Can humor be vile and funny at the same time? I admit, it has happened that comedians who flirted with the abject made me laugh. How bored I have been with others who are too well-meaning. That’s the whole mystery of humor. And it is all the ambiguity of this joke which, this week, cost France Inter comedian Guillaume Meurice his job, who had described the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as a “kind of Nazi but without a foreskin” .
Can we laugh about it without adhering to this nameless infamy which consists of nazifying the people of the Shoah? The idea is not new. What joy to unmask the wolf disguised as a grandmother and to tell the victim that she has become like her tormentor. As the philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff said, there is nothing like painting Israelis as Nazis to “free oneself from the guilt of one of the greatest tragedies of recent history: the genocide of the Jews of Europe” which, very rare exceptions, has never been recognized in the Arab-Muslim world.
It is obviously not because you belong to a hard right, like Netanyahu, and have allied yourself out of pure political opportunism with extremist parties which are the shame of Israel that you are a Nazi and we are preparing a genocide. Genocide of which we are still awaiting clear proof. The two million citizens of Arab origin who live freely in Israel are striking proof to the contrary.
The slogans heard these days on American, French and Canadian campuses, however, continue to Nazify Israel, when they do not sometimes express blatant anti-Semitism. So it is with the mantra “ from the river to the sea » (“from the river to the sea”), whose origin evokes nothing less than a Palestine where Israel would have been wiped off the map. Should we, to support the Palestinian people – who deserve all our compassion, let us repeat – go so far as to qualify the pogrom of October 7 as an act of resistance? Or silence the absolute horror, which amounts to the same thing?
We can certainly understand the desire of a generation raised in the suburbs, in an often stifling moralism, to replay the great epic of opposition to the Vietnam War. “In 67 everything was beautiful, it was the year of love,” said the song.
Half a century later, however, the mythology has taken on a few wrinkles. If the liberation of Vietnam deserved everyone’s support, the same was not true of the Viet Cong and their communist allies, whose true face was revealed to us a few years later by the multiple waves of boat people and the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. A real one, this one, since it caused 1.7 million deaths.
Half a century later, despite the legitimate emotion, it is nevertheless the same blissful naivety which is expressed towards Hamas, whose avowed objective is not to create a Palestinian state, but to re-establish the caliphate in Palestine. And for that, to put an end to the State of Israel.
Would it be betraying “the cause” or “playing into the enemy’s hands” to remind these LGBTQ+ activists and others “ Queers for Palestine » the fate that Sharia law would reserve for them in the event of a Hamas victory? As for those who scream their often legitimate anger against Israel, do they know the fate reserved for women in these theocracies?
It was Raymond Aron who said that “men make history, but they do not know the history they make”. This criminal naivety is strangely reminiscent of that of the French left which, behind Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault, had in the 1970s only kind words towards Ayatollah Khomeini, who took refuge in the small village of Neauphle-le-Château. Talk to these far-left youth who were very active at the time in Iranian universities, and who were literally exterminated after the 1979 revolution.
If we are right to denounce the political dead end that Netanyahu represents, the legitimate emotion aroused by the suffering of the Palestinians cannot justify the slightest concession to an organization which, by Islamizing the cause of the Palestinians for the benefit of a pure religious delirium, a sign for the latter of the most terrible defeats. “What Hamas was seeking,” writes the former French ambassador to Tel Aviv Gérard Araud, “is to commit atrocities that make any compromise unacceptable. I fear he has succeeded…”
*****
Impossible to write this week without raising our hats high to a man without whom we would not be what we are. Bernard Pivot was not only the representative of this art of French conversation. By transposing them to the small screen, he brought back to life these literary salons, most of the time hosted by women, which had punctuated French intellectual life since the 16th century.e century.
Even more, he will have been the eminent symbol of this democratic era which is now over, where television (along with schools) devoted its efforts to bringing the greatest number of people into communion with the great works of literature. An era where one could still enjoy civilized exchanges, regardless of their political affiliation, between Jean d’Ormesson and Philippe Sollers, Alexandre Soljenitsyne and Jean Daniel, Jacques Godbout and Pierre Falardeau.
Let us only hope that he was not the last representative of this noble idea.