PARISIAN TRAGEDIES

Dear Joe and Abigail:

The “yes, but” response was also evident after the terrible massacre in Paris of twelve people, including eight staff members of the Charlie Hebdo magazine, by Islamist terrorists on January 7, 2015. The Parisian satirical magazine made a point of sticking its finger in the eye of every established institution, including religious ones. Contrary to the general impression, its main target was not Islam. According to Le Monde, of the five hundred magazine covers published between 2005 and 2015, only seven ridiculed Islam.1 Undoubtedly its attacks on Islam were offensive, often extremely so, but, as the New Yorker observed, “the magazine was offensive to Jews, offensive to Muslims, offensive to Catholics, offensive to feminists, offensive to the right and to the left, while being aligned with it—offensive to everybody, equally.”2

But this did not stop the critics. Within a day or so of the Charlie Hebdo murders, Jacob Canfield, a young American cartoonist, criticized the notion that the victims were brave souls who suffered a terrible death. He called the editor a “racist asshole,” though he acknowledged that calling someone that the day after they were murdered was “a callous thing to do.” He defended himself by saying that he didn’t “do it lightly.” Describing them as “white-guys” (which they were not), he declared that their supporters were “wrong” to defend them and their attacks on Islam.3

While Canfield’s rantings may have come from a marginal figure, far more notable individuals reacted similarly. Though their words were less distasteful than Canfield’s, their position was the same. In June 2015, PEN, a literary organization that has long spearheaded the fight against censorship, gave its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo. The award was to be accepted by the magazine’s two surviving editors, both of whom were late to work on the morning of the murder. Six authors, members of PEN, protested and announced that they would neither serve as literary hosts nor attend the dinner. Suggesting that poverty and lack of political power motivated the murderers, one of the boycotters condemned “PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.” Another inaccurately castigated Charlie Hebdo for promotion of “a kind of forced secular view.” Unsurprisingly, Salman Rushdie pointedly disagreed. “If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures,” he stated, “then frankly the organization is not worth the name.”4 One of the surviving editors said it best at the PEN gathering when he declared, “Being shocked is part of democratic debate. . . . Being shot is not.”

In a tragically ironic coda, Stéphane Charbonnier, the editorial director of Charlie Hebdo, had completed, only two days before his murder, the manuscript for a book about what he termed the “disgusting white, left-wing bourgeois paternalism” that fanned the flames of Islamist terrorism. According to Charbonnier, when “the media decided that republishing the Muhammad caricatures could only trigger the fury of Muslims . . . it triggered the anger of a few Muslim associations.”5 By accusing Rushdie, Van Gogh, and the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists of inciting Islamist extremists, their critics come very close to making excuses for the subsequent violence and murders. The “yes, but” message is particularly painful because it comes precisely from those who should have fiercely defended freedom of expression. As Theodor Holman, a journalist and one of Van Gogh’s best friends, argued, “Tolerance has been transformed into cowardice.” He admitted that he was frightened of writing about the murder in his column in a leading Dutch newspaper. “I’m afraid, because a friend was . . . slaughtered because of what he was saying.”6

In the end, there is only one acceptable response when freedom of expression is met with terrorism and murder: a plain and unequivocal declaration that this is wrong. Nothing—not poverty, anger, disenfranchisement, religious belief, or anything else—can justify it.

Now let’s go back to Joe’s original question: How does all this connect to antisemitism? A leftist school of thought holds that one of the reasons for the anger of Muslims toward the West is nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western political imperialism in Muslim lands. And contemporary Western critiques of Islam (whether they come from “crusaders” or secularists is completely immaterial) only fan the flames of this anger. From there, it’s just a short journey for some leftists to regard Islamic terrorists as fellow “anti-imperialists.” And it’s an equally short journey for some to regard Jews—for centuries concentrated in Europe (in addition to their centuries-long second-class treatment in Islamic lands)—as Western imperialists when they seek to return to their ancient homeland, which was for centuries part of the Islamic empire. Islamic antisemitism and anti-Zionism therefore become rationalized as a legitimate response to Western imperialism. And so, we are confronted with another disgraceful “yes, but” argument.

Yours,

DEL

Dear Joe and Abigail:

In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher attacks, I exchanged emails with my friend Jean, a Frenchman in his forties. He has many other Jewish friends, and he is fascinated by Jewish history and tradition. A businessman, he would probably describe himself as slightly left of center. In light of our most recent change, I thought this might resonate with you.

Yours,

DEL

Dear Jean:

It was good to speak to you right after the massacres at Charlie Hebdo and, two days later, Hypercacher. The sadness in your voice about these events was palpable. When you called again after the massive protest marches in France on January 10 and 11 you sounded better. Participating with the millions of people who attended the marches had clearly lifted your spirits.

