Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

“The Right to Difference”: Balkanizing France

Just as Jews in the U.S. have a leading role — in Hollywood and pop culture generally — in defining what is “American,” so have French Jews pushed to redefine Frenchness away from an ethnic or even an assimilationist definition, towards a Balkanized France in which Jews may live and operate as a separate group with no unified majority against them. They market this under the slogan “the right to difference,” which the LICRA has called its “philosophy.” As the LICRA’s DDV publication argued in 1978: “Any society which requires or pushes for assimilation is a racist society. Democratic secularism [laïcité] is the coexistence of all minorities in equality and fraternity. It is not the abolition of ethnic differences and specificities.”[1]

The LICRA claims that requiring immigrants to conform to French norms is to impose self-hatred upon them. Effectively, the LICRA is arguing that not only must the French allow themselves to be colonized by others but that the new arrivals should impose their non-European cultures. In 1981, the LICRA’s DDV magazine claimed:

To block the fascist demand of assimilation and national homogeneity, we must practice difference and pluralism. … These are the only effective barriers against a return of Nazism and of its French avatar: Vichy.[2]

And in the same publication in 1985: “To be anti-racist is not to demand the other to become oneself, it is to accept him as he is, to enrich oneself at his contact, to go towards him.”[3] One buzzword used to glorify the resulting Balkanization is that of “interculturality.”

The LICRA enthusiastically took on the role of simultaneously promoting non-European immigration and lamenting the inevitable “racism” which resulted from this (which they argued, with the usual pilpul, meant more immigration was required). In 1994, the LICRA co-organized a rally with left-wing parties, trade unions and “anti-racist” groups including the slogan “We are all immigrants,” notwithstanding the substantial rootedness of the French people for thousands of years.[4] Kling argues: “the systematic defense of foreigners was considered [by the LICRA] as a way of protecting themselves.”[5]

This activism has also at times been explicitly anti-French. Le Monde reports that in 1996 the LICRA, other anti-White groups (MRAP, LDH, Ras l’Front) and Freemasons held several meetings to oppose Pope John Paul II’s visit to France that year. The meetings were styled “anti-Clovis” gatherings, named after the Frankish king who converted to Christianity and founded the French monarchy; slogans were discussed, such as “We are all citizens, France is us, we don’t give a damn about Clovis.”[6]

Besides the agitation and propaganda of these groups, Kling reports that Alain Finkielkraut (neoconservative pundit) and Dominique Schnapper (sociologist, daughter of Raymond Aron[7]) were members of the 1987–88 Nationality Committee which redefined French citizenship in a more abstract and deracinated direction.[8] As a result, a purely civic, non-ethnic and indeed non-cultural definition of Frenchness is increasingly hegemonic in France. In 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy’s Minister of Immigration and National Identity Éric Besson, reputed to be a terrible race-baiter, argued:

France is neither a people, nor a language, nor a territory, nor a religion, it’s a conglomerate of peoples who want to live together. There are no ethnic French [Français de souche], there is only a France of miscegenation [métissage].[9]

Kling slams this as a “typically globalist definition,” whereas she argues that identity is “a carnal reality forged through the centuries and from tribulations lived together and not from vague abstract values.”[10]

The CRIF is similarly committed to Balkanization. As it argued in a 2010 meeting in Strasbourg: “For History to never repeat itself, France must be convinced that plural identities can be conjugated harmoniously with the values of the Republic.”[11] The CRIF appears to suggest that French history began with the Revolution of 1789, Frenchness being a body of recent values, rather than an ancient land and people reflecting tens of thousands of years of history.

Kling is keen to highlight the hypocrisy of the CRIF’s backing of multiculturalism in France given its unconditional support for the Jewish ethno-state that is Israel. She writes of Prasquier: “he has a quite different idea of Jewish identity; he however wants, concerning French identity, a disembodied vision, ‘soil-less,’ universalist, so much more reassuring than the plunge into a history of which he would not be part.”[12] (Not to belabor the point, but Prasquier was born Ryszard Praszkier in Danzig in July 1945.)

