Jewish Influence in France

The Culture of Critique in France: A review of Anne Kling’s books on Jewish influence, Part 5

/28 Comments/in , /by

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

“The Right to Difference”: Balkanizing France

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

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

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

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

The Culture of Critique in France: A review of Anne Kling’s books on Jewish influence, Part 4

/8 Comments/in , /by

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

“At the Heart of Debates” on Censorship

The CRIF and the LICRA have assumed a leading role in undermining free speech in France. As then-CRIF President Richard Prasquier said in February 2010:

The Jews are at the heart of debates where limits on free expression are asked … . Internet is a multiplier of racism and anti-Semitism. … We want penal policy to be extended to ordinary racism on the Internet by making convictions known, improving surveillance, by helping the sentinels which are antiracist associations.[1]

During a meeting with the Justice Minister, Prasquier called for state surveillance to extend to “discussion boards, chat messages, emails, web sites and blogs,” an open assault on the right to privacy.[2] And he has argued that “free speech must be subordinated to the respect of the truth.”[3] (Whose truth? Certainly not the truth about how ethnically motivated organizations like his own have become very powerful in France and how they have used their power against the interests of the great mass of native French.)

The CRIF has also demanded more censorship at European-level censorship, calling on the EU to create “a European CSA” (in France, the CSA is the High Council for the Audiovisual, the highly censorious radio and television regulator) and for similar organizations to be created in all EU countries.[4] The French regulator has banned various Arab TV stations for allegedly supporting “terrorism” (e.g. Hezbollah, whereas support for the Israeli armed forces’ killing of civilians is fine).

All this is of course deeply shocking, indeed completely alien, to anyone attached to the Greek, Anglo-Saxon or French civic and philosophical traditions. Prasquier’s ancestors have lived for a millennium in the West, but he and his organization still simply do not understand the Western concepts of free speech, rational debate, scientific inquiry and privacy, and indeed they are agitating to impose decidedly Levantine notions of ethnically-motivated obscurantism and censorship. So much for our “Judeo-Christian values.”

Despite the guarantees in Articles 10 and 11 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which forms part of the Fifth Republic’s Constitution, free speech is poorly protected in France. The 1972 Pleven Act criminalizes speech which “provokes discrimination, hatred or violence” on a racial, ethnic or religious basis. The LICRA had pushed for this law, called for its extension as a global norm, and invited “victims of racial discrimination” to report to the police (not unlike informants in totalitarian regimes). Read more

The Culture of Critique in France: A review of Anne Kling’s books on Jewish influence, Part 3

/21 Comments/in , /by

Part 1
Part 2

Communists and Collaborators: The Dark Origins of Franco-Jewish Ethnic Lobbies

The LICRA and the CRIF, and their ancestor organizations, have been influencing French political life since before the Second World War. The LICRA, originally called the League Against Pogroms, was founded in 1927 by the Communist Jew Bernard Lecache, an early apologist of Soviet totalitarianism. He founded the League to organize the legal defense of Sholom-Shmuel Schwartzbard, a Russian Jew who had murdered Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura in broad daylight in the streets of Paris. Schwartzbard blamed Petliura for the pogroms in Ukraine and was subsequently, bizarrely, acquitted.

The LICRA then, far from being a body dedicated to universal brotherhood, was founded to justify an act of tribal vengeance. Lecache himself would, in the typical manner, enormously exaggerate the sufferings of his co-ethnics, claiming that 300,000 were killed in the Ukrainian pogroms (the Red Cross estimated the figure at between 60,000 and 120,000).[1]

Lecache would lead the LICRA until 1968. He remained a communist despite being formally expelled from the French Communist Party in 1923 because he also chose to remain a Freemason (the Party did not allow dual-membership). His successor Jean-Pierre Bloch, who led the group from 1968 to 1992, was also a Freemason.

Already in the interwar period, the League’s influence rapidly grew in the French Third Republic’s parliamentary regime, with members across political parties, including prime ministers Léon Blum (Jewish, who led a Socialist-Communist coalition government) and Édouard Herriot (whose 1898 essay on the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria brought him national attention). In 1933, Herriot would as an MP return from a fact-finding to the Ukraine and deny any famine there, stating that it was “a garden producing to the full.”[2] (Between 2.5 and 7.5 million people are estimated to have been killed in this engineered famine, known as the Holodomor). Read more

The Culture of Critique in France: A review of Anne Kling’s books on Jewish influence, Part 2

/6 Comments/in , /by

Part 1.

What are the LICRA and the CRIF?

The CRIF is an explicit Jewish ethnic lobby made up of organizations officially representing 100,000 Jews (one in six French Jews or 0.1% of the French population). Esther Benbass, a Franco-Turko-Israeli historian and member of the pro-Palestinian Greens, has said of the CRIF:

What is the CRIF other than an endogamous micro-group [groupuscule] which puts on airs of a little independent State, acting as it wishes, making people bend the knee, as much through self-censorship, sensitive for many journalists who rightly fear being suspected of anti-Semitism as soon as they dare criticize Israeli policy, as by the exploitation of the guilt of the Shoah internalized by the political class?[1]

The CRIF’s influence is acknowledged by all. In 2010, President Nicolas Sarkozy and Justice Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie both said on separate occasions: “The CRIF is an essential interlocutor of the State.”[2] Also that year, CRIF President Richard Prasquier declared: “We can be proud to be in a country where the demands we present and the worries we express are genuinely listened to.”[3]

The CRIF has gotten more shameless in its activism over the years. In 1983, the then-president, Théo Klein said “the CRIF is not a subsidiary of the Israeli embassy,” while in 2010 Prasquier said: “I want to make the CRIF the master asset of Israel in France.”[4] Various Jewish observers, both of the “liberal” center-left and the “neoreactionary” right, have expressed concern that the CRIF’s activism, essentially openly professing loyalty to Israel, would stoke anti-Semitism.

The LICRA in contrast is officially an anti-racist organization rather than an explicitly Jewish one. However, its leadership is largely Jewish and features no people of color. The LICRA quite obviously is motivated by Jewish ethnic interests, with senior managers seamlessly circulating between it and the CRIF. The novelist Marc-Édouard Nabe memorably and infamously said on national television in February 1985: “The people of the LICRA use Auschwitz’s heaps of corpses to fructify their fortune upon the manure.” Read more

The Culture of Critique in France: A review of Anne Kling’s books on Jewish influence, Part 1

/31 Comments/in , /by

Kling1Anne Kling, La France LICRAtisée: Enquête au pays de la Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme
Paris: Mithra, 2007 (first published by Déterna, 2006)

Anne Kling, Le CRIF: Un lobby au cœur de la République
Paris: Mithra, 2010 and 2013

High quality critical study of elite Jewish communities, and their ethnic activism and biases, is extremely rare today — not surprising given the enormous disincentives against such research. As a result, we inevitably must rely on non-institutional, often one-person efforts, the most celebrated being the work of Professor Kevin MacDonald and in particular of his seminal The Culture of Critique. MacDonald is not alone however and, though these works are often disconnected, other scholars conducted similar work, often being better placed to examine their particular national context.

Kling2For the French case, we can salute the work of Identitarian activist and international civil servant Anne Kling for her meticulous studies, with no less than five books on Jewish political activism and one on the Front National.[1] I here review two of these books dealing with Jewish ethnic activist organizations. The first concerns the International League Against Anti-Semitism and Racism (LICRA), perhaps equivalent to the Southern Poverty Law Center as an organization that is not explicitly Jewish but is mainly funded and controlled by Jews. The second organization is the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the official Jewish lobby.

Le CRIF and La France LICRAtisée (literally “Licratized France”) are extremely rigorous works and, as well shall see, their conclusions are highly compatible with The Culture of Critique. In short, these Jewish groups have spearheaded efforts to delegitimize French ethnic identity and indeed the French nation itself, to destroy majority self-confidence with references to “racism,” colonialism and the Vichy Regime, to aggressively promote Afro-Muslim immigration and “multiculturalism,” to marginalize the Front National from any participation in politics, to censor speech found threatening to perceived Jewish interests, and raise the Holocaust as the supreme crime above all crimes that legitimizes their activism by placing Jews as the supreme victims. This activism, plainly, is based on ethnically-motivated hypocrisy and selfishness, evident in the LICRA and CRIF’s simultaneous support for Israel as an explicitly Jewish ethno-state.

Read more

Éric Zemmour: SOS Racisme, a case study in anti-nationalist Jewish activism

/16 Comments/in , /by

By Éric Zemmour, from his Le Suicide français, translated by Guillaume Durocher

sos-racisme-1 (1)

SOS Racisme’s famous logo: “Don’t touch my pal,” urging Europeans and Jews (somewhat patronizingly)
to protect their Black or Muslim “pal.”

Translator’s note: It is common among American readers to suppose that although Jewish groups are quite powerful and are a critical force for immigration and multiculturalism in the U.S., this is not the case in Europe; e.g., Jews are less than 1% of the population of France.

Éric Zemmour, a Sephardic Jew as well as a prominent  journalist and pundit in France, however argues that Jewish ethnic activist and/or leftist organizations have worked to undermine the traditional French nation-state. No doubt he is the “most nationalist” voice allowed in French mainstream media, all but telling people to vote for the Front National. I found his bestselling book Le Suicide français, while sometimes false or circumspect, surprisingly frank on certain issues.

Zemmour observes that “the Jewish far-left, from the Trotskyite movements to the UEJF [Jewish student union], was at the reins” of SOS Racisme, a major “anti-racist” group. In alliance with the institutional left, SOS Racisme worked to divide the right-wing vote, to politically isolate nationalist parties (above all the Front National), to censor nationalist discourse, and to hijack incipient Black/Arab movements. Zemmour argues that SOS Racisme thus “sapped the foundations of the French nation.” Zemmour’s quote from the anti-nationalist Globe founded and financed by the Jewish left is particularly striking:  “Of course, we are resolutely cosmopolitan. Of course, everything that is of the soil, the beret, the bourrée, Breton bagpipes, in short petty-French or chauvinistic, is foreign or even odious to us.” The parallels with the history of groups such as the NAACP, the ADL, and the SPLC are striking. 

The following are extracts taken from Éric Zemmour, Le Suicide français (Albin Michel: 2014), “SOS baleines,” pp. 243-249. The title is editorial. 

* * *

The emergence of the Front National, during the municipal elections of 1983 at Dreux, would be a historic opportunity for the left to stay in power. Yet, [center-right leader] Jacques Chirac had first agreed to a union of the right.[1] Even Raymond Aron had blessed this alliance in L’Express, referring to the left’s totalitarian depravities: “The only fascist-style international in the 1980s is red, not brown.” But the moralistic, anti-racist, anti-fascist discourse of the left ended up riddling the leader of the Gaullist party [Chirac] with guilt, along with the pressures from all sides, of his centrist allies (friends of Simone Veil and Bernard Stasi), the media, and the Jewish organizations, without forgetting the provocations of the FN’s leader (“the detail of history”[2]) which were exploited well. Mitterrand thus avenged himself against the Gaullists who had long [divided the left by] isolating the Communist Party and its popular electorate in their revolutionary ghetto. Read more

Éric Zemmour: The Rise of the Shoah as the Official Religion of the French Republic

/33 Comments/in , /by

Translation by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s note: Éric Zemmour is a Sephardic Jewish French journalist and pundit, no doubt the “most nationalist” voice allowed on French television, all but telling people to vote for the Front National. I found his bestselling book Le Suicide français, while sometimes false or circumspect, surprisingly frank on certain issues. The title is taken from the text. Given the length of the text, I have bolded admissions that are significant for a mainstream publication.

The following is taken from Éric Zemmour, Le Suicide français (Albin Michel: 2014), “De Gaulle raflé au Vél d’Hiv,” pp. 379-385.

[French President Jacques Chirac, July 16, 1996:] There are, in the life of a nation, moments which hurt the memory and the idea one has of one’s country. . . . France, the fatherland of the Enlightenment and of the rights of man, land of refuge and asylum, France, on that day, committed the irredeemable. Betraying her word, she delivered her wards to their tormentors . . .

It was Brutus, his adoptive son, who returned, according to the legend, to finish off Caesar, stabbed with dagger strikes; it was Jacques Chirac, the self-styled heir of Gaullism, whose role it was to destroy the Gaullian mystique. The latter was founded upon the distinction between a legal but illegitimate Vichy [regime], a de facto but not de jure authority, and Free France, incarnation of national legitimacy, of the only France, of the France which fights . . .  Read more