No laughing matter
A few weeks ago,
when French Jewish actor Elie Semoun was a prime-time guest on one of the main
French television channels, Canal Plus, the words of Sebastian Thoen, a standup
comedian who introduced him may have been meant to be to be laudatory, but took
quite a different turn: "You never plunged into communitarianism [Jewish
activism] ... You could have posted yourself in the street selling jeans and
diamonds from the back of a minivan, saying 'Israel is always right, f***
Palestine, wallala.' You show that it is possible to be of the Jewish faith
without being completely disgusting."
Semoun was
obviously ill-at-ease, but did not react. A couple hours after the show, the
Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) issued a
statement denouncing a "dangerous trivialization of anti-Semitism."
The President of the TV channel responded by saying that the Jewish community
had "no sense of humor." The incident occurred, however, in a context
where the French Jewish community has no reason to have a sense of humor.
At the end of
2012, Jewish France was republished. The book is a tirade of extreme
anti-Semitism, originally published in 1886 by the author Edouard Drumont, and
reprinted repeatedly until after World War II and the fall of the Vichy regime.
The publishing
company sent a press release for the latest book launch: "A classic of
French literature is finally available again." When Jewish organizations
protested, articles in Le Monde and Le Figaro (the two leading French daily
newspapers) said that Jewish organizations had "overreacted." The
publishing company that reprinted Jewish France issued or reissued other books
at the same time, such as The International Jew by Henry Ford; The Controversy
of Zion by Douglas Reed, the first anti-Semitic writer to deny Hitler's
extermination of the Jews, and an Anthology of Writings Against Jews, Judaism
and Zionism, including excerpts from the most libelous anti-Semitic writings of
the last two centuries. These books are now available at all the most popular
French bookstores. Thousands of copies of each have been sold. The CEO of the
publishing company Kontre Kulture [Counterculture, with a play on words] is a
famous French anti-Semitic writer, Alain Soral; his last book, Understanding
Empire, purports to explain the "Jewish hold" on the world; it has
been on French bestsellers lists for more than two years.
In recent months,
an openly anti-Semitic black comedian, Dieudonné, presented a series of shows
in the main cities of France and Belgium before large and enthusiastic
audiences. One of his greatest hits is a song ridiculing the Holocaust and the
"chosen people" : Shoah-Ananas (Holocaust-Pineapple). He popularized
a gesture of greeting which he dubbed "quenelle" (a French dumpling),
which echoes the Nazi salute. The "quenelle" salute consists of
extending the right arm and straightening the hand, but the arm is lowered, and
not raised at eye level. "Quenelle" is now used by many young people
all over the country when they want to show what they think of Jews and Israel.
Recently, pictures of French soldiers stationed outside a Paris synagogue and
welcoming visitors with "quenelles" were published on several
websites: a military investigation is now under way. The French Minister of
Defense said that one should not attach "great importance" to what
happened.
At the end of
June, a documentary film, Oligarchy and Zionism, was supposed to be released
nationwide. The movie poster, with a likeness to editorial cartoons from Nazi
magazines at the time of the Third Reich, should have aroused suspicion: it
showed a Jew turned into a spider crushing the planet with his crooked legs.
The Jew wore a black jacket with the Star of David and the initials of AIPAC
[American Israel Public Affairs Committee] on his shoulders.
The film itself
uses all the themes of "classical" anti-Semitism, with a modern
twist. It is based on interviews with Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of
the Jewish People, and Thierry Meyssan, who wrote 9/11: The Big Lie, a book
explaining that the September 11 terrorist attacks were organized by the CIA
and Israel's Mossad. The film's director, Beatrice Pignede, had previously made
the film Snapping
up the Memory, glorifying the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, and she
participated in the Fars film festival in Tehran in 2012.
The film was
announced in various mainstream magazines as an "important event." It
was not released because Jewish organizations threatened to picket movie
theaters. It is available, however, on many websites, and has been widely
circulated. Beatrice Pignede said she was a "victim of the Jewish
lobby" and that the "fate" of her film is "proof" of
what she wants to denounce.
To say that the
majority of the French population is anti-Semitic would be going too far. Polls
show that a favorite public figure this year is popular Jewish singer
Jean-Jacques Goldman. But it is clear that anti-Semitism is rapidly gaining
ground in France. It is clear there is a real trivialization of anti-Semitism
that goes way beyond some ugly sentences uttered by a standup comedian during a
prime time TV talk show.
A few years ago,
anti-Semitism in France was still hiding behind the mask of
"anti-Zionism" and hostility to Israel. It is still true, but more
often now, the targets are the Jews themselves, and the mask of
"anti-Zionism" has fallen away.
In a recently
published book, Demonizing Israel and the Jews, Manfred Gerstenfeld explains
that what happens in France is happening all over Europe. "Polls
show," he wrote," that well over 100 million Europeans embrace a
satanic view of the State of Israel (...) This current widespread...view is
obviously a new mutation of the diabolical beliefs about Jews which many held
in the Middle Ages, and those more recently promoted by the Nazis and their
allies."
Seven decades
after Auschwitz, the oldest hatred is slowly regaining its place on the
continent, and it is no laughing matter.
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