Those Who Forget the Past (30 page)

Ghozlan's voice broke. “It was like this with all the families,” Monique said. The uncle had later been killed in the Algerian war.

At the bottom of Ghozlan's character lurked a trip wire: he had his own score to settle. He felt condemned to repeat his history, and he recalled the phrase
“le cercueil ou la valise”
(the coffin or the suitcase), warning Jews in his homeland that they had only days to flee. The Cremieux decree had conferred French citizenship on Algeria's Jews in 1870, so at the height of the Algerian war, most Jews with government jobs left for France. The small-business owners fled to Israel.

Ghozlan's father's boss, the former Vichy official Maurice Papon, stationed in Algeria in the 1950s, would be tried in Bordeaux in 1997 and convicted of complicity in the arrests and internments of 1,690 Jews. At that time in Constantine, no one knew of Papon's past, but anyone working in the French police force operated in a shadowy zone of possible collaboration. As a child, Ghozlan knew Papon because his uncle was Papon's barber. Once, during a control operation, Ghozlan's father refused to kill a notorious leader of the Front de Libération Nationale (F.L.N.), a revolutionary group, because it was against his moral code. As a result of that, when the F.L.N. took over Algeria, it allowed Ghozlan and his mother and sister to leave. He took only a sweater, his high-school diploma, and a salami sandwich. “I watched the city as it became smaller. I couldn't imagine I would ever see it again.”

GHOZLAN'S OPERATION, financed in part by the Wiesenthal Center, had a mandate to maintain a hot line for reports of attacks, but eventually Ghozlan himself began to act like a minister without portfolio and antagonize the authorities. Shortly after I arrived in Paris, Ghozlan organized a meeting in District 93 of all the Jewish leaders in that community and the chief of police. The tension in the little room was palpable. “You walk into the offices of the [assistant] mayor out here, and what is hanging there but the Palestinian flag,” one Jewish leader said. The chief of police did not respond directly. “We believe we are all equal—churches, mosques, synagogues,” he said. The Jewish leader countered by saying, “It is not the mosques that are being attacked.” The meeting went on for hours as representatives from the Jewish community described the attacks to which they were routinely subjected. Such an event in an American city would likely have been covered in the press, but there was not a single French reporter in the room.

The day Papon, then ninety-two, was let out of prison, I spent the evening with Ghozlan at his house. He was extremely agitated, working two phones at once, dialing ministers and politicians, as he kept up a simultaneous conversation with me. “The mayor of Paris is coming to a demonstration I have organized at Drancy! And the chief of police. And the minister [of integration] Eric Raoult.” He left long messages, giving the time of the demonstration and the names of the journalists he had invited. I had asked to hear him play at a Bar Mitzvah, and while he made and received calls, he projected a video of a party in a hotel ballroom. There he was in his tux, looking like Gilbert Bécaud at the Paramount, invoking old newsreels of cabaret performers during the Vichy era.

The next day I was at the CRIF office with Roger Cukierman when the telephone rang. Cukierman took the call and sounded annoyed. “I won't go myself, but I'll send a representative.” When he hung up he said, “A man in the suburbs is organizing a demo.”

“Do you mean Sammy Ghozlan?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “He wants to get his picture in the newspaper all of the time.”

“But isn't that good?” I asked. “Doesn't he serve a function by drawing attention to the situation in France?”

Cukierman snapped, “A totally negative function. . . . Whatever the subject, he jumps on it to get his own publicity.”

