On July 25th I wrote an article titled “The anti-Semitism Canard” that took aim at the smears directed against the pro-Palestinian protests in Europe. The gist of my analysis was that an amalgam of long standing between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism formed the foundation of the pro-Zionist attacks.
But one comment on my article caught my eye:
here too it’s worth considering this investigative report. According to Edwy Plenel’s online paper Mediapart, hooligans and skinheads partial to the call of Dieudonné are systematically infiltrating the Gaza protests in France. the reemergence of european antisemitism is not a canard, rather a self-fulfilling prophecy brought about by zionist intransigence and the genocidal acts perpetrated by the idf.
I was frustrated in my attempt to read the article, not just because it was written in French but also because it was behind a paywall. Fortunately, there have been some very important articles investigating the Dieudonné connection that have appeared on Lenin’s Tomb that are essential for understanding the challenges facing the Palestinian solidarity movement in France and anywhere else where anti-Semitism is interjected. I don’t think that anti-Semitism poses any serious threat to Jews anywhere in Europe on the scale of the 1930s but the ability of backward elements either consciously or unconsciously serving the propaganda aims of the Zionists must be thwarted since the ultimate victims will be Palestinians rather than Jews. Every article smearing the mass movement on the basis of slogans shouted on demonstrations such as “kill the Jews” will help allow the next attack on Gaza or the West Bank to proceed with greater impunity.
I don’t find anything funny about the “comedian” Dieudonné. In January I responded to Diana Johnstone who had made the case for him as a satirist on France’s well-documented support for Israel’s crimes on the basis of its “victimization” by the Third Reich. I use scare quotes around victimization not to question whether six million Jews were murdered but to call attention to Israel’s exploitation of the holocaust to justify its own Third Reich type behavior. That being said, no quarter should be given to Dieudonné whose amalgamation of Judaism and Zionism is virtually identical to Abe Foxman and Alan Dershowitz’s. I wrote:
I really wonder what went through Dieudonné’s mind when he decided that Jean-Marie Le Pen was just the right person to be his kid’s godfather. After the French banlieue riots, he had this to say: “Many live by dealing in drugs, or stealing. They have created their own ghettos. We have places where there are no schools, because they have set them afire and the police and firemen are attacked when they go there. Civilization is slowly evaporating from this country.”
I could be wrong but Dieudonné strikes me as the French version of Clarence Thomas or Roy Innis, the former civil rights leader who found it to his advantage to hook up with the Republican Party right. It is a bit harder to place Dieudonné politically on the French spectrum since he tends to be coy about what he stands for, but if you think that he is on the left, then you really have no idea what the left is about.
There are three articles on Lenin’s Tomb that are crucial for understanding the ultraright penetration of the pro-Palestinian movement. The first is “How Dieudonné’s Followers Hijack the Gaza Protests” that appeared in the MediaPart website I mentioned above. The article highlights the role of some other unsavory characters on the right, including Alain Soral who I also looked at in my rebuttal to Diana Johnstone.
Fortunately we have an English language version of the article retrieved from behind the paywall. The article calls attention to a group known as “Gaza Firm” that takes its cues from Dieudonné and company:
Although these infiltrators from the extreme right are very much in the minority at pro-Palestinian events, the protest on Saturday, July 26, organized in solidarity with the people of Gaza, was fraught with strong internal tensions. Part of the procession seemed to have been overrun with radical elements. Some of these protesters from the extreme right have united in a small cell known as “Gaza Firm.” They are unrelated to traditional pro-Palestinian groups and come to protests primarily to fight in the streets with the Jewish Defense League. But who pulls the strings of this operation?
Perhaps the article is not clear enough when it refers to “radical elements”—it is referring to ultrarightists with connections to soccer clubs, etc.
Essentially, they are extreme fans (ultras) of the Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) soccer club, former members of the “K-soce team” associated with the Auteuil and Karsud factions of fans, with ties to the radical fringe associated with the Boulogne bleachers. Besides, according to an expert in this milieu, the reference to the culture of soccer fans is transparent, “since the word ‘firm’ in this context is a codeword among extreme soccer hooligans which brings to mind the Inter City Firm,” the first group of English soccer hooligans.
So you get the idea. This outfit sends 30 or 40 of its members to a mass protest against Israeli brutality in order to fight with the Jewish Defense League, just as if it were a rival soccer fan club. The resulting publicity is exactly what the Zionists seek, namely to smear the protests as anti-Semitic especially when the Gaza Firm people yell things like “kill the Jews” when they are brawling in the streets.
Whenever I run into actions such as this that function to undermine the mass movement, I conclude that it makes little difference whether they are the result of agent provocateurs or the stupidity of those carrying them out. There is no question in my mind that the cops and the Zionists need the Gaza Firm to help tarnish the real opposition. If some Arab joins their ranks because he is a Dieudonné fan who is genuinely enraged by the attack on Gaza, it makes little difference. His actions only serves to legitimate further attacks by turning the victim into a criminal.
With all proportions guarded, Gaza Firm operates after the fashion of the Black Bloc that puts its own testosterone-laden imperatives over those of the majority. Mass demonstrations, especially those organized around issues not yet embraced by the overwhelming majority such as the case of Palestine, have to present a serious and disciplined image to the rest of society. Anything that cuts against that goal is counter-revolutionary. Period.
