 He is a native of Liverpool, of course, but lives in Paris, has done so for a number of years. He started as a journalist and then contributed articles to some of the main British newspapers. His research really focuses on extremist tendencies in French and North African politics and culture. His latest book is called The French Intifada, and if you haven't read it, I would highly recommend it. He's written for, as I say, many great newspapers. He's lectored throughout the world at this stage, and his books are on the university syllabus throughout the world. In September 2014, he published in French Guy Debord. This was a book originally in English from 2001, The Game of War, The Life and Death of Guy Debord. For those of us who are not familiar with who Guy Debord was, he was one of the leaders of the 1968 troubles, I suppose, of the work in France, and he then went on to be heavily involved with the Red Brigade and the Bader Meinhof. Andrew is extremely well-qualified, and this is a subject which we have been dealing with at the institute in the past, and which I'm afraid we will probably continue to deal with. Of course, so much has changed even, Andrew, I think, as you point out, since you published The French Intifada. There has been the growth of ISIS, the collapse of Syria, and of course the terrible attacks in Nice and Paris. So without further ado, Professor Andrew Huttie. Thank you very much. The Atrocity Exhibition, Tensions and Challenges in Contemporary France. Now before I begin, very quickly, I'm going to say there's a subtitle to this, and the subtitle is this, The Politics of Atmosphere, and that's a phrase which I think is very useful to begin with. It was first used in the 1930s by the novelist Georges Bataille in 1935. He was struggling with his own loss of faith in revolutionary leftist politics, and the rise of Nazism. But what he was really talking about, Bataille, when he talks about the politics of atmosphere, is that there were certain moments in history where emotions, extreme emotions, dominate political discourse rather than logic or reason. And this is where you slide from politics into psychoanalysis. And that's kind of where I'm going to go to today. Now there's another subtitle, and it's this. There's a lot of things happening in France. There's a lot of very complicated things happening in France from the geopolitical influence on the country to the local conditions in the country. But my focus today is on a very old historical French problem, and that is antisemitism. But what I want to look at is, if you like, a 21st century version of antisemitism, which is aligned with radical Islam. And I'm going to try and unpack some of the historical roots which have led to this situation. And without any making any predictions or prophecies, I want to provide a kind of analysis, or at least a diagnosis, it's probably a better word, a diagnosis of the extreme emotions in France now around this very difficult subject. Does that make sense as a way in? OK, good. The atrocity exhibition. It's hard to describe exactly what happens when a whole country goes into shock. But on Monday, the 19th of March 2012, the most visible signs of trauma in Paris were armed soldiers in shopping malls and train stations, bonolets on the metro, and despite the sunny weather, far fewer customers than usual at the Café-Terras. More telling still was the subdued atmosphere everywhere in the city. Certainly by the time of the evening rush hour, there was a distinct sense, and I remember this, because I was in Paris at the time, that everybody wanted to get home to safety and to the evening news on television. The reason for all of this was the news of the murder of a 30-year-old man and three small children at a Jewish school just outside of Toulouse. That morning, as Rabbi Jonathan Sandler was dropping off his two boys, aged five and three, at the Osahatora school at about 8am, all three of them were shot dead by an armed man on a Yamaha T-Max scooter. Other teachers and pupils thought at first that the noise of shots was fireworks. But as they approached, they saw a terrible scene unfold. The gunman had seized on an eight-year-old child, Miriam Monsonego, the eight-year-old daughter of the school's director. She was being pulled back by her hair. The gunman then blasted a bullet through her temple. This scene was captured by security cameras at the school. Low number of people have actually seen this footage. For most of France, for the image, first there were theories about a Rogue soldier or a neo-Nazi psychopath on the loose. These theories gave credence by the fact that the previous week bydd y ffaith yw'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio North African in being killed in the same region near Toulouse, by someone using the same weapon and techniques. But then, if such a thing was possible, given this news, events took another turn for the worst. At 1am on Wednesday 21st of March, an editor at the French news channel France Von Katra, Eber Colondo, was just about to pack up for the night when she received a call from her phone box in Toulouse, from somebody who claimed responsibility for the murders. She heard a young man, apparently in his 20s, very calm, who spoke impeccable French, placing a great weight on his words. This is what she said. Within two hours, the French police had traced the caller, Mohammed Mera, to a flat in a building at 17 Roud de Saint-Jean-Bigny in Côte-Pavie, a suburb 20 minutes in the centre of Toulouse. It turned out that Mera was not only the owner of the Yamaha scooter, but also heavily armed. After an initial attempt to break into the apartment building, special police units settled down into a siege. In the next few hours, Mera claimed to have filmed the killings at the Jewish school and given the tapes to his brothers to distribute on the internet. He said he was going to trigger assaults in Lyon, Marseille and Paris. On Thursday morning, Mera again confronted the police as they made another assault on the building. He was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a Colt 45, when it was shot dead with a bullet to the brain by a sniper. It was only then, at that moment, that the full complexity of the story began to take shape. As Le Mold described it, from this point on, the murders were no longer en ffet d'hiver, which is a term that the French used to describe any kind of generic news story, but it became en ffet politique, a political fact, a political story. And this much had actually been anticipated already, I think, by Presidents, the then President Nicolas Soccuzzi, who'd gone straight to Toulouse on Tuesday afternoon in his traditional role of the protector of the French nation. Other politicians, with the notable exception of Marine Le Pen, publicly undertook not to make political capital out of the killings. And the real issue here was a question of denial. It was the immediate reaction of the French government and the media, actually, as the killings were being reported