Reflections on anti-semitism

247 Pages·2014·1.27 MB·English

by  Badiou

This book is supported by the Institut français as part of the Burgess programme
(www.frenchbooknews.com) This English-language edition published by Verso 2013
Translation © David Fernbach 2013
‘ “Anti-Semitism Everywhere” in France Today’ first published as L’antisémitisme partout –
Aujourd’hui en France
© La Fabrique 2011
‘The Philo-Semitic Reaction: The Treason of the Intellectuals’ first published as La Réaction
philosémite ou la trahison des clercs
© Nouvelles Editions Lignes 2009
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books eISBN: 978-1-78168226-5
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Badiou, Alain.
[Antisémitisme partout. English]
Reflections on anti-semitism / Alain Badiou, Eric Hazan, Ivan Segre; Translated by David
Fernbach.
pages cm
1. Antisemitism–France–History–21st century.
I. Hazan, Éric. II. Segré, Ivan. III. Title.
B2430.B273A5813 2013
305.892’4044–dc23
2013015615
2013015615
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
‘Anti-Semitism Everywhere’ in France Today
by Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan
1. A Year of Excitement
2. Anti-Semitism Real and Imagined
3. A Strange Rhetoric
4. The New Inquisitors
5. What Interests, What Aims?
6. The Role of Israel
7. Legal actions
8. The Inquisitors’ Resources and Ruses
9. Why France?
The Philo-Semitic Reaction: The Treason of the Intellectuals
by Ivan Segré
Introduction
1. The ‘Communitarian’ Ideology (Critique of Recent French
‘Communitarian’ Thought)
Appendix: Origin and Continuity of ‘Communitarian’ Ideology From
May 1968 to Today
2. On Ethno-Cultural Sociology
Appendix: A Counter-Analysis of Ethno-Cultural Sociology’s Statistical
Data
3. Anti-Taguieff: Pierre-André Taguieff’s Revolution in Science
4. Oriana Fallaci and ‘The Jews’: An Ambivalent Resistance
Appendix: Mass Culture and ‘The Jews’
Epilogue
Notes
‘Anti-Semitism Everywhere’ in France Today
Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan
1
A Year of Excitement
In 2002 war was declared against the forces of evil in the Middle East. In
Afghanistan, the US army had invaded six weeks after 11 September
2001 and was continuing its project of liberation. A further liberation
was also taking shape, that of Iraq: generals and diplomats were openly
preparing to invade the country to establish democracy. In Palestine,
where the Second Intifada was under way, the Israeli army reoccupied
the whole of the West Bank and Operation Rampart swept away what
remained of the autonomy granted at Oslo. In April, the seizure of the
Jenin refugee camp and its destruction by bulldozers caused the death of
several dozen civilians.
In France, meanwhile, the first round of the presidential election was
marked by the success of the Front National. Roger Cukiermann,
president of the CRIF,* wrote in Haaretz (23 April 2002) that then FN
leader Jean-Marie Le Pen’s success ‘will serve to reduce Islamic anti-
Semitism and anti-Israeli behaviour, as his vote sends a message to
Muslims to behave peacefully’.
It was in this context that a campaign developed denouncing a ‘wave
of anti-Semitism’ in France:
Synagogues are burned, rabbis molested, cemeteries profaned, community institutions and
universities forced to clean walls scrawled with filthy messages in the night. It takes
courage to wear a kippa in those wild places known as ‘sensitive estates’, or on the Paris
metro.1
Why this campaign? It was important to create a diversion, as public
opinion and even the media were shocked by the brutal way in which
the Israeli army repressed the Second Intifada. Denouncing the ‘wave of
anti-Semitism’ was a good way to distract attention from the bloody
Operation Rampart, or still better, to present this as a defensive measure
in the context of a ‘general upsurge of anti-Semitism’.
The terrain was propitious for this kind of operation: in the wake of 11
September, hatred against Arabs and Muslims was on the rise
throughout the Western world. They were – of course – the propagating
agents of this anti-Semitic wave:
The revival of both verbal and physical anti-Semitic attacks in France and Europe, since
the outbreak of the ‘Second Intifada’ in autumn 2002, has undoubtedly brought to the fore
