DIRE TIMES FOR FRENCH JEWS

BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL

"Any time young people approach me in order to get married, I ask them various questions about their future. Eighty percent of them say they do not envision any future in France." This is what one rabbi in Paris told me last week. I heard similar statements from other French rabbis and lay Jewish leaders: "We have a feeling the words are on the wall now," one leader in the Lyons area confided to me. "It is not just our situation in this country deteriorating; it is also that the process is much quicker than expected."

Even the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, may be sharing that view now. A philosopher (holding a prestigious French agrégation degree in philosophy), a graduate of the French Rabbinical School in Paris, and a former student at some of the most orthodox yeshivoth (Talmudic academies) in Jerusalem, Bernheim was until recently very eager to reconcile traditional Judaism with Europe's "open society." He has just devoted a book to France as a nation and how Jews can contribute to France's public debates (N'oublions Pas De Penser La France), and in 2008, the year he was elected chief rabbi, he coauthored a book on Judeo-Christian dialogue (Le Rabbin et le Cardinal) with Cardinal Philippe Barbarin.

Despite all that, Bernheim suddenly warned Jewish leaders a few weeks ago about a growing "rejection" of Jews and Judaism in France, something he linked to the global passing of "Judeo-Christian values" in French society as a whole.

The immediate reason for Jewish pessimism in France and for Bernheim's change of heart may be the Toulouse massacre last March: the murder in cold blood of three Jewish children and a Jewish teacher by Mohamed Merah, a Muslim terrorist, on their school's premises. This crime, instead of instilling more compassion and understanding towards the Jewish community, has actually generated more anti-Jewish violence and hate talk, as if Merah was not seen as a vile thug but rather as a model by parts of the population.

There were no less than six cases of aggravated assault on Jewish youths or rabbis in France from March 26 to July 5, including one case in Toulouse again. According to the Representative Council of French Jewish Organizations (CRIF), anti-Semitic incidents of all sorts have increased by 53% compared to the same period last year.

President François Hollande and Minister of the the Interior Manuel Valls must be credited for taking the present anti-Semitic crisis seriously, a noted departure from the ambivalent attitude of the last socialist administration of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin ten years ago. On July 22 — on the seventieth anniversary of the "grande raffle" ("great round-up") of Jews by the Vichy government police in 1942 — Hollande drew a parallel between the Toulouse massacre and the deportation and mass murder of Jewish children during the Holocaust. As for Valls, he not only repeatedly acknowledged that "there was an upsurge of anti-Semitism in France," but on July 8 went so far as to stigmatize the "most stupid, most dangerous new anti-Semitism" brooding among "young and not-so-young people" in the "neighborhoods" (a code word for Muslim enclaves). Quite a bold statement, since the Socialist party and the Left at large primarily derive their present electoral edge in France from the Muslim vote. Valls and his staff may also have inspired several no-nonsense reports on anti-Semitism that were recently published in the liberal, pro-socialist press.

The connection between Muslim immigration — or Muslim-influenced Third World immigration — and the rise of a new anti-Semitism is a fact all over Europe. Muslims come from countries (or are culturally attuned to countries) where unreconstructed, Nazi-style Jew-bashing dominates. They are impervious to the ethical debate about the Holocaust and the rejection of anti-Jewish stereotypes that were gradually incorporated into the European political discourse and consciousness in the second half of the 20th century (to the point that lessons on the Holocaust are frequently dropped from the curriculum at schools with a plurality or a majority of Muslim pupils), and are more likely than non-Muslims to engage in assaults, attacks, or harassment practices directed at Jews. Moreover, Muslim anti-Semitism reactivates in many places a dormant, but by no means extinct, non-Muslim European anti-Semitism. Once Muslims are unopposed, or at least unprosecuted, when they challenge the historical veracity of the Holocaust or when they refer to the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authentic document, a growing number of non-Muslims feel free to do the same.

Muslim immigration is nurturing European anti-Semitism in more surprising ways as well. One unintended and ironic consequence of European Islam's demographic growth is that Jews are frequently amalgamated with Muslims. Many people use a widespread concern about a growing influence of Islam in Europe as a way to hurt Jews as well, or to hit them first.

Clearly, there are outward similarities between Judaism and Islam. Both religions originated in the Near East, and are — as of 2012 — related to Near or Middle East countries. Both use Semitic languages. Both insist on rituals, particularly in terms of gender roles, family life, or food, that do not fit with the current mainstream European way of life.

However, differences between Judaism and Islam may outweigh similarities. As far as Near Eastern or Middle Eastern countries are concerned, Muslims turn to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the strongholds of anti-Western hatred, while Jews turn to Israel, the super-Western "start-up nation." In terms of ritual, kosher slaughtering — a quasi-surgical operation — is as remote from halal slaughtering as from secular slaughtering. Jewish circumcision is performed on newborn babies and is much closer to secular prophylactic circumcision (as it is largely practiced in the United States) than to Islamic circumcision, which is performed on boys in their preteens or early teens. And when it comes to relations between politics and religion, there is simply a chasm between the two religions. Judaism (including Orthodox Judaism) is not interested in mass conversion; does not seek to wrest Europe or any historically Christian part of the world from Christianity; recognizes the supremacy of state law over religious law in non-ritual matters; and sees Western democracy — a polity based on the rule of law — as the most legitimate political system.

But Europeans are not culturally equipped to understand such nuances or to keep them in mind (far less than the Americans, who are more religious-minded, more conversant in Biblical matters, and more familiar with the Jewish way of life). Jules Renard, an early 20th century French writer, wrote about his cat: "I keep telling him to hunt mice and let the canaries alone. Very subtle guidelines, I must admit. Even intelligent cats can get wrong on this issue." And decide that eating canaries is easier and more satisfying than hunting mice. Regarding Judaism and Islam, most Europeans are like Renard's cat. And what usually originates as a reaction against difficulties linked to radical brands of Islam quickly evolves into a primarily anti-Jewish business.