I was touched by your quiet pride that you, as a non-Jew, had carried a “Je Suis Juif” sign at the Paris march. You were heartened by the way the march commemorated all the victims—cartoonists, shoppers, and police officers—as one. I tried to share your enthusiasm, but I think you heard in my voice that I could not. I owe you an explanation. I don’t want to be one of those Jews who “can never take yes for an answer,” which is to say, who can’t seem to accept that good things are happening. But as I watched the television coverage of masses of people at the protest march, I found one thing troubling. Though the demonstration honored all the victims of all the recent attacks, in fact there were fundamental differences among them. The Charlie Hebdo editorial staff was murdered for something that they did. (Which is, of course, no justification for their murder.) The police officers (one of whom was a Muslim) were murdered in the line of duty. (Which is, of course, just as unconscionable.) But the victims in the kosher supermarket were killed because of who they were (or who the terrorist assumed they were). It’s hard to believe that within living memory of World War II, Jews are once again being murdered on French soil just because they are Jews. The first violent attack on a Jewish institution in France since World War II was the October 1980 bombing directed against a synagogue on rue Copernic in Paris in which four people were killed and forty-six injured, most of them on the street outside the synagogue. The French prime minister at the time, Raymond Barre, infamously commented, “This odious bombing wanted to strike Jews who were going to the synagogue and it hit innocent French people who crossed the Copernic street.” His repugnant distinction between “Jews” and “innocent French people” did not go unnoticed, and he was eventually condemned by the French parliament.7

Jews constitute no more than 1 percent of the French population, yet in recent years close to half the racist attacks in the country have been directed against them.8 The president of one of the synagogues in France has noted that whenever there is some sort of special event at the synagogue, he alerts the police. Living on the defensive has become the new normal for many French Jews. As one young Frenchwoman told me, “When I bring my children to their Jewish school and see the guards with submachine guns, I feel relieved. Then I wonder, Why am I sending my children to a school where they have to be protected by armed guards? But if I send them to a ‘French’ school, they are harassed, particularly by the Muslim students.”

The initial reluctance to see an antisemitic attack for what it is continues to be troubling. When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked a reporter on the scene at Hypercacher whether there was “anything to indicate that this was an antisemitic act,” the reporter’s response was that because Muslims shop at the store, too, it wasn’t necessarily antisemitic. It took the killer’s proclamation that he had chosen the kosher supermarket in order to kill Jews to end that line of reasoning.9 Equally myopic is the attempt by some in the media to downplay the role of Islamist extremists in these attacks. The day after the supermarket massacre, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry asked Forward columnist J. J. Goldberg to assure viewers that the “antisemitism problem in France is not primarily a problem of antisemitism from French Muslims.”

“I’m afraid I let her down,” Goldberg recounted in his column in the Forward. “I cited Ilan Halimi, the school in Toulouse, the Jewish Museum in Brussels, the mob attack on the synagogue in Paris last summer—all perpetrated by Muslims . . . I was intending to expand on it and talk about the increasing presence of pure, old-fashioned Jew-hatred in various strains of radical Islamism, especially since the 1998 merger of Al Qaeda with Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad. But the segment ended sort of abruptly and I was told I was done, so I never had the chance to finish the answer.”10

Fortunately, there are those in France who do seem to get it. In an emotional speech at France’s National Assembly following the funerals of seven of the victims of the terror attacks, Prime Minister Manuel Valls eloquently condemned France’s failure to take antisemitism seriously:

I say to the people in general who perhaps have not reacted sufficiently up to now, and to our Jewish compatriots, that this time [antisemitism] cannot be accepted. . . . How can we accept that cries of “death to the Jews” can be heard on the streets? . . . History has taught us that the awakening of antisemitism is the symptom of a crisis for democracy and of a crisis for the Republic. That is why we must respond with force. . . . There is also a new antisemitism that is born in our neighborhoods, coming through the internet, satellite dishes, against the backdrop of loathing of the State of Israel, which advocates hatred of the Jews and of all the Jews. . . . It has to be spelled out—the right words must be used to fight this unacceptable antisemitism. When the Jews of France are attacked, France is attacked, the conscience of humanity is attacked. Let us never forget that.11

But there are others who tried to rationalize these antisemitic attacks by suggesting that they are a response to Israel’s actions in the Middle East. The BBC’s Tim Willcox did precisely that when, during an interview with a Jewish woman at the Paris march, he interrupted her comments about the tragedy to say that “many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.”12 British film director Ken Loach contended that an increase in antisemitism is “perfectly understandable because Israel feeds feelings of antisemitism.”13 One wonders what their response would be to a children’s program broadcast by Hamas’s al-Aqsa television channel in May 2014 in which its young viewers were urged to kill Jewish children. When a young girl announced her intention to kill “all of them,” the smiling host responded “good.”14

