November 14, 2023 - 10:45am
Paris
Watching members of a political party steeped in Holocaust denial and Third Reich nostalgia marching against antisemitism was hard to stomach for Rémy.
The 22-year-old student swore loudly and tried to challenge Marine Le Pen, of the Rassemblement National (RN), who was surrounded by giant bodyguards at Les Invalides in Paris.
“I’d like to tell her to go home, and to stop pretending she’s a friend of the Jews,” Rémy, who was among a group of demonstrators involved in brief scuffles with the police at Sunday’s Great March Against Antisemitism, told me.
The show of solidarity was organised to support a community suffering escalating abuse during the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict. Some 1,159 antisemitic acts were recorded in France following the 7 October attacks on Israel — triple the figure for the whole of 2022, according to Interior Ministry figures.
The march attracted more than 100,000 people, though French President Emmanuel Macron wasn’t one of them. His absence provoked anger, with even Yaël Perl-Ruiz — the great-granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish soldier whose conviction for high treason under false pretences in 1894 exposed rampant antisemitism in France — criticising him.
Like many others, Perl-Ruiz was concerned by Macron’s increasing criticism of Israel, as it continues a war that has already claimed thousands of civilian lives. Last Friday, the President told the BBC: “These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed. There is no reason for that and no legitimacy. We urge Israel to stop.”
All this adds up to an intensely complicated situation, and indeed a conflicted one, for France’s estimated 500,000 Jews — the largest community of its kind outside Israel and the US.
Their march followed another one in Paris on Saturday, when mainly pro-Palestinians rallied, saying they would not attend the Great March. Such dissenters included Muslims, Christians, Jews, and those of no faith who were mainly from France’s far-Left — supporters of the France Unbowed movement (La France Insoumise, or LFI).
They refused to walk with the RN because of its antisemitic antecedents: Waffen SS veterans were among its hierarchy when it was founded as the Front National in 1972. Its founder and longest-serving leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is a convicted antisemite who has contested Nazi crimes against humanity, including the gassing of Jews, on numerous occasions.
In turn commentators including Éric Zemmour, the 2022 presidential election candidate who also has criminal convictions for racial hate speech, claim that LFI has formed a cynical Islamo-gauchistes (Islam-Leftist) union which sees the Left looking after Muslim interests in return for votes at election time. It is suggested that this alliance is by definition antisemitic, because of its overwhelming support for Palestine.
Attacks on Jews certainly intensified in the 1970s and 1980s, when so-called “super terrorists” such as Carlos the Jackal and Abu Nidal claimed to be fighting for Palestinian freedom. As now, the fear was that Middle East horrors were being imported into France.
Toulouse-born murderer Mohammed Merah cited the killing “of our brothers and sisters in Palestine” as a motive for slaughtering Jews in 2012, when he also targeted Muslim soldiers for fighting with the French Army in Afghanistan.
Many French Muslims have backgrounds in former colonies such as Algeria, where the experience of conquest and war was every bit as bloody as what is going on in the Middle East today. In this sense they naturally share an affinity with Palestinian Arab Muslims, but to suggest that Muslims are responsible for a new wave of antisemitism in France is far too simplistic. Such a theory relies heavily on the deep prejudices of polemicists such as Zemmour, who believes that Islam is incompatible with modern France.
In fact, mass Muslim immigration to France started at the end of World War II, when a workforce was needed to rebuild the country’s shattered infrastructure. Many of these labourers from North Africa ended up on public housing estates, living alongside working-class Jews. Both communities share similar problems to this day, including widespread discrimination and intolerance of traditional religious expression in a fiercely secular republic.
As a result, Jews and Muslims became hugely fearful of parties such as the RN and the manner in which they have now become mainstream. Le Pen was runner-up to Macron in the last two presidential elections, and certainly considers herself respectable enough to finally move into the Élysée Palace.
As Élisabeth Borne, Macron’s Prime Minister and the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, put it: “I have never heard Marine Le Pen denounce the historical positions of her party, and I think that a change of name does not change the ideas, the roots.”
Le Pen may think that her appearance at the Great March against antisemitism will help with the RN’s ongoing rehabilitation, but it is not only French Jews who think otherwise.
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Subscribe“to suggest that Muslims are responsible for a new wave of antisemitism in France is far too simplistic.”
