Blasphemy in Secular France
by aletho
The Shoah as State Religion?
By Diana Johnstone | CounterPunch | January 24, 2014
Paris
- The campaign by the French government, mass media and influential
organizations to silence the Franco-Cameroonese humorist Dieudonné
M’Bala M’Bala continues to expose a radical split in perception within
the French population. The official “mobilization” against the standup
comedian, first called for by Interior Minister Manuel Valls at a ruling
Socialist Party gathering last summer, portrays the entertainer as a
dangerous anti-Semitic rabble rouser, whose “quenelle”* gesture is
interpreted as a “Nazi salute in reverse”.
For his fans and supporters, those accusations are false and absurd.
The
most significant result of the Dieudonné uproar so far is probably the
dawning realization, among more and more people, that the “Shoah”, or
Holocaust, functions as the semi-official State Religion of France.
On
RTL television last January 10, the well-known nonconformist
commentator Eric Zemmour (who happens to be Jewish) observed that it was
“grotesque and ridiculous” to associate Dieudonné with the Third Reich.
Zemmour described Dieudonné as a product of the French left’s
multiculturalism. “It’s the left that has taught us since May ’68 that
it is prohibited to prohibit, that we must shock the bourgeois. It is
the left that has turned the Shoah into the supreme religion of the
Republic…”
Zemmour
suggested that Dieudonné was provoking “the respectable left-wing
bourgeoisie” and that he “reproaches Jews for wanting to conserve the
monopoly of suffering and steal primacy in suffering from descendants of
slavery”.
There
is more than that at stake. Reminders of the Shoah serve indirectly to
justify France’s increasingly pro-Israel foreign policy in the Middle
East. Dieudonné opposed the war against Libya enough to go there to
show his solidarity with the country being bombed by NATO.
Dieudonné
began his career as a militant anti-racist. Instead of apologizing for
his 2003 sketch mocking an “extreme Zionist settler”, Dieudonné retorted
by gradually extending his sphere of humor to cover the Shoah. The
campaign against him can be seen as an effort to restore the sacred
character of the Shoah by enforcing repression of a contemporary form of
blasphemy.
To
confirm this impression, on January 9 an “historic” agreement was
reached between the Paris Prosecutor’s Office and the French Shoah
Memorial that any teenager found guilty of anti-Semitism may be
sentenced to undergo a course of “sensitivity to the extermination of
the Jews”. Studying genocide is supposed to teach them “republican
values of tolerance and respect for others”.
This
is perhaps exactly what they don’t need. The Prosecutor’s Office may be
unaware of all the young people who are saying that they have had too
much, rather than not enough, Shoah education.
An atypical article in Le Monde
of January 8 cited opinions anyone can easily hear from French youth,
but which are usually ignored. After interviewing ten left-leaning,
middle class spectators who denied any anti-Semitism, Soren Seelow
quoted Nico, a 22-year-old left-voting law student at the Sorbonne, who
adores Dieudonné for “liberating” laughter in what he considers a stuffy
conformist society of “good thoughts”. As for the Shoah, Nico
complained that “they’ve been telling us about it since elementary
school. When I was 12, I saw a film with bulldozers pushing bodies into
ditches. We are subjected to a guilt-inducing morality from the earliest
age.”
In
addition to history courses, teachers organize commemorations of the
Shoah and trips to Auschwitz. Media reminders of the Shoah are almost
daily. Unique in French history, the so-called Gayssot law provides
that any statement denying or minimizing the Shoah can be prosecuted and
even lead to prison.
Scores of messages received from French citizens in response to my earlier article
as well as private conversations make it clear to me that reminders of
the Shoah are widely experienced by people born decades after the defeat
of Nazism as invitations to feel guilty or at least uncomfortable for
crimes they did not commit. Like many demands for solemnity, the Shoah
can be felt as a subject that imposes uneasy silence. Laughter is then
felt as liberation.
But for others, such laughter can only be an abomination.
Dieudonné
has been fined 8,000 euros for his song “Shoananas”, and further such
condemnations are in the offing. Such lawsuits, brought primarily by
LICRA (Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme), also aim to wipe him out financially.
