Interview with P.-A. Taguieff by Giulio Meotti, published in the daily newspaper The paper (Italy) November 6, 2023, about his book The New Opium of Progressives. Radical Anti-Zionism and Islamo-Palestinianism, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Leaflets”, 2023.

How is it possible that Western elites justify, trivialize and minimize Hamas massacres?

P.-A. Taguieff: A part of the Western elites, located on the left and calling themselves "progressives", has converted to the political religion based on the cult of the Palestinian-victim and the criminalization of the Jew-dominator. Their ideological reflexes dictate that they defend the supposed "dominated" against the supposed "dominants". The "progressive" elites have long internalized the evidence revolving around the opposition "dominants/dominated". The victim inversion that this conversion implies results in the Nazification of the "Zionists" and more broadly of the Jews. The message disseminated is the following: the Jewish-Zionists are the new Nazis, while the Palestinians are the new Jews. The instrumentalization and perversion of anti-racism thus consists in giving it the face of anti-Zionism, based on the image of the Palestinian victim of a fantasized "Zionism".

To understand the passionate and mythical springs of victim inversion, we must go back to the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, around the middle of the 12th century.^e century, when the first accusations of ritual murder were made against Jews, who were hunted, persecuted and murdered for it. The myth of the Jew as "murderer of non-Jewish children" was subsequently integrated into the anti-Jewish culture of the Muslim world, to become a major theme of accusation against the "Zionists", criminalized as "murderers of Palestinian children". Let us recall that in March 2012, in Toulouse, the Islamo-terrorist Mohamed Merah, by killing Jewish children, had declared that he wanted to "avenge Palestinian children". In the last war in Gaza, triggered by the deadly jihadist attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023, the theme of the murder of Palestinian children by the IDF was immediately reactivated by Palestinian propaganda and its relays throughout the world.

In the discourse of the revolutionary or radical left, after the fall of the Soviet empire, the "proletarian cause" and the "cause of the people" gave way to the "Palestinian cause", a new "universal cause" in that it merged the theme of the courageous "resistance" of a minority to a supposedly "colonial" state, Israel, and that of the pious denunciation of "Islamophobia", a capital sin attributed to all those who did not rally to the flag of Islamo-Palestinianism. The cultural strategists of anti-Zionism, in all its forms, have continued to fuel and exploit the victim imagination and rhetoric, around the figure of the Palestinian-victim, which has gradually become that of the Muslim-victim. This gross amalgamation of victimhood has made it possible to articulate radical anti-Zionism and the "fight against Islamophobia", within a revolutionary-style political mythology.           

How is woke (LGBT, gender, decolonial, Black Lives Matters, etc.) allied to this barbarism?

P.-A. Taguieff: It is the application to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of the reading grid offered by anticolonialism and antiracism that has led to the wokeness of interpretations of said conflict. There has been, essentially on the left, a focus of indignation, previously ideologized by Palestinian propaganda, on the accusations of "massacre", "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide", criminal acts supposedly committed by Tsahal in its legitimate response to the bloody attacks of Hamas. This demonizing accusation of Israel is part of the demonological treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This globalized Gnostic anti-Zionism, which functions as a method of salvation and a promise of redemption - destroy Israel to save humanity - is at the heart of the new Judeophobia, of this hatred of Jews that has adopted the language of anti-Zionist hatred.  

 It is in left-wing opinions that today the legacy of many more or less recycled anti-Jewish prejudices is most visible: the exploitative, dominating, manipulative and socially parasitic Jew. Considered as polymorphous executioners, Jews can thus be accused of making victims of various categories: the exploited, the dominated, the manipulated and the parasitized. Added to this is the figure of the ritual murderer Jew, supposed to be reborn in that of the Israeli soldier who bombs the Gaza Strip. And the victims here are Palestinians perceived above all as Muslims. Hence the accusation of "Islamophobia".

In this context, where Israel has been accused of being an "apartheid state", the anti-racist struggle has once again turned against the Jews. These distortions of anti-racism began in the 1960s, when Soviet propaganda, relayed by that of the PLO, spread the equation "Zionism = racism". The idea was to turn the accusation of racism against the Jews by setting up the Palestinians as representatives of the victim par excellence. Since then, the pseudo-anti-racist activism of the radical left has sought and found, even invented, other general victimized categories - immigrants, Muslims, "Blacks", "Arabs", "undocumented immigrants", etc. The Jews who were victims of the Shoah were to disappear from the victim picture, replaced by the Palestinians who were victims of the Nakba. This is a sleight of hand, because the Nazi genocide of European Jews during World War II has nothing to do with the exodus of part of the Palestinian population during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948-1949.         

Are pro-Hamas rallies in Europe also a sign of Islamization and demographic changes in our cities?

P.-A. Taguieff: Since the mega-pogrom of October 7, the multiplication of pro-Hamas demonstrations, disguised as pro-Palestinian demonstrations, testifies to the formation, in each Western democratic society, of a counter-society fundamentally hostile to the global society and not simply in a state of secession – a phenomenon commonly called “communitarianism”, “separatism”, “ghettoization”, etc. This counter-society is formed from an immigrant population of Islamic culture, a significant part of which has not integrated into Western democratic societies, does not recognize itself in their values ​​and perceives the West as the enemy that must be fought. The figure of the absolute enemy includes the State of Israel and Western civilization. The counter-society now imagines the revolution on the jihadist model, involving armed struggle. It is therefore, more precisely, a two-faced counter-society: Islamist and ultra-leftist, it being understood that the radical left, rallied to decolonialism as to ecofeminism, are now wokified.  

