Dieudo gets the egghead treatment...

Prof. Eric Marty, author and editor of numerous books, gives a rather abstruse analysis of the content of Dieudonné's statements.

VIEWPOINT

Take heart, Dieudonné!, by Eric Marty

LE MONDE | 06.03.04 | 13h58

Israel, the land that, in its flesh, is surely the most comfortably universal and cosmopolitan of all.

The Dieudonné scandal is pronounced in three parts. The first is his appearance on the Marc-Olivier Fogiel's show dressed as an orthodox Jew, with the accouterments of a Palestinian terrorist and shouting "Isra...Heil!" : here the Jewish victim materializes as his two executioners.

The second part are the political statements in which it appears that Jews are "slave drivers converted to banking" and that Israel has "financed apartheid its final solution projects" (Le Journal du Dimanche, February 8).

Third part: his appearance through numerous media, yelling about conspiracies, particularly on Canal+, on the evening of Saturday, February 28, for example ("7 jours au Groland"), where he acted the part of the banished, and where it emerged that his banishment illustrates the fact that he is speaking a truth that everyone wishes to silence.

This anti-Semitic farce in three acts is easily recognizable; so much has it been played out in history that now it only exists in parodic form, in which until then, the last known actor had been Jean-Marie Le Pen.

[...]

It shall be said that a victim — and blacks are obviously victims —ultimately has two choices: he can either condemn his genuine, historic tormentor — and this is the case with current historical projects on slavery — and thus cease to be a victim; or he can play on what René Girard has called mimetic rivalry: the victim choses not the enemy but the rival, that is to say the one who appears, in his eyes, unjustly, as identified by the world as being more of a victim than he is.

The rival victim is the one who prevents the victim from being, and proclaiming himself a victim the way he wants to. In the mind of anti-Semites, such is the place of the Jew. The ideas emerging from this small but virulent fraction of anti-Semites among the black community eliminates the Jews as victims by making them into executioners (executioners of the Palestinians), but, as if this weren't enough to cancel out the weight of mimetic rivalry, the Jews must be made into their own executioners: the Jew is a slave driver, a financier of apartheid, etc.

[...]Dieudonné and his friends should take heart: Israel is the first civilization in the world to have admitted the absolute anthropological equality of blacks by viewing the sons of Cham as the direct descendants of a universal parent (Adam), and this isn't the least benefit of monotheism that the self-proclaimed atheist that is Dieudonné might think on.

Moreover, because the notion of "race" is foreign to the Jewish being, there are even Jewish "Negroes" — the Falashas — that Operation Moses, starting in 1984, and then Operation Solomon, in 1991, have saved from the discriminations they suffered in Ethiopia and integrated into the land of Sem, Israel, the country that, in its flesh is surely the most comfortably universal and cosmopolitan of all.

During the Dieudonné scandal, an AFP bulletin informed us that the mayor of Nablus resigned in the face of the terror that the Palestinian militias (including the al-Aqsa martyrs brigades) had been inflicting on the population since the start of the Intifada (September 2000) and of which the latest incidents had caused the death of 30 people, including the mayor's own brother. That I know, the French media took little notice, if any. That's another one for Dieudonné and co. to think on: the real criminal is rarely the scapegoat!

Eric Marty is professor of contemporary French literature at université Paris-VII - Denis-Diderot.

• ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN THE 07.03.04 EDITION