By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak
Capitalism is devious. It recognizes no limits when its power is threatened. Whence the relentless campaign by Emmanuel Macron’s ruling neo-liberal government to smear a new coalition of progressive parties, unions, and civil society including star athletes and artists which promises to restore a tax on the rich, increase the monthly minimum wage to 1600 Euros net, reinforce staffing at hospitals and schools, and block prices on products of first necessity and energy at a moment of corporate greed-fueled out-of-control inflation if it wins legislative elections called by the French president for this Sunday by waving the red — and false — flag of anti-Semitism to try to silence the clarion call being sounded by the New Popular Front for progressives in France and around the world. And which coalition is the only — the only — hope for blocking a xenophobic and historically anti-Semitic party, the National Front (since re-dubbed by its anti-Semitic founder’s daughter with the complaisance of a prone mainstream media the National Rally but if it walks, talks, and spews bile like a Xenophobe, it’s still a Xenophobe) party from arriving in power.
I am a Jew. I am a foreign Jew. I am a foreign Jew who first came to France 24 years ago not because he had to but because he wanted to (and not for the cheese or the wine), and who has tried to play his small role in promulgating the value of the culture and the cultural, intellectual, literary, and moral values of France he was weaned on growing up in San Francisco (where Albert Camus’s “The Plague” was required reading, Babar was king, Hergé’s Francophone journalist Tintin the role model, the Jewish immigrant Pissarro the artistic apex, the Paris of Ludwig Bemelmans’s “Madeline” Valhalla and “The Red Balloon” the fastest way to get there while singing “Frere Jacques,” which we learned at three) not because he makes loads of money doing so (which is not to say he has not been richly rewarded in other ways), but because, as an aspirant intellectual and passeur of literature and culture, he viscerally had no choice. This is what a quest is about. I moved to France in 2001 because the siren called me.
And as a Jew, as a foreign Jew, as an apostle (and grateful beneficiary) of French literature and culture for a quarter of a century, as a spreader of that artistic, intellectual, philosophical, and moral gospel and tradition, as a champion of that legacy, and as a foreigner pure and simple I am not only not threatened by the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front), I am vindicated, validated, and reinvigorated by the values, engagements, progressive and anti-racist agenda, and history of this coalition, whether it’s the heritage of Socialist party founder Jean Jaures (assassinated two weeks before the outbreak of the World War he was trying to prevent) or the progressive politics of NFP member party Les Insoumis — the Unbowed — including its righteous, founded-on-international-law-and-moral-principles, and ethical critique of Israel’s conduct in its war on Gaza, in which this so-called Jewish state has shat on Jewish (and just plain Humanist) values by killing more than 37,600 people, the majority civilians including at least 16,000 children, at least 118 journalists of color and 400 health workers, teachers, and poets in deliberately attacking schools, hospitals, refugee camps, food distribution points, mosques, churches, ambulances, U.N. facilities and refugee centers, six-year-old girls trapped in their cars, fishermen trying to feed their starving families because this so-called Jewish state is blocking food and water deliveries in illegally using starvation as a weapon of war, and private homes and deliberating starving a civilian population whose safety and well-being as the occupier it has the legal obligation to assure — *the very critique for which State-controlled French public radio is taxing les Insoumis and by association the NFP with anti-Semitism because of course if you criticize a putatively Jewish state, even for the risk of committing a genocide, that makes you an anti-Semite.
How dare they. How dare they call me and the countless other Jews, including Israeli Jews, who are and have been condemning and unmasking this ongoing genocide and other war crimes — by the very last people who should be committing genocide, especially on another Semitic people — anti-Semites. What is grave about this — what is racialist and insulting and demeaning to we Jews who try to live up to the Humanist values in which our parents steeped us by calling out a genocide when we see it — is the assumption that we ourselves are so bereft of Humanist values, that our moral compas can be so easily compromised by our ethnic affiliation, that we would countenance a genocide, that we the legacy-bearers of Anne Frank would countenance a genocide just because the Monsters of the Israeli Id perpetrating it claim to be Jewish.
And what is even more grave about them doing this at this perilous political juncture in France, about them perpetuating these completely fabricated charges of anti-Semitism against the Insoumis and by association the NFP at a decisive moment when the country is on the verge of the moral precipice, is that by fabricating this fake threat to us as the Jew or Other they have opened the door to the election of a party, the National Front/National Rally, which actually is racist in its Xenophobic discourse and promised program (among other things, binationals will be eliminated from consideration for certain ministries and jobs), which has demonized the migrant and the Other on the basis of factually false charges of “an immigrant submersion” (read: Grand or Great Remplacement/Replacement, of a Christian/White people by a Muslim/African — by inference Black and Brown — people, the exact same fabricated charge of an imagined threat and moral/ethnic inferiority, diabolicness, and corruption of White blood which has been used against the Jews for centuries), and which has a real and actual history of anti-Semitism, its founder and the father of its current leader having once dismissed the gas chambers as “a minor historical detail.”
By his insistence that, in part because according to him it has refused to denounce anti-Semitism, what he calls the “extreme left” (the Nouveau Front Populaire because it incorporates the Insoumis) and the extreme right are on the same level, it is Emmanuel Macron, enabled by State-controlled public radio, who risks paving the way for this xenophobic party with anti-Semitism in its DNA to take control of the French legislature and government if it wins an absolute majority of the 576 seats up for grabs in the June 30 election and July 7 run-off and implement a genuinely xenophobic agenda. He’ll have to live with those consequences.
What I, as a Jew in whose pretended defense Mr. Macron is agitating, and as a journalist, have to reckon with is the role that public radio journalists have played in enabling this completely fabricated charge of anti-Semitism on the Left which risks to elect real Xenophobes with a real history of anti-Semitism on the Right.
