The Silence Surrounding the New Judeophobia: blindness, complacency or connivance?
Pierre-André Taguieff
Translated by Douglas Gillison
French original: "La Nouvelle judéophobie"
(Fayard - Mille et Une Nuits, 2002/01/16)
> ...[215]
A profound intellectual and moral reform of "the struggle against racism
and xenophobia" is now necessary (367). It is simply false to maintain that
historically "anti-Arab" or "anti-Immigrant racism" has replaced anti-
Semitism, the latter having largely faded away.
It is no less false to hold likewise that there has been a displacement from anti-Semitism's modes of denigration, segregation and discrimination onto "anti-Arab racism." That this false vision should be so widely held does not make it true.
The sociological and historical truth is quite other: there has been no succession but rather a coexistence between anti-Maghrebi xenophobia - targeting certain categories of immigrants and their children, grand- children, etc. - and judeophobia as an attitude (negative prejudices and stereotypes), ideology (conspiracy theories, etc.) and behavior (violent acts, etc.) (368). Neither of these two forms of heterophobia can be made to come before the other (according to a scale of "seriousness") without bias. From a universalist perspective, which I share and which is indistinguishable from the republican aim in politics, what has to be done is to combat the one and the other, the one as much as the other...
After having criminalized the Western response to the terrorist acts, the substance of the appeals by Trotskyite/Communist circles suggests the urgent measures to be taken in order to "spring the trap set by the logic of war and to steal the thunder of religious fanaticism" (a confused naiveté!): "It is urgent that we lift the embargo on Iraq, demand of Israel the unconditional restitution of the territories occupied in 1967 and the immediate recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state."
Indeed, why not? The creation of a Palestinian state seems to me quite as necessary as it is urgent. But taken together these propositions gain their true meaning when one observes that the supreme leader of Islamic terrorism makes similar demands, whatever his deeper motives might be. Given this, the agenda of Trotskyite/Communist "pacifists," whose legitimacy and credibility derive the from sudden rebellions of their forbears starting with the Bolshevik revolution, is reduced to an elegant means of relating the arguments of bin Laden and translating them into a "soft" version.
This is surely not the first time that we have seen the rise of such an ideological brew in which all sorts of ingredients are bubbling, opposing values, contradictory norms, and whose sole function is in justifying not action but, in the international context of Autumn 2001, the absence of reaction against terrorism. Deprived of any credible revolutionary goal, the many sects of neo-Leftism can only produce moderated extremism, adapted to contemporary norms of acceptability.
In proposing to deprive terrorism of its "base," some of their colleagues in the Middle East go further than the creation of a Palestinian State, which has the draw-back of conceding that the Jewish State has a right to exist. They propose the creation of a bi-national State (373) as a way of realizing the supposedly life-saving project of multi-national society (which differs only in name and a few inflections from milti-cultural or multi-communitarian society).
Yet this model has been tried in the past and all its attempts have ended in failure. Carried to extremes in abstract utopianism and blind angelicism, some are extolling the multinational model at a time when all the multinational states (from the USSR to Tito's Yugoslavia) are collapsing only to give birth to ethnically cleansed nation-States often in bloody conflict! We may rest assured that in the reasonable and rational world where our utopists are dreaming the sympathetic measures they are proposing are enough to do away with Islamic terrorism! But in the awful world in which we live and think Islamic terrorism is a political and religious project for domination which must be fought altogether differently.
Believing that one can eradicate international Islamic terrorism simply by voiding the alibis of terrorist acts is to delude oneself, is to remain in the shadow of terrorist influence, piously responding to the questions it formulates and spreads about. None of which prevents one from legitimately demanding that the embargo on Iraq should be brought to an end on the condition that Saddam Hussein be chased from power (374). Nor of finding that given the specific nature of the conflict (which is no longer a conflict between states (375)) the American response, legitimate in itself, did not take the most appropriate form (the bombing of Afghanistan) (376).
