Review of Ivan Segr, La Raction philosmite, ou la trahison des clercs , Ligne 2009

In La Raction philosmite, ou la trahison des clercs, (The Philosemitic Reaction, or the Treason of the Intellectuals) Ivan Segr, a young Jewish French philosopher, analyzes incisively the new discourse that emerged in France after 2001 about the danger of Arab antisemitism and the need to defend Zionism against rising criticism. Among the practitioners of this discourse, occasioned by the Second Intifada and the Global War on Terror, are some of the most prominent intellectuals of contemporary France, including Bernard Henri Lvy, Bernard Kouchner, Andr Glucksman, Alexander Adler, Emmanuel Brenner, Alain Finkilekraut and others. Critics of this new discourse, most notably the Muslim philosopher Tariq Ramadan, have attacked it as a deviation from republican universalism in the name of a narrow Jewish interest, describing it as communitarian. Segrs thesis is that this discourse is not a betrayal of the universal in the name of Jewish interest but rather a reactionary discourse, a new Occidentalism, whose core is the false universalism of the defense of the West, a defense that consists in an imperialist vision of the world, a xenophobic idea of society, and a policed conception of knowledge. In the course of proving this thesis, Segr also shows, with crisp and witty style, that the aforementioned discourse is an intellectual fraud for which the proper response is ridicule. Segr proves his thesis patiently, like a prosecutor, with close readings of texts. That benefit of this method is that the charges are irrefutable. The drawback however is that the book often avoids being drawn into larger political discussions begging to be allowed in. The book is organized in four chapters. The first chapter is a close reading of five so called Communitarian Jewish writers. Segr shows how their alleged defense of Israel drifts in case after case to substituting the United States for Israel as the real Jewish state, the state that guarantees the safety of the Jews. Shmuel Trigano goes as far as referring to the US as the rock of Israel, a Jewish synonym for God. The third chapter dismantles and exposes the scientific pretense of the French political scientist Pierre-Andr Taguieff, whose 2002 book The New Judeophobia sets out to prove that opposition to Zionism is the current manifestation of the desire to kill all Jews. Segr exposes the racist underpinnings of Taguieffs criticism of Ramadans support for Palestinians, traces his attempt to police the public sphere, and mocks his absurd and reactionary demand from historians and social scientists to practice a methodological empathy for Western prejudice; (on the basis of this methodological pseudo-principle he demandes that Ilan Pappe condemn Palestinian historical memory). In deconstructing Tagieuffs analysis of antisemitism, Segr shows how Taguieff blurs the distinction between the idea of a Jewish conspiracy and the thesis that Israel is an outpost of U.S. imperialism because, ultimately, he agrees with the latter thesis, except that Tagieff defends Western imperialism in the old reactionary mould of the civilizing mission, which leads him oddly to endorse antisemitic tropes. For example, Farrakhans slur that Jews are responsible for the Atlantic Slave Trade only concerns Tagiueff to the extent that the history of slavery is at all raised as a challenge to the West. Furthermore, in line with his silly description of antisemitism as an attack on the Judeo-Christian West, Taguieff dabs in revisionism, using a mealy mouthed statement that Pope Pius XI made to a few Belgian pilgrims as a basis for the spurious claim that the Vatican took a decisive public stand against Nazism in 1938. In his last chapter Segr discusses the praise heaped by many of these Communitarian writers, including Finkielkraut and Henri-Lvy, on the singularly vulgar, violently xenophobic and purely racist book of Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride, a book that complains that Muslims breed like rats. While this is the least

interesting chapter of the book (criticizing trash is seldom rewarding), and Segrs attempt to show that Fallaci is also a closet Holocaust denier is less than fully convincing, the chapter proves conclusively that these priests of the French intellectual life have no intellectual or moral standards. The most interesting chapter in the book is the second, which deconstructs an important book-event, The Lost Territories of the Republic: Antisemitism, Racism and Sexism in the Schools, a collection of testimonies from high school teachers in predominantly immigrant school districts, published in 2002 with the introduction of sociologist Emmanuel Brenner and soon endorsed by major politicians and media figures. The book was an alarmist wake up call against the allegedly insidious role of Islam in undermining French secularism and introducing antisemitism in France. The name, addressing the presence of North African Arab immigrants in France through the prism of the anxiety of losing the colonies (Vietnam, Algeria), says it all. Segr reads the testimonies meticulously to shows how, far from providing evidence of widespread antisemitism, they reveal the Islamophobia, immaturity, and lack of understanding of secularism of a small clique of teachers. Thus, for example, in one testimony, a single Muslim community aid hired by the school becomes evidence of widespread proselytizing for Islam, the man guilty of retiring to a back room alone in order to perform discreetly his daily prayers, his extremism evident from his admonitionto high school students!to stay away from sex, drugs and alcohol. In an annex, Segr discusses a survey of anti-Jewish attitudes of young people in France used by the editor Brenner to buttress the books thesis that North African immigrants bring with them anti-Jewish prejudices allegedly rooted in their Arab/Muslim cultural origins. Segr shows how Brenner distorts the survey, suppressing non-confirming data and misinterpreting the rest. Thus, as one of many examples, Brenner cites the datum that 11% of youth of North African origins answer yes to the question do you think in France today the holocaust is discussed too much? compared to 4% of the general French youth. Omitted is the fact that in the same survey five times more (54%) youth of North African origins (compared to 52% for the general population) answer yes to the question do you think in France today the holocaust is not discussed enough? Segrs analysis begs for a more general discussion about the role of the Holocaust in French politics as a form of correct thinking that hides manipulation and ideology. What are the assumptions and political stakes in the expectation that one ought to always want more attention to the Holocaust? What authorizes using such clichs of white Christian European guilt as the measure of immigrant deviance? How is it antisemitic if an offspring of Algerian immigrants thinks that it would be right to speak a little less about the holocaust and a little more about why he or she cannot have a job? Perhaps should France talk a little more about what it did to Haiti? North African immigrants are the primary victims of the neoliberal turn in France, suffering endemic unemployment, the gutting of social services and police violence. The racist French discourse about Islam and its alleged inherent antisemitism is also an ideological response of the state and the courtly intellectuals to the demands and the radicalization of this community. This discourse seeks to blame the poverty and exclusion suffered by immigrant communities (to be correct, they are called immigrant although the second generation holds French citizenship from birth) on the victims themselves, on their culture (Islamic, Arab) which is supposedly foreign and incompatible with Frances secular values. The charge of antisemitism, Segrs analysis reveals, has been turned into a weapon in the hand of French elites against demands for redress and equality. Instead of producing a commitment to oppose racism, European guilt over the holocaust has become one of the ways marginal groups are racialized and victimized. This imaginary construction of North-African antisemitism is

