[Marxism] How French schools miseducate youth about anti-Semitic scapegoating.

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

An international trend for Jews to become scapegoats for US and allied
imperialist crimes in the Middle East, Africa, and even in the
imperialist countries themselves is beginning to take shape.  

What we are talking about is not resentment at the social position and
income of Jews in the imperialist countries -- generally privileged and
often very much so --  or their tendency to politically support
imperialist policies, but the more general acceptance of anti-Semitic
myth and mysticism to the effect that the problems and crimes of
imperialism are the product of Jewish conspiracy and manipulation.  The
tendency to accept this mythology has grown in the Middle East, for
example, especially out of the defeats dealt to the masses in recent
decades which foster a retreat to mystical thinking and scapegoating,
including among the oppressed people themselves (Sunnis and Shias,
etc.). 
The anti-Semitic fictions, the most famous of which are the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion, arise in now way spontaneously among the oppressed,
but have all their roots in the rise of imperialism, and imperialism's
need for scapegoats.  The trend has arisen along with the tendency among
some critics or opponents of the US war in this country to present US
policy  in the Middle East as imposed on a basically decent imperialism
by sinister Jewish powers, most notably AIPAC.  This includes the legend
that US policy toward Israel is dictated by Israel, a country that is
entirely dependent on massive gifts of money and arms from the United
States.  In the real imperialist world, such dependence increases the
power of the giver over the recipient, not the other way around.  But in
the world of Jewish-conspiracy mysticism, things work entirely
differently.
 
This article from today's Times shows how French imperialism uses the
pretext of educating anti-Semitism to intimidate and silence youth of
Algerian, other Arab, or African origin who may be picking up some
anti-Semitic mythology from the imperialist environment and
interpretations of events in the Middle East, but who also know some
things about the Islamic world, Israel, etc. that their teachers, school
authorities, etc., don't want to hear and don't want to allow to be
voiced.
 
 There are some lessons for the fight against anti-Semitic ideology in
this article.
  
  First, you cannot fight anti-Semitism effectively anywhere on the
basis of supporting the oppressor and the oppressed. That means, among
other things, that the fight against anti-Semitic ideology without
recognizing that Jews have been organized into the Jewish nation of
Israel as an oppressor nation against the Arabs, in the ultimate
interest of imperialism.
 
 You cannot fight anti-Semitism if  you are determined to silence youth
who notice the similarity between what you describe happening to Jews
and what the Jewish state is doing to Palest0nians and other Arabs
today.
 
You can't fight anti-Semitism if you are nostalgic -- even with "guilt"
-- for the French empire's rule over Algerians and other Arabs and
Africans, or if you regard this as a "civilizing mission" rather like
the "civilizing mission" that Israel carries out today in Palestine.
 
You cannot fight anti-Semitism by intimidating young people with
implicit threats of failure, expulsion or suspension, or even
deportation, jail for hate speech.
 
Imagine your teacher criticizing you for bringing up Palestine in a
discussion of the holocaust, and explaining that what HItler did to the
Jews has nothing to do with what Israel is doing to the Palestinians?
No self-respecting youth is going to buy this even if they make the
tactical decision to keep a tight lip about their views in future
dealings with this creep.
 
You can't fight anti-Semitism if you support the French state or the
"real French" against the Arabs and Africans of France.  You can't fight
anti-Semitism if yuu think it is something the oppressed brought into
the world.
 
Education "against" anti-Semitism in this spirit has to be opposed by
everyone who is serious about anti-Semitism.  This is not opposition to
anti-Semitism but part of the production line for it.  It does less harm
not to counter anti-Semitism at all than to "answer" it in this
repressive and reactionary spirit.
Fred Feldman
 
 
 
  
 
March 26, 2006

Jews in France Feel Sting as Anti-Semitism Surges Among Children of
Immigrants 

By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/craig_s_sm
ith/index.html?inline=nyt-per> CRAIG S. SMITH

SARCELLES,
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritorie
s/france/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> France ? In working-class Parisian
suburbs like this one, heavily populated by North African immigrants,
the word "Jew" is now a standard epithet. It appears in graffiti on
middle school walls and neighborhood playgrounds and on the tongues of
the young. 

"It's blacks and Arabs on one side and Jews on the other," said
Sebastian Daranal, a young black man standing in the parking lot of a
government-subsidized housing project with two friends. 

Eight men beat the son of a rabbi here in March. Another Jew was
attacked the next day.

In the wake of the torture and killing in February of Ilan Halimi, a
23-year-old Jew, attention has focused on an undeniable problem:
anti-Semitism among France's second-generation immigrant youth, whose
high jobless rate the government is trying to address with a law drawing
widespread protests across the country.

The law, intended to increase employment, especially among the young,
has drawn opposition because of a provision that allows companies to
hire people 25 or younger for a two-year trial period, during which they
can be fired without cause. 

Schools are the battleground over anti-Semitism, and teachers complain
that the government has done little, despite many proposals. 

"The minister of education has done nothing," said Jean-Pierre Obin, an
inspector general of education in France, who wrote a report in 2004
that called anti-Semitism "ubiquitous" in the 61 schools surveyed. "He
prefers not to talk about it." 

Mr. Obin wrote in the report of "a stupefying and cruel reality: in
France, Jewish children ? and they are alone in this case ? can no
longer be educated in just any school."

Ianis Roder, 34, a history teacher in a middle school northeast of
Paris, said he was stunned by what he witnessed after Sept. 11, 2001.
The next day, someone spray-painted in a stairwell of the school the
image of an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center beside the
words "Death to the U.S., Death to Jews."