Growing Jewish Divisions on Islam

Kling also raises the tensions within the Jewish community on Islam, particularly with the rise of Muslim anti-Zionism with the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. Jewish so-called “new reactionaries” like Alain Finkielkraut, Éric Zemmour and Élisabeth Lévy have been allowed to voice criticism of Islam and immigration in mainstream media.[13]

Roger Cuckierman, CRIF president since 2013, wrote a somewhat incoherent piece evoking these anxieties on the demographic rise of Islam in March 2010. The piece essentially debates whether Christians or Muslims are more threatening to Jews, contrasting first Jews’ supposedly peaceful life under medieval Islam as against the medieval Christian pogroms and the modern European Holocaust, and then today’s Islamic anti-Semitism as against Jews’ happy contemporary position in the West. He writes:

It is clear that our children and grandchildren will live in an environment where Christian culture will have lost influence to the benefit of Muslim culture. … Demography is not only a social science, it’s especially an evolving whole of facts which modify the political and social environment in which we live. I am thinking of course of the demographic balance in Israel, like the demographic balance in France. I draw from this only one conclusion: Let us have many children![14]

What better statement of the threat posed to ethnic Europeans by their displacement and reduction to vulnerable minorities in their own historic homelands? Kling observes sarcastically: “What arrogance, what an illusion to imagine that Islam could be different by virtue of the miraculous air breathed in Europe, from what [Islam] has been for 1,300 years the world over!”[15]

Defining Jews as “More-Equal-Than-Others”

The CRIF has simultaneously, in addition to its verbal “republican universalism,” promoted the idea of Jews as part-non-entity (therefore with no agency, nothing to criticize or praise) and part-community with special rights. It’s the usual game of attacking the hated majority out-group’s cohesion and identity, while promoting their own cohesion and identity, including Israel. The CRIF wants Jews to both be individually recognized as equal citizens no different from any other and collectively recognized as a group with special rights. Prasquier explicitly made this demand in November 2009:

“How can one be Jewish?” The question has never been easy, and often, when one thinks to have resolved it, one complicates it. Yet the Republic seemed to have brought not only an answer, but the peace of decisions taken and the serenity of overcome dilemmas. To be Jewish was to be like the others, simply. To have the same rights and the same duties. … However, if we reject any recognition of a collective identity, this means, to say it with a brutality which alone can express precise things, denying everything which means that there is between Jews a common foundation of references, attachments and values which do not set them apart, but make them distinct. To say that all citizens are equal is not to say that they are all identical.[16]

This is, at bottom, the fundamental betrayal the CRIF of the Enlightenment contract proposed by the French revolutionaries and Napoleon: Cease to act as a group and you will be recognized as equal citizens (similar groups in America have betrayed the offer of the Founding Fathers).

Prasquier has also argued:

French Jews are not, and do not claim to be, a nation within the nation. They are Frenchmen, the children of Marianne, heirs of the Enlightenment and of that part of the enlightened philosophers and of equitable tolerance which have made us what we are. Secondly, and it is no doubt the most difficult thing to understand today, the Jews, beyond borders, are a people. Certainly, not a people founded upon blood, genes or rootedness in a soil. What they have in common is a heritage, symbolic and important, founded upon a moral law … forged by centuries of painful history, maintained throughout the dispersions and affirmed despite persecutions.[17]

Again, a definition of Jews by their supposed superior morality. We also find lies or ignorance in the denial of “blood, genes” in Jews’ self-definition, an obvious falsehood given that Jewish identity is inherited from the mother, given the existence of “atheist Jews,” and given the numerous genetic studies on the topic.[18] In the end, the endless gyrations in these long statements are nothing but ethnically-motivated obfuscations and pseudo-paradoxes to justify tribal privilege and double standards.