particularly odious when one recalls the role of French colonial divide and rule policies that brough antisemitism into North-Africa. To end, I would like to revisit in greater depth one of the books key examples: Alain Finkielkrauts image opposing Auschwitz to the Statue of Liberty. Segr quotes Finkielkraut, a writer who scandalized France with his racist comments about Arabs in a Haaretz interview (November 17, 2005), affirming that the US is the reverse image of Auschwitz:
The memory of Auschwitz became the moral law of the democratic conscience [because] the Nazis, alone, in their criminalityexplicitly targeted universal humanitythe systematic and unprecedented assault against the other person which took place in Europe sends to the U.S. an inverse image of itself. The democracy of the New World is unique in that, in that motherland without an Ancien Rgime, there is no possible distinction between the regime and the country, the form and content of the national sentiment are one; identity is incarnate in the Statue of Liberty.

One can clearly see in this drift the substitution of the United State for Israel in the role of the reverse image of Auschwitz, a role Israel claimed for itself since the trial of Eichmann. Segr however criticizes Finkielkraut in the name of an imagined unity that this drift reveals between the Rabbinical Jew, the Universalist Jew and the Zionist Jew, all of whom would object to the apotheosis of the US, and all of whom would agree that the history of slavery makes the US fail the test of a democracy that is co-substantial with the nation. This imagined Jewish unity allows Segr to say that what is a overlooking the USs historical crimes from the point of view of universal ethics is also the blasphemy of worshiping a statue from the point of view of a Rabbinical Jew. However, insisting on keeping Zionism inside his Jewish tent, Segr adds that Israel, from whose history slavery is absent, has a better claim to be a democracy co-substantial with the nation. This is a thankfully rare insertion of crude apologetics for an Israeli regime that is as far from democracy as it is from the moon. A better reading of Finkielkrauts image would pass through Arendts thesis that modern antisemitism is always feudal and arises from the defamation of the bourgeoisie by the aristocracy. It is within this optics that Finkielkraut argues that Jews can be safe from antisemitism only where modernity did not win out in a difficult and inherently incomplete struggle, but took over in one single swoop, leaving no room for a rearguard assault, no Ancien Rgime. The opposition between Europe and the US is therefore between the French revolution culminating in Napoleons reforms, which established a bourgeois order in Europe but left a wounded aristocracy claiming to represent the timeless nation against the modern regime, and the colonial genocide of the Native-Americans, which established a bourgeois order on cleansed land, creating a total identity between the regime and the country. Thus, according to Finkielkraut, the condition of a democracy in which Jews are safe is genocide. Beside the Hegelian triumphalism (the US bourgeois order must be the end of history for this argument to hold), and the severe historical reductionism, the salvation Finkielkraut has to offer is a nonsensical abomination. As Hitler referred to the Slavs as redskins and the Reichs eastern expansion was consciously borrowing from U.S. manifest destiny, it effectively makes Auschwitz the opposite of Auschwitz. Finkielkraut doesnt merely overlook the foundational crimes of the US, but uses Jewish history and in particular the Holocaust as aplogetics for genocide. Segrs book is an intelligent but strange book circling an absent attractor. It offers a devastating critique of the role professed support for Israel plays in an odious an intellectually specious new Occidentalism while barely

saying anything about Israel, and it claims the guiding mantle of human emancipation with no reference to Palestinians. Segr criticizes Ramadans thesis that ascribes a Jewish Communitarian outllook to this gaggle of court intellectuals, but without himself broaching the question of the content of Jewish Communitarianism, notably in its historical Zionist forms. That avoidance alone allows Segr to uncritically assume an exclusive disjunction between a reactionary Occidentalism and a specific Jewish Communitarian interest that all versions of Zionism since Herzl have in fact defined in Occidentalist terms. One hopes Segr will overcome this aporia in the future without compromising the integrity of his critique of the Occidentalist discourse.