An excerpt from La Nouvelle judéophobie [The New Judeophobia]:

The Silence Surrounding the New Judeophobia: blindness, complacency or connivance?

Pierre-André Taguieff
Translated by Douglas
French original: "La Nouvelle judéophobie"
(Fayard - Mille et Une Nuits, 2002/01/16)

[215]
A profound intellectual and moral reform of "the struggle against racism and xenophobia" is now necessary (367). It is simply false to maintain that historically "anti-Arab" or "anti-Immigrant racism" has replaced anti-Semitism, the latter having largely faded away.

It is no less false to hold likewise that there has been a displacement from anti-Semitism's modes of denigration, segregation and discrimination onto "anti-Arab racism." That this false vision should be so widely held does not make it true.

The sociological and historical truth is quite other: there has been no succession but rather a coexistence between anti-Maghrebi xenophobia - targeting certain categories of immigrants and their children, grand-children, etc. - and judeophobia as an attitude (negative prejudices and stereotypes), ideology (conspiracy theories, etc.) and behavior (violent acts, etc.) (368). Neither of these two forms of heterophobia can be made to come before the other (according to a scale of "seriousness") without bias. From a universalist perspective, which I share and which is indistinguishable from the republican aim in politics, what has to be done is to combat the one and the other, the one as much as the other.

I would add that the only realistic answer to the seductive powers of fundamentalist Islam, that is to say of a politicized Islam directed against republican values and institutions (and generally against all that is "Western," democracy included), is the promotion of a French Islam (369), of an Islam that is organized transparently, accepts secularization and respects its principals, complete with places of worship and representative institutions, explicitly and firmly condemning fundamentalist and jihadi demagoguery. In France and in Western Europe there are enough Muslims who are "well integrated and secularized while remaining practicing believers" (370) to allow us the reasonable hope that, even beyond the creation of the institutional conditions of an "Islam à la Française," Islam shall have its Vatican II. Or, more modestly, that a French Islam shall be built on a renewed application of the legal principle separating church and state to the specific characteristics of the Muslim religion.

But let us return to the present. The progressive and planet-wide rise since the 1960s of an anti-Jewish mythology based on the demonization of Israel and of "Zionism" that is today carried and broadcast by transnational islamist circles, should be a prime target of anti-racist vigilance and should inspire profound self-examination. To the duty and work of remembering, we should add the labor and reflection on emergent threats in order to act on their causes and contextual factors and to limit their devastating effects.

It is unbearable to see so many good souls and forthright minds allow it to be said, to be believed or understood that all misfortunes in the world can traced to the existence of Israel. It is intolerable that Israel should be permanently denounced, following the title of one of the first Russian editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as "the source of our suffering" (371). For a long time, Israel has lead the charge against fundamentalist terrorism.

The better souls and the right-thinking minds in France and elsewhere (Italy and Germany, in particular) say they are against terrorism but also come out against the fight against terrorism. And not surprisingly we have heard the traditional chant of the leftists on the good side: "Neither imperial crusades nor Taliban terror!" (372). And of course: "This is not our war."

After having criminalized the Western response to the terrorist acts, the substance of the appeals by Trotskyite/Communist circles suggests the urgent measures to be taken in order to "spring the trap set by the logic of war and to steal the thunder of religious fanaticism" (a confused naiveté!): "It is urgent that we lift the embargo on Iraq, demand of Israel the unconditional restitution of the territories occupied in 1967 and the immediate recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state."

Indeed, why not? The creation of a Palestinian state seems to me quite as necessary as it is urgent. But taken together these propositions gain their true meaning when one observes that the supreme leader of Islamic terrorism makes similar demands, whatever his deeper motives might be. Given this, the agenda of Trotskyite/Communist "pacifists," whose legitimacy and credibility derive the from sudden rebellions of their forbears starting with the Bolshevik revolution, is reduced to an elegant means of relating the arguments of bin Laden and translating them into a "soft" version.

This is surely not the first time that we have seen the rise of such an ideological brew in which all sorts of ingredients are bubbling, opposing values, contradictory norms, and whose sole function is in justifying not action but, in the international context of Autumn 2001, the absence of reaction against terrorism. Deprived of any credible revolutionary goal, the many sects of neo-Leftism can only produce moderated extremism, adapted to contemporary norms of acceptability.

