*
THE SHOAH AS STATE RELIGION?
BLASPHEMY IN SECULAR FRANCE
Diana Johnstone
january 24-26, 2014
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 (CounterPunch, January 1, 2014) 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 vigorous 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 hoard 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.
