Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe

A Shared Story?

James Renton, Ben Gidley, James Renton, Ben Gidley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137413000
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137413024
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This is the first book to examine the relationship between European antisemitism and Islamophobia from the Crusades until the twenty-first century in the principal flashpoints of the two racisms. With case studies ranging from the Balkans to the UK, the contributors take the debate away from politicised polemics about whether or not Muslims are the new Jews. Much previous scholarship and public discussion has focused on comparing European ideas about Jews and Judaism in the past with contemporary attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. This volume rejects this approach. Instead, it interrogates how the dynamic relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia has evolved over time and space. The result is the uncovering of a previously unknown story in which European ideas about Jews and Muslims were indeed connected, but were also ripped apart. Religion, empire, nation-building, and war, all played their part in the complex evolution of this relationship.  As well asa study of prejudice, this book also opens up a new area of inquiry: how Muslims, Jews, and others have responded to these historically connected racisms.

The volume brings together leading scholars in the emerging field of antisemitism-Islamophobia studies who work in a diverse range of disciplines: anthropology, history, sociology, critical theory, and literature. Together, they help us to understand a Europe in which Jews and Arabs were once called Semites, and today are widely thought to be on two different sides of the War on Terror.

 

© The Author(s) 2017

James Renton and Ben Gidley (eds.)Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe10.1057/978-1-137-41302-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Shared Story of Europe’s Ideas of the Muslim and the Jew—A Diachronic Framework

James Renton¹ and Ben Gidley²

(1)

Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK

(2)

Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part.

—Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seabord (1904)

[B]y defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. I (1925)

End Abstract

Twenty days after the beginning of the events that led to the murders in the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine and the kosher supermarket in Paris, French President François Hollande delivered a speech. It is Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2015, and he is standing at a lectern at the Mémorial de la Shoah accompanied by ministers from his government. His goal: to argue that the recent killings of Jews belonged to an ancient, persistent and singular narrative of anti-Jewish prejudice that, in recent French history, began with the Holocaust, and had not ended—indeed, it was escalating. ‘Three weeks ago’, he pronounced to the gathered throng, ‘four men died in a kosher shop for the same motive that families were rounded up at the Vel d’Hiv in 1942, that the faithful of rue Copernic were attacked in 1980, that pedestrians on rue des Rosiers were assassinated in 1982, that the young Ilan Halimi was attacked in 2006, that the children of the Ozar HaTorah school were massacred in Toulouse in 2012.’ He went on to contend:

The responsibility of the authorities of the Republic—they are here, all of them assembled—is therefore to do everything, in order for Jews to be completely at home, in France, so that they never feel threatened or isolated. To fight an enemy, one has first to identify it and name it: antisemitism. It has changed its face but it has not lost its millennial roots. ¹

Hollande claimed that this fight was not the exclusive concern of the Jews; it was a challenge that belonged to all of humanity: ‘The democratic nations chose to inscribe 27 January on the memory of humanity, what did they mean by doing so? That 27 January is a universal event, which not only concerns the Jews, but the whole world.’ To emphasise the point, he tried to distance the fight against antisemitism from the states of the West by enlisting the words of the totem of anticolonial radicalism, Frantz Fanon: ‘When you hear bad things being said about Jews, prick up your ears, they are being said about you.’

For all of his focus on antisemitism, Hollande attempted to present himself and his government as opponents of racial prejudice in general. In addition to anti-Jewish persecution, he referred to ‘the anti-Muslim acts that also have multiplied in recent weeks’. And in his solution to this crisis of racism in France, Hollande declared that the government would put forward ‘a global plan to fight against racism and antisemitism’. His words were soon put into action. On 17 April, Prime Minister Manuel Valls, beneath the slogan ‘The Republic mobilised against racism and antisemitism’, announced the government’s plan for what the President called ‘une Grande cause nationale’ for 2015, with a fund of 100 million euros over three years and its own Twitter hashtag, ‘#PlanAntiRacisme’. ²

The claim to universalism of the French government’s plan was misleading, however. The term ‘racism’ was arguably deployed in order to assert the state’s concern for Muslims alongside Jews, but without recognising, or promoting the significance of, Islamophobia. This stance of silent erasure was not new: much of the French political elite have largely resisted using the term Islamophobia since it came into circulation in international civil society in the late 1990s. ³ The acrobatics performed to claim concern for Muslims while prioritising the struggle against antisemitism was clear from the content of Valls’ speech. France, he argued,

has become aware that we must fight with determination against everything that divides us and separates us. This is what I wanted to sum up … [at] the National Assembly on 13 January, by simply saying that French Jews must no longer be scared to be Jewish. And that French Muslims must no longer be ashamed to be Muslim.