BY LATE 2002, some American anti-war intellectuals were strongly criticizing the American Jewish organizations that were trying to call attention to the situation in France. As I left for France, in the fall, Susannah Heschel warned me, “If you write about any of these attacks, you will be used for fund-raising purposes by the Jewish organizations.” Heschel, the chairman of the Dartmouth Jewish Studies Program, is the daughter of the prominent Jewish scholar Rabbi Abraham Heschel. Along with Cornel West and Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of
Tikkun,
a liberal Jewish magazine, Heschel is a co-chair of Tikkun Campus Network, a college movement. By April of this year, however, Heschel, like Rothschild, felt that she had been misled by the lack of proper reporting. “The situation in France reminds me of the Dreyfus case. After he was found innocent, the Jews were blamed for getting him exonerated. . . . There was a clear failure of the French left to respond to Muslim anti-Semitism or to know how to criticize the victims of their own colonialism.” Tony Judt, writing in a recent issue of
The New York Review of Books,
allowed that anti-Semitism is on the rise around the globe, but he cited the ADL's statistics on the number of reported American incidents, as if to imply an equivalency in the lifestyles of the middle-class American Jewish community and the Jews of the Parisian banlieues.

The new interior minister of France, a young man named Nicolas Sarkozy, had a clear sense of the terrorist activity in his country. On the Jewish high holy days, Sarkozy visited synagogues in the vicinity of the tony suburb of Neuilly, near the Bois de Boulogne. It is often said that Sarkozy's grandfather was Jewish—a figure of speech employed by Jews whose families, terrified for their lives, changed religions before or during World War II. “It is wrong that, fifty years after the Shoah, Jews have to be afraid how they think about Israel,” he said. I followed him that day as he traveled with his wife, who wore a pink Chanel suit, and his deputy minister. Sarkozy was applauded in the tiny meetinghouses called
oratoires,
where, in the last century, assimilated Jews had gathered. Virtually no mention of his visits appeared in the press.

In February, Sarkozy announced that scores of potential terrorists had been arrested, and in April a Muslim
consistoire
was established. Many imams in France adhere to fundamentalism, which the demographer Michèle Tribalat and a co-author have reported extensively on in
La République et l'Islam:
Entre Crainte et Aveuglement
(
The
Republic and Islam: Between
Fear and Blindness
). The imams reported to Sarkozy's representatives that they would tell their followers the first law for Muslims is the religious law. Ghozlan had taken it on himself to try to negotiate with some of the more moderate imams, but certain Jewish organizations in France had put him on warning that he was overstepping his mandate. On the telephone, Shimon Samuels was philosophical when he told me, “Suddenly there are those who rejected Ghozlan in the beginning, but who are seeing that he is effective and what he's doing is important, and they want to take it over.” If France accepted a role in the coming Middle East war, Samuels added, it would mean that the attacks that had been limited to the banlieues could escalate to bombs going off in supermarkets all over France.

I STAYED IN close communication with Ghozlan and Samuels through this past winter and into the spring. As the first bombs landed on Baghdad, Ghozlan was bracing himself for what might come next. He used the word
“ratonnade,”
and I asked him to define it. “It means that as an immigrant you are being attacked for being a separate identity.” He feared, he said, a sinister new way of life, where people would abandon their common Frenchness and return to medieval tribalism, marooning themselves in their separate religions and ethnic inheritances.

In January, Samuels and the Wiesenthal Center announced a special UNESCO conference to address the issue of antiSemitism—the first such conference in a decade. David de Rothschild offered his house for a reception for the world leaders who would attend. Trying to maintain a cosmopolitan overview, Rothschild told me, “If you fall into a depressed spiral and believe that there is no future and the French state is pro-Arabic, where does that lead but to wrong analysis and desperation?” In early April a new wave of anti-Semitism merged with France's anti-Israel politics and its outspoken disapproval of America's war. At demonstrations in Paris, not far from where Clément Weill-Raynal had heard the crowd cry “Death to the Jews” in October 2000, Stars of David were now intertwined with swastikas on banners. Nicolas Sarkozy's office dispatched marshals in white caps to keep the protests under control, but the new epidemic of violence grew—women clubbed in the street, rocks thrown through a synagogue window, another
shul
burned. One demonstrator told a reporter for
The New York Times,
“They are the targets. They are not welcome here because of what they did to our Palestinian brothers.”

