Liberte, Egalite, Judeophobie : Why Le Pen is the least of France's problems, by Christopher Caldwell

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 emerged 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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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!"

[...]

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. 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 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. 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.

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?

[...]

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. [...] In other words, the new anti-Semitism is not coming from the right.

"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 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 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.)

[...] (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 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] Nimes--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.

I do feel I've learned a fair amount from this. I don't have to watch out for anti-semites. I have to watch out for delinquents. Has anyone called Officer Krupke?

Oh, okay, here's something about the French intellectual side:

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.)

Read the rest to read about Pierre-Andre Taguieff's "The New Judeophobia" ("La Nouvelle judeophobie"). Giving a taste, I've always wondered about the exceptionalism of so much criticism of Israel -- one might agree with much of it, but so much seems oddly focused uniquely on Israel, whilst ignoring similar or identical injustices around the world; here's an explanation for a bit of it:

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 Empireone 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.

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."

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.