The location of the speech was meant to illustrate the same point of a shared story: Créteil in Le Val-de-Marne, which, the official government summary explained, possessed ‘the most important Jewish community of the region and, at the same time, one of the most important mosques in France’. ⁴ But—and this is the most revealing point—the town was also the location where, on 1 December 2014, three men broke into the home of a couple who, it was widely reported, were believed to be wealthy because they were Jewish. While one of the robbers stole money from a cashpoint, another sexually assaulted the woman. ⁵ Valls described this as ‘One more trauma, one trauma too many’. ⁶ The selection of the site was, therefore, a nod to thinking about Muslims alongside Jews, and diversity in general. Yet it was only a nod. The present violence to be noted is against Jews. Muslims merely risked shame—the shame of being themselves.

However, there is an enemy that the French government, with its partners, deems to be more perilous and significant than antisemitism: the Muslim enemy. In his speech on 13 January for the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Valls said: ‘France is at war with terrorism, jihadism and radical Islamism.’ Certainly, he added that ‘France is not at war with a religion, France is not at war with Islam and Muslims’. ⁷ Yet the fact remains that Muslims are the enemy, even if not Muslims are the target. Antisemitism pales in significance in the face of this foe: on 21 January, Valls announced 425 million euros of additional spending for ‘la lutte contre le terrorisme’ over three years, more than four times the budget for ‘la lutte contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme’, and a total expenditure of 940 million. The government began or expanded a raft of measures and initiatives, including an additional 60 million euros for ‘la prévention de la radicalisation’ programme. ⁸ And on 24 July, the government adopted a new intelligence law that allows the use of surveillance techniques in ‘le domaine de la prévention’ that in the eyes of the law were previously reserved for judicial investigations, including computer data capture and surveillance on private premises; as well as access to telecommunications operators for preventative individual monitoring; and data gathering from travel and transport companies. The government’s press dossier argued that the law was needed in response to ‘a protean threat undoubtedly without precedent’. The safety of France, the dossier asserted, required the state to ‘anticipate, detect, analyse, understand and thwart the threats’ that confronted the country. ⁹ Following the attacks in Paris in November 2015, the government’s desire to extend the law to facilitate the war on Islam(ism) surpassed the limits of the possible, and could only be satisfied by suspending the rule of law itself: a state of emergency. After the murder of over eighty people in Nice on 14 July 2016, Valls reiterated that France was at war, a war that had been forced on the country by terrorism; and Hollande announced that the government would extend the state of emergency. ¹⁰

These developments in France belong to a global process that began in earnest after the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Antisemitism and so-called Islamism—not Islamophobia—are twin and, in the Western official mind, connected enemies of the West. The latter opposition is illustrated quite clearly in a 2015 French government world map that depicts the political geography of the ‘international coalition’ against Islamic State ¹¹ : a politico-military incarnation of the Islamic enemy that seeks to establish a borderless Muslim state in western Asia, and thereby smash the Middle East state system sponsored by the West since 1918.

Genealogies of Coupling and Divergence

How can it make sense to talk about a relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia in this context, in which the figures of the persecuted Jew and the political Muslim are on opposite sides of a war waged by the West? Anthropologist Matti Bunzl gave us one possibility with his 2007 pamphlet Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe. ¹² We can, he suggested, compare and contrast the present European fear of Islam with the past European fear of Jews—in short, a comparative study of two temporally separate racisms, which has also been put forward by others such as Ilan Halevi, Nasar Meer and Tehseen Noorani. ¹³ Yet why bother with this kind of exercise? Of course we can see similarities: the association with political and cultural subversion; and the ideas of a protean, invisible, morally corruptive, degenerative and fanatical enemy. Nevertheless, as Bunzl has argued, it would be misleading to ignore the huge differences.

For example, there have been earlier wars on terror, which have often focused on racialised suspect minorities (the nineteenth-century panic about Fenians; the globally co-ordinated war on anarchism of the 1890s–1900s, which gave birth to many modern policing techniques; the first red scare in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution; the second red scare during the Cold War ¹⁴ ), but the global infrastructure of surveillance, incarceration and killing that is today focused on Muslims has no precise precedent. The closest we come to it in history, in essence though not in scale, is the structure of the anti-Jewish surveillance and control apparatus of the Nazi state and then empire, particularly the work in the late 1930s of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) internal intelligence office, AMT II 112, which tracked Jewish conspiracies around the globe. ¹⁵ However, the aim of the Nazis was not, ultimately, to control or defeat one single category of Jew—a political Jew, analogous to the West’s political Muslim of today. For the Nazis, all Jews were the political enemy. And...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: The Shared Story of Europe’s Ideas of the Muslim and the Jew—A Diachronic Framework
• 1. Christendom
• 2. Empire
• 3. Divergence
• 4. Response
• Backmatter