Earlier this year in France, during the last months of the conservative Sarkozy administration, a debate about the rapidly growing halal meat industry led to attacks against the kosher meat industry as well, complete with uncomely remarks about "old-fashioned rituals" by then-Prime Minister François Fillon. While Fillon subsequently "clarified" his views, the Sarkozy administration upheld its support for some kind of "tagging" of "ritually slaughtered meat," a European Union-promoted practice that would prompt commercial boycott of such food and thus make it financially unaffordable for most prospective buyers. Since kosher meat regulations are much stricter than halal meat regulations, religious Jews would be more hurt at the end of the day than religious Muslims. The reason why French conservatives were so fond of tagging is that a 2009 poll shows a 72% rejection of "ritual slaughtering" writ large. And Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate, dwelled on that issue for a while.

In Germany, a rare case of malpractice by a German Muslim doctor in a Muslim circumcision led a court in Cologne to ban circumcision on children all over Germany on June 19, on the quite extravagant grounds that only legal adults may decide on issues irreversibly affecting their body, except for purely medical reasons. Which is tantamount, in the considered issue, to denying parents the right to pass their religion to their children.

Conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel immediately filled a bill to make religious circumcision legal in Germany, and it was passed on July 19 by the Bundestag (somehow, German conservatives are nowadays more genuinely conservative than, say, their French counterparts). But according to a YouGov poll for the DPA news agency released at about the same moment, 45% of Germans support the ban, while only 42% oppose it.

In an even more ominous instance, Judaism has been singled out in a protracted intellectual debate in France since early June, as the fountainhead, past and present, of totalitarianism and political violence and thus as a more dangerous religion than radical Islam.

The charge was made in Le Point, an important right-of-center newsmagazine, by Michel Onfray, a commercially successful dabbling philosopher and a long-time supporter of the radical Left, who himself reviewed and approvingly quoted Who Is God? (Qui est Dieu), an essay by another controversial author, the former diplomat Jean Soler. In the 1970s Soler, who holds an agrégation degree in Greek and Latin classical studies but was never academically trained in anthropology, Semitics, or Near Eastern history, applied a structuralist approach to the study of Jewish rituals and won some polite applause from French, Israeli, and American scholars. Later on, when structuralism fell out of fashion, he sort of remixed his early work with neo-Marcionite currents in 19th century and early 20th century German and French Biblical criticism which claimed there was no spirituality at all, and indeed no real monotheism, in the Old Testament, a narrowly"tribalist" book. Or that everything spiritual in the Old Testament was a transplant from other cultures, either Pharaonic Egypt or Indo-European Iran.

Very few people in France realize what Soler's later writing is really about, and that his approach or sources do not fit present academic standards. Even fewer people are aware that the neo-Marcionite hypothesis to which Soler has switched and which Onfray supports exerted a major influence on Nazi anti-Semitism (including the so-called "German Christian" movement) and remained after 1945 a major polemical tool in neo-Nazi or post-Nazi circles. So much so that the media had no qualms engaging for weeks in multifaceted debates and discussions about the Soler/Onfray contentions and thus, for all practical matters, promoted them.

The second half of the 20th century was a golden age for French Jews, both in terms of numbers (from 250,000 souls in 1945 to 700,000 in 1970 due to population transfers and natural growth) and in terms of religious and cultural revival. There was only one shadow: the French government's anti-Israel switch engineered by Charles de Gaulle in 1966, in part as a consequence of a more global anti-American switch. The 21st century may however be a much darker age. After a first wave of anti-Jewish violence in the early 2000s, some Jews left for Israel or North America. Emigration never really ceased since then, and may soon reach much more important proportions.

Michel Gurfinkiel is a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at Middle East Forum and the Founder and President of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think-thank in France.

http://www.meforum.org/3304/french-jews

GURFINKIEL JOINS MEF'S WRITING FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

August 15, 2012

PHILADELPHIA, August 15, 2012 — The Middle East Forum (MEF) is pleased to announce the launch of its Writing Fellowship Program, made possible by the generous support of Stan and Arlene Ginsburg and of Dr. Bob Shillman.

Expanding on the Forum's work as a source of research and writing on the Middle East, Islamism, and related issues, the program provides timely analysis by specialists on the Middle East's most pressing problems, with an eye toward policy solutions.

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Michel Gurfinkiel, Efraim Inbar, Alex Joffe, Ayman Jawad al-Tamimi, and Raymond Stock as Writings Fellows. All of them have worked with the Forum in various capacities, as symbolized by their all having contributed to the journal's flagship publication, the Middle East Quarterly.

Michel Gurfinkiel, a prominent scholar of European Islamism, Turkey, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, is president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a Paris-based think tank he founded in 2003 and a former editor-in-chief of Valeurs Actuelles, France's foremost conservative weekly magazine. A French national, he studied history and semitics at the Sorbonne and the French National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations. Mr. Gurfinkiel is author of eight books and a frequent contributor to American media, including the Middle East Quarterly, Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Weekly Standard, and PJMedia.

Efraim Inbar, a leading authority on Middle Eastern strategic affairs, is professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University and director of its Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center). He earned his undergraduate degree in English literature and political science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his postgraduate and doctoral degrees in political science from the University of Chicago. Prof. Inbar has held visiting posts at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown universities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. A contributor to the Middle East Quarterly, his books include Outcast Countries in the World Community (1985), War and Peace in Israeli Politics (1991), Rabin and Israel's National Security (1999), The Israeli-Turkish Entente (2001), and Israel's National Security (2008).

Alex Joffe, a former director of the Forum's Campus Watch project, is a writer on Israel and Jewish affairs. Trained as an archaeologist and historian, he holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies from the University of Arizona and has participated and directed archaeological research in Israel, Jordan, Greece, and the United States. He has taught at Pennsylvania State University and the State University of New York, and has published over 150 scholarly articles on archaeology, ancient and modern history, political science, environmental studies, and cultural affairs. Mr. Joffe is a contributing writer with Jewish Ideas Daily, and his work has appeared in leading national and international newspapers including the Middle East Quarterly, Wall Street Journal, Jerusalem Post, Yediot Aharanot, Tablet, and Ha'aretz.

Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, whose ancestry traces back to Baghdad and Mosul, is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, Mr. Tamimi's articles have been published, among other places, in the Middle East Quarterly, the American Spectator, Daily Star (Beirut), Ha'aretz, Jerusalem Post, Kurdish Globe (Arbil, Iraqi Kurdistan), and al-Ayyam (Damascus).