GHOZLAN'S CELL PHONE rang during a Bar Mitzvah he was attending. “It was a boy attacked during the demo. . . . He had approached a group carrying the Israeli and American flags intertwined with swastikas and told them they were not allowed to do that. . . . They beat him up.” Ghozlan persuaded the young man to go to the police and took him to the Jewish radio station. It was clear that Ghozlan's dark prophecies had become reality. In the first week of April,
Le Monde
published a shocking poll, revealing that 30 percent of the French wanted Iraq to win the war. Mecca Cola was selling briskly all over the country, and Jacques Chirac suddenly had a new nickname on playgrounds in the banlieues: King of the Arabs. I had difficulty reaching Ghozlan and Samuels, and when I did, Samuels sounded as morose as Ghozlan had two years earlier. It had become impossible for the opinion-makers of France to distinguish between its NATO allies and Saddam's terrorists, he said. I mentioned the new poll to him. “You don't even know the full statistics they published,” he said. “You really want to hear? Total of those disapproving of the American- and British-led intervention in Iraq: 78 percent. The city of Paris: 85 percent. The extreme left: 85 percent. The extreme right: 48 percent. Asked if they would be more supportive of the war if chemical weapons were used against American and British forces, 52 percent said no. Asked do you hope the U.S. wins, 33 percent said no.”

I mentioned that I had been having trouble reaching Ghozlan. There was a reason, Samuels said; he and Ghozlan had that day decided to open an alternative headquarters in the Maison France-Israël headquarters on the Avenue Marceau, a few blocks from the Arc de Triomphe. Ghozlan's hot line was still going strong in the banlieues, but it was crucial that they also have a respected presence in central Paris. “The government has endorsed Saddam Hussein as a hero,” Samuels said. “The genie has been let out of the bottle.” The new police station would be one block from the main police headquarters. As American tanks rolled into Baghdad, there were signs that the French situation was not completely irrevocable. The cover story of the French newsmagazine
Le Point
was headlined: HAVE THEY GONE OVERBOARD?, a reference to the anti-American posturing of Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin. President Chirac, riding the popularity polls for his intractable opposition to the war, stayed mute even when the citizens of Baghdad openly embraced American forces, but his prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, attempted to redress the balance: “Being against the war does not mean that we want dictatorship to triumph over democracy.”

The last time I spoke on the phone with Ghozlan, he sounded as frenzied as I had ever heard him. He had just learned of a new attack and was rushing to find out the details. In the first three months of this year, he told me, he had verified reports of 326 serious incidents in Paris alone.

PART SIX

THE SHIFT FROM RIGHT TO LEFT

MELANIE PHILLIPS

The New Anti-Semitism

WANT TO MAKE yourself really, really unpopular if you're a Jew? Try saying that the world is witnessing a terrifying firestorm of hatred directed at Israel and the Jewish people, in which the British and Europeans are deeply implicated.

Since it is now a given in many circles that Israel is a threat to the world equal to North Korea, and that Ariel Sharon is a cross between Martin Bormann and Hendrik Verwoerd, you will find yourself accused of using the Holocaust to avoid any criticism of Israel's behavior. Because, well, you know, you Jews always stick together and are mighty quick to deal that persecution card.

Anyone who holds that view may as well skip what follows. More objective and fair-minded souls, however, might be deeply alarmed to learn of the evidence provided at a recent conference on anti-Semitism and the media at the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism in Jerusalem.

This was scarcely a gathering of the Ariel Sharon fan club. Among academics and journalists from Israel, Europe, Britain, and America were several left-wingers and liberals who were deeply hostile to Israel's Likud government, believed that the settlements should be dismantled, and were troubled by the behavior of some of Israel's military. “There's no doubt that Israel is committing human-rights violations on the West Bank,” said Professor Yehuda Bauer, the distinguished Holocaust expert.

