immigrant, Muslim and Arab, Arab and North African, and so on.
But the grand plan of the enemies of Islamophobia is to place anti-Semitism and criticism of anyone who claims to follow Islam on the same footing. Making fun of an Islamist terrorist would be the same as insisting that Jews are inferior or noxious beings. The Internet is infested with commentary insinuating that the liberties cartoonists take with Muslims (and I repeat, drawing a Muslim with a Kalashnikov doesn’t mean that all Muslims carry them), they would never dare take with Jews. Well, exactly. Not if we’re talking about the Jewish people. Just as you wouldn’t ridicule the Arab people because they are Arabs, you wouldn’t ridicule the Jewish people for being Jewish.
On the other hand, we certainly do equate Jewish religious extremists who, for instance, stalk Palestinians in the West Bank by bulldozer and machine gun with jihadists who stalk infidels in Iraq or Syria. We don’t draw an Arab in Muslim dress if we want to represent an Arab, and we don’t draw a Jew in a rabbi’s clothes if we want to represent a Jew. There is no correspondence between racism or anti-Semitism and the critique of religious extremists. But the inventors of Islamophobia won’t budge; they absolutely insist that Islamophobia be treated as anti-Muslim racism equivalent to anti-Semitism, which is anti-Jewish racism.
And idiots aren’t the only ones preaching in favor of this recognition. On September 20, 2012, the admirable reporter Alain Gresh published a lengthy article in Le Monde diplomatique in which he excoriated Charlie Hebdo for its “irresponsibility.” According to him, Charlie Hebdo, a liberal, anti-racist publication, was playing into the hands of the right and extreme right. He wrote, in part:
Let’s imagine that it’s 1931 in Germany. Just as anti-Semitism is really beginning to take off, a leftist weekly issues a special edition on Judaism (the religion) in which it demonstrates at great length, without the least connotation of anti-Semitism, that Judaism is backwards, that the Bible is an apologia for violence, genocide, and stoning, that religious Jews wear funny clothes and conspicuous religious symbols, etc. It would obviously be impossible to dissociate such a publication from the German political context and the rise of Nazism.…In Europe we are seeing the rise of nationalist forces and parties whose principal weapon is no longer anti-Semitism, as it was in the 1930s, but Islamophobia.
Charlie Hebdo might indeed have said all this about Judaism (the religion), with the caveat that we would have been talking about Jewish religious extremists and not about all practicing Jews. But was there an international terrorist movement in 1931 that claimed to act on behalf of Orthodox Judaism? Were there Jewish jihadists threatening to establish the equivalent of sharia law in Libya, Tunisia, Syria, and Iraq? Did Rabbi Bin Laden send a biplane crashing into the Empire State Building? I’m no historian, but I don’t think so. Jewish fundamentalism was not to 1931 what Muslim fundamentalism is to the twenty-first century. And no, Islamophobia is not the new anti-Semitism. There is no new anti-Semitism, only racism—ancient, disgusting, and immortal. Racism that victimizes people of Muslim origin, for sure. Today, in France, the most violent racism is directed against the Romas. Do we need to call it “Romaphobia?” Don’t be stupid. It’s racism directed against the Roma.
Why this grim determination to pair anti-Semitism with Islamophobia? The only outcome of such an association would be to make the word “racism” obsolete.
On March 16, 2007, long before Alain Gresh wrote his article, Plantu, our fellow cartoonist at Le Monde, who was deeply involved in the campaign against censorship, was invited to a debate convened by the UN in Geneva. There, as reported by Agence France-Presse, he called for a “blasphemy ceasefire.”
But the grand plan of the enemies of Islamophobia is to place anti-Semitism and criticism of anyone who claims to follow Islam on the same footing. Making fun of an Islamist terrorist would be the same as insisting that Jews are inferior or noxious beings. The Internet is infested with commentary insinuating that the liberties cartoonists take with Muslims (and I repeat, drawing a Muslim with a Kalashnikov doesn’t mean that all Muslims carry them), they would never dare take with Jews. Well, exactly. Not if we’re talking about the Jewish people. Just as you wouldn’t ridicule the Arab people because they are Arabs, you wouldn’t ridicule the Jewish people for being Jewish.
On the other hand, we certainly do equate Jewish religious extremists who, for instance, stalk Palestinians in the West Bank by bulldozer and machine gun with jihadists who stalk infidels in Iraq or Syria. We don’t draw an Arab in Muslim dress if we want to represent an Arab, and we don’t draw a Jew in a rabbi’s clothes if we want to represent a Jew. There is no correspondence between racism or anti-Semitism and the critique of religious extremists. But the inventors of Islamophobia won’t budge; they absolutely insist that Islamophobia be treated as anti-Muslim racism equivalent to anti-Semitism, which is anti-Jewish racism.
And idiots aren’t the only ones preaching in favor of this recognition. On September 20, 2012, the admirable reporter Alain Gresh published a lengthy article in Le Monde diplomatique in which he excoriated Charlie Hebdo for its “irresponsibility.” According to him, Charlie Hebdo, a liberal, anti-racist publication, was playing into the hands of the right and extreme right. He wrote, in part:
Let’s imagine that it’s 1931 in Germany. Just as anti-Semitism is really beginning to take off, a leftist weekly issues a special edition on Judaism (the religion) in which it demonstrates at great length, without the least connotation of anti-Semitism, that Judaism is backwards, that the Bible is an apologia for violence, genocide, and stoning, that religious Jews wear funny clothes and conspicuous religious symbols, etc. It would obviously be impossible to dissociate such a publication from the German political context and the rise of Nazism.…In Europe we are seeing the rise of nationalist forces and parties whose principal weapon is no longer anti-Semitism, as it was in the 1930s, but Islamophobia.
Charlie Hebdo might indeed have said all this about Judaism (the religion), with the caveat that we would have been talking about Jewish religious extremists and not about all practicing Jews. But was there an international terrorist movement in 1931 that claimed to act on behalf of Orthodox Judaism? Were there Jewish jihadists threatening to establish the equivalent of sharia law in Libya, Tunisia, Syria, and Iraq? Did Rabbi Bin Laden send a biplane crashing into the Empire State Building? I’m no historian, but I don’t think so. Jewish fundamentalism was not to 1931 what Muslim fundamentalism is to the twenty-first century. And no, Islamophobia is not the new anti-Semitism. There is no new anti-Semitism, only racism—ancient, disgusting, and immortal. Racism that victimizes people of Muslim origin, for sure. Today, in France, the most violent racism is directed against the Romas. Do we need to call it “Romaphobia?” Don’t be stupid. It’s racism directed against the Roma.
Why this grim determination to pair anti-Semitism with Islamophobia? The only outcome of such an association would be to make the word “racism” obsolete.
On March 16, 2007, long before Alain Gresh wrote his article, Plantu, our fellow cartoonist at Le Monde, who was deeply involved in the campaign against censorship, was invited to a debate convened by the UN in Geneva. There, as reported by Agence France-Presse, he called for a “blasphemy ceasefire.”
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