People have been asking: since when, and for what reason, has Zionism become a dirty word? Paul Berman speculates on this question and reports on recent alarming events in France:
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The Yellow Vest sidewalk mini-riot against Alain Finkielkraut [pictured right], the French philosopher, in Paris a few weeks ago—widely and even internationally reported in the press—deserves an additional commentary, apart from the obvious remark made by many people at the time, to wit, that manias against the Jews have gotten out of hand in France. Finkielkraut was walking in the street, when a group of Yellow Vests discovered him, and, recognizing his face, famous from a thousand talk-show appearances, shouted at him, “France belongs to us! Damn racist! You are a hatemonger. You are going to die. You are going to hell. God will punish you. The people will punish you. Damn Zionist!,”—along with “Go back to Tel Aviv!,” “Get lost, dirty Zionist shit!,” “We are the people!,” and other such cries, expressed with an air of violent menace—until he was rescued by a more sympathetic Yellow Vest and by the police.
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The sidewalk attack ought to remind us, in short, that Zola’s phrase (in his immortal J’accuse) was “imbecile anti-Semitism,” and not something adjective-free. Imbecility undergirds the phenomenon. If the attack on Finkielkraut revealed anything new, it was only by showing that imbecilities of different provenances can blend together—a loathing of the Jews compatible with the leftist tone of Yellow Vest economic protest; a loathing in the populist mode, with its rhetoric of “the people” against the Jews; and, as it happens, a touch of Islamist loathing, to boot. The most vituperative of the Yellow Vests shouting at Finkielkraut turned out to be an Islamist, known to the French police. The Yellow Vests on the sidewalk must have found the combination very exciting.
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The American universities have become famous for those melodramatic scenes, with crowds of undergraduates convincing themselves that Satan or Joseph de Maistre is about to deliver a lecture, and must be stopped. But student fads are the least of it. In our era, the loftiest of intellectual journals have been known to execute their own editors at noon. If the French version of this sort of thing is different, it is chiefly because the best-known of writers, and not just the academics, can find themselves on trial now and then, not just in the “court of public opinion,” and not just in the American closed-door Title IX university hearings (which is bad enough), but in courts of law.
This has been Michel Houellebecq’s situation, brought up on charges in France some years ago for having insulted Islam, which, of course, he had done—Houellebecq, whose novel Submission, is routinely denounced as racist (though an exposé of anti-Semitism is one of its principal themes). Pascal Bruckner was obliged more recently to defend himself in court, not once but twice, because of his analytic dissections of the Islamist controversies in France—Bruckner, the author of An Imaginary Racism, whose crime can be guessed at from the title of his book. Georges Bensoussan, the historian of the Jews in the Arab countries (in a compendious 900 pages), was brought up on charges for having said in a radio interview that, among Arab families in France, “anti-Semitism is imbibed with one’s mother’s milk”—though, like Houellebecq and Bruckner, Bensoussan managed to avoid conviction (in his case because he had quoted someone else, and the court ruled that he had merely misspoken, and his intentions were not criminal).
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To continue reading the essay, published in Tablet, click here. See also David Lehman's review of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission here.
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