new agents of anti-Jewish hatred, in particular aggressors hailing from the banlieues or
from immigration, victims of racism and discrimination who embark on behaviour
towards Jews of a kind they are entitled to be protected from.2
This notion of a ‘wave of anti-Semitism’ was not entirely without
foundation. It is undeniable that the years from 2002 to 2004 saw insults
against Jews, hostile graffiti, wooden crates burned outside synagogues,
and fights among youths. Even if those acts that attracted the most
media coverage, triggered the strongest words among politicians and the
greatest indignation from Jewish organizations were the act of a
fantasist (the ‘aggression’ of Marie Leblanc on an RER train in July
2004),† or of a poor simpleton, himself Jewish (the arson at a Jewish
social centre on rue Popincourt in August that year),‡ the reality of
hostile acts against Jews in this period is not open to doubt, and we do
not take any acts of this kind lightly. Yet nothing happened that a
reasonable person could see as particularly serious, nothing irreparable,
and even Simone Veil sharply criticized Alain Finkielkraut for calling
2002 a ‘year of crystal’.3
For the initiators and activists of this campaign, however, the real
scope of the so-called wave mattered little: the impulse had been given.
In tandem with the police-style listing of ‘acts of an anti-Semitic
character’ in the press, designed to demonstrate their proliferation, we
had the publication in October 2004 of the Rufin report, commissioned
by the minister of the interior, which denounced ‘an imported anti-
Semitism, particularly rife among young people whose families come
from countries where anti-Semitism is culturally commonplace’. Rufin
equated ‘anti-Zionism’ with ‘surrogate anti-Semitism’, and proposed
legislation that would criminalize criticism of the state of Israel.
This was also the time of the first prosecutions for ‘incitement to racial
hatred’ brought by a group calling itself Avocats Sans Frontières
(Lawyers Without Borders) – against the journalist Daniel Mermet,
against the publisher La Fabrique, then against philosopher Edgar Morin,
political scientist Sami Naïr and novelist Danielle Sallenave.4 We also
saw the appearance of a series of publications denouncing the anti-
Semitism of ‘Maghrebians’. In Les Territoires perdus de la République, a
collective work edited by Emmanuel Brenner and focusing on the
question of schools, the general theme was that
the anti-Semitism that finds free rein in the educational establishments of certain quarters,
the fear of the adults in charge in the face of unacceptable utterances and behaviour, the
intellectual retreat in the face of the Islamist offensive, are all symptoms of the abyss that
divides France more than ever between the common people and the elites.5
Nicolas Weill, in La République et les antisémites, took it as an ‘accepted
fact’ that there was ‘a particularly virulent Arabo-Muslim anti-Semitism,
tolerated when convenient by a certain far left that is often passive – if
not fascinated – in the face of this extremism’.6
We might note in passing the new emphasis placed on the word
‘Republic’, already wielded to support the ban on the ‘Islamic headscarf’
in schools: as if, by a singular paradox, a word generally seen as
indicating a certain political universalism, even oriented to the defence
of the right of ‘those below’, now serves as a token of hostility towards
the Arabic and Muslim workers of the housing estates.
The bulky tome Prêcheurs de haine, by Pierre-André Taguieff, is a 968-
page denunciation of this alleged phenomenon, proscribing a whole list
of ‘archeo-Trotskyists and anti-globalist new leftists, extravagantly
Palestinophile … despite the increasing Islamization of the Palestinian
cause’.7
This denunciation of an ‘upsurge of anti-Semitism’ was relayed and
amplified by almost the whole of the media and what is known as the
‘world of politics’. On the left, its most vocal proponents were the
habitual enemies of French ‘Arabo-Muslims’: secularist zealots and
misguided feminists. (We should note in passing that the composite
‘Arabo-Muslim’, along with ‘Islamo-leftist’ of the same coinage,