The alliance of Islamists and radical lefts was baptized and conceptualized by me, in the early 2000s, as "Islamo-leftism." Its representatives are recognized in particular by the fact that they erect "Islamophobia," "anti-immigrant xenophobia," and "Zionism" as the main figures of racism in contemporary Western societies. Therefore, being antiracist means being at once anti-Islamophobic, pro-immigrant (or "immigrationist"), and anti-Zionist. The Islamophilia presupposed by this ideological position often takes the form of "Islamismophilia," particularly in interpretations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that imply seeing Islamo-terrorist movements, such as Hamas or Islamic Jihad, as legitimate representatives of Palestinian "resistance" against the "colonialism" and "racism" of the State of Israel. More generally, it is about "resisting" the forces or states that are supposed to embody "colonialism," "racism," and "imperialism," namely Western nations and Israel, or, in the sloganeering language of Islamists, "the American-Zionist axis" or "the Jewish-Crusader alliance." This is why Islamo-leftists are doomed to transform themselves into "Islamismo-leftists."  

What is at stake in this battle of civilization? Not just Israel…

P.-A. Taguieff: The enemy designated by the leaders and ideologues of these heterogeneous neo-revolutionary counter-societies is not simply the West – a fantasized West, the principle of Evil – but the Westernization of the world. This is the new absolute enemy, with multiple faces, like the devil: the West denounced as intrinsically racist, Islamophobic, imperialist (or expansionist) and colonialist, even genocidal. This type of anti-Western counter-society can be observed in many other European nations as well as in North America. The seduction it exerts comes from the fact that it arises in societies that want to be and say they are multicultural or multi-ethnic, thus offering the enemies of the West a powerful legitimizing argument: Western civilization does not exist or no longer exists, since there is only cultural diversity and cultural or civilizational hybridizations. The crossing, mixing and blending of civilizations would have made civilizations disappear in the global melting pot. It would therefore be false, even dangerous, to assert that there are civilizational identities in the age of globalized trade and mixing. This would be to sink into the new deadly sin defined by the social sciences: essentialism. The paradox of radical anti-Westernism shared by Islamists and neo-leftists, that is to say the members – active or not – of the Islamo-leftist camp, consists in the simultaneous affirmation of two contradictory theses: on the one hand, the thesis according to which Western civilization does not exist, and, on the other hand, the thesis according to which the West is toxic, predatory and domineering, and consequently embodies a threat to all peoples.   

In the years following the First World War, faced with the spectacle of mass slaughter and ruins, a great debate pitted the prophets of the decadence or decline of the West against those who called for the defense of the West. This debate focused on the fate of Western civilization, which was supposed to be surrounded by threats, struck by a temporary weakening or entered its twilight or final phase. The vision of the end of the Western world then took on the color of evidence and became the major theme of a mythical narrative. In some respects, we can consider that this intellectual and political debate has today re-established itself at the center of Westerners' questions about themselves, bringing back the question of the civilizational identity of the West, and more particularly of the modern West, approached through its crises and its malaise, in which the pathologies of identity have played a major role.

     But the passionate and political-cultural context is no longer the same: it is characterized today by the articulation between a hatred of the West that has become globalized and a self-hatred that has taken root in the Western world. A hatred fueled by envy and resentment in the first case, a hatred poisoned by shame and guilt in the second. The loss of self-confidence is a symptom of decadence. In his essay on "murderous religions" published in 2006, the Israeli historian Elie Barnavi, referring to the Islamist threat, did not hesitate to state with lucidity: "A civilization that loses confidence in itself to the point of losing the taste for defending itself, begins its decadence." As for self-hatred, it prepares the ground for betrayal: many Westerners have joined the camp of the enemies of the West, or are preparing to do so.  

Hatred of the West can be referred to by the neologism "hesperophobia" - but semantically, the expression "hesperomisia" would be better formed, since it is a question of "hatred" (misos) more than fear (phobos). This is an ontological hatred that is found today spread in particular in the Muslim world under Islamist influence. A paradoxical hatred, since it took off long after the dismantling of the European colonial empires. But hesperophobia is also present in Russia, China and in the populations of Western countries, in particular in the circles of the new wokified extreme left, which wants to put an end to the heritage of Western civilization that it never ceases to demonize.       

Observable especially among young people fascinated by violence and radical commitments, the Islamization of radicalism is a process of which political and cultural Islamo-leftism is one of the products, the other being the shift to jihad. Islamization plays the role of a powerful mode of legitimization of a desire for a total break with the Western world that has become an object of hatred. By insisting on the Ummah as a community of supranational belonging, in accordance with Islamic tradition, the ideologues of political Islam strive to delegitimize national affiliations located outside the "domain of submission to God" (Dar al Islam). This Islamic disqualification of national sentiment constitutes a point of ideological convergence with the left-wing lefts who, faithful to their internationalist tradition, demonize patriotism as much as nationalism. What must be avoided at all costs is the formation of powerful and dynamic counter-societies within our Western democratic societies which often tend to blind themselves to threats coming from within themselves, particularly when they sharpen the feeling of guilt that is working on them. A refuge for freedoms and the demand for rationality despite its suicidal temptations and its bursts of arrogance, Western civilization deserves to be defended against its enemies and false friends. Let us simply say that the West must be defended in spite of everything, and now in spite of itself.