by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2022 Paul Ben-Itzak
“Have we learned nothing?”
— I.F. Stone
I really wanted to listen to French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour being interviewed on Radio France’s middle-brow chain France Inter’s morning program Monday. Not because I’m tempted by what has been reported as Zemmour’s venomous discourses — “reported” because the journalists of France Inter and its counterpart France Culture rarely quote these discourses directly, typically referring to them without a specific citation and expecting us to take their word for it — but because I have always been taught to keep an open mind, and because on at least one question Zemmour himself doesn’t fit the expected conservative mold, having expressed his openness to legalizing Marijuana. But I had to turn my radio off after five minutes. Not because of what Zemmour said — I believe it can be stimulating to listen to the arguments of people who don’t agree with you — but out of exasperation with the personalities who host program, Lea Salame and Nicholas Demorand, who never challenged Zemmour on his racialist (I prefer this term to ‘racist’ because it describes a kind of stereotyping based on racial prejudices, as opposed to labeling the person promulgating the stereotype, thus sticking to the act without demonizing the person, and I should add that I myself am regularly guilty of harboring racialist conceptions of the Other, particularly Blacks) premises, letting pass without follow-up his positing of a “war of civilizations” between Islam and Christianity (a trope whose historical resonances go as far back as the poet Alfred de Vigny justifying the invasion of Algeria by saying they’re all just a bunch of ‘throat-cutters’ anyway) as well as his description of HLM (moderate-priced housing) complexes as havens not only for “Islamists” but ‘kebab-eaters’ and ‘veil-wearers.’ (Seriously: “Kebab-eaters”? This doesn’t even rise to the level of rational argument but resembles more stadium name-calling or school-yard brawling, akin to the Brits calling the French “frog-eaters” or the French calling the Brits “roast-beefers.” I’m not sure what Zemmour would make of mezigue, like him a Jew and a devotee of Lebanese ‘schwarma’ kebabs who admires the exquisite method of the most expert purveyors of this delicacy to slice the lamb slivers from the spit with the precision of a moyle practicing a circumcision during the bris.) Had the population in question been Jewish and Zemmour reduced them to “knish-knoshers,” we all know that the interview would have ended right then and there. But as the only ones being denigrated were Muslims (or, implicitly, French Arabs) — in both the ‘kebab-eaters’ reduction and the tired ‘war of civilizations’ postulate — not only did it continue, but Zemmour’s racialisms were left to stand, unchallenged and mundane-isized. As had been his statement in a previous interview conducted by the same personalities held in December, just before vacation (thus allowing it to squeeze in before a strict equal media time rule for presidential candidates took effect in January; and this doesn’t count the disproportionate attention the French public radio media has been according to Zemmour for years, alarmingly similar to the free publicity the American mainstream media gave to Donald Trump prior to the 2016 presidential election, in both cases in a way promoting right-wing extremist points of view, because even when the media dismisses it, it is still exposed to and nourishes a certain public) that a Zemmour presidency would include no new naturalizations. Never mind that the interview took place just two weeks after the Franco-American entertainer, Rainbow Tribe mother, and decorated Hero of the Resistance Josephine Baker’s entry in the French Pantheon; Zemmour’s interlocuteurs failed to give the obvious response: “Et Josephine Baker?”
When the premises that support its proposed policies — that confirm its distorted vision of the world and society — are not challenged, racialism becomes banalized. (Resuming the interview later Monday, Inter reporter Elodie Forrest even characterized Zemmour’s discourse as ‘softened.’) This is precisely the type of irresponsible journalism that Albert Camus inveighed against in one of his first signed editorials when his newspaper Combat emerged from clandestinity just days after the Liberation of Paris, because Camus (who got his start as a journalist in his native Algeria) realized — with hope and idealism — the fundamental role journalism can and must play in constructing a free and democratic society. The immediate impetus for Camus’s concern was the deadly and rotten role the Vichy press had played in not just the collaboration globally, but specifically the demonization of the Jews that in turn enabled the deportation of 74,000 of them to the death camps, including 11,000 children, from which only 3,000 total returned. One of Zemmour’s claims which has been repeated — but never directly quoted — by the media here is that Vichy leader Rafael Petain saved the lives of French Jews. Apparently Zemmour has never heard of Max Jacob, the leading Surrealist poet, collaborator of Apollinaire and friend of Picasso and Cocteau, who, despite his conversion to Christianity 30 years earlier and fervent Christian proselytizing (Jacob’s last letter, to his priest, smuggled out from the train thanks to a complacent gendarme, referred to having several conversions in progress), was arrested in his native Bretagne in February 1944 by the Gestapo after being turned in by a neighbor, succumbing to pneumonia at the Drancy way-station outside Paris before he could be deported — and to his grand chagrin, confessed. (And presumably another Christian convert, the novelist Irene Nemirovsky, doesn’t count for Zemmour at all because she was born in Ukraine; never mind that Nemirovsky’s last novel, “Suite Francaise,” retrieved in a valise after she was deported and killed by the Nazis, is concerned not with her own plight and the looming peril on her own life but the perilous flight of Frenchmen and woman from assieged Paris. The pleas of Nemirovsky’s husband to the