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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (27608)	4/28/2002 10:41:53 PM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

"The anti-Semitism of the left is more dangerous than that of the right. They have power in the media, the universities, the associations, the political class." If anybody doubts this observation, they only have to look at France's flirtation with Stalinism, and what the Left, and this was not the extreme-Left I'm talking about, was up to during that time. They had and fully exercised the ability to smear and falsely discredit anyone who spoke of gulags, or anything that called in question the great Soviet dream of communism for all.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (27608)	4/29/2002 2:19:47 AM
From: frankw1900	Respond to of 281500

This is the best article I've yet read on the subject of contemporary French antisemitism. IT'S FAR MORE READABLE IN THE PRINTER FREINDLY VERSION. There is a strain in the french intelligensia which adores violence or, violent people, anyway. Mostly because they have very little experience of it - they theorize about it. In many ways France is a very repressed society in that it is highly regimented in ways that seem utterly strange to "anglo saxons." (For instance, there is a law outlining the "permissable errors" one is allowed to make in writing and speaking French. I guarantee if you tried to pass such a law in the anglo saxon countries there would be folk in the streets and any politician who voted for it in serious trouble). But the real regimentation of French society is oriented around the "concours" system. The correct translation into English is 'contest', not 'competition' - the difference is subtle but real - in North America we have competition for university placement and there are the usual placement exams but doing mediocrely doesn't put a person in a non-place because there are still lots of alternatives. There are far fewer alternatives in France. That is, you must qualify for any significant employment stream by passing an exam - the triage starts at a very early age and continues until the very end of a person's professional or occupational formation. At the end, in the French system the winners take nearly all. In the North America the winners get ahead, but they don't take nearly all. Thus the first twenty to twenty five years of a french person's life is consumed with passing exams. The winners don't just feel successful. They feel entitled. The system has been in place since Napoleon. It has become exceptionally rigid. Go to the wrong elementary school, be born in the wrong place, and you probably aren't going to make it (this is true in N America also, but to a hugely lesser degree). The aggressiveness so remarkable in french cities I believe arises from this system. It has given the French an elite which is tremendously articulate often owning remarkable theoretical knowledge but also often having very little experience of how folk really behave. They are vulnerable to the most remarkable delusions: To be human is to wish it had never happened. (Those who deny that it did may be those who can't bear to admit that it happened.) But it did. If there's a will-to-anti-Semitism in Western culture--as there probably is--then the Arab style of Judeophobia, which is an anti-Semitism without the West's complexes, offers a real redemptive project to those Westerners who are willing to embrace it. It can liberate guilty, decadent Europeans from a horrible moral albatross. What an antidepressant! Saying there was no such thing as the gas chambers is, of course, not respectable. But the same purpose can be served using what Leo Strauss called the reductio ad Hitlerum to cast the Jews as having committed crimes identical to the Nazis'. They must be identical, of course, so the work of self-delusion can be accomplished. We did one, the Jews did one. Now we're even-steven. You can see the attractive force in such an ideology. Author Alexandre Del Valle fears that anti-Semitism could also be a binding force, leading to a "convergence of totalitarianisms," of Islamism and the Western anti-globalist left. Elisabeth Schemla, a longtime editor at France's center-left opinion weekly Le Nouvel Observateur who now edits the online newsletter www.Proche-Orient.info, says, "The anti-Semitism of the left is more dangerous than that of the right. They have power in the media, the universities, the associations, the political class." Schemla worries that a third of the candidates in the first round of the presidential election were strongly motivated by the conflict in the Middle East. As such, it is not the strong showing of LePen that is the most alarming development in the first round of the election, but the record-high score of the three Trotskyite parties on the hard left. ( weeklystandard.com [part 1])

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (27608)	4/29/2002 3:59:13 AM
From: FaultLine	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Liberte, Egalite, Judeophobie Wow, quite an article. I printed it out to pass around to my sons (who have been to France). Among the many interesting items, the following tidbit sure stood out . It almost sounds like a plotline from a movie.. There was also a spectacular terrorist incident a week before. On September 2 in the town of Beziers, along the Belgian border, a hoodlum named Safir Bghouia attacked a group of police with a shoulder-held rocket launcher, phoned in death threats to local officials, machine-gunned the local police constabulary, and executed the town's deputy mayor, before he himself was shot dead the next day, dressed in white and howling that he was a "son of Allah." --fl@shudder.com