Ramadan has been accused of fifth-column behaviour before, most notably in Paul Berman’s book-length takedown The Flight of the Intellectuals.22 And it’s true that some of his texts are at best apologies for, and at worse endorsements of, virulent anti-Semites and the Muslim Brotherhood’s often reactionary ideology. But Charlie Hebdo’s “big iceberg” does not stop with Ramadan, whose intellectual track record is published for all to see. Riss targets the regular man and woman on the street, painting a picture of sleeper-cell fifth columnists on every corner, wherever one sees a veil or a beard.
Riss’s next incognito jihadist is the pious woman on the street, brave and devoted to her family. She would never hide a bomb under her veil, but she makes us shut up and flee from debate, he argues. Her role, according to Charlie Hebdo, even if she doesn’t realize she’s playing one, is to silence criticism from those who feel uncomfortable seeing veiled or, worse yet, niqab-wearing women in the streets.
The next unwitting terrorist conspirator is the friendly neighborhood baker with a beard and a prayer mark on his forehead. He has replaced the old French baker, who retired. “He makes good croissants, is friendly and always has a smile for his customers. He’s perfectly integrated into the neighborhood,” Riss writes. His insidious sin is not offering ham sandwiches or bacon. And with that, the closet jihadist baker’s role is fulfilled.
Now Riss moves to the morning of the Brussels attack. He writes of “a young criminal who has never opened a Koran in his life, knows nothing of the history of religions or colonialism.” He calls a cab with two of his friends and heads for the airport with a bag packed with explosives. “They are not as learned as Tariq Ramadan, they don’t pray as much as the baker, and they don’t observe the precepts of Islam as well as the brave veiled mother,” he writes.
It’s here that Riss glides into the territory of the legendary nineteenth-century anti-Semite Édouard Drumont. Any Muslim, like the Jews in the anti-Semitic imagination during the Dreyfus Affair, becomes a threat to the nation. “At this precise moment, no one has done anything wrong,” he intones ominously. But the terror that strikes when the bombs explode, shattering glass and leaving bodies strewn across the Brussels departure hall, “could not happen without the contribution of all of them … from the bakery that forbids you from eating what you like to the woman who forbids you from telling her that you’d prefer her without a veil,” Riss contends. “The path is drawn for all that will follow.” For Riss, the terrorists’ role is merely to “conclude what has already begun” and to tell us “shut up forever, living or dead.”23
One can muster genuine empathy for a man who lost most of his colleagues in a bloody attack just one year earlier, but his chilling conclusion has a great deal in common with the anti-Semitic tracts that paved the way for Vichy. Aside from the dubious logic of arguing that halal bakeries encourage terrorism, there is something much more sinister at work in Riss’s editorial. In arguing that there is a direct line between the carnage in Brussels and the neighborhood baker who doesn’t serve ham croissants, Riss is deploying protofascist rhetoric and actively insinuating that the most basic forms of religious observance pose a threat to society. It is scapegoating of the highest order.
Alain Finkielkraut, the well-known French philosopher, claims not to have seen the editorial, but he is familiar with the tip-of-the-iceberg theory and completely rejects the comparison to anti-Semitism. He argues that there is no resemblance between the two because the Jews scapegoated in the nineteenth century and during World War II were innocent; today’s Muslims are blowing things up.
“There was no Jewish jihadism; it did not exist—that is, the Jews were seen as intruders, as a threat even though they were absolutely peaceful.… They had neither the intention to secede nor the intention to attack the citizens and institutions of the host country,” he tells me. “On the contrary, they came to France with a feeling of gratitude and intense love. They came to France because it was the country precisely that had cleared Captain Dreyfus.” And besides, he adds, Riss’s editorial can’t possibly be as dangerous as Drumont because “real racists do not read Charlie Hebdo.”24
But Finkielkraut misses the fact that the perceived Jewish threat and the actively fomented fear of it was a key component of the anti-Semitic imagination, and many were recruited to the cause by the framing of Jews as dangerous outsiders.