“Hatred”
One
line in the chorus against Dieudonné is that he is “no longer a
comedian” but has turned his shows into “anti-Semitic political
meetings” which spread “hatred”. Even the distant New Yorker
magazine has accused the humorist of making a career out of peddling
“hatred”. This raises images of terrible things happening that are
totally remote from a Dieudonné show or its consequences.
There
was no atmosphere of hatred among the thousands of fans left holding
their tickets when Dieudonné’s January 9 show in Nantes was banned at
the last minute by France’s highest administrative authority, the Conseil d’Etat.
Nobody was complaining of being deprived of a “Nazi rally”. Nobody
thought of causing harm to anyone. All said they had come to enjoy the
show. They represented a normal cross-section of French youth, largely
well-educated middle class. The show was banned on the grounds of
“immaterial disturbance of public order”. The disappointed crowd
dispersed peacefully. Dieudonné’s shows have never led to any public
disorder.
But there is no mistaking the virulent hatred against Dieudonné.
Philippe
Tesson, a prominent editor, announced during a recent radio interview
that he would “profoundly rejoice” at seeing Dieudonné executed by a
firing squad. “He is a filthy beast, so get rid of him!” he exclaimed.
The
internet Rabbi Rav Haim Dynovisz, in the course of a theology lesson,
acknowledged that Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he rejects, had
been proved by Dieudonné to apply to “certain” people, who must have
descended from gorillas.
Two
17-year-olds have been permanently expelled from their high school for
having made the quenelle gesture, on grounds of “crimes against
humanity”. The Franco-Israeli web magazine JSSNews is busily
investigating the identities of persons making the quenelle sign in
order to try to get them fired from their jobs, boasting that it will
“add to unemployment in France”.
The
owners of the small Paris theater, “La Main d’Or”, rented by Dieudonné
on a lease running until 2019, recently rushed back from Israel
expressing their intention to use a technicality to end his lease and
throw him out.
The
worst thing Dieudonné has ever said during his performances, so far as I
am aware, was a personal insult against the radio announcer Patrick
Cohen. Cohen has insistently urged that persons he calls “sick brains”
such as Dieudonné or Tariq Ramadan be banned from television
appearances. In late December, French television (which otherwise has
kept Dieudonné off the airwaves) recorded Dieudonné saying that “when I
hear Patrick Cohen talking, I think to myself, you know, the gas
chambers… Too bad…”
With
the anti-Dieudonné campaign already well underway, this offensive
comment was seized upon as if it were typical of Dieudonné’s shows. It
was an excessively crude reaction by Dieudonné to virulent personal
attacks against himself.
Irreverence
is a staple for standup comics, like it or not. And Dieudonné’s
references to the Holocaust, or Shoah, all fall into the category of
irreverence.
On matters other than the Shoah, there is no shortage of irreverence in France.
Traditional
religions, as well as prominent individuals, are regularly caricatured
in a manner so scatological as to make the quenelle look prudish. In
October, 2011, Paris police intervened against traditional Catholics who
sought to interrupt a play which included (the apparent) pouring of
excrement over the face of Jesus. The political-media establishment
vigorously defended the play, unconcerned that it was perceived by some
people as “offensive”.
Recently,
France gave a big welcome to the Ukrainian group calling itself
“Femen”, young women who seem to have studied Gene Sharp’s doctrines of
provocation, and use their bare breasts as (ambiguous) statements. These
women were rapidly granted residence papers (so hard to get for many
immigrant workers) and allowed to set up shop in the midst of the main
Muslim neighborhood in Paris, where they immediately attempted to try
(unsuccessfully) to provoke the incredulous residents. The blonde Femen
leader was even chosen to portray the symbol of the Republic, Marianne,
on the current French postage stamp, although she does not speak French.
Last December 20,
these “new feminists” invaded the Church of the Madeleine near the
Elysée Palace in Paris, acted out “the abortion of Jesus” and then
pissed on the high altar. There were no cries of indignation from the
French government. The Catholic Church is complaining, but such
complaints have a feeble echo in France today.
Why the Shoah Must Be Sacred
When
Dieudonné sings lightly of the Shoah, he is believed by some to be
denying the Holocaust and calling for its repetition (a contradictory
proposition, upon reflection). The sacred nature of the Shoah is
defended by the argument that keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust
is essential to prevent it from “happening again”. By suggesting the
possibility of repetition, it keeps fear alive.