Nazi commandant of Paris after she was arrested to spare his wife because of the supposed critiques of Jews and Communists in her writings — in letters sent before he himself was arrested and deported to his death — are both pathetic and tragic.) If the brand of journalism practiced Monday morning at France Inter does not pro-actively caricature Muslims, in a way it is more nefarious because in not challenging these stereotypes when they are vehicled by presidential candidates, it lets them pass as facts, as givens: Muslims are kebab-eaters and veil-wearers, the Islamic and Christian concepts of ‘civilization’ are diametrically opposed (never mind that in a news program on a public radio station in a lay state, religious contructs of morality should be off the table, but this idea went out the window on France Inter earlier this year when Salame asked the Green Party candidate, Yannick Jadot, “Do you believe in God?” I’ll share Jadot’s answer here because it underlines that my criticism is not of France nor of French society nor even French politicians but of a sometimes deficient public radio standard which does justice to neither: He answered “No,” a response which would seal the end of any presidential candidate in another country that vaunts the separation of church and state, the United States but that here may have the opposite effect, so highly are lay values vaunted by ordinary citizens. And while we’re on Jadot — and just to demonstrate that I’m not particularly picking on the Right — equally abhorrent to Zemmour’s propositions was the Green candidate’s nauseating likening of Republican candidate Valerie Pecresse’s resurrecting president Nicolas Sarkozy’s idea to pass a Karcher wind-blower in the Paris suburbs, implicitly to deal with the real public safety threats that Pecresse, as the Paris region’s president, understands a lot better than Jadot, to “ethnic cleansing,” which also went unchallenged on France Inter. Jadot’s proposal to resolve the problem of pedestrians accidentally killed by hunters — banning hunting on week-ends and school vacations, which would effectively eliminate a centuries-old French tradition — if not as offensive was equally inane. If he’d just talked to my neighbor, he would have discovered an easier solution: Ban the use of long-distance carabines, which can reach as far as 1.5 kilometers, and confine hunting to shot-guns, which can only go 150 meters, thus permitting the user to actual see what he’s shooting at.)
Camus once envisioned (as A.J. Liebling reported in his classic “The Press”) keeping a file on all journalists in which their biases would be enumerated — a sort of “truth index,” as Liebling characterized it, which would allow the reader to evaluate the verity of the journalist’s reporting based on his or her record and established biases.
But now the problem is much more grave, much more deep-rooted, because it is not one of journalistic bias but of journalistic inadequacy (because journalists are not just ciphers, they should be interlocuteurs) and — given the stakes — complete irresponsibility. And abdication. An abdication which, to the extent that it could allow an Eric Zemmour to be elected president because it banalizes his constates (for a U.S. equivalent, imagine if Ku Klux Klan “wizard” and one-time presidential candidate David Duke was given the same media attention as Zemmour, his racialist constructs banalized and left unchallenged. Oops, already happened, in 2016.)
I want to repeat that the problem here is not so much the candidate, or even his inclusion in the mainstream debate, but the failure of (public radio) journalists to show up and do their job. In fact, the French system itself is FAR superior to the U.S. system for choosing a president; whereas in the U.S. the Democratic and Republican parties, with the mainstream media’s connivance, have succeeded in locking any other party and candidate out (and even some candidates from their own parties, worthy nominees Cory Booker and Julien Castro being excluded from some Democratic presidential debates in 2020 not because the New Jersey senator and former Obama housing secretary lacked the credentials, but because they hadn’t raised enough money), the spectrum of candidates for the two-round April French presidential election by law receiving equal media attention includes eight men and women, ranging from Zemmour on the extreme Right to the Communist party’s nomination on what’s described here as the extreme Left. So the failure here is not the State’s, but the Fifth Estate’s.
PS: Speaking of exactly the type of journalistic abdication which horrified Camus and which he was warning against in his Combat editorial — and just so you know I’m not just picking on the journalists of France Inter — of course the biggest horror which horrified Camus and his post-war generation was war. Ahead of France Inter’s banalization of the brand of racialist tropes vehicled by Eric Zemmour, its colleagues at sister chain France Culture were banalizing a classic war-mongering trope last week-end, with morning news anchor Camille Merigo characterizing new German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s hesitation to jump on the latest Russia paranoia express war bandwagon as “complacency.” If I say the characterization was hers — that of a news reader putatively supposed to be neutral — it’s because both occasions in which she employed this term lacked a subject, Merigo referring to the German leader’s “suspected complacency” towards the Kremlin… without specifying who exactly was the suspector, leaving us to assume that Scholz’s alleged complacency is universally suspected, and thus a given.
Here — in anti-Russian war-mongering — French journalists are unfortunately not alone, with (as Democracy Now reported last month) some of the American reporters questioning President Biden at his first White House news conference this year, the New York Times correspondent leading the charge, by practically goading him to war, repeating their performance ahead of the first Gulf War. (And during the second, NBC host Brian Williams went rhapsodic over the beauty of the rockets’ bright glare.)
The Paris Tribune 