How this man would like reality to be otherwise. Ruddy-cheeked Frenchman in berets brutalising Jewish children would be so much more digestible for his ilk. But sadly for him, it is not so. He must declare the truth to “simplistic” because his own untruths cannot withstand scrutiny.
An all too common problem among the commentariat.
Zemmour is accused of deep prejudice and yet the author displays similar deep prejudices in failing to accept that daughter Le Pen is not the same as father Le Pen and happily attributing to Jews his own partial views in the final sentence. The important thing is that people condemn current anti-semitism and recognise from where it currently comes. When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do? In this case the author hasn’t changed his mind since Le Pen the father led his differently named Party.
His ilk being the intellectual classes who for generations have viewed the Right with distaste and the Left with sympathy and indulgence.
This is Guardian level schlock. Less of this, please.
Perfect response. Mine was way wordier.
And yet…
…are we supposed to ignore the sly Holocaust approval and even Holocaust celebration which we have seen during the ‘Freedom for Palestine’ protests of late? Embittered Muslims and hard-line Lefties are increasingly eschewing self-censorship and making their true feelings plain to see.
Like in the UK people have been indoctrinated for years about Palestine being the victims and they understand none of the reality.
‘Hijacking’
‘Simplistic’
To which I say ‘bollox’ . Importing a million Muslims and antisemitism is a pretty simple equation
Open borders are the problem and in the UK we have the same problem , ditching the EU was supposed to have fixed this nasty problem but if anything things are worse .with the complete lack of border controls .We are inviting a disaster like the rest of Europe .
The disaster has already happened. I’m seriously beginning to think that it’s too late now.
Never expected to read this kind of shallow, blinkered islamo-gauchiste twaddle in UnHerd.
This is looking at it from the wrong side, surely.
Marine Le Pen hasn’t had to get out of her chair; it’s the Left that have plainly now abandoned any pretence of protecting the rights of those ‘wicked, right-adjacent, world-controlling, oppressive ubergroup’ (ie Jews) so she’s naturally been drawn into the space.
She’s been shedding the extremist elements of the party for years; she even got the gay vote on board the last time round.
Whatever you think of her, I’d expect she’s far less likely to revert to her ‘wicked past’ if she gets to power than any of the Lefty extremists, never mind the fact that she’ll be constrained by the job. Just look at all the pre-election hysteria about Georgia Meloni that has amounted to what, exactly.
The right-wing problem is the opposite; she gets power, she can’t really achieve that much and then we really do get a far-right alternative that shuts up all the Lefties currently crying wolf.
The RN are racist antisemites if they march in support of the Jews. Yet imagine the response if they didn’t march with Jews. The circular reasoning and sophomoric logic is breath taking – one of the worst essays ever published by Unherd.
The author suggests that Muslims being responsible for a new wave of antisemitism in France is far too simplistic and that such a theory relies heavily on the deep prejudices of polemicists. WTF!! Does he not realize these events are actually reported and the identify of the offender is recorded. It’s not actually a theory.
Maybe he thinks there is a wave of RN supporters attacking Jews while dressed up as Muslims. Now this makes perfect sense.
Exactly : “if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s obviously a right wing nutter disguised as a duck”
“I’d like to tell her to go home, and to stop pretending she’s a friend of the Jews,” Rémy, who was among a group of demonstrators involved in brief scuffles with the police at Sunday’s Great March Against Antisemitism, told me.
Are friends of the Jews so thick on the ground right now that the Jews can afford to reject any?
The problem is that the author needs the approval of his fellow Parisian journalists more than anything else (including the truth).
I once found myself in a similar situation when, in a lively discussion of an event, I expressed an opinion opposite to what was accepted in our circle. I admit that I was shocked by how instantly my dear friends turned into a pack, driving out the alien. I no longer tried to prove that I was right, although time has confirmed that I was not mistaken.
That’s why I don’t criticize the author too much. The very fact that his article appeared here could make his life difficult.
If she hadn’t turned up they’d have accused her of anti-semitism. She turned up, so they accused her of anti-semitism.
The author blithely ignores the fact that 95+% of attacks against Jews do NOT come from the right wing anymore. Almost all the violence is driven by Muslims, leftists, and others from the “coalition of the dispossessed” (i.e. not White males).
In the US if these pro-Hamas rioters start attacking Jews in a right-wing neighborhood, they’ll get shot at (by Christians, Jews, and everyone else). If they attack Jews in a nice liberal city, the bien-pensant class will hand the Jews over so that they get eaten last.
