Speech of M. Roger Cukierman, president of the CRIF, on January 25th, 2003

You greatly honor the Jewish Community in graciously agreeing to hold this meeting with us, true to the Republican tradition of dialogue initiated by your predecessors.

The CRIF was founded in 1943, during the dark days of Nazism as hope began to emerge from London within the resistance movement. We are also commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

President Chirac’s historic declaration on July 16 1995 enables us to draw lessons from this somber period in human history. The Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust chaired by Mrs. Simone Veil symbolizes this desire never to forget.

This is also the aim of the Yad Vashem Institute, which will soon publish a Dictionnaire des Justes de France (Dictionary of the Righteous Of France), which pays tribute to French people, often from humble backgrounds, who courageously helped Jews at the risk of their own lives.

Last year, we voiced our strong support for France and our major concern at the increasing number of acts against Jews.

Mr. Prime minister, you heard our appeal. On July 21 2002, at the Square of the Jewish Martyrs of the Vel-d'Hiv Round-up, you strongly stated that any attack on the Jewish community was an attack on France and its Republican values.

We welcome the efficient work being done by your interior minister under your authority. Acts against Jews are noticeably decreasing but they have not stopped entirely. Far from it. These acts not only pose a threat to public law and order but a challenge to the future of the Republic.

In the attack on Rabbi Gabriel Farhi, which has grieved us all, we seek the truth, the whole truth, and not pernicious rumors.

Because we feel we are in the vanguard in defending Republican values and remain keenly preoccupied by the resurgence of acts against Jews, we have several wishes:

- the law must be stricter in punishing racist or anti-Semitic acts. Such a motion, that we welcome, was submitted by Pierre Lellouche and unanimously adopted by Parliament;


- we also believe that the three-month period of limitation on crimes involving the expression of racist or anti-Semitic views in France should be extended to one year when such crimes are committed on the Internet;


- finally, we call for international legislation to prevent the dissemination of racist or anti-Semitic material on the Internet.

we have observed other abuses which are of major concern to France as a whole since they undermine the very principle of a secular state.

We receive a growing number of worrying reports on such abuses from headmasters, teachers, students or their parents. The book Les territoires perdus de la République (The Republic's Lost Territories) is a revealing example.

In spite of their undoubtable willingness to do so, schoolteachers are finding it more difficult to teach pupils about the Holocaust, about Zionism, the Dreyfus case or the ancient history of the Hebrews. Some pupils use negationist rhetoric to refute the very existence of the Holocaust. Can we expect the rewriting of France's history, beginning with episodes like Charles Martel or the Crusades?

Eating habits and dress codes are already changing. Some pupils refuse to attend biology classes, physical exercise sessions or sports activities.

The free expression of anti-Semitism has become widespread. Yet a baby is not born an anti-Semite. If he becomes anti-Semitic it is due to family attitudes, a flawed education system, the influence of leisure activities and violence on television. It is also the result of distant TV channels, which spread thanks to dish antennas despicable propaganda such as the 42 episodes of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion broadcast on Egyptian TV. Such messages are entering the classrooms of our schools.

Jews have long been the victims of slander and libel.

The violence of recent years has hurt us a lot. Not because of physical pain or material prejudice, but because of the moral suffering we bore. Sixty years after the Holocaust, people dare to hurt our children because they are Jews.

We cannot mention anti-Semitism without talking about racism, as reflect in disrespect towards teachers, rudeness, misogyny, verbal abuse and physical violence.

This climate has prompted some parents to take their children out of state schools and to enroll them in private schools. The regrettable consequence of this is the fragmentation of France into communities.

We are wrongly perceived as contributing to the fragmentation of French society. We are the victims, not the creators of this fragmentation. This argument is tantamount to accusing Emile Zola and Bernard Lazare of supporting Dreyfus !

The education system in France must tighten the social fabric as it so brilliantly did in the past with all the different waves of immigrants.

The time is now ripe to teach the history of the world’s major religions in our schools as part of the general curriculum, to let pupils learn about peoples, to introduce civics and teach tolerance.

The State guarantees citizens the right to choose and practice their own religion. However, in a Republican context religion must remain a private matter. Secular schools are places of neutrality and freedom. Secularism is an urgent obligation.

resolve and imagination are needed to pursue the vision held by Jules Ferry. The national education system has a challenge to face that concerns France’s future. I am aware of the hugely difficulty task that Luc Ferry and Mr. Darcos have.

But aren't the most desperate the most beautiful songs?

The danger lies indeed in tolerating intolerance. When the statue of captain Dreyfus is smeared with graffiti, when tombstones are desecrated, when violence is no longer headline news, we are right to feel concern.

We realize that France is neither a racist nor an anti-Semitic country, nor are the successive governments that run the country. But whether on the extreme right or left of the political spectrum some of our fellow countrymen and women are.

