Thousands of people marched through Paris at the end of March in what was billed as a protest against racism. It was another display of the long-standing alliance between the far left and Islamist groups, exemplified by the numerous Palestinian flags dotted alongside the red banners deployed by the organizers.
The march illustrated how the term “racism” has been appropriated by parts of the left to describe measures aimed at combating the spread of Islamism. Many of the demonstrators lashed out at Bruno Retailleau, the French interior minister, for his allegedly racist statements about Algeria, a French colony until its independence in 1962, and his support for a ban on the wearing of the Islamic veil—a rule that is imposed on women alone—in French institutions of higher education.
Yet closer inspection of both issues reveals that Retailleau has not uttered racist comments on either. On Algeria, Retailleau’s complaint is that the authorities in Algiers have consistently refused to accept Algerian nationals slated for deportation by France, including one man who carried out a deadly terrorist attack in the city of Mulhouse in February, leading him to warn that a 1968 agreement facilitating Algerian immigration to France would be reviewed unless that position is reversed. On the veil, he has eschewed bigoted language about “Islam” and “foreigners,” arguing instead that the “veil is not merely a piece of fabric; it is a banner for Islamism and a symbol of the subjugation of women to men.”
Once upon a time, that was an assertion made by the left.
But perhaps the most egregious aspect of the demonstration was its contemptuous approach to the problem of antisemitism, which has risen precipitously in France, as elsewhere in Europe, in the 18 months that have elapsed since the Hamas mass atrocities in Israel. There were no banners, no chants, no signs condemning the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust and its consequent unleashing of antisemitic rhetoric and violence against Jewish communities across the globe.
Indeed, the entire event suggested that in order to combat racism, the French far left—a large bloc that won 182 parliamentary seats in last year’s legislative elections—has embraced Jew-hatred as a strategy. A poster publicizing the march urged attendees to “fight the extreme right, its ideas and its networks.” To accentuate its point, the poster was dominated by an image of Cyril Hanouna, a right-wing pundit of Tunisian Jewish origin.
Hanouna was displayed in extreme close-up with his eyes narrowed in hostility and a curving, beak-like nose protruding over a snarling mouth. You don’t have to be an antisemitism expert to trace the lineage of an image like this one. In the French context, it is painfully reminiscent of the crude propaganda aimed at Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish army officer falsely convicted of espionage in 1894 amid a wave of bestial antisemitic violence.
It also brought to mind the Nazi demonization of the Jews and, more recently, social media memes like the “Happy Merchant,” an antisemitic caricature much loved by semi-literate, far-right delinquents like the American Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
The offending image of Hanouna was eventually withdrawn but not before the guilty party here—the far-left “La France Insoumise” (“France Rising”)—angrily voiced its outrage at the accusation of antisemitism (a routine tactic whenever someone has the temerity to suggest that the far left is hostile to Jews qua Jews.) The party’s leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, visibly lost his temper when asked about the image during a television interview, bellowing the words “Enough is Enough!” at news anchor Francis Letellier.
Yet for all of Mélenchon’s protestations, this is exactly what we have come to expect from him. Mélenchon has ventured into antisemitism several times in his career. Random highlights include his 2013 statement accusing the then-Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, who is Jewish, of no longer “thinking in French but thinking in the language of international finance.” More recently, he leapt to the defense of his comrade Jeremy Corbyn, the antisemitic former leader of the British Labour Party, declaring that “Corbyn had to endure without help the crude accusation of antisemitism from the chief rabbi of England and the various Likud networks of influence.” He then added that Corbyn, “instead of fighting back, spent his time apologizing and giving pledges. (…) I will never give in to it for my part.”
Along with the various Islamist associations present in France, La France Insoumise has been a key transmitter of antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, at the same time dismissing outright, much as Corbyn did in Britain, the concerns of the Jewish community. French President Emmanuel Macron alluded to this in a speech on April 2, when he presented an award on behalf of LICRA, a long-established French organization that combats racism and antisemitism. “The antisemitic poison consists of only one ingredient, hatred … a hatred born on the far right, which has prospered on the far right and has managed to spread beyond the far right,” Macron stated. “Today, unfortunately, it has reached certain ranks of the far left and the left, for whom anti-Zionism serves as an alibi for the expression of antisemitism.”
While these sentiments are laudable, the historical record shows that the far left has often trafficked in the hatred of Jews with the same enthusiasm as the Nazis and ultranationalists on the facing side of the horseshoe. As I wrote last year, anti-Zionism in our time has undergone a process of Nazification to the point where, in my view, we should remove the hyphen from this term to underline that what is presented as political opposition to the Zionist movement is more properly understood as a full-blown antisemitic conspiracy theory with the State of Israel at its core.
The unmistakable message delivered by the Paris march against racism, along with satellite marches in other French cities, was this: Jews are not allies; Jews fabricate claims of bigotry and discrimination against them; and Jews are guilty of perpetrating a “genocide” against Palestinians rooted in “Zionist ideology.” In the ultimate irony, the implication here is that to be a good anti-racist, it helps if you are an antisemite.