White males also. After appropriate university
Males maybe, but not too many men.
“males with pronouns”
Absolute nonsense! In the real world, except in Liberal La La Land, there are no permanent political friendships, only temporary political alliances of convenience. That’s the way it works. When the British hastily evacuated Palestine the day the mandate ended in 1948, most of the weaponry they didn’t take with them fell into the hands of the Arabs, specifically the Arab Legion, led by British Colonel John Glubb. The fledgling Israeli army needed weapons and they needed them fast. Israeli politician, Moshe Sneh, head of Israel’s miniscule bi-national Communist Party contacted Josef Stalin directly and requested assistance. Ironically, because at the same time (1948) the Soviet Union was at the start of a major attack on Jews and Jewish institutions in the USSR, including murders, executions, deportations, shutting of Jewish publications, and ending in the infamous Doctors Plot, Stalin, eager to create as much chaos as possible in the region due to the political vacuum created by the British evacuation, authorized the release of massive numbers of weapons – guns, ammunition, etc. out of the fully-stocked former warehouses of the defeated Wehrmacht in Russian-occupied Prague to be flown to the new Jewish army immediately.
Here in the States, the most vocal and political supporters supporters of political and military assistance by the United States for Israel are not the Jewish members of Congress, or even 60% of Jewish voters, who are still under the delusion that the blacks and the Muslims love them, but those congressmen and senators from states with large Evangelical Christian populations. The Evangelical clergy will preach on Sunday that everyone who doesn’t accept Jesus as his Savior is going to Hell, but on Monday the same clergy will write, phone and email their congregations to contact their senators and congressmen in Washington to vote more financial aid and more military support and hardware for Israel.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if only temporarily. The metastasizing Muslim population, whether in France, England or the United States is a danger to all. Period.
“… to suggest that Muslims are responsible for a new wave of antisemitism in France is far too simplistic.“
To suggest that they are not responsible for most of that wave—today—is disingenuous.
The fact that Unherd is willing to allow this gaslighting shit:
“Both communities share similar problems to this day, including widespread discrimination and intolerance of traditional religious expression in a fiercely secular republic”
Is making me reconsider my subscription. This article is not only infested by blatant lies and lefty coded language but it requires to adopt the author’s whole ideological corpus of trash in order to even consider it could have a point. Disgusting islamist apologist
I agree !!! Let’s fight prejudice by being prejudiced. Great !
no, let’s fight prejudice by importing even more Islamists. That will work surely!
Judging a party solely by its roots, including people no-longer representing it, = the genetic fallacy..
Correct. The Democratic party in the US was the party of slavery and Jim Crow. Does Mr. Allen dismiss them similarly?
Indeed. Labour voters should have a look at what Keir Hardie had to say about Lithuanian migrant mineworkers in Ayrshire. Not to mention the Soil Association’s origins as an offshoot of the British Union of Fascists.
“…but it is not only French Jews who think otherwise” – Correction: you have to read “stupid French Jews”
Oh boy, here go another white liberal telling evvabody how to think and who to be friends with again. As a Jew myself, I’m happy to see any and all conservatives willing to march with my people, whatever the reason. The masses of terrorist simps and their useful idiots need to be educated in how to behave in Western societies, and I’ll raise a glass to anyone who can understand that.
This conservative stands with you.
100% of the rise in antisemitic attacks in the UK are because of Islam. It’s not simplistic. It’s a clear and obvious fact.
The RN has changed. Times have changed. Jews are part of our heritage and history going back 2000 years. Yes, we have been pretty awful to them over the millennia but in the end we are brothers and sisters who have everything in common.
Look at the hatred on the faces of the Muslims marching in Europe last weekend. That clearly isn’t just for Jews!
We either unite today or be subsumed.
“100% of the rise in antisemitic attacks in the UK are because of Islam. It’s not simplistic. It’s a clear and obvious fact.”
I think that at least some are because of the violent racist hate scam Black Lives Matter, but this doesn’t really damage your broader point.
Thin gruel.
There were virtually no Muslims on the march.
That’s because Macron wasn’t there. There was no one to take care of the presence of a pair of nesting dolls representing the “religion of peace”
A mediocre regurgitation of banalities, as others have noted…..
Leadership often involves joining one’s political adversaries in common cause. Through his absence – with both Hollande and Sarkozy present, no less! – Macron has made MLP appear more presidential.
This essay is beneath contempt!