Firstly, France has an extreme-right wing that hankers after racial ranking, embracing the theories of deicide, that delights in finding scapegoats to explain social frustrations or concerns over insecurity. It is also frightening to think that one French voter out of five may have embraced such ideas and that their candidate reached the second round of the last presidential elections.

In the same time, an extreme-left wing, which is anti globalization, anti capitalist, anti-American and anti-Zionist is expanding. It’s a nouvelle cuisine concocting old fantasies with the trendy dressing called anti-Zionism. Israel, a country no larger than two or three French departments, is claimed to exemplify every injustice in the world.

Anti-Zionism unites this movement, which extends from revolutionary parties such as Lutte Ouvrière and the LCR, to a fraction of the extreme left. To clear their conscience, this broad spectrum of opinion boasts progressive ideas that purport to be anti racist.

This current of anti-Zionist thinking also extends to one farmers’ union in France. The leader of this movement flouts our laws and stirs up agitation to the extent that it defends French farmers in Durban, Porto Alegre, Genoa, Ramallah and Seattle! French people sensitive to the world’s ills are made to believe in a herald in whom they see a Robin Hood.

We feel deprived of the friendship of too many of these historical figures and organizations supposed to defend human rights, arguing humanism based on extremism.

Curiously, these groups also absolve the bloodiest of regimes. No one gives a thought any more to the millions of murders perpetuated on every continent under their banner.

This brown-green-red alliance sends a shiver up the spine. It is waiting for democrats to slip up and falter.

Why are these movements given such favorable treatment in so many publications? I have no answer to this.

On the other hand, I note an improvement in the semantics used in the media, which seems to have heard the insistent and legitimate remarks made by the CRIF.

The CRIF endeavors to maintain contacts with moderate Muslim leaders who, like us, are concerned by the rise of fanaticism. We believe that the major religions are duty-bound to observe moral precepts that must govern the lives of people on this earth.

Turning to French Muslims, to the Hon. Boubakeur. Let us focus on what we have in common in our cultures and it is an important lot. Let us resume a dialogue to live more in harmony with one another. This country must not import violence from the Middle East. It would be harmful for our communities to do so. It would be harmful for France.

An odd complicity, an unnatural alliance between the secular and revolutionary left and pro-Palestinian movements has an unexpected consequence: boycott. There has been a coordinated call since last spring to boycott Israeli products. Consumers have been told to shun so-called Zionist companies owned by or managed by French Jews, singled out to the hatred of the consumer. This confirms, if needed, how anti-Zionism is the new manifestation of anti-Semitism.

Six months ago we asked the French justice minister to fully enforce the law against the boycott. We gave him substantial evidence and reasons. We are waiting for a decision. We hope, Mr. Prime minister, that the law will be enforced.

The boycott idea is also gaining currency in our in universities.

Academics committed to pro-Palestinian militancy are calling for the termination of the European framework agreement on university cooperation with the State of Israel initiated by Mrs. Edith Cresson. The Board of Governors of Paris 6 University is even calling on the Conference of University Deans to adopt the same motion nation-wide.

In so doing, these academics are using their institutions to pursue ends that have nothing to do with the transmission of knowledge. They are creating discrimination against a university system that is the envy of the whole world.

Raison d’état here overlaps with morals. We know that scientific cooperation as a model of harmony and efficiency will be maintained.

Because the boycott concept seems to us contrary to the principles of democracy, we traveled to the United States last May. We explained to American Jewish organizations, who were tempted by a boycott against French products that France was not an anti-Semitic country. We believe that we convinced them.

We are particularly sensitive to these questions of secularity and tolerance since the harmony of French society and law and order in our country depend on the solutions to be found.

Mr Prime Minister, Europe’s founding fathers - Robert Schuman, Monnet and Adenauer – dreamt of a humanist, tolerant Europe. These moral values are disputed by international terrorist groups, which wish to impose a new world order. Its supporters hold established positions in our society and operate within the United Nations.

The same fanaticism is blindly striking at Europe, America, Africa and Asia. No one is safe. The blood of French nationals has not been spared. This same blood was spilled in Bali, Kenya, Karachi, Djerba, Yemen or Israel. Chemical, biological and nuclear weapons may be deployed. Our aircraft, hotels, monuments, skyscrapers are targets. Those who fear that the fight against terrorism will undermine our freedoms have got their priorities wrong, as did Daladier and Chamberlain. Democracy has prevailed over Nazism and Stalinism. It must extirpate the terrorist cancer. We have no doubt that faced with this peril, France, as in the past, united with other free nations, will overcome fanaticism.

In the single month of March 2002, 125 Israeli civilians were killed in terrorist attacks.