In proposing to deprive terrorism of its "base," some of their colleagues in the Middle East go further than the creation of a Palestinian State, which has the draw-back of conceding that the Jewish State has a right to exist. They propose the creation of a bi-national State (373) as a way of realizing the supposedly life-saving project of multi-national society (which differs only in name and a few inflections from milti-cultural or multi-communitarian society).

Yet this model has been tried in the past and all its attempts have ended in failure. Carried to extremes in abstract utopianism and blind angelicism, some are extolling the multinational model at a time when all the multinational states (from the USSR to Tito's Yugoslavia) are collapsing only to give birth to ethnically cleansed nation-States often in bloody conflict! We may rest assured that in the reasonable and rational world where our utopists are dreaming the sympathetic measures they are proposing are enough to do away with Islamic terrorism! But in the awful world in which we live and think Islamic terrorism is a political and religious project for domination which must be fought altogether differently.

Believing that one can eradicate international Islamic terrorism simply by voiding the alibis of terrorist acts is to delude oneself, is to remain in the shadow of terrorist influence, piously responding to the questions it formulates and spreads about. None of which prevents one from legitimately demanding that the embargo on Iraq should be brought to an end on the condition that Saddam Hussein be chased from power (374). Nor of finding that given the specific nature of the conflict (which is no longer a conflict between states (375)) the American response, legitimate in itself, did not take the most appropriate form (the bombing of Afghanistan) (376).

But one must avoid confusing everything. It is fitting to take Islamism seriously, as the principal threat hanging over free societies for it could well be the "Communism" of the 21st century (this is perhaps precisely what has seduced those nostalgic for Leninism/Trotskyism, as Islam seduced Stalinists such as Roger Garaudy) (377). And this "green" (Islamist) neo-totalitarianism could well be the harbinger, in its calls to "holy war," a new era of massacres of in the name of a sacred cause. Jews, "crusaders," "infidels" or "miscreants," but also "monkeys" and "pigs" represent a new variety of the absolute enemy treated as one of a category of "harmful insects" (Lenin) of which one must urgently rid the world (378). The sacred cause of extirpating evil is hailed as a universal mission for cleansing the human species. The idea of "holy war" is confused with that of redeeming purification. At the heart of this new totalitarian vision there is the project of radical purification based on the will to total control, to total Islamist normalization.

Anti-globalization militants must immediately sweep their doorsteps and keep watch over their own houses for what threatens their legitimate and respectable struggle is at once an americanophobic temptation and a growing judeophobia, which, in a bond sealed with the total rejection of the West, risks opening the royal road to the Islamist illusion (379). That is to say, to darkness, to oppression, to idiocy and deadly violence.
Blind pacifism, which puts the aggressor and his victim on equal footing, is a particularly dangerous form of moralism in that it amounts to permitting or encouraging the actions of the aggressor while paralyzing the victim, criminalizing its legitimate defense. Not knowing how to recognize the enemy, not being able to distinguish him, not daring to mobilize against him... this is the absolute zero politics. It is also the absolute zero of geopolitics.

Without demonizing it mimetically in return, let us have the courage to recognize the persistent reality of violence and to name the emergent enemy: the transnational Islamic terrorist networks in whose eyes the Jews are one people too many and democracy is a poison. This identification of the diasporic Islamist enemy, at once interior and exterior, in no way implies renouncing criticism of the policies of the sole hyper-power: one must not, as too many hasty intellectuals do, lazily oppose a sanctified (and circumstantial) pro-Americanism to a Gnostic anti-Americanism. It is worth referring to Max Weber: "He who would be involved in politics and above all who would make it his vocation [...] compromises himself with the diabolical powers that lurk in all violence" (380).
[224]

[…]

[229]
In France, as in other European countries, certain fanatical americanophobes and israelophobes, of which the majority are on either the far-Right or the far-Left (Communist or neo-Marxist), play the role of fellow-travellers and auxiliary helpers in the total war instigated by the anti-American attacks of 11 September. I shall confine myself, by way of illustration, to a very summary text dated 7 October 2001, signed Bruno Roy, a sociologist and director of Fata Morgana publications, in which he addresses his academic colleagues:

