The image becomes banal: brainless students angrily tearing down posters as if refusing reality. Yesterday, these were the faces of the Israeli hostages, in the name of the Palestinian cause, in the name of decolonialism, for some in the name of a conspiracy which refutes the existence of hostages or even abuses, murders, rapes , of the massacres of October 7 – let’s not even talk about pogroms, they don’t understand – even though the Hamas terrorists filmed them and bragged about them widely.
Today, it is the face of Philippine, a 20-year-old student, who is torn off in the same hall of Sciences Po, it is the same demonstrators who disrupt minutes of silence in her memory. In the name of what? In the name of the young woman’s practicing Catholicism. To avoid playing into the hands of the far right. Because his assassin was of foreign origin. Not playing into the hands of the far right now amounts to denying violent death, to denying the horror of a crime, to choosing one’s dead, to hiding one’s empathy in obtuse activism. Each has its own deaths, each has its own tears.
The comments, indignations, positions become predictable, tell me where you live, where you pray, where you campaign, where you vote and I will whisper your text to you. You will tell me that it has always been like that. Yes and no. Yes, the communists who denied the bloody ravages of Stalinism as much as they repeated “fascists” over and over again at each contradiction while brutally attacking an authentic Victor Serge who had returned critically from the USSR, had set the tone.
But unlike yesterday, the confrontation of ideas is impossible, the debate dies down at the corner of a table where we meet because we resemble each other. Talking to the “enemy” is already a betrayal. As evidenced by Gilles Verdez who, converted to Islam and columnist for Cyril Hanouna, makes this chilling admission: “I was told not to come see you anymore, choose your side, the attacks were very hard for me, the cleavage is hyperviolent. I tell them you are my friend. […] to stop coming is to give in to this fracturing which is real, the young Muslims, they are much firmer than me, it’s one camp or the other.” You, the Muslim, must not go to the Jew. That’s it how we reduce humanity to being nothing more than a speaking leaflet. Everyone has their own faith, everyone has their own broadcast.
Netanyahu takes all the space
Certainly the most blatant rupture of reality is the one which tears apart the analyzes around no longer the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor even Israeli-Hamas, but Israel itself which has become the catalyst for all the past faults of the West and Benjamin Netanyahu. sole representative of the Hebrew State, ignoring a civil society as vibrant as it is fractured, a democratic society which must fight for its legitimacy and to which part of the world refuses the right to security and existence . It becomes impossible to talk about the reality of Israeli society as the simple mention of Israel leads to a now well-established sequence: “apartheid”, “genocide”, “massacre”, “extreme right”. That the enemies of Israel are the enemies of the democratic and liberal West, what does it matter! Netanyahu takes up all the space, a unique case where a government is deliberately confused with these citizens. Everyone has their own Israel, everyone has their own hatred.
In the French political landscape, the Trumpization of the left is now a fact. Since July 8, the NFP has repeated, against the figures, outside of true reality, that it emerged victorious from the polls, forgetting in passing the Republican front which favored its score, but above all refusing the democratic game through pathetic : “denial of democracy”, “theft of the election”, “assumed illiberalism”. A Prime Minister has been appointed, a government is in charge, but the left is dying by refusing the digital reality of the National Assembly, by continuing to go around in circles around a bone that has nevertheless escaped its control, giving the RN a foothold to vote for yet another vote of censure while denouncing the RN hostage government. Each has its own electoral results, each has its own assembly, each has its own reality.