Like Finkielkraut, the Dutch Jewish academic Paul Scheffer doesn’t see today’s hatred and fear of Muslims as comparable to Nazi persecution of Jews in the 1940s. He regards the backlash against Muslims as occurring “in a context of violence” with no parallel in Jewish history. In other words, no Jews murdered well-known filmmakers, so hatred of them was indefensible. After Mohammed Bouyeri killed Theo Van Gogh, the argument goes, it’s understandable. This ignores the fact that most people targeted and harmed by the current backlash are not guilty of any crime.25
Finkielkraut and Scheffer seem to forget the pretext for Kristallnacht—and that fears of radical Jewish communists and violent anti-British Zionists were once used as grounds for denying entry to Jewish refugees fleeing eastern Europe.26 There is no reason that in the long run it couldn’t happen in Europe again.
Instead of dismissing the analogy, we should learn from Europe’s recent history—when the groundwork for mass murder was laid with talk of “them” and “us.”27 The fact that a small group of fanatical Muslims are engaged in violent terrorism does not mean that the entire group is guilty and deserves to be ostracized.28
Anti-Semitism remains a malignant force in France. But that form of racism has become unacceptable among major politicians and opinion leaders and has receded from the surface of political debate. Muslims have replaced the specter of the international Jew in mainstream discourse.
For the older generation of the French right, there was a direct line to Marshal Pétain and collaboration with the Nazis. Those old Vichyist Nazi sympathizers are dying off. Now it is the Muslim, “who incarnates an international threat to France, who invades France, who threatens to take power in France,” argues Daniel Lindenberg, a Jewish academic who specializes in the study of authoritarianism. The fear is that Muslims, like the Jews before them, will take power, that Sharia will be applied in Europe. In many ways, he argues, it is like anti-Semitism of the past. There are “the rich Muslims like Qatar’s rulers, who replace the Rothschilds” as the wealthy usurping villains, he explains. “At the same time there are the very poor who are threatening because they come here with their large families” and threaten to outnumber and replace the native Christian inhabitants.29
What bothers Lindenberg the most is that there are now Jews who subscribe to this thinking and echo the views of the far right.30 Éric Zemmour, an observant Jew who wrote the best-selling book The French Suicide, is the most visible, but Finkielkraut is the most influential.
Lindenberg knew Finkielkraut a bit in the 1980s and considered him “rather left-wing and anti-racist.” Then, in 1989, the same year as the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the debate over French Muslim girls wearing veils in school exploded. At that point, Finkielkraut started to become an intellectual of reference for the French right. It is a strange sight, Lindenberg admits, to see that “newspapers that are otherwise rather anti-Semitic are not anti-Semitic vis-à-vis Finkielkraut.” The journal Rivarol, a wildly right-wing publication named after a French counterrevolutionary writer, still occasionally features baldly anti-Semitic material. However, says Lindenberg, “If there is an attack against Finkielkraut, there is always a reader who says, ‘No, he is useful.’” For them, “the role of an intellectual like Finkielkraut is to give respectability to rather racist ideas.”
The great irony is that the old identity at the core of this nostalgic vision is a conception of Frenchness that explicitly excluded Jews. “It is quite paradoxical because it uses against others the arguments of anti-Semitism,” namely the idea of a foreign body that is unassimilable, says Lindenberg.31
The ambivalen
ce toward Jews can be traced to two traditions on the French far right—that of Charles Maurras, a Catholic nationalist and monarchist whose counterrevolutionary ideas were in many ways protofascist; he called the collaborationist Vichy regime a “divine surprise.”32 For Maurras, the Jews were the antithesis of Frenchness par excellence and had to be excluded. Then there was Maurice Barrès, the right-wing novelist who wrote the novel Les Déracinés (The Uprooted) in 1897, lamenting rootless cosmopolitans and celebrating those grounded in the terroir. He was also a leading voice among the anti-Semitic propagandists during the Dreyfus Affair and spoke of his identity as rooted purely in his bloodline. “I defend my cemetery,” he famously wrote, tracing a lineage back through blood and soil to generations past.