But there was equally no doubt, from what he and others said, that anti-Zionism is now being used to cloak a terrifying nexus between genocidal Arab and Islamist hatred of the Jews and deep-seated European prejudices.

Anti-Semitism is protean, mutating over the centuries into new forms. Now it has changed again, into a shape which requires a new way of thinking and a new vocabulary. The new anti-Semitism does not discriminate against Jews as individuals on account of their race. Instead, it is centred on Israel, and the denial to the Jewish people alone of the right of self-determination.

This is nothing to do with the settlements or the West Bank. Indeed, the language being used exposes as a cruel delusion the common belief that the Middle East crisis would be solved by the creation of a Palestinian state.

The key motif is a kind of Holocaust inversion, with the Israelis being demonized as Nazis and the Palestinians being regarded as the new Jews. Israel and the Jews are being systematically delegitimized and dehumanized—a necessary prelude to their destruction—with both Islamists and the Western media using anti-Zionism as a fig-leaf for prejudices rooted in both medieval Christian and Nazi demonology.

This has produced an Orwellian situation in which hatred of the Jews now marches behind the Left's banner of anti-racism and human rights, giving rise not merely to distortions, fabrications, and slander about Israel in the media but also to mainstream articles discussing the malign power of the Jews over American and world policy.

The Jerusalem conference heard chilling presentations about a phenomenon barely discussed in Britain: the virulent Arab and Muslim hatred of the Jews. This goes far beyond even the desire to finish off Israel as a Jewish state. Anti-Jewish hatred plays a crucial role in the fanatical jihadism that now threatens all of us in the West, pouring out in television programs, newspapers, and religious sermons throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and amounting to a new warrant for genocide.

The dominant message is that Jewish power amounts to a conspiracy to destroy Islam and take over the whole world. Truly mad theories circulate on Islamist Internet sites which have now convinced untold numbers of Arabs and Muslims that the Jews were behind both 9/11 and the
Columbia
space-shuttle disaster. Egyptian television transmitted a forty-one-part series which presented the notorious Tsarist forgery, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—which purported to be a Jewish plot to control the world—as the truth. (This has prompted some Arab intellectuals to condemn such propaganda as both untrue and a tactical error, but these dissidents remain a small minority.) Meanwhile, Saudi media and religious sermons incite the murder of Jews.

According to the Arabic scholar Professor Menachem Milsom, this Arab and Islamist propaganda persistently dehumanized Jews by representing them as apes and pigs. A preacher at the totemic Haram mosque in Mecca said the Jews were “evil offspring,” the “destroyers of God's word,” “priest murderers,” and the “scum of the human race.” The medieval Christian blood libel—the claim that the Jews kill children and drink their blood—has surfaced time and again in prestigious Arab newspapers.

And Zionism was equated with Nazism; just as the Nazis believed in the superiority of the “Aryan” race, so Zionists [sic] believed they were the chosen people, which justified their own military expansion. This equation was not confined to a marginal few. Abu Mazen, said Milsom, the Palestinian Authority intellectual who is being talked about as Yasser Arafat's prime minister in a “reformed” administration, wrote as much in his doctoral thesis—in which he also said that the Zionists gave the Nazis permission to treat the Jews as they wished so long as this guaranteed their immigration to Palestine.

These sick outpourings are not so much religious or even fundamentalist doctrines as rooted in a fanatical totalitarian ideology. As Professor Bauer observed, the driving aim is the Islamic dictatorship of the world. Realization of this utopia necessitates the destruction of the foundation creeds of Western culture, Judaism and Christianity—and especially Israel, the supposed personification of Western global power-lust, which was planted as an incubus on Arab soil as a result of the Holocaust.

Holocaust denial is therefore central to Arab anti-Semitism, the prejudice which such historical falsehood has helped to forge a strategic alliance with Europe. For it absolves Europe of its guilt over the Jews, and replaces it with European guilt towards Arabs displaced as a result of the Holocaust.

Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the Jews for their own destruction. So instead of sounding the alarm over genocidal Islamist Jew-hatred, Europeans have eagerly embraced the Nazification of the Jews, a process which really got under way with Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This marked the beginning of the media's systematic inversion of Israeli self-defense as aggression, along with double-standards and malicious fabrications, which have nothing to do with legitimate (and necessary) criticism of Israel and everything to do with delegitimizing the Jewish state altogether in readiness for its dismantling.

So the conference heard about German accusations that Israel was using Nazi methods and (repeating a claim by Hamas) that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a Jewish conspiracy against Bill Clinton. It heard of the Nazification of Israel in Sweden, where there were charges that the Israelis were exterminating the Palestinians, that the media were controlled by Jewish interests to suppress criticism of Israel, and that influential Jewish lobby groups were “spraying journalists with poison.”

It heard that in France Jews were vilified and excluded from public debate if they challenged the lies being told about Israel. It was shown a devastating French film
Décryptage
(
Decod
ing)—which has been playing to packed houses in Paris— about the obsessive malevolence toward Israel displayed by the French media. It was told about the way the British media described Israel's “death squads,” “killing fields,” and “executioners” while sanitizing Palestinian human bombs as “gentle,” “religious,” and “kind.” It heard about the cartoon in the Italian newspaper
La Stampa
during the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, depicting an Israeli tank pointing a gun at the baby Jesus who is saying, “Surely they are not going to kill me again.”

And of course there was Jenin, the so-called “massacre” or “genocide” reported as such by virtually the entire media, where in fact 52 Palestinians died, of whom more than half were terrorists, while Israel sustained (for it) the huge loss of 45 of its soldiers. This astonishing media distortion was conceded at the conference by the (extraordinarily brave) Palestinian politics professor Mohammad Dajani, who also observed that a distraught Palestinian public was—on this and other occasions—whipped up by biased and emotional Palestinian reporting which showed little concern for the truth. But the big lie of the Jenin massacre is now believed as fact, contributing to the belief that Israel is a criminal state.

Europeans have thus made themselves accomplices to an explicitly genocidal program. But an even more striking feature is that, while the old anti-Semitism still festers away among neo-Nazis, the new anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of their sworn enemies on the political Left. So, as the Canadian law professor Irwin Cotler observed, we now have the mind-twisting situation where anti-Jewish hatred is harnessed to the cause of anti-racism and human rights, with Israel being compared to both Nazism and apartheid by those who define themselves against these ideologies. Such a travesty of the facts involves, of course, the implicit denial of the truth of those terrible regimes, quite apart from the prelude to annihilation created by such a lethal defamation of Israel. And even more counterintuitively, many Jews and Israelis on the Left also subscribe to this analysis— and even to the demonology of Israeli Nazism and apartheid— handing an effective weapon to those who dismiss the claim of a new anti-Semitism as Jewish paranoia or Islamophobia.

So what is the explanation for the Left's position? Partly, it's the old anti-imperialist and anti-West prejudice. Partly, it's the view that only the powerless can be victims; so Third World people can never be murderers, and any self-defense by Western societies such as Israel must instead be aggression. Partly, it's the postmodern destruction of objectivity and truth, which has ushered in the hegemony of lies. And partly, as the Left takes an axe to morality and self-restraint, it's a golden opportunity to pulverize the very people who invented the damn rules in the first place.

A left-wing Polish journalist at the conference, Konstanty Gebert, got the real point. The Left, he said, could not face the fact that they had totally misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole philosophy. This was founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view. It would also give credibility to the hated Sharon, whose demonization is absolutely vital to the Left as a protection against the implosion of its whole ideological position.

So the evidence is being denied, and truth is being stood on its head. The result is the defamation of a people, the greater prospect of its destruction, and the disastrous failure of the populations of Britain and Europe to understand properly the threat that all free peoples now face.