******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
Just the latest example of using the "anti-Semitism" card in elite
opinion. From the blatantly false charges against Ilhan Omar to the
resignation of 7 MPs from Labour, this is a concerted effort to smear
the left. Finkielkraut is handled with kid gloves in this rancid
article. Wikipedia reports:
His interview published in the Haaretz magazine in November 2005 in
which he gave his opinion about the 2005 French riots stirred up much
controversy. Finkielkraut's remarks that the French Soccer Team was
"Black, Black, Black" (as opposed to the expression "Black, Blanc,
Beur"—meaning "Black, White, Arab"—coined after the 1998 World Cup
victory to honor the African and Afro Caribbean, European and North
African origins of the players) were seen as "racially insensitive".
Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan took legal action against Finkielkraut
after the Frenchman said Sivan "is, if you will, one of the actors in
this particularly painful, particularly alarming reality, the Jewish
anti-Semitism that rages today."[4]
60 researchers and professors at the École Polytechnique signed a
petition in 2006 to protest his alleged colonial views.[5]
In 2009, he was criticized for his strong defence of Roman Polanski,
arrested in Switzerland for the rape of a 13-year-old girl. Finkielkraut
claimed that she was a "teenager", "not a child".[6]
-----
NY Times, Feb. 19, 2019
Anti-Semitic Taunts by Yellow Vests Prompt French Soul-Searching
By Adam Nossiter
PARIS — He was one of France’s few public intellectuals to express
support for the Yellow Vest movement at the beginning, but last week he
said the protesters “devastate without regard for anything or anybody.”
Over the weekend, they turned their ire on him.
As Alain Finkielkraut, one of France’s leading essayists and critics
from the right, walked by a Yellow Vest demonstration, protesters at its
edge shouted insults widely condemned as anti-Semitic.
“Fascist!” they yelled.“Palestine!” “Go home to Israel!” “Tel Aviv, back
to Tel Aviv!”
By Monday, the affair had snowballed into another episode of anguished
national soul-searching over the problem of persistent anti-Semitism in
France, and the evolution of the Yellow Vest movement from gas-tax
protest to violent street revolt with hints of menace and hooliganism.
Some politicians and intellectuals accused others of not condemning the
insults to Mr. Finkielkraut firmly enough. President Emmanuel Macron
telephoned him to express his anger, but said he would not be attending
a march in Paris scheduled for Tuesday to condemn anti-Semitism.
The march, the accusations and counteraccusations, and the insults
themselves are a recurring feature of public life in France, where the
Interior Ministry last week reported a 74-percent rise in anti-Semitic
incidents nationally.
The extreme sensitivity of the issue was evident again Monday in the
recriminations that poured down on those whose condemnation was judged
not severe enough. A lawyer with connections to Mr. Macron was forced to
apologize for seeming to take the epithets too lightly in a television
interview.
The affair crystallizes a number of dark elements bubbling to the
surface in a climate of public tension in France, even beyond the Yellow
Vest protests, now in their 14th week, whose economic resentments
sometimes elide with anti-Semitism.
Mr. Finkielkraut, the son of an Auschwitz survivor and a member of the
Académie Française, one of the country’s oldest cultural institutions,
is a polarizing figure. His views on politics and France’s immigrants
put him well to the right in the country’s political spectrum.
Apart from displaying his erudition as a critic deeply knowledgeable
about French literature and philosophy, Mr. Finkielkraut regularly
inveighs, on a popular weekly radio program, against what he considers
the lack of respect for traditional French culture in France’s immigrant
communities. He has lamented the incursion of these communities into
hitherto all-French zones, and often speaks out about the anti-Semitism
in France’s Muslim suburbs.
Some of the virulence directed at him Saturday could perhaps be
explained by these positions, though analysts said there was no doubt
that anti-Semitism also played a role. The Yellow Vest movement has been
criticized for its lack of diversity and for not raising the problems of
longstanding poverty in France’s heavily immigrant suburbs, or banlieues.
The movement has been fueled by economic and class resentments,
particularly over elitism and inequality, and mostly among white
working-class French in small towns and rural areas.
Muttering about the “Rothschild bank” can frequently be heard at the
edges of the demonstrations, mixed in with expressions of hatred toward
the president.
Mr. Macron was a banker at Rothschild and Company. But the invocation of
Rothschild has also become a kind of anti-Semitic code for the supposed
influence of Jews over the economy.
Mr. Finkielkraut was in the cross hairs of several of these currents on
Saturday, as he stepped out to take his mother-in-law home from lunch
and crossed the now-weekly Yellow Vest demonstration near his home on
the Left Bank.
Citizen videos, which have run continually on French television, make
clear what happened next: Several in the crowd, recognizing Mr.
Finkielkraut from his frequent television appearances, began yelling
insults.
One man was particularly virulent: Tugging at a sort of kaffiyeh scarf,
he yelled: “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!”
The intentions of some in the crowd were clear, Mr. Finkielkraut said.
“I think some of them wanted to beat the hell out of me,” he told the
television station LCI.
“There was a pogrom-like violence about it,” Mr. Finkielkraut said,
though he noted that “one of them accompanied me so that I would escape
from my aggressors.” The ones who wanted to harm him had “faces full of
hatred,” he said.
Mr. Macron, writing on Twitter, said, “The anti-Semitic insults he was
subjected to are the absolute negation of what we are and what makes us
of a great nation.”
The Paris prosecutor’s office said it was opening a criminal
investigation into “public insults attributable to origin, ethnicity,
nationality, race or religion.” France’s interior minister said Mr.
Finkielkraut’s principal antagonist had been identified by the authorities.
The barrage aimed at Mr. Finkielkraut combined elements of traditional
French anti-Semitism, deeply rooted in the writing and thinking of many
of the country’s greatest writers, and the so-called new anti-Semitism
of the country’s Muslim suburbs.
“It’s a mix of the two,” said Laurent Joly, one of France’s leading
historians of anti-Semitism and the author of numerous books on the
subject. “It’s quite striking, and it’s the first time.”
“It’s a kind of hybrid phenomenon, a sort of intellectual confusion,” he
said.
The insults combined anti-Semitism, hatred of elites and anger at
Republican institutions. That made for a close parallel with the
political anti-Semitism of the late 19th century, in Mr. Joly’s view.
“It’s a hatred of the elites that are in place,” the historian said.
“Before, Jews were accused of being the winners in the Republic. It’s a
little bit now what were hearing, with all this talk against the
Rothschilds.’’
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
