This is happening in the cozy setting of the American Congress. On the walls, paintings of the fathers of the largest democracy in the world watch you. That day the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania appeared. It’s Elise Stefanik, a moderate Republican representative from New York State, who asks the question: Does calling for the genocide of Jews go against your universities’ codes of conduct?
The answer is astonishing. “It’s a decision that depends on the context,” says University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill. The MP insists: “Calling for the genocide of the Jews depends on the context? » Skirting the question, Harvard President Claudine Gay ventures to say that, “when talk turns into behavior, we take action.” The situation can even “be the subject of an investigation for harassment if it is widespread and serious,” adds MIT President Sally Kornbluth.
We will have understood that, if, in these prestigious institutions which form the globalized elites, mentioning the book by Pierre Vallières White Negroes of America can earn you a dismissal, calling for the genocide of the Jews will only earn you “an investigation”. Unless it turns into… “behavior”!
Even though the presidents denounced all “hate speech” — as has become a ritual — there is no doubt that Henry Kissinger, a Holocaust refugee whose years of service at Harvard were numbered in decades, had to turn around in his grave, although barely closed. Moreover, the White House was so outraged that its spokesperson immediately declared that “calls for genocide are monstrous and contrary to everything we represent as a country.” While specifying that “it is incredible that this must be said”.
Those who still doubted the harassment suffered by Jewish students on American campuses will find an answer in these interventions. Above all, they illustrate the ascendancy that Islamism has gained among the American elites in recent years. In faculties corrupted by woke activism, it has become commonplace to treat Israel as a racist and colonialist state practicing apartheid without ever hearing the opposing arguments. As Joe Biden enters an election year, it is not certain that, in certain states like Michigan, he can do without the Muslim vote. As in Canada, Islamist pressure is felt even in the highest places of power, where leaders are frozen with fear at the idea of being accused of Islamophobia.
In France, this current of thought is widely represented by the far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose repeated outbursts never cease to amaze the political class. Since the pogrom of October 7, the leader of La France Insoumise (LFI) had refused to qualify Hamas as a terrorist organization, of which the massacre committed that day was an eloquent illustration.
The one who came third in the 2022 presidential election and who remains the main leader of the left has just pushed radicalism to the point of attacking one of France’s most respected journalists: Ruth Elkrief. Following an uncompromising interview with the number 2 of LFI, Manuel Bompard, he called the editorialist “manipulative” and “fanatic” practicing “contempt for Muslims”. Remarks after which the one who was born into a Jewish family had to be placed under police protection.
Some will have concluded that Mélenchon has become anti-Semitic. A somewhat hasty judgment for such an experienced and devious political leader, who is above all coldly calculating. Coming in first in the immigrant suburbs in 2022 with almost 70% of the vote, Mélenchon understood that, if he slightly reduced abstention there, which remains enormous, he could easily obtain the 400,000 votes he missed in 2022 to move on to the second round.
This is why he literally turned the hood on secularism and multiculturalism. This strategy which consists of flattering Islamism is perhaps “hazardous”, as the political scientist Jérôme Fourquet said, but it remains well-founded. In any case, the left has no other. Because it would take a miracle for it to recover its traditional working-class electorate, which has long since moved to the National Rally.
Despite the cries of horror that his positions arouse, Mélenchon remains for the moment the undisputed leader on the left. As for this heterogeneous fusion of the vote of woke student youth and a rather conservative Muslim electorate, it could surprise more than one person.
In France and the United States, fish rots from the head. As in the majority of Western countries, Islamism is no longer just this gigantic international political force which, from Algeria to Iran and from Yemen to the Caucasus, has for half a century put the Arab-Muslim world with fire and blood. It has become an internal force capable of influencing our elites and weighing on the internal politics of nations.