Yet as Finkielkraut himself acknowledges, the “immense pleasure” Barrès found in his heredity had a flipside during the Dreyfus Affair. “The other face of this pleasure was the physical and metaphysical disgust” that Captain Dreyfus inspired in him. Dreyfus was “very different from us, resistant to all the stimuli that our land, our ancestors, our flag and the word ‘honor’ stir in us.” All throughout the Dreyfus Affair, Barrès remained obstinately attached to this view. As Finkielkraut wrote, “Dreyfus had betrayed because, a foreigner on the soil, he had treason in his blood. His crime was a product of his race. As a Jew, he is Judas, he conspired by his nature against the nation’s identity.”33
Barrès eventually accepted Jews as part of the spiritual family of France after seeing them die on the battlefields of World War I. But the seed was planted, and in certain quarters of the French right, these ideas never went away. Maurras never got over his fixation on the divide between the “real France” of authentic people rooted in the land and the “legal France” of paper citizens, an idea that is at the centre of current debates about immigration, the books of bestselling writers, and the FN’s campaign.34 Maurras “is still alive, even among those who never read a line of him,” insists Lindenberg.35 And today, his ideas have found new form and a new scapegoat.
Still, Finkielkraut rejects any comparison between the hatred of Jews then and hostility toward Muslims today. The anti-Semites “were mistaken; they invented, it was a fantasy,” he told me, dismissing the analogy. “But who can say that jihad is a fantasy? Who can say that Salafism is a fantasy?”36 he asks. Lindenberg sees it as a dodge. It’s intellectually lazy, he argues, to deny a similarity between the two eras even if today’s Muslims aren’t wearing yellow stars. The differences shouldn’t prevent us from seeing that today they “occupy the unenviable position of scapegoats.”37
As France obsesses over Islam, Marine Le Pen is appealing to intellectuals of the left to join the so-called camp of patriots. She knows, Lindenberg writes, that there is total confusion and disarray among a group that was once “so sure of its identity.”38
As Islam has taken centre stage in political debates since 9/11, it has redrawn the ideological battle lines that once clearly separated Christian conservatives from secular liberals. Whereas Muslims were once wholeheartedly welcomed by the intellectual left in the name of solidarity with the third world, their cultural conservatism has now placed them closer, in terms of family values, to the positions of the old French right. But they haven’t been warmly welcomed by those conservative Christians who see themselves as defenders of French identity. At the same time, the transformation in the eyes of French liberals of the poor oppressed immigrant into a Muslim making demands has “alienated the progressive left and made it possible to build a bridge” between the old left and those surrounding Marine Le Pen, argues the French scholar of radical Islamism, Olivier Roy.39
Many on the old left are buying into the cultural argument of the new right because its leaders have shed the Catholic traditionalism and toxic anti-Semitism of the past and recast themselves as the defenders of French secular values. Lindenberg believes it is happening now because the same cultural anxieties animating the fears of ex-Communist workers in the industrial north are striking fear into the hearts of intellectuals in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.40 Dozens of writers, even if they have no expertise in the field of religion, now pen books on Islam and talk about the Koran on television; the most widely read is the pop philosopher Michel Onfray. “It’s a bit like in the 1930s, there was … always the Jewish question,” says Lindenberg.41 Today, the Muslim question is everywhere. And when Islamists attack France or its neighbours, that question, and the blame that follows it, is thrust to the fore.
Stéphane Charbonnier was one of the twelve people murdered at the offices of Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. He was also one of France’s best-known cartoonists. His book, Open Letter, was published posthumously. Charb, as he was known, presented a rousing defence of free speech and the right to insult any religion. He also rightly pointed out that Charlie Hebdo had a history of vicious mockery of Catholics and Jews; Muslims were hardly unique in that sense.
