Damian Thompson: What North African anti-Semites learned from the French. Extraits:

Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

Daily Telegraph

Damian Thompson: What North African anti-Semites learned from the French. Extraits:

[...] Before I read Hussey [The French Intifada: the Long War Between France and its Arabs by Andrew Hussey], I knew that French anti-Semitism, nurtured by Dreyfus and Vichy, was alive and well: it still flavours French traditionalist Catholicism and the Front National. I also knew that attacks on synagogues and cemeteries are predominantly the work of young males of north African descent (something the EU has tried to conceal).

The French Intifada joins the dots between the two. You might think that, given the gruesome racism of French Algeria, the Arab gangs of the banlieues (squalid housing estates encircling Paris and other cities) would despise no one more than the nominally Christian descendents of their colonial oppressors.  Wrong. It’s French Jews they really hate. Worse, Jew-hatred isn’t confined to gangs.Hussey spells this out in uncompromising language that you don’t expect from a contributor to the BBC and Guardian, which shy away from exposing non-white racism.  Anti-Semitism thrives in the banlieues, says Hussey: young people’s chatter is full of references to sale juif, sale yid, sale feuj (backslang), even youtre, an old slang word derived from the German Jude that carries overtones of the deportations of Vichy.  All this is less surprising once Hussey explains that, for 100 years, Algeria’s French settlers (colons or pied-noirs) and their Arab neighbours were united in loathing Jews: indeed, Cagayous, an anti-Semitic thug from pied-noir popular fiction, is still part of the folklore of Muslim Algeria. During Vichy, “both the colons and the Algerian Muslims were happy to accept the anti-Jewish laws that the Pétain government so shamefully and swiftly put into place”.


This historical context is worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder in 2006 of Ilan Halami, a 23-year-old Jewish mobile phone salesman who was found tied to a tree, dying of burns and other mutilations. Residents of the Parisian banlieue where he was tortured heard his screams and did nothing; his murder was celebrated in a community where Muslim rappers base their lyrics on the novelist Céline, a Nazi collaborator. This is Dieudonné’s audience.

I can derive only one comforting thought from Hussey’s brilliant book: Muslim Jew-hatred in France is so deeply rooted in that country’s native anti-Semitism that it’s unlikely to be replicated in Britain. Half a million French Jews, on the other hand, face an unnerving future. Last year Israel announced a three-year initiative to attract more Jewish immigrants from France. My guess is that it will succeed – thus handing final victory to the evil old men of Vichy and their successors: the young, vibrant, hate-crazed bigots of the banlieues.