Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter asHolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.
What North African anti-Semites learned from the French
By Damian Thompson World Last updated: February 14th, 2014
Dieudonné: hero of the banlieues (Photo: AP)
This week a French judge ordered the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala to take down a YouTube video. In it, he says he “knows nothing about the gas chambers” but can refer his viewers to “Robert” – that is, Robert Faurisson, a former academic who reckons the six million deaths never happened.
Dieudonné invented the “quenelle”, a disguised Nazi salute. I’m sure you remember the fuss. How odd, I thought at the time, that an entertainer who was once part of a double act with a Jewish friend should have drifted into Holocaust denial.
I’m no longer puzzled. I’ve been sent a copy ofThe French Intifada: the Long War Between France and its Arabs by Andrew Hussey, Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris. Hussey, liberal-Left in outlook, has been given an OBE for “services to cultural relations between the UK and France”. But his new book is unlikely to improve relations any further.
Before I read Hussey, I knew that French anti-Semitism, nurtured by Dreyfus and Vichy, was alive and well: it still flavours French traditionalist Catholicism and the Front National. I also knew that attacks on synagogues and cemeteries are predominantly the work of young males of north African descent (something the EU has tried to conceal).
The French Intifada joins the dots between the two. You might think that, given the gruesome racism of French Algeria, the Arab gangs of the banlieues (squalid housing estates encircling Paris and other cities) would despise no one more than the nominally Christian descendents of their colonial oppressors.
Wrong. It’s French Jews they really hate. Worse, Jew-hatred isn’t confined to gangs. Hussey spells this out in uncompromising language that you don’t expect from a contributor to the BBC and Guardian, which shy away from exposing non-white racism.
Anti-Semitism thrives in the banlieues, says Hussey: young people’s chatter is full of references to sale juif, sale yid, sale feuj(backslang), even youtre, an old slang word derived from the German Jude that carries overtones of the deportations of Vichy.
All this is less surprising once Hussey explains that, for 100 years, Algeria’s French settlers (colons or pied-noirs) and their Arab neighbours were united in loathing Jews: indeed, Cagayous, an anti-Semitic thug frompied-noir popular fiction, is still part of the folklore of Muslim Algeria. During Vichy, “both the colons and the Algerian Muslims were happy to accept the anti-Jewish laws that the Pétain government so shamefully and swiftly put into place”.
This historical context is worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder in 2006 of Ilan Halami, a 23-year-old Jewish mobile phone salesman who was found tied to a tree, dying of burns and other mutilations. Residents of the Parisian banlieue where he was tortured heard his screams and did nothing; his murder was celebrated in a community where Muslim rappers base their lyrics on the novelist Céline, a Nazi collaborator. This is Dieudonné’s audience.
I can derive only one comforting thought from Hussey’s brilliant book: Muslim Jew-hatred in France is so deeply rooted in that country’s native anti-Semitism that it’s unlikely to be replicated in Britain. Half a million French Jews, on the other hand, face an unnerving future. Last year Israel announced a three-year initiative to attract more Jewish immigrants from France. My guess is that it will succeed – thus handing final victory to the evil old men of Vichy and their successors: the young, vibrant, hate-crazed bigots of the banlieues.
Beware the clerical clampers
There was something a little strange about the photograph of Lino Carbosiero, David Cameron’s hairdresser, receiving his MBE from the Prince of Wales. Look closely, and you could see that Carbosiero was performing a double handshake, cupping his left hand under the Prince’s wrist. “He looked like a conductor congratulating the leader of the orchestra,” says my etiquette expert. At least HRH didn’t receive the deadly clerical handshake – that is, the left hand clamped on top of your wrist. “It’s the thing I hate most about priests,” I remember a teacher at my Catholic school telling me. “If you want to avoid it, nip out of Mass by a side entrance.”
Malt loaf memories
I had a visit the other day from a friend who’s careful with his pennies, shall we say. His gift: a packet of the fabled malt loaf Soreen, reduced by Tesco from 83p to 56p. I’d forgotten what good stuff it is, though I’m not a fan of its current slogan, “The secret’s in the squidge”. I much prefer the original Sixties TV ad, in which a dainty couple are taking tea when the glamorous lady spots an empty doily. “Hey! Where’s the Soreen, Doreen?” she bawls like a fishwife. (Doreen was presumably an absent-minded maid, or had scarfed it herself.) Beat that, Don Draper.
The name “Soreen” is derived from Sorensen and Green, the original owners. Incidentally, its website is still advertising a free tasting of Soreen in Leeds city centre earlier this month. How very frustrating to have missed it.
No one could be in safer hands
There was a heartbreaking article in the Telegraph last weekend by my friend Mary Kenny, the Irish journalist, human rights campaigner, historian and playwright. Her husband Richard West – once the most obstinately fearless of foreign correspondents – now needs full-time care after a stroke. As Mary recounts in her book Something of Myself and Others, that duty falls to her – and “I am not altruistic by nature”.
I yield to no one in my admiration for Mary’s work, but on this last point she is talking nonsense. Let’s go back to April 1994. I was present when a young man had to be helped to pick up a cup of coffee, so badly were his hands trembling after a near-suicidal drinking binge. The woman helping him was Miss Kenny, herself an ex-drinker, who had whisked him off to his first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.
The young man was, as you’ll have guessed, me. I haven’t had a drink since. Mary Kenny saved my life. God bless her.
When brisk walkers step on it
A “brisk walk” can reduce your risk of having a stroke by 20 per cent, according to Californian researchers. Hmm. I’ve got nothing against walking fast; indeed, I tend to walk very fast to the shops because I’m impatient and delayed gratification drives me nuts. But “brisk walks” are a different matter. They’re an end in themselves, much recommended by upper-class bores who announce “I’m going for a brisk walk” and even expect you to join them. They stick out a mile, their cheeks aglow with self-satisfaction, their gait verging on the Pythonesque. I like to watch them from taxis, hoping that they’ll step briskly into something that takes ages to remove from their brogues.
More by Damian Thompson:
A minute of Doctor Who you must not miss
Why persecuting gays is all the rage
Britain's real nasty party: the Liberal Democrats
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