There are 15.7 million Jews in the world. 7.2 million live in Israel, 6.3 million in the United States, 27,000 in Arab-Muslim countries and 440,000 in France. Since the pogroms of October 7, anti-Semitic acts have exploded all over the world. In France they have increased by 1000%. The expression of anti-Semitism has become uninhibited, as if the massacre of men, women and children, the torture, the mutilations, the rapes, filmed with enthusiasm by terrorists happy to have accomplished their duty of total annihilation, authorized the average person, whose anti-Semitism was quietly humming, to express their hatred in broad daylight.
And because this hatred finds justification in the speeches of politicians who are as opportunistic as they are convinced and intellectuals who are negationist and rancid, they add to it in words, in actions, in vociferations. They draw up lists of Zionists to be killed “economically” – while waiting for better. Anti-Semites no longer hide, they are proud and applauded, they are courted. Post-October 7 anti-Zionism is an anti-Semitism finally accepted. Anti-Semitism is a challenge to liberal democracy, anti-Semitism is the moral victory of Islamism in the West.
Here, we doubt, with a smile on our lips, the comfortable resistance of cowardly bourgeois academics, the rapes perpetrated by Hamas terrorists, there we rejoice that Europe is finally emerging from its post-Shoah guilt to condemn Israel with barely any hope concealed from erasing it from the map of the Middle East, here we rewrite History by considering Israel as a colonizing occupying force since 1947, there we agree to debate with uneducated students about the possibility of ceasing all collaboration with universities Israelis, here we want to ban a former Israeli ambassador, a fervent supporter of the two-state solution, from speaking, there we tear down posters of Israeli hostages because it is a lie, an invention of “fascist Zionists”, here we give a standing ovation to a French activist -Syrian at best with the Syrian authorities who massacred half a million individuals without blinking, there sets in, without limits, without shame, a negationism which eats away the truth, destroys reality, damages humanity, here it becomes inaudible to refuse the inappropriate words of genocide, apartheid, fascism, there we intimidate anyone who does not denounce the protocol of the elders of Zion version 3.0.
“Israel’s great fault is being populated by Jews”
Intimidation works. The worst is here. A minority of ideologues fed up with Islamist theories whipped up in mayonnaise by the synthesis of identity are holding out against political, institutional and media leaders. They yell, threaten, block, report, sign indigestible platforms, lies on a bed of anti-Semitism, and the elite obediently bows down – you understand, we are for the debate – the elite retreats – we must know how to listen to the pain of those who cry for the civilians in Gaza even if they have not had a moment of compassion for the thousands of murdered Jews – the elite digs its grave smiling politely at kids who have never opened a book of history, who enjoy being congratulated by the mullahs, who shout at the top of their lungs their love of Hamas, this “anti-colonial resistance army”, painting their hands blood red, pretending not to know what this gesture means is filthy, by not imagining that their pink hair, their gender fluidity, will earn them death in the dream kingdom of Islamism which vomits them up.
There is one country, only one, not two or three, only one country, which is a refuge for the Jews. There is only one country, only one, not two or three, only one country from which the world demands a proportionate response to a pogrom; There is only one country, not two, not three, which is in the crosshairs of all international organizations, guilty of birth, guilty of existing. Israel’s great fault is being populated by Jews. If we want to avoid one day starting a column with “once upon a time there was a country, Israel”, it is time to truly fight against anti-Semitism which is anti-humanism and which will tomorrow be our collective shame.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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