If you haven’t yet done so, go read the excellent two-part piece from Christopher Caldwell in The Weekly Standard, “Liberte, Egalite, Judeophobie”.

Part 1 introduces us to the softer side of that famed French McMalcontent, Jose Bove. It seems genetically altered foods aren’t the only things this randy old le Cock mistrusts:

France has laws against Holocaust denial. The current climate shows them to be bad laws, not just because they make free-speech heroes of those who are basically mentally ill, but because they can be violated in spirit with impunity. Such a violation was committed by Jose Bove in the first days of April, when he was expelled from Israel following a visit to Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. Bove, who rose to fame for vandalizing a McDonald’s in southern France as a protest against American influence, is not merely the informal leader of the younger French left, the ‘hero’ of the Seattle riots, and the guiding spirit of many of the anti-Le Pen protests that are now raging in Paris; he is also the most charismatic leader of the anti-globalization movement in the world.

It was thus alarming to see Bove, after a pro forma denunciation of anti-Jewish violence, informing viewers of the TV channel Canal Plus that the attacks on French synagogues were being either arranged or fabricated by Mossad. ‘Who profits from the crime?’ Bove asked. ‘The Israeli government and its secret services have an interest in creating a certain psychosis, in making believe that there is a climate of anti-Semitism in France, in order to distract attention from what they are doing.’

Since Bove didn’t actually say Jews weren’t killed in the Holocaust, it may seem excessive to some readers that B’nai B’rith accused him of negationnisme, or Holocaust denial. But B’nai B’rith is right. They have simply thought about the roots of Holocaust denial a bit more thoroughly than others. For anyone who inhabits Western culture, the Holocaust made that culture a much more painful place to inhabit — and for any reasonably moral person, greatly narrowed the range of acceptable political behavior. To be human is to wish it had never happened. (Those who deny that it did may be those who can’t bear to admit that it happened.) But it did. If there’s a will-to-anti-Semitism in Western culture — as there probably is — then the Arab style of Judeophobia, which is an anti-Semitism without the West’s complexes, offers a real redemptive project to those Westerners who are willing to embrace it. It can liberate guilty, decadent Europeans from a horrible moral albatross. What an antidepressant! Saying there was no such thing as the gas chambers is, of course, not respectable. But the same purpose can be served using what Leo Strauss called the reductio ad Hitlerum to cast the Jews as having committed crimes identical to the Nazis’. They must be identical, of course, so the work of self-delusion can be accomplished. We did one, the Jews did one. Now we’re even-steven.

…Hence, the D.C. “peace” rally — where we witnessed the surreal sight of puppet-wearing anti-globo protesters thirsting for Jewish blood like some gaggle of patchouli-drenched vampire muppets made stupid from years of excessive glue huffing.

Part 2 begins with the story of Pascal Boniface, top foreign policy advisor to Lionel Jospin, whose veiled nationalist threats against the Jewish community in France (dubbed “bonifacisme” by wags in the Jewish press) are indicative of the French Left’s attitude toward the current Jewish problem.

Concludes Caldwell

The French left has thoroughly assimilated the lessons of World War II. Maybe too thoroughly. After fantasizing for years about how much braver than their parents they would have been had they lived in 1938, after waiting stylishly for years for a predictably fogey-ish, Vichy-style anti-Semitism so they could combat it according to their anti-racist operator’s manual, they suddenly find themselves confronted with evidence that there are at least hundreds of thousands of people in their country who think pretty much as the Al Aksa Martyrs’ Brigade does, and millions more whose opinions are anyone’s guess. The French left may have idealistic reasons for placing its sympathies with the Palestinians, but it has powerful reasons of expedience, too. Thus far its heart lies with the side that has committed the most violence on French soil.

The most dangerous thing about Jean-Marie Le Pen, who loathes the global economy, distrusts the Jews, and practices gesture politics, is not that he’ll get elected. It’s that he’ll serve as the hate object who unites anti-Western Islamists and anti-Western anti-globalists, who march against him night after night over ideological differences that grow harder and harder to discern.

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