And then there are the individuals who defend themselves against accusations of antisemitism by insisting that it’s actually Zionism to which they are opposed. In Brooklyn, on the eve of Yom Kippur in 2014, the proprietor of a coffeehouse posted a virulent antisemitic rant on Instagram about greedy Jews, which went viral.15 When he was criticized, he insisted that he had been misunderstood; he was not antisemitic but “anti-Zionist.” Then in a rather incoherent gloss (or perhaps a very coherent one), he added, “It’s about greed.”16 In June 2009, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which Barack and Michelle Obama had attended when they lived there, told the Newport News Daily Press that “them Jews aren’t going to let him [President Obama] talk to me.” When a firestorm of criticism erupted, he insisted that he had been misunderstood. “I misspoke. Let me just say: Zionists . . . I’m not talking about all Jews, all people of the Jewish faith, I’m talking about Zionists.”17

I’m with Prime Minister Valls on this one. There are ways of disagreeing with the policies of the Israeli government without sounding antisemitic. And blaming all Jews for something wrong that Israel has done—that’s antisemitic.

No one who offers the “yes, but” rationalization actually engages in racist violence or even thinks that they are condoning it. But they are virtually guaranteeing that it will continue because what they are doing is facilitating it.

Jean, I know I have wandered a bit afield from the topic of the march. I apologize for that and for putting a damper on your upbeat feelings. But if ever there was a moment that demanded the airing of some painful truths, this is it.

Yours,

DEL

Dear Joe and Abigail:

I wrote the preceding letter right after the 2015 Paris attacks. There have been more than a few incidents since then, one of the most notorious in April 2017, when Sarah Halimi, a retired doctor in her mid-sixties, was murdered in Paris by Kobili Traoré, a twenty-eight-year-old Muslim neighbor, who shouted Allahu Akbar and referred to her as Satan as he beat her, fracturing multiple bones in her body. He then threw her from a third-floor window in her apartment onto the street, where she was found dead. French officials initially refused to classify this as an antisemitic assault and held Traoré for months in a psychiatric hospital, although he had no history of mental illness.18 Almost a year after the murder, and after much public protest and an appeal from the Paris Prosecutor’s Office, the French magistrate amended the indictment against Traoré to “murder with antisemitism as an aggravating factor.”19 The initial police reaction to this horrendous crime seemed to many people, including a group of prominent French intellectuals, a “denial of reality.”20

In the past, French police often failed to see the antisemitic nature of crimes committed by Muslims against Jews, treating them instead as ordinary criminal acts. Such was the case in Paris in February 2006 with the kidnapping and horrific torture and murder of twenty-three-year-old Ilan Halimi. Some French Jews reported being told by police that as long as they lived in the same neighborhoods as Muslims, little could be done to prevent these attacks.21

But we are also beginning to see some hopeful signs. On March 1, 2018, a young boy wearing a kippah was beaten outside a synagogue by four teenagers believed to be of North African descent, who called him and his sister “dirty Jews.” This time the police responded with alacrity, and the assault was immediately classified as an antisemitic incident.22

That same month, Mireille Knoll, an eighty-five-year-old Holocaust survivor who as a child had escaped the notorious roundup of Jews in Paris in 1942, was murdered by a Muslim neighbor and his friend. After stabbing her eleven times, they set fire to her apartment in an apparent effort to cover up the murder. One of the suspects was reported to have cried Allahu Akbar as he stabbed Mrs. Knoll, and one of the suspects was reported to have told the other, “She’s a Jew. She must have money.” While the murder bore tragic similarities to the killing of Sarah Halimi, this time French officials responded differently. The Paris prosecutor immediately asked that the suspects be charged with “premeditated murder of a vulnerable person for antisemitic motives.”23

A few days after the murder, thousands of people participated in a march in Paris organized by the Jewish community in Mrs. Knoll’s memory.24 French president Emmanuel Macron attended her funeral, after attending that morning a state ceremony honoring a gendarme who had been murdered by an Islamist extremist in an attack on a supermarket in southern France in which two other hostages had also been killed. In a speech at the ceremony, Macron connected the two crimes, one committed by a “terrorist in Trèbe” and the other by murderers “who assassinated an innocent and vulnerable woman because she was Jewish.”25

At last, some recognition that terrorist acts may at first be directed at Jews, but they never end with Jews.

Yours,

DEL