Overwhelmed by the incessant chatter of words that mask reality, we are constantly confronted with partisan discourse that claims to explain the world and which often only justifies the worst. The assault suffered by Jérémie Cohen in Bobigny, and which caused his death, illustrates by the story that was made of it, how one transforms an uninhibited savagery into an ignoble discursive fair.
The same argumentative movement is reproduced with each probably anti-Semitic aggression and with each attack: denial, attenuation, victimization reversal. We first deny the existence of the facts – here, we spoke of a traffic accident, then of “news item” and not of aggression or beating. Then, we attenuate the scope: it’s a human drama as it happens daily… Finally, we come to try to exonerate the aggressors in order to displace the guilt and transfer it to the opposing ideological camp.
Release thus find that “the refrain of the dangerous ‘young people from the city’ was not long in being sung by the extreme right”, which is valid for automatic disqualification. Instead of denouncing what should be, Liberation preferred to speak of “recovery” and “gray areas”. The discursive smoke of a fact-check that obscures the evidence then looks like a shameful travesty: “We conclude that the victim was indeed attacked before crossing the tram tracks, but no one can really say why.” By imagining an enigmatic causality, we drown the fish of violence by acting as if it had a “good” reason which would already not be very far from an excuse. One can thus write whole articles to sow doubt, as if an aggression with ten against one could not be the fruit of hatred.
The death of Jérémie Cohen illustrates what these territories that the Republic claims not to have lost really are: the reign of thugs constantly comforted and excused by an ideological discourse that made them heroes and martyrs. The indigenism that opposes “the whites, the Jews and us” finds its rawest expression here, that of violence. The law, in some places, is the law of impulse and xenophobia taken in its literal sense: what happens to a stranger who does not belong to the clan, and it becomes possible to hit him. Whether he stands out with his yarmulke, his white skin or his slanted eyes, he becomes an obvious target.
We no longer count the outbursts that break out on the occasion of a careless look, an inadvertent jostling, a blast of the horn. The death of Jérémie Cohen thus refers to what the child psychiatrist Maurice Berger has abundantly described as a cultural pathology: gratuitous violence as a group mode of being.
“The myth of Islamophobia”
Anti-Semitism is only one of its manifestations. In this supposedly multicultural France, the jungle of separatism has already drawn its territory. Violence against Jews, Asians or “Céfrans”, against those who are not from the same neighborhood or the same band is accompanied by an anti-republican discourse. For today’s violence is doubled by a discursive legitimization now well anchored in political discourse. The rhetoric of victimization thus constitutes the main justification for violence.
Thus, the decolonial discourse contrives to teach part of the French population that they would be victims of France. For this, it is necessary to stage a colonization that has disappeared for decades, a racism of the State however fought by the State, and to give substance to Islamophobia as a legitimation of a community spirit. Indeed, the celebration of the group is embodied today in indigenism and the discourse of racialization. As everything has a price on the market of ideas, the defense of this slump, masked by the grandiloquences of an anti-racism in the form of a license to attack, constitutes an electoral niche.
It is this niche occupied by the party of La France insoumise (LFI). The staging of Islamophobia in France finds there the complacency of the speeches of the extreme left – always extreme, less and less left -, making Muslims the victims of a fantasized hunt. LFI therefore defends Palestinian terrorists like Marwan Barghouti or Salah Hamouri, castigates the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (Crif), defends the anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn, puts Jews and Muslims in competition (the famous “if Blanquer had said no yarmulke on a school trip, he would no longer be a minister” by Raquel Garrido).
These are not slippages, but political orientations. The march of November 10, 2019 “against Islamophobia” was a luminous demonstration of this – we remember its abject parallels between the Muslims of France and the deportation of the Jews -, and saw LFI march alongside the Islamists of the CCIF. Islamic clientelism has thus become a defining part of its identity since the Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) – dissolved by the government because of its Islamic radicalism and reconstituted in Belgium, under the name of Collective against Islamophobia in Europe (CCIE) – carried out a survey with clear conclusions: more than 80% of its members chose LFI as their election party. That the teachers (“800 academics” called to vote for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in a column published on the site of The Obs) and number of artists have chosen to publicly support the same candidate as the Islamists speaks volumes about their political foresight.
According to the slogans of Brotherhood activists, “Islamophobia kills”. The absence of a victim is not an obstacle to this derealized discourse, which is nevertheless frequently overtaken by the facts. To save the myth of Islamophobia, it is necessary to hide the reality of Islamic anti-Semitism. And, jointly, develop a discourse of cultural detestation that now points to the entire West. We must make French culture and history abominably racist: this anachronistic moralization serves as a narrative allowing the demonization of anyone who claims secularism and cultural continuity.
Because the decolonial discourse, by its Manichean sampling of bits of history, constructs an alternative history where only a presumed Western power exists, and which has been purged of Islamic conquests and slavery. By writing this story serving to make people feel guilty by historical heritage, the indigenist project finds its realization there: to substitute the racial question for the social question, according to the word of Houria Bouteldja. No surprise that Mr. Mélenchon’s party is considered “spoils of war” by the indigenists…
Impotence of the public force
There is therefore an ideological camp that systematically practices the attenuation of murderous anti-Semitism – denied, diluted, excused – and the hyperbolization of an imaginary state racism. This argumentative device presents a bipolar rhetoric that signals the denial of reality. With the help of sociologist-militants, the decolonial discourse constructs a racial and religious martyrology which arms its troops by excusing its exactions in advance. During this time, the public force contrives to hide its impotence behind proclamations as hollow as they are hieratic. And the auxiliaries of a revolution increasingly opposed to democracy denounce as fascistic any reminder of reality. In this case, it was to the point where Jérémie Cohen’s lawyer refused, out of personal political bias, to publicize the case before the first round of the elections.
The terrible fate of Jérémie Cohen reveals, once again, the nature of living together in what are modestly called “neighbourhoods”, that is to say the territories abandoned by the Republic to the barbarian bands. Because the hordes capable of stalking a lonely and diminished man until he dies under the wheels of a tram, are at home.
Jérémie Cohen’s family calls for “being careful” about the anti-Semitic nature of this attack. But from Ilan Halimi to Sarah Halimi, from Sébastien Selam to Mireille Knoll, from the targets of Merah and Coulibaly to all the victims of attacks listed by the Observatory of the Jewish World, Jewish victims have a particular visibility. The Jewish fuse, however, only alerts: symbolic targets in the suburbs, the Jews reveal the conditions of generalized social disintegration that the elites of the city centers do not want to see.
Between the party of the blind volunteers and that of the accomplices of savagery, the tragic misfortune of Jérémie Cohen resembles that of the Republic, staggering on the rails of destiny without seeing what will hit it. The dramas will however have been numerous enough to understand that from incivility to aggression, from murders to attacks, France is now the place of clan violence, encouraged by irresponsible politicians.
Jean Szlamowicz is a linguist, co-founder of the Observatory of Decolonialism and author of thinking sheep (Deer, 2022), by Jazz Talk (2021, PUM) and the book gender and language (2018, Intervals).