A few humanists had hoped that the just admonition addressed on 11 September to the United States would lead them, from its moderation (5,500 dead is less than 1% of the victims of the embargo on Iraq), to change their policies. A vain illusion: the worst of the terrorist States, founded in genocide, enriched in slavery, prospers only through crime, from Mexico to Hiroshima, from Guatemala to Vietnam, from Colombia to Palestine. When today the Afghan people are the direct victims of bombing (and Palestine the indirect victim, the Zionist power's profiting from the situation to worsen its massacres), so much less it is acceptable for us to remain indifferent as the French government, valet of the Americans, wishes to involve us in these crimes. What can academics do? In answer to the lies of power, to the disinformation of the media, try to make the truth known, to oppose the war, to show our solidarity with the victims (389).

To read such a text, oozing hatred (the massacre of 11 September presented as a just admonition!), consorting with the enemies of all freedom, one is reminded of some of Orwell's reflections on intellectuals, singularly receptive to totalitarian dictatorships: "Intellectuals are led to totalitarianism much more than ordinary people" (390). "What is sinister is the fact that the knowing enemies of freedom are those for whom it ought to mean the most" (391). Still, one must resist the urge to hate, to hate hatred, and refuse to enter into the vicious cycle of mimetic hatreds. Neither must one give in to the "victim's pathos" or show the "avenger's adamancy." This is one of the grander lessons that I have retained from Primo Levi's great book If He's a Man, that, in 1976, lucidly answered a reader's question:

I must admit that seeing certain faces, certain old lies, the maneuvers of certain individuals whose respectability is problematic, certain indulgences and complicities, the temptation to hate arises within me, even violently. But I am not a fascist. I believe in reason and in discussion as the supreme tools for progress and the desire for justice wins out over the hatred within me (392).

There is no destructive violence without legitimizing reference to strongly held beliefs that are themselves reaffirmed by the violence they cause and justify. This vicious circle of beliefs and violence was thus described by Zygmunt Bauman:

Like vampires, values need blood to reinvigorate their vital energies. The more there are dead, the more radiant and divine the values on the altars of which we have burnt the cadavers (393).

This terrible logic is not fatal. The toil of Sisyphus in politics is precisely to determine the conditions for a sort of vicious circle, in establishing an order in which pluralism does not prevent unity. In the face of combative groups whose stated aim is to convert or vanquish the "infidel", to conquer recalcitrant nations or to wipe them from the slate, pacifist angelicism is of no use. It is only the acquiescing and smiling face of defeatism. We have embarked upon war and in choosing sides cannot fail to take up arms for that of liberty. Ibn Warraq ended his book in this way: "The final battle will not necessarily be between Islam and the West but between those who value freedom and those do not" (394). Correction: there will be no final battle.

It is essential, without further delay, in the nation which would have itself be the one of man of the citizen, that those of all beliefs and origins, who reject intolerance and fanaticism, begin by opening their eyes to the current situation, that they dare at long last to ask themselves what it is right to do to prevent the spread and banalization of that terrible soul sickness (395) which is ceaselessly reborn through ideological metamorphoses: anti-Jewish hatred in the new context of transnational Islamic terrorism which its vehicle and intensifier. "Intolerance breeds intolerance," (396) observed Leroy-Beaulieu in 1897, in the troubled context of the Dreyfus affair. The spread of the Enlightenment has not done away with religious fanaticism (397). Nothing in man is eradicable.

History shows us its unpredictable ebb and flow, its disappearances and reappearances. Anti-Jewish passions have repeatedly been reborn in unforeseen forms over the course of the twentieth century. After racist and nationalist judeophobia came in the three previous decades an anti-racist and anti-nationalist judeophobia... if not anti-globalization one: a tragic perversion of the "struggle against racism" which, since the end of the nineteenth century, had included the fight against anti-Semitism.

The hour is one of mimetic hatreds that feed off each other. Intellectualized hatreds who accompany the spread of a technically advanced neo-barbarism that aims to put all peoples in lock-step. And its jihadi flipside: the calls to submission and to provincialism, to blind obedience and to the holy extermination of satanic enemies. Martyrs are plentiful. But, as Nietzsche said, "martyrs prove nothing as to the truth of a cause [...]. Blood is the worst attestation to the truth. Blood is a poison that transforms the purest doctrine into madness and into hatred of hearts" (398).