He insisted that cartoonists were not mocking all Muslims when they drew a gun-toting jihadist just as he was not mocking all Jews when he caricatured right-wing Israeli settlers. He was happy to equate “Jewish religious extremists who, for instance, stalk Palestinians in the West Bank by bulldozer and machine gun with jihadists who stalk infidels in Iraq or Syria.” But Charb fundamentally rejected the concept of Islamophobia on the narrow grounds that it is fair to mock or fear a faith but that it is wrong to target the individuals who adhere to it, which would be simple racism. “The inventors of Islamophobia won’t budge; they absolutely insist that Islamophobia be treated as anti-Muslim racism equivalent to anti-Semitism, which is anti-Jewish racism,” he wrote.42
This hairsplitting is a fair argument if Islamophobia is strictly defined as mockery of the institutional religion or fear of its most fanatical and violent believers. The problem is that most people engaging in Islamophobic behavior today do so out of fear and hatred of Muslims as individuals and as a group simply because of who they are, the God they worship, and what they wear.
The crux of his argument in the end is like Finkielkraut’s—that hostility toward Islam today is different from hatred of Jews, and hence somehow more understandable and excusable, because Muslim extremists are killing lots of people. “Was there an international terrorist movement in 1931 that claimed to act on behalf of Orthodox Judaism? Were there Jewish jihadists threatening to establish the equivalent of Sharia law in Libya, Tunisia, Syria, and Iraq? Did Rabbi Bin Laden send a biplane crashing into the Empire State Building?” Charb fumed. “Jewish fundamentalism was not to 1931 what Muslim fundamentalism is to the twenty-first century.”43
Given that Charb was murdered by Muslim extremists, his words carry added weight. Yet he did not foresee how the sort of violence that killed him might be harnessed politically to marginalize Muslims.
Hatred against a group can be mobilized when one of its members commits a violent crime. Whether the backlash should be characterized as simple racism or “Islamophobia” is a semantic debate that does not change the fact that collective blame is being ascribed—including by one of the murdered cartoonist’s surviving colleagues—and where there is collective blame, collective punishment can soon follow.
Finkielkraut concedes that “at some point, there’s a risk that the French will have had enough of Islam,” because they already live to the rhythm of attacks and violence. Islam in its most violent form has become “a sort of permanent ambient noise, constantly being discussed in national politics.” But for the moment, he believes, “French opinion is holding remarkably well. It is resisting the sirens of racism.”44
The question is for how long and whether figures like Finkielkraut will give an imprimatur of legitimacy to those who would rather sound the sirens than resist them.
The conflation of individual Muslims and terrorist extremists is spread by people who claim they are attacking a religion but spend a great deal of time attacking its believers. It is a tactic that was used by those who deplored the influence of Jews in nineteenth-century France; anyone
who dared to denounce anti-Semitism was accused of attacking freedom of expression.45 Indeed, the title of the arch anti-Semite Drumont’s magazine was La Libre Parole (Free Speech). These days, “very few of them express old-fashioned ‘biological’ racism,” wrote Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books. “Instead, their ‘cultural racism’ portrays Muslims as an irremediable, jihadist fifth column.”46
One of those who makes both arguments about Muslims today is the German central banker turned writer Thilo Sarrazin. His book Germany Abolishes Itself caused an uproar when it was released in 2010, not least because he was a member of the Social Democratic Party. Sarrazin, an economist by training, is more fixated on a Social Darwinist argument against immigration; he believes Turks are dumbing down Germany and endangering its competitive edge. But he also claims that Islamophobia can never be equated with anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism was all invented and based on hysterical jealousies. Echoing Charb, he writes that discrimination against Muslims is acceptable because “terrorist attacks, honor killings, the furies of the Taliban … and the hangings of homosexuals are realities.”47
But his analysis reveals a similarly static and racially driven view of Muslims. He blames Islam because Vietnamese immigrants have done better than Turks in Germany and ventures to argue the same is true in Britain because Indians tend to do better than Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. (He neglects to mention that British Indians also perform significantly better than white working-class British children, who are presumably not lagging behind due to genetic inferiority or their fanatical embrace of Islam.)48 Sarrazin’s dire warnings of cultural suicide sold 1.5 million copies. Even more people turned out in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre to express solidarity with the victims.
Go Back to Where You Came From Page 14