During a round table organized in Pantin on February 7, 2024, the American philosopher Judith Butler, whose reputation is international and who is invited almost permanently in France, at the ENS-Ulm, at Sciences Po Paris and elsewhere, declared that the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 was "neither a terrorist attack", "nor an anti-Semitic attack", but an act of "armed uprising". She was invited by a collective of indigenous, decolonial, anti-Zionist associations, as well as by the NPA.
Why come back to these statements that have been said and repeated by members of political parties (LFI and others), student associations, and pretty much everywhere else? It is not because the parents of this philosopher were practicing Jews and that part of her family was exterminated by the Nazis: after all, no one is obliged to take responsibility for their family history. Nor is it because of the discordance between the poverty of Judith Butler's supposedly philosophical thought and her immense fame as a great philosopher of our time: after all, the gap between reality and appearance is so general that we are hardly surprised in this case. Finally, it is not because she is a muse of the Queer movement and gender theory, which radically questions heterosexuality as the basis of male domination: after all, these options on sexuality do not necessarily imply the loss of all common sense and honesty on other levels such as that of war or terrorism.
So why come back to it? Because the non-recognition of the ignominiously terrorist nature of the Hamas attack, with the assassination of 1200 people including babies, children, women raped and disemboweled, entire families burned alive, and all of this filmed by the actors-murderers of these terrible atrocities, is the symptom of an evil which, certainly, is not new, but is spreading very widely throughout the world.
I propose to call this evil "voluntary blindness", and I am of course forging this notion on the model of the concept of "voluntary servitude" by Étienne de La Boétie. This great thinker, a friend of Montaigne, used it to explain that submission to a tyrant is not based solely or primarily on constraint, but above all on the acceptance of the people, their renunciation of resistance and revolt. The power of the tyrant comes from the accumulated force that those who submit to him as if voluntarily lend him, without realizing it. In the same way, we can say that voluntary blindness affects those who do not want to recognize what, however, they see. This blindness is all the more blind because it takes itself for clairvoyance. And the reason for this is, this time, ideology. This was true with communist ideology when French intellectuals went to the USSR or China at the time of Mao's cultural revolution and returned delighted with what they had seen. Blindness is mistaken for clairvoyance when it passes through the sieve of ideology.
Today, the dominant ideology is decolonial, racialist, and gendered, and it is all the more blinding because it calls itself woke . It transforms Israel into the last of the colonial states, domineering and persecuting, in complete ignorance of historical reality. Worse, this blindness is fueled by the inverted mimicry of all moments in Jewish history (the diaspora, exile, the Holocaust, the return, etc.) to label the Palestinians, who thus become the "true Jews" (Alain Badiou, another self-proclaimed philosopher, this time French), including in universities in France, Europe, and the United States.
The most extravagant thing about this willful blindness is that, given Judith Butler's positions in favor of homosexuality, she would be immediately liable to stoning and death in a regime that followed the Islamist doctrine of Hamas...