Raymond Stock, an expert on Egyptian social and cultural affairs, lived in Cairo for 20 years (1990-2010). He has translated seven books by Egyptian Nobel laureate in literature Naguib Mahfouz, whose biography he is presently writing. He was denied entry and deported by the Mubarak regime in December 2010 due to his Foreign Policy Magazine article criticizing the bid by the explicitly anti-Semitic culture minister Farouk Hosni to head UNESCO. With a Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania, he has taught at Drew University and has published in the Middle East Quarterly, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and PJMedia. His translations from Arabic fiction have appeared in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, and London Magazine.

"We are very fortunate to have these five analysts as writing fellows," said Daniel Pipes, President of the Middle East Forum. "Each brings a body of expertise critical to addressing the contemporary problems confronting the Middle East at this momentous time in the region's history."

The Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank, is dedicated to defining American interests in the Middle East and protecting America from Islamist threats. It achieves its goals through intellectual, activist, and philanthropic efforts.

For more information, contact Judy Goodrobb at 215-546-5406, ex. 19 or MEQ@MEForum.org.

FRENCH JEWS : NO FUTURE

The Toulouse massacre did not bring French anti-Semitism to a halt. It actually increased.

By MICHEL GURFINKIEL.

“Any time young people approach me in order to get married, I ask them various questions about their future. Eighty percent of them say they do not envision any future in France.” This is what one rabbi in Paris told me last week. I heard similar statements from other French rabbis and lay Jewish leaders: “We have a feeling the words are on the wall now,” one leader in the Lyons area confided to me. “It is not just our situation in this country deteriorating; it is also that the process is much quicker than expected.”

Even the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, may be sharing that view now. A philosopher (holding a prestigious French agrégation degree in philosophy), a graduate of the French Rabbinical School in Paris, and a former student at some of the most orthodox yeshivoth (Talmudic academies) in Jerusalem, Bernheim was until recently very eager to reconcile traditional Judaism with Europe’s “open society.” He has just devoted a book to France as a nation and how Jews can contribute to France’s public debates (N’oublions Pas De Penser La France), and in 2008, the year he was elected chief rabbi, he coauthored a book on Judeo-Christian dialogue (Le Rabbin et le Cardinal) with Cardinal Philippe Barbarin.

Despite all that, Bernheim suddenly warned Jewish leaders a few weeks ago about a growing “rejection” of Jews and Judaism in France, something he linked to the global passing of “Judeo-Christian values” in French society as a whole.

The immediate reason for Jewish pessimism in France and for Bernheim’s change of heart may be the Toulouse massacrelast March: the murder in cold blood of three Jewish children and a Jewish teacher by Mohamed Merah, a Muslim terrorist, on their school’s premises. This crime, instead of instilling more compassion and understanding towards the Jewish community, has actually generated more anti-Jewish violence and hate talk, as if Merah was not seen as a vile thug but rather as a model by parts of the population.

There were no less than six cases of aggravated assault on Jewish youths or rabbis in France from March 26 to July 5, including one case in Toulouse again. According to the Representative Council of French Jewish Organizations (CRIF), anti-Semitic incidents of all sorts have increased by 53% compared to the same period last year.

President François Hollande and Minister of the the Interior Manuel Valls must be credited for taking the present anti-Semitic crisis seriously, a noted departure from the ambivalent attitude of the last socialist administration of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin ten years ago. On July 22 — on the seventieth anniversary of the “grande raffle” (“great round-up”) of Jews by the Vichy government police in 1942 — Hollande drew a parallel between the Toulouse massacre and the deportation and mass murder of Jewish children during the Holocaust. As for Valls, he not only repeatedly acknowledged that “there was an upsurge of anti-Semitism in France,” but on July 8 went so far as to stigmatize the “most stupid, most dangerous new anti-Semitism” brooding among “young and not-so-young people” in the “neighborhoods” (a code word for Muslim enclaves). Quite a bold statement, since the Socialist party and the Left at large primarily derive their present electoral edge in France from the Muslim vote. Valls and his staff may also have inspired several no-nonsense reports on anti-Semitism that were recently published in the liberal, pro-socialist press.

The connection between Muslim immigration — or Muslim-influenced Third World immigration — and the rise of a new anti-Semitism is a fact all over Europe. Muslims come from countries (or are culturally attuned to countries) where unreconstructed, Nazi-style Jew-bashing dominates. They are impervious to the ethical debate about the Holocaust and the rejection of anti-Jewish stereotypes that were gradually incorporated into the European political discourse and consciousness in the second half of the 20th century (to the point that lessons on the Holocaust are frequently dropped from the curriculum at schools with a plurality or a majority of Muslim pupils), and are more likely than non-Muslims to engage in assaults, attacks, or harassment practices directed at Jews. Moreover, Muslim anti-Semitism reactivates in many places a dormant, but by no means extinct, non-Muslim European anti-Semitism. Once Muslims are unopposed, or at least unprosecuted, when they challenge the historical veracity of the Holocaust or when they refer to the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authentic document, a growing number of non-Muslims feel free to do the same.

Muslim immigration is nurturing European anti-Semitism in more surprising ways as well. One unintended and ironic consequence of European Islam’s demographic growth is that Jews are frequently amalgamated with Muslims. Many people use a widespread concern about a growing influence of Islam in Europe as a way to hurt Jews as well, or to hit them first.

Clearly, there are outward similarities between Judaism and Islam. Both religions originated in the Near East, and are — as of 2012 — related to Near or Middle East countries. Both use Semitic languages. Both insist on rituals, particularly in terms of gender roles, family life, or food, that do not fit with the current mainstream European way of life.

However, differences between Judaism and Islam may outweigh similarities. As far as Near Eastern or Middle Eastern countries are concerned, Muslims turn to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the strongholds of anti-Western hatred, while Jews turn to Israel, the super-Western “start-up nation.” In terms of ritual, kosher slaughtering — a quasi-surgical operation — is as remote from halal slaughtering as from secular slaughtering. Jewish circumcision is performed on newborn babies and is much closer to secular prophylactic circumcision (as it is largely practiced in the United States) than to Islamic circumcision, which is performed on boys in their preteens or early teens. And when it comes to relations between politics and religion, there is simply a chasm between the two religions. Judaism (including Orthodox Judaism) is not interested in mass conversion; does not seek to wrest Europe or any historically Christian part of the world from Christianity; recognizes the supremacy of state law over religious law in non-ritual matters; and sees Western democracy — a polity based on the rule of law — as the most legitimate political system.

