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JEANNE ACCORSINI/SIPA

 

From far right to communitarian left: The tectonics of anti-Semitism

12 June 2024 Investigations   78776  

Since the Dreyfus Affair, left-wing movements have been perceived as Judeophilic, despite historical anti-Semitism dating back to the 19th century, which saw the left confuse Judeophobia with anti-capitalism. And since the Nazi horror, anti-Semitism has been relegated to the far right. Except that the decolonial and indigenist excesses of wokism are in the process of giving rise to a left-wing neo-anti-Semitism that has nothing to envy the abjectness of fascist currents on the far right.

By Pierre Rolet et Gérard Legraud

On 6 November 2003, three leaders of the Socialist Party launched an appeal in Le Nouvel Observateur entitled “Mr Ramadan cannot be one of us”. The aim was to challenge the participation of Hassan al-Banna’s grandson in the European Social Forum. The preacher had just accused French Jewish intellectuals of obeying communitarian logic. “By singling out intellectuals designated as ‘Jews’ and placing them outside common reason, Mr Ramadan is following in the classic tradition of the extreme right. It’s the fascists who think and speak like that”, concluded the letter signed by Manuel Valls, Vincent Peillon and… Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

What has happened since then in the mind of the former Socialist minister turned leader of La France insoumise? Many of his “fellow travellers” testify that he was hardly anti-Semitic when they knew him. Many even doubt that he has become one with age (73 next August). How, then, to explain his chilling excesses, which almost make Jean-Marie Le Pen look like a modest fan of tasteless jokes?

For historian Robert Hirsch, author of “La Gauche et les Juifs”1(The Left and the Jews), although there has been anti-Semitism specific to the Left since the 19thcentury, combining Judeophobia with anti-capitalism (see the article by Pierre-André Taguiff, page 28), the anti-Semitic excesses of the leader of LFI and a number of his zealous lieutenants have a completely different motivation: they accompany – with the ulterior motive of gaining electoral advantage – the rise of Islamist-based anti-Semitism among a large section of Arab-Muslim youth in the French suburbs.

Islamists call for LFI vote     

This type of anti-Semitism feeds on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is why LFI is deliberately hysterising the debate on this issue, to the point of making its European election campaign almost exclusively about the war in Gaza.

And this sordid electoral cynicism is, alas, bearing fruit. During the 2022 presidential election, a poll conducted by IFOP for the newspaper La Croix revealed that 69% of Muslims put a ballot paper in the name of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the ballot box.

Worse still, some of the most radical Islamists, such as Vincent Guyot, known as Vincent Souleymane – described by the Rhône prefect, Fabienne Buccio, as a “Salafo-freedom preacher known for his anti-Jewish hatred” – or Hani Ramadan – director of the Islamic Centre of Geneva, brother of Tariq Ramadan, and in favour of stoning adulterous women – called on the eve of the 2022 presidential elections for “French citizens of Muslim faith to vote in the first round for the least worst candidate in this presidential election: Jean-Luc Mélenchon”.

Examining the outrageous statements made by the leader of LFI, Iannis Roder, director of the Observatoire de l’éducation at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, was already talking in 2021 about “a political calculation to establish a foothold and consolidate elections”2. The aim is to appeal to the baser instincts of the Muslim electorate: in the past, the Communists could count on the working-class “red belt” around Paris. Today, the Insoumis are trying to knit themselves a “green belt”!

This observation has led some analysts – particularly on the left – to play down the nature and scope of left-wing neo-anti-Semitism, which in the end is “not very serious”. It’s almost like anti-Semitism with a human face! Since it is only “contextual, populist and electoralist” and therefore has nothing to do with the good old bad anti-Semitism of the National Rally, which is “founding, historical and ontological3”.


As extremes have an unfortunate tendency to converge, the current tectonics of anti-Semitism risks leading to a ‘convergence of struggles’ between Mélenchonist anti-Semitism and the fascist currents of the far right

But this watered-down vision only sees the tip of the Melenchon iceberg. Apart from the electoral cynicism of blowing on the embers of communitarian passions and exploiting the worst impulses in the hope of one day gaining power, Melenchon’s anti-Semitic excesses are also – and above all – part of the continuity of a historical Judeophobia that bears no relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 2017, during the commemoration of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ roundup, Jean-Luc Mélenchon claimed that France had “nothing to reproach itself for” with regard to the fate of the Jews during the Second World War. As for the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF), founded in 1943 during the Resistance, Mélenchon claims that it is “far right”. Then, in 2020, speaking of Christ, the leader of LFI takes up the old cliché of the deicidal people: “It was his own countrymen who put him on the cross”.

Neo-anti-Semitism woke

Worse still, a new type of anti-Semitism is being grafted onto these outrages, which bear the scars of the “old Christian anti-Judaism”: under the pressure of the Woke, indigenist and intersectionist anti-Semitism, Melenchon’s anti-Semitism is not only following in the footsteps of the old anti-Semitism of the left, which amalgamated Judeophobia and anti-capitalism. It overlaps with many aspects of fascist anti-Semitism long relegated to the far right!

Carried by the decolonial and intersectionalist components of wokism, this neo-anti-Semitism is characterised by an obsessive denial: denying Jews – lumped together with Zionism and/or the State of Israel and thus pigeon-holed as the “white dominating” oppressor – any victim status. Even during Mohamed Merah’s attacks on Jewish children at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse in 2012, or after the pogrom on 7 October 2023.

So Mélenchon is incapable of seeing Merah’s killings as anything other than a plot deliberately hatched during the presidential election campaign. And faced with the extreme savagery of the acts perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October 2023, LFI MP David Guiraud is taking refuge in conspiracy denial. Guiraud, a social network junkie and admirer of conspiracy theorist pamphleteer Alain Soral, said at a conference in Tunis, referring to the disembowelled mother and the baby allegedly thrown into an oven during the 7 October pogrom, that “it was done by Israel (…) The disembowelled mother… it was done, it’s true, by Israel”.

And since extremes have an unfortunate tendency to converge, this tectonics of anti-Semitism is likely to lead to a “convergence of struggles” between Mélenchonist anti-Semitism and the fascist currents of the far right, which have suddenly resurfaced in recent election campaigns – despite Martine Le Pen’s efforts to break with this heritage – through the many anti-Semitic remarks made by RN candidates (see page 26).

Proof, if proof were needed, that such an “intersectionality” – which might appear at first sight to be an unholy alliance – is by no means out of the question:  no one at LFI is offended by or dissociates themselves from the nauseating comments made by the indigenist muse Houria Bouteldja, who states in “Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous”: “For the South, the Shoah is – dare I say it – less than a ‘detail’. It’s not even in the rear-view mirror”. Follow his gaze!

 

(1)  La Gauche et les Juifs, Robert Hirsch, Éditions Le Bord de l’Eau, 2022.

(2)  Clément Pétreault, “Les vieux démons de Mélenchon”, Le Point, 20 July 2023.

(3)  Arié Alimi, Vincent Lemire, “L’antisémitisme de gauche est instrumentalisé pour décrédibiliser le Nouveau Front populaire”, Le Monde, 21 June 2024.