This
argument is generally accepted as a sort of law of nature. We must keep
commemorating genocide to prevent it from happening again. But is there
really any evidence to support this argument?
Nothing
proves that repeated reminders of an immense historic event that
happened in the past prevent it from happening again. History doesn’t
work that way. As for the Shoah, gas chambers and all, it is quite
preposterous to imagine that it could happen again considering all the
factors that made it happen in the first place. Hitler had a project to
confirm the role of Germans as the master “Aryan” race in Europe, and
hated the Jews as a dangerous rival elite. Who now has such a project?
Certainly not a Franco-African humorist! Hitler is not coming back, nor
is Napoleon Bonaparte, nor is Attila the Hun.
Constantly
recalling the Shoah, in articles, movies, news items, as well as at
school, far from preventing anything, can create a morbid fascination
with “identities”. It fosters “victim rivalries”. This fascination can
lead to unanticipated results. Some 330 schools in Paris bear plaques
commemorating the Jewish children who were deported to Nazi
concentration camps. How do little Jewish children today react to that?
Do they find it reassuring?
This
may be useful to the State of Israel, which is currently undertaking a
three-year program to encourage more of France’s 600,000 Jews to leave
France and go to Israel. In 2013, the number of Aliyah from France rose
to more than 3,000, a trend attributed by the European Jewish Press
to the “French Jewish community’s increasingly Zionistic mentality,
particularly among young French Jews, and a manifestation of efforts by
the Jewish Agency, the Israel government, and other non-profits to
cultivate Jewish identity in France.”
“If
this year we have seen Aliyah from France go from under 2,000 to more
than 3,000, I look forward to seeing that number grow to 6,000 and
beyond in the near future, as we connect ever more young people to
Jewish life and to Israel,” declared Natan Sharansky, Chairman of the
Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Surely, one way to encourage
Aliyah is to scare Jews with the threat of anti-Semitism, and claiming
that Dieudonné’s numerous fans are Nazis in disguise is a good way to do
this.
But
as for Jews who want to live in France, is it really healthy to keep
reminding Jewish children that, if they are not wary, their fellow
citizens might one day want to herd them onto freight trains and ship
them all to Auschwitz? I have heard people saying privately that this
permanent reminder is close to child abuse.
Someone
who thinks that way is Jonathan Moadab, a 25-year-old independent
journalist who was interviewed by Soren Seelow. Moadab is both
anti-Zionist and a practicing Jew. As a child he was taken to tour
Auschwitz. He told Seelow that that living with that “victim
indoctrination” had engendered a sort of “pre-traumatic stress
syndrome”.
“Dieudonné’s
jokes about the Shoah, like his song Shoananas, are not aimed at the
Shoah itself,” he says, “but at the exploitation of the Holocaust
described by the American political writer Norman Finkelstein.”
On January 22, on his web site Agence Info Libre,
Jonathan Moadab openly called for “separating the State from the
Holocaust religion”. Moadab cites professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz as the
first to point out the many ways in which the Holocaust has become the
new Jewish religion. If that is so, everyone has the right to practice
the religion of the Shoah. But should it be the official religion of
France?
French
politicians never cease celebrating the “laicité”, the secularism, of
the French Republic. Interior Minister Manuel Valls, who proclaims his
own devotion to Israel, because his wife is Jewish, recently called the
Shoah the “sanctuary that cannot be profaned”. Moadab concludes that if
the Shoah is a sanctuary, then the Holocaust is a religion, and the
Republic is not secular.
Changes
are taking place in the attitude of young people in France. This change
is not due to Dieudonné. It is due to the passage of time. The
Holocaust became the religion of the West at a time when the generation
after World War II was in the mood to blame their parents. Now we are
with the grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, of those who lived
through that period, and they want to look ahead. No law can stop this.
*As described in my earlier article,
the “quenelle” is a vulgar gesture roughly meaning “up yours”, with one
hand placed at the top of the other arm stretched down to signify “how
far up” this is to be. Using the name of a French dumpling, Dieudonné
started using this gesture in a wholly different context years ago, as
an expression of defiance, incredulity or indifference.
Diana Johnstone can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
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