On 7 April 2002, at the request of the CRIF, 200,000 French men and women took to the streets in Paris, Toulouse, Nice, Strasbourg, Marseille and Lyon. They carried the French national flag and sang the Marseillaise. They were not ashamed to express their support for the Israeli people hard hit by terrorist attacks.

On that day, those men and women who belong to the right and left of the political spectrum asserted their support for the CRIF’s fight against anti-Semitism and their attachment to the State of Israel.

Yes, we stand united with the State of Israel. From that tiny state we derive the basis of our regained dignity after centuries of wandering and suffering opprobrium.

The existence of the State of Israel should be an accepted principle. It is not. Many dictatorships in the Middle East would like to see its demise. They are intolerant towards the existence of a democratic state.

If Israeli soldiers did not deeply respect human life, this war would have claimed a hundred times more deaths, as the present civil war in Algeria is doing and about which we read so little, although it taking place on our doorstep.

Israel is not just the only democracy in the Middle East. It is the only democracy in the world, which maintains the freedom of the press in war, something that neither the USA, the UK, nor even our own country have done nor do.

Let me be clear here. The CRIF wants a negotiated solution, which will enable the Sate of Israel and Palestinian state to live in peace.

The government of the State of Israel makes mistakes? Who doesn’t? True, it reacts forcefully to acts of terror. But what would we do if hundreds of women and children were bombed in our buses and cafés? Turn the other cheek? Walk away? Where to? Be generous with the enemy? From a Paris perspective, yes, we are tempted to tell the Israelis: «Show generosity, agree to concessions such as those negotiated at Camp David».

However, we are saddened and embittered by the fact that the chairman of the Palestinian Authority continues to refuse such concessions.

Why has he not followed the example of President Sadat of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan? There is only one explication. He refuses to recognize the State of Israel.

The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will emerge when all those who refuse to coexist with Israel are brushed aside.

France and Europe must play their part in working for peace in the Middle East. This would be possible through a balanced policy on the part of France and Europe. But what are we to think of Europe’s financing of anti-Semitic Palestinian schoolbooks? What are we to think of France’s support for a Palestinian TV channel that urges children who are today adults to join Allah in paradise by blowing themselves up in a crowd of Jews? What are we to think of countries that are friendly towards states that finance, arm and harbor terrorism?

We welcome the distinct change in tone adopted by the France’s new foreign affaires minister. He was bold enough to declare in Damascus that there was no such thing as good terrorism.

We hope that behind the changing language, France’s moral and political interests will be reassessed.

However, we fail to understand why a French ambassador in London who insults the State of Israel is not rebuked.

We fail to understand why France intervened to prevent the Hizbullah from being included in the European list of terrorist groups.

We fail to understand why Jerusalem is not on the list of Israeli towns in which France has a diplomatic mission.

We fail to understand why the Institute of the Arab World in Paris, financed by France, displays a huge map of the Middle East in which the state of Israel is missing.

We fail to understand why France, the cradle of Human Rights, abstained in the vote which gave Libya the chairmanship of the UN Commission of Human Rights.

We fail to understand why the French language and culture summit in Beirut was allowed to become a platform inveighing hatred at Israel. The final straw was that this violence was uttered in French in front of an audience in which the Hizbullah leader sat the front row reserved for VIPs.

I would like to recall here a few leading lights of French culture: Blaise Pascal, François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine, both former Foreign Affairs ministers, Charles Péguy and Paul Claudel.

They see eye to eye on Israel’s mystery.

Chateaubriand wrote: «If every there was something that can be likened to a miracle, we believe it lies here».

Lamartine wrote: «Such a country, repopulated with a new and Jewish nation, cultivated and watered by intelligent hands, would still be a promised land today if Providence returned a people to it and if politics brought it peace and freedom».

In recalling these writings, I would like to propose holding a summit on French language and culture be held soon in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is Israel’s capital for Jews the world over. It is the queen of capitals! What a symbol for French culture! What a contribution to peace!
This would be a unique opportunity to renew the Israeli-Arab dialogue! Is this a utopian idea? Certainly. But no more than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights! No more than the Zionist utopia! No more than the biblical dream, repeated over the centuries “Next year in Jerusalem»!

I will not allow my seven grandchildren to one day suffer prejudice based on their identity as human beings. This is why I declare here and now my pride in being French, my attachment to the French Republic as upholding Human and Citizens’ rights.

Victor Hugo and Napoleon have become my heroes, the Age of Enlightenment my creed and the history of France my own history.

But at the same time I declare my pride in being Jewish and my attachment to Israel.

To quote the chief Rabbi Kaplan: “It is my right to love my father AND my mother”.

No one can question the Jewish contribution to making France a more harmonious nation over the centuries.

your presence here today demonstrates that you acknowledge the role we play.

Thank you, for examining these issues that we raise with you, believing they are in France’s interests.

Translated by TRANSMEDIAS, transmedias@paris.com