When he told his class months later that
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/adolf_hitl
er/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Hitler had killed millions of million
Jews, one boy blurted out, "He would have made a good Muslim!" Mr. Roder
told of a Muslim teacher who dismissed her class after a shouting match
over Nazi propaganda. The students said the offensive images accurately
depicted Jews.

Even today, he said, there is widespread belief that the Sept. 11
attacks were a Jewish plot and that Jews were notified beforehand. 

Barbara Lefèbvre, a history teacher who has taught in several of the
working-class suburbs, said many people minimize the anti-Semitism among
France's youth. 

"They say, 'That's the way the kids talk ? they don't mean it in the
same way that you or I would,' " she said. Ms. Lefèbvre, who is Jewish,
said she had to argue with the principal of her school several years ago
to get an investigation when a student wrote "dirty Jew" on a notebook
used by her class. The student, a French-Arab boy, was ultimately given
just two hours of detention.

Some teachers simply gloss over subjects likely to elicit anti-Semitic
responses. Ms. Lefèbvre said she knows teachers who even show fictional
films, like Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful," instead of treating
the Holocaust directly.

France was the first European country to offer Jews full citizenship and
has done as much as any to exorcise the ghosts of Nazi collaboration. 

But the postwar climate for Jews has steadily soured as attention has
focused on the Palestinian cause and Muslims have moved here in large
numbers.

With the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada against Israel in
2000, anti-Semitic attacks in France skyrocketed. While the number of
reported incidents has fallen since peaking in 2004, anti-Semitism is
now entrenched in many of the country's working-class housing projects. 

The Arab communities of North Africa had no postwar sense of Holocaust
guilt. If anything, distress over the creation of Israel in 1948
reinforced anger at Jews to the point that successive waves of
anti-Jewish riots drove most of North Africa's Jews to Israel and Europe
? primarily France ? in the 1950's and 1960's.

Some people say that many of the North African Arabs who subsequently
moved to France carried anti-Jewish prejudices with them and passed them
to a second-generation, where they have been reinforced by support for
the Palestinian cause. And French guilt over colonialism has made such
prejudices harder to counter.

"As long as anti-Semitism came from the extreme right there was a
reaction," said Ms. Lefèbvre, who has written about anti-Semitism and
sexism in the schools. "But when it came from that part of the
population that itself was a victim of racism, no one wanted to see it."

Sitting in a room hung with posters deploring racism at a youth center
in La Courneuve, a suburb on the outskirts of Paris, Yannis, the
16-year-old son of a French father and Algerian mother, said racist talk
was common. "We've become used to it, hearing it day after day, so we've
all started to speak like that," he said, adding that even 7-year-olds
say, "Don't eat like a Jew," if someone is being stingy with food.

Fahima, 14, with long black hair and limpid eyes, doing her homework
beside him, spoke of a confrontation she had with a Jewish teacher two
years ago.

"He said, 'You blacks and Arabs will never get apartments in Paris,' "
she said, explaining that he meant the students would never manage to
move out of the poor suburbs. Fahima, who is French-Algerian, said she
retorted, "You Jews only have apartments there because you were picked
on during the war."

"I was mean," she said, playing with a shiny cellphone. "But I'm not
anti-Semitic."

The girls with her complained about the teacher, saying he talked often
about his family's suffering in the Holocaust. "He cries whenever he
mentions his grandmother," one girl said with exasperation.

Some schools have tried to defuse the problem without addressing it
directly. After a Jewish girl was harassed in Saint-Ouen two years ago,
the administration of her school decided to show "Night and Fog," a
haunting 1955 documentary film that includes graphic footage of Nazi
death camps. 

Initially, teachers feared that showing the movie risked inciting
confusing comparisons between the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, but then relented. 

At the film's end, one boy ? not a Muslim ? asked how Jews who had known
such suffering could treat Palestinians "the same way." 

No one responded, though Carole Diamant, a philosophy teacher, said she
spoke to him privately later about why he was wrong. "I felt like we
were on a wire," she said, describing the tension. Since then, the
school has included the Holocaust in a broader program on genocide. 

Anti-Semitism is felt most acutely in communities like Sarcelles, where
many North Africans settled in the 1950's and 1960's. Sarcelles is home
to one of the most concentrated Jewish communities in France, surrounded
by an unsightly sprawl of apartment blocks that house the North African
and sub-Saharan immigrants who arrived later.

France has a well-established Jewish community with European roots, many
of whose members occupy the upper echelons of French society. Hundreds
of thousands of poorer North African Jews have more recently swelled the
Jewish community to about 600,000, making it the largest in Europe.
Those North African Jews and their children bear the brunt of the
anti-Semitism in the working-class neighborhoods. 

Each time anti-Semitic attacks make news, the Interior Ministry promises
more security around Jewish institutions. But "more police aren't the
answer because it remains in the spirit of the people," said Dr. Marc
Djebali, a spokesman for the Jewish community in Sarcelles.

Laurent Berros, the synagogue's rabbi, said local imams had evaded his
suggestion that Jewish and Muslim leaders go together into troubled
neighborhoods. "They say that bringing a rabbi into these neighborhoods
isn't easy," he said. "There is a fear that they'll be seen as
collaborators."

The deteriorating climate has led thousands of French Jews to move to
Israel in the past five years, including about 3,300 last year, a
35-year high. 

Murielle Brami, 42, whose parents immigrated to France to escape
anti-Jewish riots in Tunisia, has the sinking feeling that history is
repeating itself. "All the Jews in France want one thing, to leave for
Israel or the United States," she said. That is hyperbole, but it is a
sign of the anxiety percolating through France's Jewish community. "When
our parents came, it was paradise here," said Ms. Brami, who remembers
staying out late without worrying about her safety. 

Now she avoids certain neighborhoods even in the day and no longer
allows her son to wear a yarmulke in the street after some youths put a
knife to his throat last year.

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