But Europeans are not culturally equipped to understand such nuances or to keep them in mind (far less than the Americans, who are more religious-minded, more conversant in Biblical matters, and more familiar with the Jewish way of life). Jules Renard, an early 20th century French writer, wrote about his cat: “I keep telling him to hunt mice and let the canaries alone. Very subtle guidelines, I must admit. Even intelligent cats can get wrong on this issue.” And decide that eating canaries is easier and more satisfying than hunting mice. Regarding Judaism and Islam, most Europeans are like Renard’s cat. And what usually originates as a reaction against difficulties linked to radical brands of Islam quickly evolves into a primarily anti-Jewish business.

Earlier this year in France, during the last months of the conservative Sarkozy administration, a debate about the rapidly growing halal meat industry led to attacks against the kosher meat industry as well, complete with uncomely remarks about “old-fashioned rituals” by then-Prime Minister François Fillon. While Fillon subsequently “clarified” his views, the Sarkozy administration upheld its support for some kind of “tagging” of “ritually slaughtered meat,” a European Union-promoted practice that would prompt commercial boycott of such food and thus make it financially unaffordable for most prospective buyers. Since kosher meat regulations are much stricter than halal meat regulations, religious Jews would be more hurt at the end of the day than religious Muslims. The reason why French conservatives were so fond of tagging is that a 2009 poll shows a 72% rejection of “ritual slaughtering” writ large. And Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate, dwelled on that issue for a while.

In Germany, a rare case of malpractice by a German Muslim doctor in a Muslim circumcision led a court in Cologne to ban circumcision on children all over Germany on June 19, on the quite extravagant grounds that only legal adults may decide on issues irreversibly affecting their body, except for purely medical reasons. Which is tantamount, in the considered issue, to denying parents the right to pass their religion to their children.

Conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel immediately filled a bill to make religious circumcision legal in Germany, and it was passed on July 19 by the Bundestag (somehow, German conservatives are nowadays more genuinely conservative than, say, their French counterparts). But according to a YouGov poll for the DPA news agency released at about the same moment, 45% of Germans support the ban, while only 42% oppose it.

In an even more ominous instance, Judaism has been singled out in a protracted intellectual debate in France since early June, as the fountainhead, past and present, of totalitarianism and political violence and thus as a more dangerous religion than radical Islam.

The charge was made in Le Point, an important right-of-center newsmagazine, by Michel Onfray, a commercially successful dabbling philosopher and a long-time supporter of the radical Left, who himself reviewed and approvingly quoted Who Is God? (Qui est Dieu), an essay by another controversial author, the former diplomat Jean Soler.

In the 1970s Soler, who holds an agrégation degree in Greek and Latin classical studies but was never academically trained in anthropology, Semitics, or Near Eastern history, applied a structuralist approach to the study of Jewish rituals and won some polite applause from French, Israeli, and American scholars. Later on, when structuralism fell out of fashion, he sort of remixed his early work with neo-Marcionite currents in 19th century and early 20th century German and French Biblical criticism which claimed there was no spirituality at all, and indeed no real monotheism, in the Old Testament, a narrowly “tribalist” book. Or that everything spiritual in the Old Testament was a transplant from other cultures, either Pharaonic Egypt or Indo-European Iran.

Very few people in France realize what Soler’s later writing is really about, and that his approach or sources do not fit present academic standards. Even fewer people are aware that the neo-Marcionite hypothesis to which Soler has switched and which Onfray supports exerted a major influence on Nazi anti-Semitism (including the so-called “German Christian” movement) and remained after 1945 a major polemical tool in neo-Nazi or post-Nazi circles. So much so that the media had no qualms engaging for weeks in multifaceted debates and discussions about the Soler/Onfray contentions and thus, for all practical matters, promoted them.

The second half of the 20th century was a golden age for French Jews, both in terms of numbers (from 250,000 souls in 1945 to 700,000 in 1970 due to population transfers and natural growth) and in terms of religious and cultural revival. There was only one shadow: the French government’s anti-Israel switch engineered by Charles de Gaulle in 1966, in part as a consequence of a more global anti-American switch. The 21st century may however be a much darker age. After a first wave of anti-Jewish violence in the early 2000s, some Jews left for Israel or North America. Emigration never really ceased since then, and may soon reach much more important proportions.

Michel Gurfinkiel is the Founder and President of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think-thank in France, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at Middle East Forum.

© Michel Gurfinkiel & PJMedia, 2012

FRANCE'S LONG SUMMER VACATION

Until September 2, half the country will be disconnected from work and business.

BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL.

The long summer vacation – les grands vacances - just started in France. From July 14 (Bastille Day) to September 2, one citizen out of two will be disconnected from work or business ; one out of two will be out of town, if not out of the country. Some people will leave for one week or two, some others for three weeks or more. Many upper middle class or upper class families still stick to a traditional two months pattern : wifes and children start their vacation as early as possible in July, husbands join them for most of August. Middle class families focus on August. Youngsters nomadize on low budget lines throughout France, Europe and even more exotic places, from the Americas to East Asia. The ethnic French working class stays iddle at home or resort to camping. The immigrant working class flies back for Ramadan to the old country (usually North or Subsaharan Africa) where their French income turns them into rich visitors.

Foreigners may wonder how the French do it, especially when an economic tsunami is looming over all of Europe. For the French, however, this is even not an issue : vacation is as sacred to them as Yom Kippur to Jews. Woe to presidents or governmens that fail to understand that. Eight years ago, in 2004, the conservative prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin attempted to abolish one legal holiday, Pentecost Monday, in May-June, a holiday-saturated season. The Catholic Church did not object (in religious terms, it is Pentecost Sunday only that matters). But the populace did. On the first « working Pentecost Monday »,most employees, including civil servants, simply did not show up, and nobody in higher management dared to substract that illegally unworked day from the monthly check. It went on like that year after year ever since then. By now, Pentecost Monday, while not mentioned anymore in the calendar, has been fully restored as a national holiday for all practical matters.

In a similar way, Nicolas Sarkozy, the outgoing conservative president, blundered when he suggested, in 2007, that people should be allowed « to work more in order to earn more » : the proposal sounded decidedly obscene, and played as such an important role in mobilizing voters against him in 2012.