But one must avoid confusing everything. It is fitting to take Islamism seriously, as the principal threat hanging over free societies for it could well be the "Communism" of the 21st century (this is perhaps precisely what has seduced those nostalgic for Leninism/Trotskyism, as Islam seduced Stalinists such as Roger Garaudy) (377). And this "green" (Islamist) neo- totalitarianism could well be the harbinger, in its calls to "holy war," a new era of massacres of in the name of a sacred cause. Jews, "crusaders," "infidels" or "miscreants," but also "monkeys" and "pigs" represent a new variety of the absolute enemy treated as one of a category of "harmful insects" (Lenin) of which one must urgently rid the world (378). The sacred cause of extirpating evil is hailed as a universal mission for cleansing the human species. The idea of "holy war" is confused with that of redeeming purification. At the heart of this new totalitarian vision there is the project of radical purification based on the will to total control, to total Islamist normalization.
Anti-globalization militants must immediately sweep their doorsteps and keep watch over their own houses for what threatens their legitimate and respectable struggle is at once an americanophobic temptation and a growing judeophobia, which, in a bond sealed with the total rejection of the West, risks opening the royal road to the Islamist illusion (379). That is to say, to darkness, to oppression, to idiocy and deadly violence. Blind pacifism, which puts the aggressor and his victim on equal footing, is a particularly dangerous form of moralism in that it amounts to permitting or encouraging the actions of the aggressor while paralyzing the victim, criminalizing its legitimate defense. Not knowing how to recognize the enemy, not being able to distinguish him, not daring to mobilize against him... this is the absolute zero politics. It is also the absolute zero of geopolitics.
Without demonizing it mimetically in return, let us have the courage to recognize the persistent reality of violence and to name the emergent enemy: the transnational Islamic terrorist networks in whose eyes the Jews are one people too many and democracy is a poison. This identification of the diasporic Islamist enemy, at once interior and exterior, in no way implies renouncing criticism of the policies of the sole hyper-power: one must not, as too many hasty intellectuals do, lazily oppose a sanctified (and circumstantial) pro-Americanism to a Gnostic anti-Americanism. It is worth referring to Max Weber: "He who would be involved in politics and above all who would make it his vocation [...] compromises himself with the diabolical powers that lurk in all violence" (380). [224]... (373): See for example Michel Warshawski: Israël-Palestine, le défi binational, post-scriptum d'Elias Sanbar, [Israel-Palestine, the bi- national challenge, post-script by Elias Sanbar] Paris, Textuel, coll. <<La Discorde>> (edited by Daniel Bensaïd), 2001. Such a "bi-national project", under the direction of "the greatest Palestinian intellectual of the 21st century" (p. 18): Edward Saïd (Israël-Palestine: l'égalité ou rien, Paris, La Fabrique, 1999 [Israel-Palestine: equality or nothing]), constitutes the matrix of new and nonspecific appeals which would justify the refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel, even after the creation of a Palestinian State. Can we believe that once this bi-national state is created the professional assassins of Hamas and Islamic Djihad will transform themselves into moderate Muslims, into peaceful humanists and pluralist democrats? We know the fate of most of the Islamists who had been volunteer combattants in Afghanistan: after 1989, the "Afghans", having become a body of killers of non-Muslims or of non-conforming Mulims, searched the world for conflicts where they might see action (Sudan, Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, etc.). Like the demand for the "right of return" for Palestinians, the "bi-national wager" constitutes a fearsome symbolic weapon, and nothing more, against the very principal of the existence of the Israeli State. Far from defining possible solutions to the conflict, these two forms of demand are destined to forbid any legitimate arguments, save by one route: Israel's abandonment of its right to exist. The good souls offer suicide to Israel.
(377): After the Bolshevik Revolution, Max Weber declared: "It's the Islam of modern times" (cited by Hichem Djaït, L'Europe et l'Islam, Paris, Le Seuil, 1978, p. 138). See also the remarks by Bertrand Russell in 1921 in his book "The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism," quoted by Ibn Warraq, op. cit., p. 207.
(378): For multiple examples taken from Leninist writings, see Dominique Colas, Le Léninisme, Paris, PUF, 1982, pp. 195-216. We can scan the infernal regions of the Bolshevik landscape where we meet "parasites," "vermin," "fleas," "virus," "bacilli," "the waste of humanity."