Because I try to stay informed, on Wednesday I tuned in to the 6 p.m. newscast of the public radio chain France Culture, only to hear it continue to propagate the myth that anti-Semitism has increased in Germany, a myth because Germany now qualifies criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism (thus including this in the overall tally of anti-Semitic incidents which it claims are on the rise); the report from Radio France’s Berlin correspondent, based on a report by the German government, specifically cited “hostility towards Israel” as one piece of evidence that “anti-Semitism” was on the rise. “Hostility” towards a country which has killed nearly 40,000 Semitic people, the majority civilians including at least 16,000 children, is not hostility towards me as a Jew, it is “hostility” towards war crimes, crimes against humanity, and particularly genocide, which a people, Germany, with a history of genocide has the moral and political responsibility to oppose thus those in Germany who are leading this fight are, if anything, saving Germany’s honor. One would think they would be embraced instead of being calumnied by being falsely charged with anti-Semitism because they dare call out these crimes including when they are being committed by a so-called Jewish state. Indeed, at least a third of those whose awards ceremonies, events, and appearances — including a school tour by an 87-year-old German-American survivor of both the concentration camps and the Allied bombing of Hamburg who denounced Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza — have been cancelled by Germany authorities are Jewish. This false equivalence of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism is not confined to Europe, and is not only particularly “hostile” towards Jews but Israeli Jews who dare to criticize the ongoing genocide as well as a system of Apartheid which has been amply documented by Israeli, Palestinian, and International human rights organizations. In Minnesota last week, the noted Israeli-American genocide scholar Roz Segal, one of the first to call out Israel’s genocide in Gaza, had his appointment as director of a center for Holocaust and genocide studies rescinded under pressure from two board members.
When I switched Wednesday evening to another French public radio station, France Inter, it was only to hear the newscaster perpetuate the myth of another fake anti-Semitism incident which, she said, triggered a French Senate investigation of alleged anti-Semitism at French universities, a fake anti-Semitic incident previously debunked by reports on this same radio chain, in which students occupying an amphitheater at the University of Political Science in Paris temporarily refused entry to another student not because she was Jewish but because she was carrying a video camera, and militant pro-Israel groups have a history of ‘docsing’ critics of Israel by putting their images online and thus potentially placing them at risk. (Meanwhile, coverage of demonstrations in support of Gazans and critical of Israel has been so scant on French public radio that we only heard about a Paris demonstration calling for an arms embargo of Israel in a report long after the event that a journalist allegedly arrested while covering it has filed a complaint.)
The tragedy here is that if enough of the voting public buys the public radio fake news campaign (in parlaying charges rarely documented or simply substantiated by pointing to the criticism of Israel) to label the New Popular Front coalition of the Socialist, Ecologist, Communist, and Insoumis parties — a coalition which has anti-Racism in its blood as well as its platform — as anti-Semitic to not vote for the NPF for this reason* the result could be the election to control of the French legislature and thus government and future of a party, the “Rassemblement/Front National,” with a genuine history of anti-Semitism and a current pattern in its pronouncements of Xenophobia. While this kind of frontal anti-Semitic discourse advanced by Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen has moved under the water somewhat, the party’s central campaign strategy is still a Xenophobic appeal based on a factually false “immigrant submersion” which, like the National Socialist Party in Germany in the 1930s and like Trump today, exploits people’s real economic pain to stigmatize and target a racial or ethnic group which has nothing to do with it, yesterday the Jews, today immigrants, as being responsible for that pain be they from Mexico, Haiti, Muslim, or other African countries. (Just the other day, a French neighbor — a French neighbor whose generosity towards me and friendship I value — blamed migrants, or if you prefer, undocumented migrants for her own economic suffering because according to her their getting services, notably free medical care, is why she is deprived of them. And when I pointed to undocumented migrants both of us know who have always paid for their own medical expenses, she essentially responded, “I’m not talking about them.”) Also because — like the Jews before — “they don’t share our values.”
Against this fear-based, real-pain exploiting and ultimately Xenophobic platform, the platform of the “Rassemblement/ Front National” and the even more extremist “Reconquest” party of Great Replacement myth-stoker Eric Zemmour — who once again was given free range to spread his factually false statements about an immigrant submersion on France Inter’s midday news broadcast yesterday, without challenge from the newscaster (a professional fault which isn’t anodyne, given national polls which identify a concern about immigration which is factually unfounded and which would not be there if the journalists had done their jobs and pointed this out) — I prefer the anti-racist, hope-based platform of the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front, which takes its name from an earlier and successful progressive coalition, the 1936 Front Populaire, headed by Leon Blum, a French Jew and disciple of Jaures, and which ushered in the 40-hour work week and paid vacations.) It is a coalition which will take France into the future with an agenda worthy of its rich cultural, intellectual and politically vanguard past — and inspire the world.
*The other day a French acquaintance who said she has not yet decided who to vote for Sunday recounted a supposed video circulating in which, as she understands it, a member of les Insoumis uses a pizza carton in front of an oven to invoke the gassing of Jews, an association targeting a Jewish legislator. While France Inter’s brief reporting on the incident later was even more murky, as usual, the legislator in question — the one making the charge of anti-Semitism — was, as the newscaster didn’t mention, a legislator known for his unwavering support of the Netanyahu government (and who thus has a vested interest in painting the party which has led all French parties in criticizing Israel’s war on Gaza, called for an arms embargo until there’s a ceasefire, and says it will recognize the State of Palestine as anti-Semitic); the Insoumis member accused of anti-Semitism says the video in question was of a NFP campaign meeting, the pizza carton from the dinner they consumed.
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