For centuries, the French worked hard. Peasants had toiled the land from time immemorial. Up to 1918, urban workers were supposed to spend ten hours a day at factories. Even entrepreneurs stayed at the office on Saturdays. Things changed a bit in 1936, the nearest thing to a social-democratic revolution France ever had, when the working week was limited to 40 hours and the working class was entittled, for the first time ever, to two weeks of paid vacation. However, the real break-up took place after WW2, when France - vindicating Mises and Hayek’s wildest predicaments - built up Europe’s most comprehensive and efficient Welfare State and crowned it with the Fifth Republic, a nationalistic and technocratic regime founded in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle. While working class and middle class salaries were kept comparatively low, especially as compared to the United States, social benefits grew inordinately :  vacation, in particular, was steadily extended, and working hours reduced.

As of today, French employees are entitled to five weeks of paid vacation per year, in addition to ten legal holidays and, in some occasion, conconmittant extended week-ends ; Civil Service workers (a category that encompasses all national or local government employees) are entittled to seven weeks. In addition, the legal working week is of 35 hours only : a statute introduced by the Lionel Jospin socialist cabinet in the early 2000’s, and piously maintained by the subsequent conservative administrations, in charge from 2002 to 2012. And here is the final stroke : in terms of school holidays, France is split in three completely arbitrary zones with different calendars (not to mention Corsica and the overseas territories). Since parents tend to adjust their own vacation time to their kids free time, companies with branches all over the country must deal with several different vacation peaks instead of just one.

As a result, French work and business life is a rapid and rather confusing succession of idle and overworked periods. It has been estimated that regular, reliable, work schedules can be sustained for five months out of twelve only : which means that the French economy must achieve in five months the best part of what most other advanced economies achieve in ten to eleven months. No wonder France’s work productivity is one of the highest in the world, either per capita or per hour, just behind the United States (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/icp/international-comparisons-of-productivity/2010---first-estimates/stb-icp-sep11.html). No wonder either French companies have outsourced massively to less vacation oriented countries : France is #2 in FDI abroad, just after the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_FDI_abroad ).

One set of French citizens is definitely not going to enjoy the present long vacation and is compelled instead to work day and night : the two hundred people or so who help the newly elected socialist president François Hollande and his senior ministers to finalize their new policies – and draw a budget. The whole package must be delivered by mid-August : shortly before the nation comes back from rest. And it looks very much like mission impossible.

Last June, six weeks after being elected president of France, Hollande won the parliamentary elections as well – by an amazingly large margin. The socialist party alone got 300 seats out of 577 : eleven seats beyond absolute majority. Together with the Green party (17 seats), the Left Front (10 seats) and a few microparties from the overseas territories, it even garners a sum total of 346 left-oriented seats and comes even rather close to a two thirds majority at the National Assembly. The right fell to 226 seats. The far right stormed two seats.

Under the Fifth Republic constitution, the president is either all-powerful with a devoted National Assembly or powerless without one. From now on and for the next five years, Hollande is thus all-powerful : a « monarchic » president, in the grand tradition of Charles de Gaulle. Moreover, he will enjoy complete subversience from the other elected and unelected powers, something de Gaulle could never fully achieve. As of today, the socialist party controls the Senate,  Parliament’s Upper House, in addition to the National Assembly. It runs almost all régions (provinces) of France, most départements (counties), and most big cities, including the capital, Paris. Most French representatives at the European parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg are socialists too. And when it comes to the civil society, socialists and other leftwingers dominate – sometime to the point of suffocating them - the academic, mediatic and even religious powers. 

For all that, there are too many pyrrhic elements in Hollande’s victory. First and foremost, it rests on shaky fondations in terms of electoral participation. 43 %  of the voters abstained in the parliamentary ballot : a very high proportion by French standards. Then, victory depended in many instances on the immigrant or « culturally alien » vote, a worrying development, or on triangular ballots where the far right undercut the right. Thirdly, the more powerful and victorious Hollande may look by now,  the more answerable he is going to be in case of error, failure or just shortcoming.

Clearly, Hollande and his closest advisors are aware of that. Their bid, so far, is to distance themselves from their quasi-utopian electoral platform and reconcile with the real world – in such a smooth and gradual and « honest » way that voters will not get angry.

To that effect, Hollande systematically « doubled » many of his cabinet ministers : while the radical Guyanese Christiane Taubira has been put in charge of the Ministry of Justice, the Spanish-born Manuel Valls, usually described as more rightwing than socialist, heads the Minister of the Interior (and of the Police) ; while Arnaud Montebourg, the leader of the socialist party’s left wing, runs a surrealistic new Ministry of Productive Recovery, Pierre Moscovici, as Minister of Economy and Finance, insists on the orthodox policies put forward by his mentor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at IMF ; while Laurent Fabius, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, picked up an Arabist as chief of staff, Jean-Yves Le Drian, the Minister of Defense, is seen as staunchly pro-American and pro-Nato. But will the good guys actually prevail in the end of the day ?

We will have a clue when the long vacation is over.

Michel Gurfinkiel is the Founder and President of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think-thank in France, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at Middle East Forum.

© Michel Gurfinkiel & PJMedia, 2012

FRANCE WANTS ISRAEL TO RECOGNIZE 'GREEN LINE' - YET FRANCE DOES NOT

 

BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL

You too.

PJMedia, June 12, 2012 - 12:00 am

The French government insists Israel must withdraw to the 1949-1967 ceasefire line in the West Bank (the “Green Line”) in order to achieve peace with the Palestinians. France holds it to be an “international border” and deems any Israeli presence beyond it to be an illegal settlement built on foreign soil. Even in Jerusalem, where the Green Line – back then an eerie, barbed wire no-man’s land — cut off one half of the city from the other and deprived Israelis and Jews from any access to the holiest of all Jewish holy places: the Western Wall.

The proper Israeli answer to France should be: We dare you.

It’s a matter of logic, indeed. If the Green Line is an international border, everything located west of it in pre-1967 Israel is indisputably Israeli. This is the case, in particular, of the Kiryah, the hill where the Israeli parliament and government are located. As a consequence, France should acknowledge West Jerusalem as the rightful capital of Israel and transfer without delay its embassy from Tel Aviv to there.

The fact is, however, that the French are not as logical as they claim to be, and that while regarding East Jerusalem as part of some half-born “state of Palestine,” they do not see West Jerusalem as part of Israel, either.

