, the universities, the associations, the political class...
...What...
...There are others who have courageously stood up against the Islamist wave, like Rachid Kaci, a mayoral aide in San-nois 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...
...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 in their country who think pretty much as the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigade does, and millions more whose opinions are anyone's guess...
...Yes...
...Bloch is a common Alsatian Jewish surname...
...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...
...It exists in the heads of three or four alcoholic skinheads...
...He is a goon and a gangster, but he had little need to raise divisive issues in the first round...
...These neighborhoods are becoming single-race areas, inhabited by North African immigrants and their second- and third-generation descendants...
...What is surprising and confusing in all of this is that the "new anti-Semitism" in France is a phenomenon of the left...
...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...
...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...
...As do hymns to Osama bin Laden, according to reports of last October's pro-Palestinian march in Paris...
...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...
...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...
...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 mère 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...
...Okay, not engraved in the skin, but, still...
...It has practically nothing to do with Le Pen...
...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's right, but this requires some explaining...
...And second, "F— off...
...France has laws against Holocaust denial...
...And that is why denial, or at least minimization, of the Holocaust is an indispensable part of the ideology...
...It has long alarmed Jews that non-Jews are showing up less and less at their marches...
...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...
...Thus far its heart lies with the side that has committed the most violence on French soil...
...The authorities seemed to be waking up...
...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...
...You have a sort of league between anti-Semitic Islamism and self-disparagement, between repudiation of another and hatred of oneself...
...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] Nîmes—more and more kids from the projects are identifying the victimization of the Palestinians with their own...
...September 11 saw West Bank-style rejoicing incidents in some Arab neighborhoods...
...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...
...Benladenisation des banlieues The Jewish attacks—it should be plain by now—are the work of the Muslim minority in France...
...The French ambassador to Israel, Jacques Huntzinger, called them "only part of the general violence manifested by marginal youth in France...
...As if the others were not really anti-Semitic and their exactions not just as serious...
...But the "evenhandedness" of Jacques Chirac on communitarian matters was almost worse...
...He continues to hold that view...
...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...
...Particularly by Palestinian terrorists...
...Bové, 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 French 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...
...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...
...He has been a consistent foe of immigration and a practitioner of nudge-nudge, wink-wink cracks against Jews...
...But Keller was a convenient stand-in...
...Only 5 were subject to legal proceedings, being far Right," according to a report prepared by Shimon Samuels of the Wiesenthal Center...
...As such, the French lack the imagination to see that the new anti-Semites— who are primarily radical Muslims—are anti-Semites at all...
...Who profits from the crime...
...Claude Kei-flin, a political reporter for the Dernières 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...
...In other words, the new anti-Semitism is not coming from the right...
...They are zones of drug-dealing, political apathy, unemployment (which stands over 35 percent in such places), and violence...
...Three of the 21 members of the CRIF board decided to make only the second part of the march...
...and shots were fired outside a Jewish association in Paris...
...Bayrou's visit, an 11-year-old boy jostled up against him and tried to pick his pocket...
...To be human is to wish it had never happened...
...Twenty years ago when Israel invaded Lebanon they were evenly divided...
...This would seem to be immunity on grounds of ani-mality—or at least on grounds of ignorance...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...This attitude was given a witty shorthand—bonifacisme—in the Jewish press, which condemned it as a form of anti-Semitism...
...Between a quarter and a half million people marched, and President François Mitterrand marched with them—the only demonstration he attended in his presidency...
...The French left has thoroughly assimilated the lessons of World War II...
...Law enforcement is under-equipped to handle such a challenge...
...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...
...According to an exposé in Le Point this spring, units from chilly Normandy are even detailed to the Côte d'Azur to help "reinforce" the beaches there...
...Now they are overwhelmingly pro-Palestine...
...On April 7, the CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organizations, held a march for Israel...
...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...
...Boniface is not alone in his opinions...
...What an antidepressant...
...The lawyer Pierre François Veil remarked that if Boniface had wanted to reach an Israeli friend, he could have written to the Jerusalem Post...
...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...
...Doesn't the citizen of a free country have a right to back whatever side he wants in a foreign war...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...French foreign minister Hubert Védrine told the Wiesenthal Center last June that the anti-Jewish acts were a matter of "suburban hooliganism...
...Saying there was no such thing as the gas chambers is, of course, not respectable...
...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...
...Liberté, Egalité, Judéophobie Why 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 François Bayrou's visit to Strasbourg on April 9. Bayrou, who represents Valéry 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...
...The votes of the two communities are about even...
...Public powers are resisted with force, and not just the police, who have been targeted for killing by organized "anti-cop brigades...
...But it did...
...In fact, it would be accurate to describe "suburban" as the French equivalent of the American adjective "innercity," except for one difference...
...They must be identical, of course, so the work of self-delusion can be accomplished...
...In this understanding, Zionism constitutes not just racism but the ne plus ultra of racism...
...He notes that beurs are among France's most dynamic entrepreneurs...
...What he is talking about is "mythic anti-Zionism," which treats Zionism as absolute evil, against which only absolute warfare can be raised...
...They have simply thought about the roots of Holocaust denial a bit more thoroughly than others...
...At some point during Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 33
