Eric Zemour’s speech should not be associated with Jewish thought. In the name of the morality of Judaism, Elie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Simon Wiesenthal, Emmanuel Levinas, made their lives a fight against all racial discrimination. Simon Wiesenthal fought for the dignity of the Roma, whom he saw as brother-victims of Nazism, who after the war were targeted by far-right European political parties. These great thinkers of Judaism would never have tolerated a speech like that of Eric Zemour, and would not have forgiven his equivocal attitude about Petain and Mauras, and his use of ethnic and cultural arguments. Terror is synonymous with terror. In the life of a society, this means that fear feeds on terror and can make it a career, a raison d’être. Thus arises the political scarecrow, a practical tool in the binary right / left chess game, when the need to stoke polarization arises. Therefore, serious consideration should be given to the possibility of racist forces using members of targeted minorities to cynically convey their hate speech, while keeping their hands clean. This is to attract arrows to specific populations. Through our activities around the tragedy of Ilan Halimi (alav hashalom) our association FJN has spent years informing the public of the danger of anti-Semitic abuses, and offered our analysis of the social dynamics that favor these contexts. We shared our diagnosis and our testimony. On the one hand, the political recovery of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the left as well as by the right, and on the other hand responses too slow to remedy the situation, or too subject to the anti-immigrant political discourse, are among the causes. that prevent meaningful intercultural dialogues. We have suggested how to overcome these apparent difficulties. It is essential to understand the push and promotion of the character Eric Zemour in this time frame. For FJN, which has decades of experience in the field of racial discrimination and its social consequences, the Éric Zemour phenomenon is not an exception, but a typical feature of far-right politics. There is nothing new about putting a child of immigrants (or ex-colonies) in the position of spokesperson for anti-immigrants. It is a strategy of public infantilization, a method particularly in vogue in the American or British right. The scarecrow Eric Zemour exists in America. He is the famous American Cuban who is used to make speeches glorifying American culture and especially the embargo on Cuba. In England he is the descendant of Indians or Pakistanis who nostalgically sing the praises of the former British Empire. And who also praises reactionary movements against immigrants and poor social classes. In France as in America and England and elsewhere in Europe, there is a political and media machine behind these public characters. These opinion mechanisms make cynical choices when the subject is to establish spaces of identity. We will without embarrassment make characters on the right say arguments on the left and vice versa, in order to confuse voters. Paying attention to intentions must be more important, if one attaches moral value to the truth. The image of an immigrant with a knack for fallacy and parlor talk insisting that he read Maupassant, and therefore he became an acceptable foreigner, is pitiful. Maupassant deserves to be read for a reason other than that of being validated as an acceptable human being. Literature cannot be reduced to being the subject of an identity card. But it is comparable to the history of many complexed Africans (and North Africans) who spend their lives validating their humanity in the eyes of the majorities. Sadly, there is nothing exceptional about this. Because he has nothing to offer other than what he has been given, and finds nothing to do other than thank the boss. The fight of the Jewish community against all racism and all discrimination will survive the Zemour phenomenon. Those who use it as a political scarecrow are too obvious to be hidden from view. You cannot erase the human vision of Frank Rosenweig, Wiesel, Wiesenthal, Buber or Simone Weil with a talkative sophist who makes populism or human morals are ridiculed.
Eric Zemour’s political spectrum and Jewish thought