All, consumers, stock-holders and suicides, are seeking happiness. The "Islamikaze" murderers themselves are seeking heaven. Might I be allowed here to quote André Breton?

To reduce one's imagination to slavery, while what is crudely called happiness would also serve our ends just as well, is to shy away from the supreme justice one has in his heart (399).

What truly belongs to man is the act of wagering on a possible world where hatred does not have the last word. Love remains a utopia. Love married to intelligence.
[234]

(367): In this way I am reiterating the diagnosis and perspectives adumbrated in my book Face au racisme, t. I: Les moyens d'agir, op. cit. introduction: "La lutte contre le racisme, par-delà illusions et désillusions," pp. 11-43. [Facing Racism, v. 1: The Means to Act. Introduction: "The Struggle Against Racism: beyond illusions and disillusions"]

(368): For more on this tri-partite model of racist or anti-Jewish configurations (attitude/ideology/behavior), see my book Les Fins de l'anti-racism, op. cit. pp. 21-42 [The Ends of Anti-Racism]

(369): While Jean-Pierre Chevènement was Minister of the Interior (1997-2000) he worked hard to establish a republicanized Islam. See the interview he granted to Le Monde, 19 February 2000: "L'Islam à la Française, selon Chevènement." It is to Jeanne-Hélène and Pierre-Patrick Kaltenbach that we owe a particular intriguing essay which opened this path: La France, une chance pour l'Islam, Paris, Editions du Félin, 1991.

(370): Notre Histoire Editorial, special edition on Islam, November 1996 (cited by Paul Balta, L'Islam, Paris, Le Cavalier Bleu, 2001 p. 121).

(371): La source de nos maux, anonymous pamphlet reproducing the unedited version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that appeared in journal Znamia (26 August-7 Semptember 1903), published at Saint Petersburg in December 1905. See my book Les Protocoles..., op. cit., p. 366.

(372): "Non à la croisade impériale" ["No to the Imperial Crusade"], an appeal made at the behest of Daniel Bensaïd (the Revolutionary Communist League), Willy Pelletier (Communist), Jacques Bidet (Communist), Henri Maler (Communist), etc., made public October 15 2001. See Le Monde, 21-22 October 2001, p. 32: "113 French Intellectuals Launch an Appeal Against the War in Afghanistan." Among the signatories: Pierre Vidal Naquet, Yves Benot, Elias Sanbar (editor in chief of Revue d'études Palestiniennes [Palestinian Studies Review]), Aline Pailler (MEP on the Communist list), etc.

(373): See for example Michel Warshawski: Israël-Palestine, le défi binational, post-scriptum d'Elias Sanbar, [Israel-Palestine, the bi-national challenge, post-script by Elias Sanbar] Paris, Textuel, coll. <<La Discorde>> (edited by Daniel Bensaïd), 2001. Such a "bi-national project", under the direction of "the greatest Palestinian intellectual of the 21st century" (p. 18): Edward Saïd (Israël-Palestine: l'égalité ou rien, Paris, La Fabrique, 1999 [Israel-Palestine: equality or nothing]), constitutes the matrix of new and nonspecific appeals which would justify the refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel, even after the creation of a Palestinian State. Can we believe that once this bi-national state is created the professional assassins of Hamas and Islamic Djihad will transform themselves into moderate Muslims, into peaceful humanists and pluralist democrats? We know the fate of most of the Islamists who had been volunteer combattants in Afghanistan: after 1989, the "Afghans", having become a body of killers of non-Muslims or of non-conforming Mulims, searched the world for conflicts where they might see action (Sudan, Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, etc.). Like the demand for the "right of return" for Palestinians, the "bi-national wager" constitutes a fearsome symbolic weapon, and nothing more, against the very principal of the existence of the Israeli State. Far from defining possible solutions to the conflict, these two forms of demand are destined to forbid any legitimate arguments, save by one route: Israel's abandonment of its right to exist. The good souls offer suicide to Israel.

