Emmanuel Razavi

At the end of August, the Albi public prosecutor’s office issued a summons to the rapper Médine for broadcasting a video in which he threw darts at the photos of two elected representatives from the Tarn region, the mayor of Lavaur Bernard Carayon (LR) and the MP Frédéric Cabrolier (RN). You could say that the singer has been more inspired in the past, but no. This was never the case. But that was never the case.

In a message posted a few days earlier on the social network X, he had already attacked essayist Rachel Khan, the granddaughter of deportees, infamously calling her “resKHANpée”. An insult that he said he regretted a few days later, denying any form of anti-Semitism.

Médine is a habitual provocateur, a recidivist of anathema who never shies away from abjection. Incapable of composing the slightest melody, his “hits” consist of nothing but belches and exhausting borborygmus. No matter how hard you look for an audible track in his repertoire, there isn’t one. Médine is not a rapper, he’s just a barker. Listening to him, you think that his lack of artistic disposition should have disqualified him long ago from any stage, radio or television exposure.

Lack of talent is not a crime, of course, but it can still lead to one. One wonders whether his inability to create has simply led him to play the communitarian scum, simply to be able to exist on the media scene.

The case of Médine is in fact the revelation of a whole mechanism which has been undermining our humanist values for years. It’s a mechanism made up of crass stupidity that absolves anti-Semitism and Islamism in the name of artistic freedom of expression but is in fact nothing more than a cover for the intellectual collapse of the french far left.

The word of the scoundrel has as much impact as that of the philosopher

The most important thing is not Médine. After all, he’s just a “petty thug” who plays at being a poet by surfing on communitarianism. The most important thing is that, from Médiapart to the executives of EELV and LFI who invited him to their summer days, some people are still trying to understand what drives him, what he really wants to say.

In other times, Médine would simply have been banned from radio, television and concert halls. No elected official would have compromised himself by debating with him, and only the courts would have dealt with him. But these are ‘‘times when the words of the scoundrel have at least as much impact as those of the philosopher’’.

And it is in this respect that the Médine affair should appeal to us. It is symbolic of the degradation of thought, a metaphor for a world where relativism has taken precedence over notions of respect, humanity and reflection.

A society in which it is acceptable for a political party and the media to give pride of place to a rascal like Médine no longer responds to any transcendence. In fact, it’s a society that has become hostage to stupidity and intellectual inconsistency, in which one word is worth another. Médine understands this perfectly well. He has made it his trademark, moving from insult to repentance with disconcerting ease.

Of course, it would be foolish to believe that our contemporaries are fooled by this deception. On the contrary. However, when political figures from EELV and LFI, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Mathilde Panot, become the sounding board for abjection, “relativising” anti-Semitism and homophobia, while at the same time disqualifying any form of criticism of Médine, what room for protest remains?

When an elected representative of the French Republic, Martine Tondelier, explains that she wants to make up her own mind about Médine, even though his comments have been well documented, and when a major newspaper like Mediapart relays his bogus mea culpa almost fervently, what are we to think?

Have the political and media elites of the radical left become so incapable of discernment that Médine’s anti-Semitic excesses lead them to temporise rather than condemn? We have to ask ourselves this question. Because freedom of expression, which is necessary for democracy, cannot have racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism as its corollaries.

If we are not careful, the relativism we are facing will soon become a prelude to the erasure of all our republican and secular reference points. So, let’s stop kidding ourselves. There are people in France today who want to destroy what makes us a nation. People for whom a woman counts for less than a man, and for whom the Jews are the enemy. These people do not deserve any hint of understanding. For they are the objective allies of a new form of totalitarianism, even though they claim to speak in the name of democracy.

“War is peace”, wrote George Orwell in his prophetic novel ‘‘1984’’, in which he denounced the excesses of a tyranny that turned words into something other than what they were. Today, the disciples of the extreme left would have us believe in the same way that the rapper is a messenger of peace and the defender of oppressed minorities, at the same time as the scapegoat of the extreme right. This is as much bad faith as it is dialectical perversion and negationism.

In so doing, they justify the unjustifiable. Above all, they trample on democracy and the notion of reason.