Go for instance to France Diplomatie, the French Foreign Ministry website. It just posted the returns for the first round of the parliamentary elections held on June 3 in the eleven “residing abroad” constituencies. What you will learn about the eighth constituency is that it comprises the following countries: Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jerusalem, Malta, and Turkey. Yes, Jerusalem as a separate entity, distinct from Israel.

French diplomatic mail, when sent to any destination in Jerusalem, including the pre-1967 western sector, is directed to “Jerusalem, via Israel.” Upon delivering documents to French citizens, the French consular authorities in Israel routinely fail to ascribe any place in the Jerusalem area, including outside the city’s limits, to Israel.

Last February, the French consulate in Jerusalem did not allow a French retired couple living in the Emek Refaim vicinity in the pre-1967 sector to say in a formal request that their home was located in Israel. In an even more troubling incident, the city of Mevaseret Zion, a few miles west of Jerusalem on the road to Tel Aviv, was not registered on a birth certificate as belonging to Israel. The consular authorities usually mollify their stand once the citizens they are dealing with are not going to give in. It is, however, very difficult not to believe that such behavior is part of a broader, deliberate policy.

In his thoroughly researched book Betrayal: France, the Arabs and the Jews, David Pryce-Jones made clear that both anti-Jewish prejudice and pro-Arab or pro-Islamic infatuations have run high at Quai d’Orsay, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, since the 19th century. Even if France’s actual policies as a colonial power in Arab and Muslim lands were not as generous to the Muslim natives as one would have expected.

The French diplomatic establishment opposed Zionism at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris and throughout the inter-wars period. It steadily supported Amin el-Husseini, the infamous mufti of Jerusalem who fled to Nazi Germany in 1941 to become a chaplain for Muslim Waffen-SS divisions, and helped him to flee again, this time to Egypt, in 1945, and thus to escape being indicted as a war criminal and an accomplice in genocide against Jews and Christians in Yugoslavia and the USSR.

The French diplomatic establishment never agreed with the pro-Israel line taken by the French Fourth Republic in the late 1940s and 1950s, and was instrumental in convincing Charles de Gaulle, the Fifth Republic’s founder and first president, to engage in a radically anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli “Arab policy” from 1966 on (one year before the Six Days War). It saw to it to iron out the doubts that succeeding presidents might have entertained in that respect — including Nicolas Sarkozy, who was briefed away from supporting Israel the very day he took up office in 2007.

Things are not likely to change under François Hollande, the new socialist president. His prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, has evolved over the years — like most socialists and social-democrats in Europe — from being mildly pro-Israel to being actively pro-Palestinian and pro-Islamic. While he still perfunctorily characterizes “Israel’s security” as an important issue, he twice faulted Israel for resorting to self-defense operations against aggressions: in December 2008 and January 2009, when the Israel Defense Forces retaliated in Gaza against Hamas’ incessant rocket bombings; and in May 2010, when the Israeli Navy hailed the Turkish Mavi Marmara ship during the so called “flotilla incident.” In March 2010, two months ahead of the Mavi Marmara operation, Ayrault — then the mayor of Nantes in western France — suspended a pro-Israel conference that was to be held in that city by Charles Mayer, an international lawyer and the vice-chairman of the France-Israel Alliance, and Muriel Touaty, the director of the French Friends of Technion University in Haifa.

Laurent Fabius, a former prime minister under François Mitterrand in the 1980s and Hollande’s choice for a foreign minister, has Jewish family roots but was baptized and raised as a Catholic. He seems to have undergone the same pro-Palestinian transition as Ayrault. He made clear that France, under Hollande, was “going to play a more active role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process,” code for pressuring Israel. It is noteworthy in this respect that he appointed Denis Pietton as his chief of staff. Pietton, who more recently served as the French ambassador to Lebanon, was in the early 2000s the French consul general in Jerusalem. In other terms: he was the man whose job was to wrest Jerusalem, or any part of it, from the Jewish state.

True enough, anti-Israel biases and nonsenses are common staple in most diplomatic services in the world, including the State Department. But in many countries and especially in America, diplomats are still accountable to elected governments, who may take a more sober view of the Near East. In France, governments just do what they are told to do by the diplomats.

Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Paris.

© Michel Gurfinkiel & PJMedia, 2012

NOT OVER YET : FRANCOIS HOLLANDE FACES NATIONAL ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS

What if the new president of France does not win them next month ?

BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL.

François Hollande, the socialist candidate, won the French presidential election on May 6. He got 51.63% of the vote against 48.37% for the incumbent conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Quite a good score, even if Sarkozy did much better than expected.

However, the presidency is only a first step. A lot will depend on the National Assembly elections, which are due to take place on June 10 and 17. If the socialists and their allies secure themselves an absolute majority, Hollande will enjoy quasi-monarchical powers for five years. If they do not, he will be a lame duck.

Americans are familiar with similar scenarios, except the United States Constitution provides a clear-cut separation of powers and thus preserves many of the presidential powers and prerogatives, even against a hostile or uncooperative Congress. Whereas the French Fifth Republic constitution, a creation of Charles de Gaulle in 1958, combines — in an uneasy and uncertain way — presidential and Westminsterian features, and thus turns any conflict between the powers into a ballistic zero-sum drama. In theory, France is not ruled by its president, as in the American presidential system, but rather by its prime minister who, as in the English Westminsterian system, is answerable to the National Assembly. As long as both officials are political partners, the president — endowed with such special powers as the right to call for an early election or a referendum — is a de facto but undisputed CEO. When they belong to different and competing parties, the prime minister takes over.

De Gaulle perfectly understood the logic — or the illogic — of his system: he made clear that the president, once deprived of electoral support, had no choice but to resign. He actually acted accordingly in 1969, when he abdicated following a failed referendum on comparatively minor issues. Things changed, however, when François Mitterrand, the Fifth Republic’s first socialist president, was faced with a conservative National Assembly in 1986: instead of resigning he agreed to become a lame duck — but a lame duck with teeth who made full use of his residual powers in order to undermine the cabinet, to hasten its fall, and to win a reelection in 1988.

A conservative and allegedly Gaullist president, Jacques Chirac, followed in 1997 when his party lost an early election he himself had called. For the five ensuing years, he “cohabited“ (to use the authorized French expression) with Lionel Jospin, the socialist prime minister. Both under Mitterrand and Chirac, cohabition led to such ridiculous situations as the president and the prime minister of France together attending international summits like G7 or the European Council.