Like its American cousins, the CRIF has attempted to promote bizarre theories arguing for the moral superiority of Jews over non-Jews. CRIF Vice President Jean Kahn argued in 1986 that Jews had “a particular vigilant sensibility … which means that the Jewish voter is, by the conditioning of history, a voter with an extra touch of soul [un supplément d’âme].”[19] A CRIF member similarly argued in 2010:

But, what characterizes the Jews of France — above all — can be defined thus: the Jews carry the standard of republican values, deep in their hearts, of a France whose identity is plural, a France which must be welcoming and fraternal.[20]

This vision of Jews as passive moral agents randomly attacked by the irrational goyim has also been promoted by historians. For example, at a 2009 CRIF event, the Belgian-Jewish historian Joël Kotek, for a time a senior official at the Paris Memorial for the Shoah, said: “Ultimately, the Jews are despite themselves ‘the seismometers of modernity’.”[21]

The CRIF and the CRAN, the Black ethnic lobby, justify their explicit ethnically-motivated activism by championing it as enforcing “republican” universalism. CRAN President Patrick Lozès has stated: “the CRIF and the CRAN are indefatigable sentinels of the Republic, watch posts of our common values. The Republic is celebrated every year during the events organized by the CRIF and the CRAN.” Similarly, CRIF president Prasquier has claimed that “if the CRIF has one objective, it’s to fight against communitarianism.”[22] One can scarcely think of a more blatant ethnically-motivated contradiction!

Conclusion: France as Zionist Asset

Anne Kling has provided a great service in documenting the gradual fall of France since 1945 to its low condition of today. Reflecting a decades-long cultural struggle and the ethnic power imbalances at the head of the political-cultural apparatus, the country is now riven by double standards to the detriment of the indigenous French population and indeed threatening the very existence of the French nation. In this, groups like the LICRA and the CRIF have played a leading role, even as they enthusiastically support the existence of the Jewish ethno-state of Israel.

Kling summarizes her thesis thus:

The LICRA, the moral left, [allied] itself naturally with the political left and other so-called progressive forces to lead together in the name of antiracism and human rights, the offensive in favor of a massive immigration, rightly thought to be the best way of diluting a ‘national’ identity and cohesion considered threatening for various reasons. Towards those who would oppose this, the argument is ready and unanswerable: they are necessarily racist, nostalgic of Vichy, worse perhaps. In reality, the goal is for France to be deeply transformed. That the population — and thus its electorate — be modified in a direction favorable to the left. That she become plural [plurielle], by means fair or foul.[23]

Kling laments “the identitarian destruction of a country which was, even a few decades ago still, rich, proud of its history and its culture. And homogenous.”[24] This was “the weakening of a country deemed guilty” and the enforcement of “antiracism, the obligatory religion of universal man.”[25] Ethnic warfare through cultural means. We again must salute Kling’s courage in highlighting the role of the LICRA and the CRIF despite France’s censorious legislation:

If Muslims are today living among us in ever-greater numbers, it’s indeed because irresponsible and short-sighted politicians, under the pressure of so-called anti-racist associations, in fact anti-national and anti-identitarian, opened the doors wide open to them [. . .] To point the finger at these first causes, by refusing to confuse causes and consequences, is practically to run the risk of violating the law.[26]

Kling’s narrative is a story of generational change: of the passing of leaders who knew the war and who knew things had been very complicated (after all the overwhelming majority of civil servants and army officers had remained loyal to Vichy) to a Manichaen vision that can only be seen as a caricature. This was symbolized by the harassment of President François Mitterrand towards the end of his life by ethnocentric Jews — Mitterrand had been both an honored Vichy official and a resister; though Jew-friendly he kept friendships from the collaboration era and insisted on honoring Marshal Philippe Pétain as the victor of the First World War — against whom he could only protest: “Young man, you do not know what you are talking about.”

In a way, the story is a logical fulfillment. If the ethnocentrism of National Socialist Germany and the Jewish Holocaust were the supreme evil – Jewish ethnocentrism being unmentionable and communist crimes of lesser moral significance – as the Allies declared, then all people and ideas even vaguely associated with the National Socialist regime were also evil. Jewish groups like the LICRA and CRIF have simply pushed to rigorously extend these principles to France as a whole, including its history and very society, even if it means the destruction of the nation.

Barring a political revolution, there is every reason to think the influence of these groups will grow. It does appear that Jewry’s influence will differ somewhat between America and France. Intermarriage appears relatively high in the U.S. and the country’s elite increasingly features half- and quarter-Jews. The liberal wing of Jewry appears decidedly stronger in the U.S. than the neoconservative/Likud wing.

