As part of its “de-demonisation” strategy, the National Rally is doing everything it can to distance itself from the fascist and anti-Semitic past of the National Front and its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. So much so that the RN not only claims to be contributing to the fight against anti-Semitism but is now posing as the ultimate “protector of the Jews”, a label accorded to it by eminent figures including the famous Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld.
And yet, despite all the efforts made to banish natural anti-Semitism from its ranks, it is back at full gallop! Witness the many infamous anti-Semitic statements made by RN candidates who have qualified for the 2nd round of the current legislative elections.
Pierre-André Taguieff is a philosopher and historian of ideas, director of research at the CNRS, and the author of an abundant body of work*. When, how and why did the concept of “Jew-capitalism” come into being? This figure of the main enemy of revolutionaries – socialists, anarchists, communists – is at the heart of the first form of modern Judeophobia on the left. From Charles Fourier to Karl Marx, the amalgam between Jews and “speculators”, “international bankers” or “international finance” remains the founding act of anti-Semitic hatred in the political field in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
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.
Since the launch, in May 2019, of Global Watch Analysis and Screen Watch magazine – which define themselves as progressive, secular and humanist media, dedicated to resist fanaticism – we have placed the fight against antisemitism at the heart of our struggles. This is demonstrated by dozens of surveys, interviews and editorials published by Ian Hamel, Martine Gozlan, Jean-Marie Montali and Atmane Tazaghart.
The Belgian political class is perhaps more characterised than any other in Europe by its denial of what is currently happening in the Middle East. This has been particularly true since the pogrom of 7 October, which seems to have moved people far less than Israel’s response. In recent weeks, there has been one appalling and revolting comment after another:
If it is true that old age is a shipwreck, in the case of the Palestinian raïs Mahmoud Abbas (84 years old), it is more like a long and lamentable drowning that drags in its wake Palestine and its just cause. Physically worn out, isolated and politically challenged, Abbas has been multiplying blunders and aberrations for many years. Ultimate slippage, speaking on August 24 before the “revolutionary council” of his party, Fatah, he uttered extremely serious anti-Semitic remarks: “Hitler did not kill the Jews because Jews […] but only because of their social status as usurers,” he asserted.
The Palestinian raïs took up here a hazy theory that he had already developed during a “History lesson” delivered before the Palestinian National Council, in Ramallah, on April 30, 2018, according to which “the reason for the Holocaust is not the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but the “social behavior” of the Jews”! But in his lucubrations of last August 24, he enriched this infamous theory with a new argument tinged with conspiracy: in a delirious attempt to prove that the ‘‘Nazis were not anti-Semites’’, he advanced the strange argument according to which ‘‘Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites”, because “they are the descendants of the Khazars [ancient Turkish people] who have nothing to do with Semitism”. Which, of course, has no historical basis!
In early March, Tariq Ramadan demanded the dismissal of a court-appointed expert to analyse the control he could exercise over young women with whom he had violent sexual relations. The preacher’s defence for the dismissal of Dr Daniel Zagury refers to “manipulation”. In fact, the main reproach levelled at this doctor is that he is… Jewish!
67 swastikas, discovered on December 28, desecrating the graves of a municipal cemetery in Fontainebleau; a torrent of anti-Semitic insults lashing out against Miss Provence 2020, April Benayoum, for claiming her Israeli ancestry on December 19, when she was elected as Miss France 2021’s first runner-up; anti-Semitic death threats against TV columnist Valérie Benaim on December 29; a delivery man from a big name in the new digital economy, boasting that he does not agree to deliver to Jews, on January 7 in Strasbourg; and to top it all off, an odious letter of anti-Semitic (and homophobic) insults, addressed to the government spokesperson, Gabriel Attal, on January 8… The phenomenon is not new, but in the space of a few weeks, it is a veritable surge of anti-Semitic acts which have descended on France, often in general indifference. And more worrying still, to the old anti-Semitic evil, that of hatred and (in)human stupidity, is added a new anti-Semitism, which tries to cover itself with political justifications, like that of the icon of the Indigènes de la République movement, Houria Bouteldja, justifying the anti-Semitic insults against April Benayoum with a mind-blowing argument according to which “one cannot be innocently Israeli”!
In rapid succession, Islamic Relief Worldwide, Britain’s leading Muslim NGO, was forced to get rid of two of its key leaders. The first for antisemitic writings, the next for singing the praises of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Highlights of the heartbreaking book of our colleague Jean-Marie Montali ‘We are the voices of the dead, the last deportees testify’, which has just been published by Le Cherche Midi. 75 years after the liberation of the camps, these testimonies from survivors, which resound like voices from beyond the grave, describe the unspeakable and name with singular sobriety the absolute horror of the Holocaust.