Things went even further in 2002, when Jospin introduced — with Chirac’s assent — a constitutional revision that shortened the president’s term from seven to five years. Since the Assembly is also elected for five years, the obvious outcome was that the parliamentary election would closely follow the presidential one. It worked to Chirac’s advantage upon his reelection in 2002, and then to Sarkozy’s advantage in 2007.

Hollande is convinced that the same will be true about him next month. But will it? There is at least one precedent that he should consider. After being reelected in 1988, Mitterrand called an early election to get rid of the 1986 conservative National Assembly. What he got was a lame Assembly with a relative but not an absolute majority for the socialist party, and a weak centrist minority that could not act as a steady ally. Five years later, he lost the 1993 parliamentary election and was reduced to a lame duck position again. Since he was then dying of cancer, he could not again mastermind a socialist revenge; on the other hand, he was treated in an extremely respectful and dignified way by the day’s ruler, conservative Prime Minister Edouard Balladur.

Can the Right actually wrest the National Assembly from Hollande next month? It is not wholly unthinkable. First and foremost, one must remember that the main factor for Sarkozy’s defeat was his personal unpopularity, and not just among the Left — which hated him from the onset in the most irrational way — but also among the Right, which felt he had not implemented the platform he had been elected for in 2007. Even given such unpopularity, Sarkozy managed to win back most of the conservative vote.

What, then, of a new and less controversial conservative leader? For the time being, there are three potential leaders. Jean-François Copé, the UMP (conservative party) boss, is an overambitious young man who opposed Sarkozy on many issues but is nevertheless seen as a Sarkozy’s clone (a bad point). François Fillon served as Sarkozy’s underling prime minister for five years and enjoyed some kind of popularity among conservatives for looking more conservative than his boss, but he could not possibly cut it against Hollande. Alain Juppé, the mayor of Bordeaux and a former prime minister under Chirac, seems to enjoy as much gravitas as Hollande and could actually be up to the job.

A second argument for a conservative rebound next month is that a socialist parliamentary victory would subject France to a one-party regime. The socialists and their allies would control the presidency, both houses of Parliament (the Assembly and the less consequential Senate), the government, almost all regional councils, most counties, and most big towns. They would, in line with France’s statist character, control the media, the academic sphere, and many of the most important industries even more tightly. Sarkozy declined to mention this throughout his campaign for reelection — another mistake of his. I have noticed that Nadine Morano, a Sarkozy archloyalist and a rising conservative star, started talking about it right after Hollande’s election.

A third argument is that Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, and François Bayrou, the centrist maverick, may have lost some of their luster. Both declined to support Sarkozy on the presidential second round. Le Pen said her voters were free to act as they wished. Bayrou said that while he would vote for Hollande, he would allow his voters to decide for themselves. That ran against the wishes of most of their respective supporters. Most National Front voters switched to Sarkozy in order to defeat Hollande at any cost; most Bayrou voters supported Sarkozy or abstained. A new conservative leader with charisma, vista, and guts could certainly get them to “vote for France” or to “vote for democracy” in June.

Hollande’s toughest challenge is to make sense of his economic platform. The new French president is a follower of Keynes: he believes in state control, high taxes, and extended welfare. The fact that the global economy has undergone massive changes since the days of Keynes and that Barack Obama failed while implementing similar policies in the United States does not deter him. What he takes seriously, however, is the European Union, which will not allow for too much state control, and the euro, which does not allow for inordinate welfare spending. He can quit the EU and the eurozone as both the Far Left and the Far Right recommend, a move that would probably bring about a “Greek effect” on the French economy. Otherwise, he can abide by European rules, thus negating his platform altogether. Since both options are beyond him, he frantically insists for a drastic “production-oriented” and “people-oriented” revision in the European and euro policies.

His European partners may listen to him to a point. He may then tell the French that in order to overcome a very dangerous situation a broader coalition or even a national unity government is needed, and that a “socialist cum allies” parliamentary victory may help.

Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Paris.

FRANCE/ A REFERENDUM ON NATIONAL IDENTITY

BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL.

There is one thing every French citizen agrees upon: the second and final round of the presidential election will have far-reaching consequences. It will not just decide between two candidates, or two parties, or even two political or economic philosophies. Rather, it will settle the fate of France as a nation.

For clarification, examine the 18th district in northern Paris. It voted heavily for the left in the first round on April 22, and is poised to do the same in the second round. François Hollande, the socialist candidate, garnered 43% of the vote there, much more than the 28% he received nationally. Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon received 15% there but only 11% nationally. The other left candidates received a combined 7% both there and nationally. All in all, the left won a staggering 65% of the vote in the 18th, about 20 points higher than the national returns.

Incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy took only 19% of the vote in the 18th; nationally he took 27%. Far-right contender Marine Le Pen won only 6.5% there, a huge difference from her 18% nationally. Centrist François Bayrou received 7.7% locally and 9% nationally. With the addition of 2% won by conservative dissenter Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the combined strength of the local right and center amounted to no more than 35%, compared to the national take of 55%.

A completely different picture emerged in the neighboring northwestern 17th district of Paris. There, Sarkozy was the undisputed frontrunner, with 44% of the vote. While Hollande lagged with 26%, Bayrou finished slightly better than he did nationally, with over 10%. Mélenchon stayed near 7%; Le Pen fell to 6%. The far left took 3%. The right and the center took 60% of the vote in the 17th, while the left did not even reach 40%.

Politically speaking, why are these neighboring districts worlds apart? The 17th is a bit richer as a whole, a bit more bourgeois than the 18th, but there are both affluent and working class areas in both districts. The actual differences are ethnic and cultural.

The 18th is essentially a “neo-French” stronghold: a place where most inhabitants are immigrants (or children of immigrants) from non-European countries and where Islam is the dominant religion. Admittedly, two major tourist spots with a distinct French flavor — Old Montmartre, the Disneyland-style artists’ village near Sacré-Cœur Basilica atop Montmartre Hill; and Pigalle, nowadays merely a sex shop row — are to be found here. But they are just enclaves in an otherwise increasingly alien environment.To understand what the 18th district really is, one must examine everyday life. For instance, note the street prayers that Muslim Arabs and sub-Saharan Muslims have been routinely organizing on Fridays. Though an illegal practice — it blocks cars and even pedestrian traffic for hours — the socialist mayor of Paris and the police have had no option (so say they) other than tacitly tolerating it.

On the contrary, the 17th remains staunchly French in outlook. Its inhabitants, whatever their race, ethnicity, or religion, prefer France to be Western, Judeo-Christian, and democratic. They do not want it to become a post-Western, “globalized” nation. (Or, to use a formerly rude and now politically correct French expression: “Une société métissée” – a mongrel society). Quite remarkably, the 17th district today hosts — along with more districts and communes in western Greater Paris — the largest French Jewish community. Many of the local Jews are Sephardic immigrants (rather, refugees) from Arab countries who upon coming to France lived in the same areas as Muslim immigrants from North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa. They were forced over the years to migrate to areas where they could expect to be both physically and emotionally safer.

What is true of Paris is equally true of the rest of France, except that in many places the National Front gets a much larger share of the conservative vote. Anywhere the left is winning, the neo-French factor makes the difference. Anywhere the right is ahead, opposition to métissage and Islamization is the key mobilizing argument. The political class, right or left, does not like to mention it too loudly. Even Marine Le Pen sees to it not to dwell only on “national identity” matters, but rather to also run as a champion of the poor and the outcasts. Still, this is the real issue. A Hollande victory on Sunday will resonate as a great leap forward for the neo-French and as the beginning of the end for traditional France. A Sarkozy victory will mean that the case is deferred for at least another five years.

Just how many do the neo-French number? Under French law which bars global and interlinked statistics to race, religion, or ethnic origin, it is very difficult to compute reliable figures. An additional difficulty stems from the special character of the French polity, which consists of France proper (European France including Corsica) and distant overseas territories from the French West Indies to French Polynesia. Technically, overseas-born citizens or their children cannot be referred to as immigrants, though most of them are cultural aliens in many ways and tend to behave much as foreign immigrants when they settle in metropolitan France.

A further difficulty: there are marked differences among immigrants, between Europeans and non-Europeans on one hand, and even among non-Europeans on the other hand. Some of them came to France to be French, some to turn France into their own thing.

We may rely on some figures. According to Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union), metropolitan France was in 2011 the most immigration-oriented of all EU countries: 26.6% of its inhabitants were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. A similar figure is provided by Insee, the French National Institute of Statistics: they found that 23.9% of all babies born in metropolitan France in 2010 had at least one parent born outside of Europe, including the overseas French territories. Roughly speaking, this amounts to one quarter of the 63 million population, or about 15 million people.

Some 40% of the global immigrant community must be subtracted from these figures: the European, East Asian, or Latin American immigrants, as well as the Christian or Jewish refugees from the Middle East or North Africa, see themselves as French rather than as neo-French. On the other hand, the five million French citizens from overseas territories tend to identify with the neo-French and the post-Western project (overseas France voted overwhelmingly for Hollande on April 22). Which brings us back to 15 million.

By and large, this is a rapidly growing community. Its birthrate is much higher than the average French birthrate, and further immigration is constantly reinforcing it. Legal immigration only amounted to 180,000 individuals in 2011, which means that almost two million new citizens, most of them neo-French, might have aggregated to the French population as a whole by 2010. Illegal immigration is said to be as important, which would lead to a net immigration surplus of four million people, most of them neo-French. All in all, half the population of France writ large — the younger half — can be forecast to be neo-French at some point between 2020 and 2030.

While not all neo-French are Muslim (the French polity’s Muslim population amounts to less than 10 million people, and some French Muslims are in fact quite secular), militant Islam — endowed as it is with a purpose, a will to power, networks, foreign money, and leverage — is clearly the driving force behind the neo-French project. But what makes Islam irresistible is a tactical alliance with the left. In France, like everywhere, the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy has eroded the left’s largest voting blocks: the working class and the civil service. Immigrants and the so-called minorities are however providing an alternative and potentially more important constituency. Philosophers like Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek, as well as“anti-globalist“ pamphleteers like Stéphane Hessel (a guru of the Occupy movement), have revamped the old Marxist topoi in order to make the switch palatable. The proletariat is known nowadays as the “Multitude,” and the West as the “Empire.” Jews, once the chosen people of the revolution, have been recast as Zionists, the spearhead of counter-revolution.

The killings in southern France a few weeks ago were a moment of truth in this respect. As one will remember, a neo-French jihadist of Algerian origin named Mohamed Merah murdered in cold blood three non-Caucasian soldiers (whom he saw as traitors) and then four Jews: a teacher and three children of 7, 5, and 4. For about 36 hours, there was some reason to believe that the killer was in fact a far-right extremist, similar to the Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik. The left parties and various Muslim groups started organizing mass rallies against racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia throughout France. When the killer’s identity was finally established, and when it appeared that the French Muslim community nurtured ambivalent feelings, if not sympathy, towards him, the whole idea was dropped. Some democratically minded Muslims, led by Hassen Chalghoumi, the mufti of Drancy in northern Paris, set up an anti-racist and anti-terrorist demonstration on April 29, the French national Shoah memorial day. They attracted less than one hundred followers.

In between the two presidential rounds, Nicolas Sarkozy constantly mentioned France’s national identity as one of his priorities. France, he said in Toulouse on April 29, “was twenty centuries old. … It was the combined produce of Christianity, the Enlightenment, the Revolution, and the anti-Nazi resistance. … It was the land of Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Joan of Arc. … It was keeping the memory of the Shoah and of the thousands of North African Muslims who had fought in its armies during WW2.” Clearly, he was wooing both Marine Le Pen’s and François Bayrou’s supporters, the key voters in the second round. But his words rang true.

Hollande has also undertaken winning at least some of Le Pen’s votes. During his debate with Sarkozy Wednesday evening, he repeatedly said that he would be as tough as anybody on immigration matters, and would uphold a strict separation between state and religion. He even said that his most controversial and most pro-immigration proposal — granting electoral franchise to legal foreign residents in local ballots — was not to be taken seriously, since it implied a complex and unlikely constitutional revision in the first place.

But such cynical short-term tactics cannot change that the long-term future of the left lies with the neo-French only.

Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Paris.

© Michel Gurfinkiel & PJMedia, 2012