In contrast, French Jewish identity and conscious ethnocentrism appear more pronounced. There are more overt perceived threats in France. After all, a nationalist party, with a party leader who refused to kowtow to the postwar civil religion of “Holocaustianity,” consistently received 10–20% of the vote. Like the golem, Islamic immigration has, though promoted by Jewish groups, led to a growing community on French soil which is deeply anti-Zionist, no doubt more anti-Semitic than either the native French population or Hispanic and Asian immigrants to the U.S. Since at least 2002, with the Second Intifada and the Iraq War, this has increasingly been of concern to French Jewish elites. Finally, Israel is just next door, a four-hour flight away, meaning that French Jews can easily commune with an undiluted, unapologetic and indeed supremacist Jewish culture in an explicitly Jewish ethno-state. This means Jews can live in France and periodically go to Israel, or they can notionally perform their Aliyah and still have a foot in France, continuing to lobby on behalf of their ethno-state and people.

The future of the organized Jewish community in France will then likely be that of explicit dual loyalty. We already have examples: grandson-of-deportees-and-IDF-soldier-cum-French-government-lawyer Arno Klarsfeld, the repulsive “French MP” Meyer Habib representing French citizens in Israel, the rather “honest Zionist” Gilles-William Goldnadel who is close to the Likud party, and indeed CRIF President Roger Cuckierman’s son Édouard, an Franco-Israeli businessman active in both countries.

Thus I think all the reports about Jews fleeing France en masse for Israel are highly exaggerated: elite Jews are not going, and even those who do have by no means necessarily given up on doing their best to serve their tribe by meddling in French political life.

Organized Jewry in France may well come to actually oppose Islamic immigration or indeed allow the Front National to participate in government.[27] They will do this if they deem this (rightly or wrongly) to be in the interests of Jews and Israel. Tragically, I do not believe nationalists can come to power in France without either a political collapse or the tacit support of at least a part of the Jewish community. The French politico-media elite plays with the FN like a cat with a mouse.

Kling laconically notes: “[I]f ‘Israel is the State of the Jewish people’, why would France not be the State of the French people?”[28] Such appeals to moral consistency will never have any effect on the LICRA and the CRIF, whose religion appears to be hypocrisy, but they will be important in convincing Frenchmen and Europeans worldwide of the righteousness of self-defense, whose political name is nationalism. Every day, France weakens, but nationalism and anti-Zionism grow stronger.

End of Part 5 of 5.

[1] Ibid., 164

[2] Ibid., 166

[3] Ibid., 166

[4] Ibid., 186

[5] Ibid., 172.

[6] “Tous et toutes citoyens, la France c’est nous, Clovis, on s’en fout !” Ibid., 233

[7] Discussed in Guillaume Durocher, “The Jew as Citizen: Raymond Aron & Civic Nationalism,” Counter-Currents, November 5, 2014.

http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/11/the-jew-as-citizen-part-1/

[8] Kling, Le CRIF, 19.

[9] Ibid., 263.

[10] Ibid.

[11]Ibid., 210.

[12]Ibid., 263.

[13]I discuss the highly ambiguous and complex possible political ramifications of this in Guillaume Durocher, “Towards Kosher Nationalism?,” The Occidental Observer, January 17, 2015.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/01/towards-kosher-nationalism-1-the-unstable-jewish-gentile-dialectic/

[14]Kling, Le CRIF, 261-2. My emphasis.

[15]Kling, La France LICRAtisée, 247.

[16]Kling, Le CRIF, 265-6. My emphasis.

[17] Ibid., 25.

[18] To cite only one Jewish publication, Jon Entine, “Jews are a ‘race’ study reveals,” Forward, May 4, 2012.

http://forward.com/culture/155742/jews-are-a-race-genes-reveal/

[19] Kling, La France LICRAtisée, 208.

[20]Kling, Le CRIF, 257.

[21]Ibid., 116.

[22]Ibid., 176.

[23]Kling, La France LICRAtisée, 82.

[24]Ibid., 245.

[25]Ibid., 246-7.

[26]Ibid., 248.

[27]Guillaume Durocher, “Towards Kosher Nationalism?,” The Occidental Observer, January 17, 2015.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/01/towards-kosher-nationalism-1-the-unstable-jewish-gentile-dialectic/

[28]Kling, Le CRIF, 26.