Islamophobia in the country of human rights – Part 2
By Vincent Delbos-Klein*
France saw a spate of terror attacks in recent months that the authorities attributed to Muslim extremists. In an exclusive series, Vincent Delbos-Klein explains what Islamophobia means in a country which is de facto multi-cultural society.
– Editor
Antisemitism
Racism is not a brand new burden in French history, but an old prometheus eagle always coming back to devour our entrails in the greatest of suffering. For example, it is hard to find when antisemitism started in France, but history of the Jewish community, for nearly two millenials has been punctuated by violent episodes of stigmatisation, rejection and massacres.
For historians, this long-time curse is multifactorial. For Christian, Jewish people were descendants of Juda, the guy who murdered Jesus and no matter if Jesus was Jewish himself. Also, considered as the wandering people, the Jewish community was structurally threatened by the sedentary people who suspected them to be attached to their community and not to their land and country. In other words, they suspected them to be traitors, enemies from inside.
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Gypsy community share a similar destiny since its arrival in Europe a thousand year ago. As everyone knows, this led to one of the biggest mass murder in human history during world war two. But four decades before the Shoah, an important case divided the whole country : the Dreyfus affair, a long term injustice against a captain of Jewish descent convicted of treason. The context of national antisemitism was so strong in the public opinion and major newspaper that it lasted for 12 years before justice proved him to be innocent.
The affair let a durable wound in French history. After 1917, the people against this racist violence were considered as “Jewish Bolchevism” by the nationalist and extreme right wing people, once again with the idea that people supporting socialism or the Jewish community were part of the same threat : traitors against the country.
Even the trauma of the Shoah itself was not strong enough to keep the country from antisemitism forever and so in 1969, another affair, the rumour of Orleans, reminded bitterly that antisemitism was here, still.
Mistrust, hate against the allies considered as traitors, stereotypes, constant threat : the story of antisemitism show us the structure of racism and how it can puts minorities in danger. But before we describe the mechanism of islamophobia nowadays, a detour is required.
*Vincent Delbos-Klein is a Paris-based filmmaker and a researcher in sociology
