THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

the deceitful war in Lebanon, for the Geneva Accords, and for and against numerousother issues in between.When I wrote my previous book, God Is Back, I felt that I was losing him. I triedto clarify my position regarding the anti-Semitic wave that swept the world in theearly 2000s and the increasing feeling that I had that some of us drewsadomasochistic pleasure from it. During this clarification, I reached for a thirty-pagebooklet by Finkielkraut, In the Name of the Other. Daring and innovative, it wasoriginally published in France as the French, and the Europeans, debated the minoritychallenge. The essay deals with the attitudes toward Muslims and Jews and makes adistinction between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel. Finkielkraut also discussesEurope’s view of the war in Iraq, Osama bin Laden, radical Islam, terror, and more.One of the most prominent debates at that time was the French government’sdecision to ban traditional Muslim dress in public schools for girls. A state committeeexamined ways of preserving the separation between church and state, and was thefocus of heated public debates.This philosopher’s diagnosis of Europe and its accounting of its past and ours isoften stunning in its innovation. Yet something bothered me very much, until I had toask, You too, Alain? Even you were infected with this national malaise? You, too,obsessively deal with the gentiles as persecutors? I wondered, also to his ears, if hehad started to adopt the insights of the conservative Jewish right, which draws fromthe well of “The Entire World is Against Us.”In a visit he made to the Knesset, and during a meeting he had with several of itsmembers, he tried to pacify me: “No, there was nothing to worr y about, but . . .”That but broke out forcefully in an interview he gave to Haaretz Magazine. Tounderstand the meaning of the original interview, it is worth reading first the apologyhe gave, in French in Le Monde after he had almost drowned in denunciations. Hiscritics erased all hues between white and black and placed him to the wall next toHitler, or at least Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is ridiculous: he is far from this place. Yet,what is troubling in Finkielkraut’s following words is not where his arrow hits or thesize of its vector, but its direction: from humanism to the right-wing— white,patronizing, and arrogant. He is not Eichmann or Göbbels, neither Jörg Haider ofAustria nor Vladimir Zhirinovsky of Russia, and not even a common national religiousIsraeli member of the Knesset, but what he says is still problematic.