(374): Dan Meridor, president of the Commission of Foreign Affairs and of Defense for the Knesset, who took part in the Israeli delegation lead by Ehud Barak to Camp David (11-24 July 2000), puts the geopolitical problem lucidly: "At bottom, the Palestinian problem is not the essential one. Even though it is difficult to resolve, we can find an answer for it. The grand danger for our region comes from States such as Iran or Iraq where the three following factors are present: a strong effort to procure nuclear weapons as well as delivery missiles; a direct and unprecedented implication in terrorism which is considered a legitimate means of action even at the very top of the State and thirdly the quite serious belief that their goals is the destruction of the State of Israel, pure and simple. Neither Egypt, nor the Syrians nor the Palestinians speak in such terms. Khomeini declares every week that Israel must be liquidated. As for Khatami, the "moderate reformer," he does not say different." ("Vivre sans les Palestiniens" ["To live without the Palestinians?"] interview with Dan Meridor conducted by Emmanuel Halperin, Politique internationale, nº 93, automne, p. 238).

(375): This is an asymmetrical war in which a State is fighting an enemy which is not another State but a transnational network benefiting from numerous complicities and enjoying support from various quarters.

(376): See François Géré, "Vers une victoire de façade" ["Toward a Superficial Victory"], Libération, 16 October 2001, p. 11.

(377): After the Bolshevik Revolution, Max Weber declared: "It's the Islam of modern times" (cited by Hichem Djaït, L'Europe et l'Islam, Paris, Le Seuil, 1978, p. 138). See also the remarks by Bertrand Russell in 1921 in his book "The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism," quoted by Ibn Warraq, op. cit., p. 207.

(378): For multiple examples taken from Leninist writings, see Dominique Colas, Le Léninisme, Paris, PUF, 1982, pp. 195-216. We can scan the infernal regions of the Bolshevik landscape where we meet "parasites," "vermin," "fleas," "virus," "bacilli," "the waste of humanity."

(379): About the Appeal of the "113 intellectuals," Delfiel de Ton said what had to be said, with the requisite irony and seriousness: "And after all this, what do we get? 'This War is Not Our War.' This war might not be theirs but bin Laden declared it upon the infidels, that is to say all those who do not believe in a single God, upon the Jews, upon the crossed, that is to say upon Christians of all persuasions, upon hypocrites, that is to say upon Muslims who do not share his fanaticism. In short, in whatever category bin Laden might put them, he has declared war on our intellectuals. [...] "This war is not our war. In the name of the law of the jungle, the Western armada is administering is celestial justice." Are they joking or what? "Celestial Justice"! Who's talking of celestial justice if not bin Laden himself. He is prepared to scorch the planet for his celestial justice. He says so, is proud of it, has begun doing it and announces every day his intention to continue. One is saddened at seeing certain names among the 113 intellectuals. One would have hoped they had more common sense." ("Intellect", Le Nouvel Observateur, nº 1929, 25-31 October 2001, p. 126.) See also the solidly argued text of a collective of journalists, writers and academics (Gérard Grunberg, Pascal Perrineau, Stéphane Courtois, Michel Taubman, etc.), "Cette guerre est la nôtre" ["This Is Our War"], Le Monde 8 November 2001, p. 16.; Robert Redekker, "Le Discours de la cécité volontaire," ["The Discourse of Willing Blindness"], Le Monde 22 November 2001, supplément, p. IV, which hits the mark; and the beautiful article by Liliane Kandel, "Il ne s'est rien passé le 11 semptembre?" ["Did nothing happen on 11 September?"], Libération, 5 novembre 2001, p. 7, which ends on this disturbing question: "This glacial indifference, this haughty distance, this insidious transformation of the victims into the guilty, this radical - and devoutly wished -absence of compassion for them, of horror (really!) before the crime, is this the new politics that the Left of the Left is offering us?" Claude Lanzmann ferrets out from behind the "old rote anti-Imperialism" of the neo-leftist circles what he calls their "original hatred, that of Israel, which is more guilty than bin Laden, guilty of having created him, the only guilty party. Why not?" ("The Disaster", Les Temps modernes, nº 615-616, September-October-November 2001, pp. 1-3).

(380): Max Weber, Le Savant et le Politique ["The Scholar and the Politician"] [1919], Fr. trans. Julien Freund et al., Paris, Plon, 1959, p. 196.

[Posted 2003/02/22]

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