Richard also made available two articles that appeared originally on Le Monde Diplomatique. The first is titled “France, Racism is Indivisible” and is written by Dominque Vidal. I found it very useful since it helped me understand that anti-Semitism is on the rise in France even if a Kristallnacht is not in the offing. Violent attacks are on the upswing as the article documents but unfortunately appear to be inspired by young and disaffected Muslim identification with the Palestinians:
Who attacked Jewish schools and synagogues, as well as individual Jews? The CNCDH report quotes the police intelligence service view that the second intifada and consequent repression have “led many young people to identify openly with the Palestinian fighters, who are seen as symbolising the same exclusion which they consider themselves to suffer in France”.
So France is facing neither Alain Finkielkraut’s threatened Kristallnacht nor the “new Judaeophobia” denounced by Pierre-André Taguieff (21), but is confronted with the rising tide of social violence diagnosed by Théo Klein. Its breeding grounds are the miserable ghettoes of the unemployed, where entire sections of French youth, especially those of immigrant origin, vegetate without hope for the future. Racism and anti-semitism, especially its violent expression, must be fought there as in the rest of French society. But the problem must also be tackled at its roots, which is why it is important to have an alliance between traditional democratic forces, alternative-world activists and the autonomous movements of the young in disadvantaged suburbs.
The other article that is a must-read is titled “The online politics of Alain Soral”, written by Evelyne Pieiller. Soral is described in the subhead as ‘Leftwing on labour but rightwing values’. It starts off:
Visitors to Alain Soral’s Egalité et Réconciliation (Equality and Reconciliation, E & R) website see pictures of Hugo Chávez, Che Guevara, Muammar Gaddafi, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin on the left of the masthead. Joan of Arc and Soral are on the right. The site, with its motto “leftwing on labour, but rightwing values”, is France’s 269th most popular, a few places behind the TV magazine Télérama.
The juxtaposition of Guevara and Putin, of Chávez and rightwing values is a sign of the confused political times. The big questions are, who stands for what and what does it mean to be on the right or left?
That, of course, is consistent with the developing trend in Europe that unites Putin with Le Pen’s party in France, Jobbik in Hungary, and the Golden Dawn in Greece. All these groups are united in the belief that the EU is designed to ruin the working and middle classes, as well as a call for “traditional values” on homosexuality and the precious bodily fluids of the Nation, as General Jack D. Ripper put it in “Doctor Strangelove”.
What Soral amounts to is the French equivalent of the “right-left” alliance that people like John V. Walsh have been calling for in the USA. Pieiller writes:
His talks appeal to key emotions and ideas: a feeling of powerlessness about globalisation and France’s loss of autonomy under EU law; worries about economic and social decline; the malaise caused by modernity; the difficulty of conceiving a different future. He highlights the need to fight globalism, as “an ideological project that aims to create a global government and dissolve nation states on the pretext of universal peace; this will be achieved through the complete commodification of humanity” (3). To Soral globalism means “oligarchic domination”, which disregards popular sovereignty and underpins the myth of market omnipotence, “as though that were not a political phenomenon, created by power and class relations”. The granting of specific rights to “oppressed minorities” replaces collective social advances and leads to the fragmentation of society, which risks civil war. He believes the evidence for this is the racialist interpretation of social relations: “indigenous French” against “Arabs”, at the lowest echelon of society, rather than labour against capital. One result of this is that Muslims are scapegoated.
That young Arabs and Muslims can find themselves being led around by the nose by human garbage like Alain Soral and Dieudonné should be a clarion call for a return to class politics.
Over the past decade or so there has been a gathering of forces internationally that speaks in the name of the left as “anti-imperialists” that is marching more or less under the same banner as the ultraright. With a fixation on “national sovereignty” as the last bastion against “globalism”, you will sooner or later end up in bed with Rand Paul, Pat Buchanan and the like.
Just compare what Diana Johnstone said about Marine Le Pen, and what John V. Walsh said about Ron Paul to get an idea of the dry rot that is sinking in:
Among the leading candidates, the only clear anti-war policy is that of Marine Le Pen, who favors immediate withdrawal from both Afghanistan and the NATO command, describes the current French government policy of supporting the Syrian opposition as “totally irresponsible”, calls for recognition of a Palestinian State and opposes threats to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, which have not been proven to be military. And she adds: “As far as I know, no nation which has atomic weapons has ever asked for permission from anyone, neither the United States, nor France, nor Israel, nor Pakistan… Must we then plunge the world into a war whose extent we will not control because certain foreign counties ask us to?”
The Left has complained for decades that it is unable to reach much of the American public with a message of peace. In large part that is due to a cultural gap – the “progressive” Left does not speak in the same language as much of the country. Nor does the Left share the same worldview as many Americans. Ron Paul does, and he can reach, in fact, has reached these people with a solid anti-intervention message. Paul does not ask that his base change its worldview but simply to understand that anti-interventionism is a consistent part of that view. Paul speaks in straightforward terms. Let us stop poking our nose into other nations’ business and stop wasting our money doing so. He reaches people never before touched by an anti-war message. How can the Left pass up the chance to help such a candidate?
At the risk of sounding platudinous, isn’t it about time that the left returned to class? After all, that is what Karl Marx was all about. This is especially important in a time of rising class tensions when some demagogues will try to exploit ethnic or religious differences in order to weaken us and strengthen the ruling class. We went through this in the 1920s and 30s and there’s no need to go through this again, especially with more than 15,000 nuclear weapons scattered around the globe.
Arcelor Mittal steel workers dressed in protective work suit demonstrate over pension reforms in Marseille October 12, 2010. (REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier)