As an instinctive friend of Israel’s who abhors antisemitism — and as an alumnus of Columbia University which faces massive defunding by the Trump administration for allegedly not doing enough to combat antisemitism during campus protests over Gaza – I was stunned and disheartened to read this CNN headline yesterday:
“Israel embraces France’s Far Right, turning a blind eye to its Nazis.”
According to the CNN story, Jordon Bardella, leader of France’s Far Right National Rally Party, which has Neo-Nazi roots, is among the scheduled speakers at an international “antisemitism conference,” due to open in Jerusalem today.
The Netanyahu government is officially sponsoring the affair as it seeks new supporters abroad — with Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli serving as principal organizer.
“It is a stunning reversal of political norms” write CNN reporters Joseph Ataman and Mick Krever, in describing the conference.
“Far Right leaders across Europe, desperate for mainstream acceptance, are seeking common cause with Israel in demonizing Muslims sympathetic to the Palestinian cause,” note the reporters. “And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose party has long seen itself as a natural ally of right-wing movements around the world, is giving his stamp of approval to a movement historically shunned by Jews.”
Seven years ago, Bardella’s coalition sprang from the ashes of the National Front Party, a fascistic hodge-podge which had been founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972. His co-founders included ex-Nazi collaborators from WWII and retrograde veterans of France’s colonial excesses in Indochina and in Algeria, where Le Pen himself had racked up a brutal military record.
Bardella, a follower of Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, has sought to attract younger Far Right voters in France to the National Rally by airbrushing its Neo-Nazi origins.
But it has been an imperfect rebranding. Marine Le Pen officially expelled her father from the National Front in 2017 just before it morphed into its successor, because of his brash hate-mongering, but he remained a
presence at her side, and continued to sprinkle the air with fetid reminders of his prejudices right up until his death last January.
A monarchist by upbringing and a bigot by disposition, Le Pen seemed always to take pleasure in flogging those he considered racially inferior or morally afflicted. He frequently advocated “for the enforced isolation of people with AIDS” and “once claimed the French national football team had too many black players to represent French society,” The Independent has reported.
At an early age he enriched himself by selling recordings of Nazi speeches and German military songs and never lost his taste for the goosestep or the ideology. Frequently describing Nazi gas chambers as a mere “detail” of history, he delighted in wordplays that carried the same sick message. In one oft-cited example, he warned Jewish singer and critic Patrick Bruel that he would be part of “a batch we will get next time” — using a French word for “batch” that is widely construed to be a pun for “oven.” He was also notorious for having conjured a similar pun to suggest that another critic was out to reduce the National Front itself to a “crematory oven.”
In the words of Israel’s former ambassador to France, Avi Pazner, Le Pen was a “notorious antisemite.” And, according to many sources, the smut he spread about helped stunt his daughter’s own political career, including her three runs for the French presidency.
Despite the whitewash Bardella has splashed on himself, his scheduled participation in the antisemitism conference has caused several other speakers to drop out in protest, including the head of the US Anti-Defamation League and Jewish-French philosopher, Bernard Henri-Levy.
“I find it hard to feel protected by a party whose leader [Bardella] still does not know whether Jean-Marie Le Pen was antisemitic or not, and whose presidential candidate [Marine Le Pen] lumps the kippa and the Islamic veil together in the same category of opprobrium,” Henri-Levy wrote in an open bail-out letter.
All of which begs the following question:
How is it that Trump feels content to bash Columbia and potentially other universities for offending a concept of antisemitism he hasn’t carefully articulated while turning a blind eye to the dizzying spectacle of Israel itself getting a little too cozy with original offenders or at least their spiritual offspring?
Don’t get me wrong. If the evidence proves that Columbia or anybody else has attempted to incite violence against any Jew or Israeli citizen for being Jewish — I will be the first to call for sanctions against the perpetrators and to march on the victims’ behalf.
But the Le Pen examples show true hate speech and incitement in action and leave us wondering how any Israeli could possibly countenance anybody or anything (like Bardella’s party) that threatens to soft-soap the ugly truth. If this practice were to become a trend anywhere, it would make antisemitism seem negotiable.
Trump’s own record, of course, raises questions about how reliable his own moral compass is in this regard. Witness his tolerance of the Proud Boys and the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville. In each instance he demonstrated that, as far as he is concerned, antisemitism can be interpreted in any way that fits his own agenda.
Lest he continue to play the issue this way, to the detriment of American academia and so many of our institutions – and Israel’s — let’s hope Israelis themselves, including Netanyahu and his enablers, will recalibrate and remove any doubts left by this conference about what antisemitism looks and sounds like and how it should be resisted.