Hyper Cacher, then Silence and Lies
Years ago, as a college student, I said something to my mother about my feelings of betrayal by classmates who prided themselves on their political awareness, but ignored or deliberately excluded and diminished Jewish issues. My mother was doing the dishes, I recall, and I have always remembered how she hung a dish towel over the faucet, and told me “they don’t mean you”.
It was an important lesson for any young Jewish adult grappling with their role in social justice circles. It may seem dismal, but it’s actually been a source of strength to me in the years since then to understand that I am not confused, not misunderstanding, nor somehow deficient...it’s simply that the global left is anti-Semitic as hell, and that influences left-wing politics on every level, even/especially young progressive would-be activists at a liberal arts college in Northern California.
Twenty years later, I’ve had far too much practice in understanding the vectors of anti-Semitism and violence. As soon as I realized that the shooters who murdered twelve people at the Charlie Hebdo offices were still loose in Paris, I understood a couple of things right away: if not stopped, they would kill again, and they would seek out Jews to kill. There was no doubt in my mind that their next target would be a Jewish school, synagogue, or community center. The only way this would be avoided is if they were killed or captured before they got that far. The second massacre at the Hyper Cacher was like a punch in the gut, but it was entirely expected.
So was what happened afterward in the left-wing blogosphere and some mainstream media. The Hyper Cacher massacre, and the religious, ethnic and political reasons for it were completely erased. Progressive media immediately became obsessed with the prospect of rising Islamophobia in France and elsewhere as a result of the attacks. Charlie Hebdo’s crude cartoons were examined, and they/France/the Western world were duly judged racist...not, everyone perfunctorily added, that that justified violence. In other words, a complex terror attack carried out by people with ties to al-Qaeda and Islamic State, specifically targeting Jews among others as targets for murder, was quickly transformed by progressive American writers into a story about French racism, isolated extremists, and the importance of protecting Muslims in France and elsewhere. Because the murder of Jews did not fit the narrative, and because it was not important to these people to begin with, it was thrown out. Erased. This is so routine by now that it doesn’t even register with people who consider themselves hyper-sensitive to matters of oppression and exclusion.
Some people simply wrote about the attacks without acknowledging the Jews at all. Mehreen Kasana, a well-regarded blogger, devoted a lengthy essay on her blog to Charlie Hebdo, satire, and the violence done against Muslims by European and American society, without once mentioning the Jewish victims of the massacre--even those who didn’t work for Charlie Hebdo. No, that’s in error. Once, she does mention Jews, in passing, to condemn not those who murdered Jews in Paris, but, of course, Charlie Hebdo. Jews are good enough to be added on to the charges against Europe, but on their deaths, Kasana is silent.
Melissa McEwan at Shakesville took another approach, noting the Western press’s muted response to the Baga Massacre, with its far higher death toll, that took place at the hands of Nigeria’s Boko Haram in the same week as the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
“The massacre in Nigeria has gotten comparatively little attention in the Western media,” she writes, “which has been obsessively documenting the attack in France on the staff of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Though both attacks were committed by men who are Muslim extremists, here are some key differences between the two massacres: 1. In Nigeria, the victims are black, many of them women and children. In France, the victims are almost exclusively white men. 2. In Nigeria, many/all of the victims were themselves Muslim. In France, all but one of the victims were not Muslim.” (Bolding mine).
I’m in agreement with McEwan that the horror in Nigeria, as in Syria, as in many places was and is disregarded in the West for reasons that are as obvious as they are inadequate. But that phrase ‘almost exclusively white men’ skillfully, and perhaps unconsciously, erases who was actually killed and why. Elsa Cayat was both a woman and a Tunisian Jew. Moustapha Ourrad was Algerian, and a Muslim. George Wolinski was a Jew raised in Tunisia. Ahmed Merabet was a North African Muslim. Clarissa Jean-Philippe was a black woman from Martinique. Philippe Braham, Francois-Michel Saada, Yohan Cohen and Yoav Hattab were Tunisian Jews. So a group of seventeen that includes seven ethnic North Africans, six Jews, two women, and one black Martiniquaise becomes with a wave of McEwan’s hand, a group of ‘almost exclusively white men’, the powerful whom the world mourns, presumably.
Once again, it is far easier to pit the dead at the Charlie Hebdo offices against the death toll elsewhere, and to cut out the Jews completely, to the point where it cannot be said that they were murdered because they were Jews, where they cannot be named, and where they are, in fact, misidentified as ‘white men’.
McEwan continues: “As "reprisal" attacks on French Muslims are justified or contextualized with rhetoric about people being "fed up" with Muslim extremism or terrorist violence, we are not meant to question the yawning apathy directed toward Nigerian victims who don't fit into simple narratives of Muslims attacking non-Muslims, or dark-skinned people attacking white people, and who don't inspire calls for solidarity because they were killed for simply living their lives instead of something "heroic" like publishing reprehensibly racist cartoons.”
There’s a simple narrative at work in McEwan’s writing as well, and it begins with the complete erasure of the anti-Semitic nature of the attacks. Out of seventeen people killed in the Paris massacre, six were Jews. At least five were targeted explicitly for that reason. Elsa Cayat was the only woman killed at the Charlie Hebdo offices, and there is ample reason to believe that she was targeted as a Jew.
Moving beyond erasure, some journalists from prestigious European news sources explicitly tried to create a narrative that framed anti-Semitic murders by men actively involved with anti-Semitic terrorist organizations as legitimate acts of...resistance? Righteousness? Interviewing a woman in Paris in the wake of the Hyper Cacher shooting, Tim Willcox of the BBC told a Jewish woman he interviewed in Paris that “(m)any critics, though, of Israel’s policy would suggest the Palestinians suffered hugely at Jewish hands as well.” and that everything is seen from different perspectives.” Jeremy Vine, on BBC Radio 2 responded to a guest on his show stating that Jews are targets of Muslim terror, and that the reverse does not happen by stating: “You say it doesn’t happen the other way round – there will be people who say wait; when you look at the State of Israel and what it does in the occupied territories, that’s the…that’s the other side of the argument.” Both men, addressing an act of terror that was aimed at French Jews, by French Muslims, both communities of primarily North African culture and descent, feel that it is necessary to suggest that the Israel/Palestine conflict acts as an inspiration and justification for the murder of non-Israeli Jewish civilians--and of course, it does, in large part because the Left, all the while protesting too much, has allowed it to be that for more than forty years.
I don’t want to dismiss the concerns of the European Muslim communities about how terrorist attacks affect them. My anger is about the experience of being told, repeatedly, that the actual murder of Jews is a sidebar issue, if that, to the real, true and important social justice concern that is concern for non-Jews. My anger is about being told, at once, that my privilege is so great that I should have no concern for my people’s safety and that I should expect my people to be targets. My anger is about being told that the existence of a Jewish nation, and its involvement in conflict is so extreme a violation of the human norm of the powerless Jew that it must be brought up as a moral counterweight each and every time that Jews are attacked by Muslims or leftists anywhere in the world.
Silence breeds forgetfulness. Not long ago, I observed a Jewish blogger told that anti-Semitism in Europe is minimal. “Come back when your children are being shot in the streets,” he was told. He pointed out that not only have Jewish children been targeted repeatedly throughout history both ancient and modern, but that
If you don’t remember these events, if you make a conscious effort not to register these events, and are part of a political framework that encourages you not to register them, and to consider them isolated, and to dismiss them because the perpetrators are from ethnic and religious groups you feel protective toward, or presume must always be victims in their relationship to people in the West, you are collaborating in the perpetuation of global anti-Semitism.