to actively disassociate Meher from anti-sanitism and thus from Islam. The real issues they suggested were immigration, unemployment, psychiatric problems. But for all of this confusion, one fact was clear enough at least for the Jewish population in France. These killings were obviously an anti-Semitic act. Now, this might seem a strangely obvious thing to say, but it's a fact that the question of what is and what isn't an anti-Semitic act in contemporary France has recently been the subject of much debate. That's not to say anti-sanitism doesn't exist, obviously. Obviously it does. It's well documented that anti-Semitism in various forms has been on the rise in France in the past decade. For one thing, more French Jews have been leaving for Israel than ever before as a response to this. So whatever the political and media reluctance to discuss anti-Semitism as a separate category of politically motivated racist activity, it's clear that French Jews themselves know what is happening and understand the potential dangers that lie ahead. So what I want to do today, the overall aim of this talk, really, this lecture, is to describe and define what's happening, to describe and define the various strands of anti-Semitism which are now at work in France and how, first of all, they've been making an impact on Jewish communities, but most importantly, the wider French political landscape. Most crucially, most importantly, what I want to do is also make the case that what's happening in France now is actually a new form of anti-Semitism. And, you know, there are new forms, new varieties of anti-Semitism which seem to be related to each other but actually have the tangled deep roots in the common soil of French history. And more to the point, it's true that since the end of the Second World War, France has largely been in denial about the resurgence of anti-Semitism. And most particularly, there's been an unwillingness to engage with the new and mutated forms that it's taken. But I do think that the political issues here are crucial. And this is partly because, on the left in particular, it's been a long-standing taboo to be seen to be taken the Israeli side in the Israel-Palestine conflict. A much anti-Jewish feeling on the left is confused with anti-Zionism and the desire to be on the side of the former colonised in the post-colonial world. And, you know, there's a book which is called The Llewer of Anti-Semitism, Hatred of Jews in Present Day France by Michel Viocca. And he describes, it's a very good book, he describes contemporary anti-Semitism in France as inextricably linked to colonial history. And in particular the history of the Pinoir, the white settlers who returned to France from North Africa after the French handed independence to Algeria in 1962. And Viocca also links this history to what he calls islamo-progressivism, which is a term used by the philosopher Alan Finklhout and which is linked in contemporary political imagination to the merge of Islamist strains of thought and leftist post-colonial narratives. Well, my feeling is that Viocca is kind of right and that the process he describes has in fact accelerated and taken on a harder form in the past few years. It's also part of my argument, I think, my thinking at least, that as Islamo-progressivism has popularised itself, there's been an emerging anti-Semitic counter-narrative from the right and in particular the Catholic nationalist groups which have rallied round the issue of gay marriage. The academic Pierre Bernbaum has written very powerfully about the convergence of what he describes as convergence of anti-modernism and anti-Semitism. This is in a recent book called C'est un nouveau moment anti-Semite. And he notes that the right, and I saw this actually at Anthe Leed, he notes that at the right-wing demonstrations against gay marriage in 2014, the slogan La France of França was often apparently incomprehensibly accompanied by the cry, cry, Morrojwif, Death to the Jews. So it's trying to understand what brings these apparently very different slogans together. And I think one way of thinking about it is following Bernbaum, is that he sees here a very real alliance between Islamo-progressivism, progressive east, who are open in their contempt for Israel and the coalition of religious groups in and around a right-wing caucus in the Catholic Church. So this debate, I think, is intensified since the killings which took place in January 2015, and then November 2015, which were aimed very precisely at the notion of the Republik Andy Wiesieble, but also as a way of attacking the Republik Andy Wiesieble. You can see, or at least I'm going to try and make the case, that one, as it were, is a particular way of undermining the French Republic is to aim very squarely and precisely at the Jewish population of France. And that's why I talk about a French intifada, or if you like, a new anti-Semitism for a new century. And it brings us quite sharply to the language of radical Islam in France in the 21st century. And going back to the crime, I'm just outlined at the beginning in the mind of the Islamist, in the mind of a killer like Mohammed Merah, it is a double crime, a double crime to be French and a Jew. Now, in some ways, this has a historical origin. And as an origin in colonial Algeria, actually, where Jews apparently enjoyed special favour status under the same French law that apparently excluded Muslims from citizenship. This is the Loire claimer in the 19th century. So historically, for a long time, Algerian Muslims have always thought of Jews as traitors, as traitors who took their own country by stealth in the colonial project. And this belief system, like a lot of belief systems, no matter how much you repress it, keeps coming back. And, well, this was something that I investigated as an academic and a journalist. This was the torture and murder in 2006 of a 23-year-old mobile phone salesman named Ilan Halimi. Halimi was kidnapped in central Paris and it was driven out to the Bannu of Bannu, in Syria. He was Jewish and he'd been invited out for a drink by a young Iranian woman who was called Yalda. He met her while he was selling phones. It turned out her mission, Yalda, was to trap him and to lure him away from safety. Yalda later described in police custody how Ilan had been seized by thugs in Balaclavas in central Paris and bundled into a car. He said he screamed for two minutes with a high-pitched voice like a girl. Three weeks later Ilan Halimi was found naked and tied to a tree near the RER station of San Geneviève de Bois in the Bannu. He died on the way to hospital. His body had been mutilated and burned. Since being kidnapped he'd been imprisoned in a flat in Bannu, starved in torches. This is one of the things that I found really shocking when I went down to Bannu and I interviewed people who'd been in the building at the time. They all knew about it. Residents of the apartment block where he's been imprisoned, they'd heard his screams and the laughter of those torturing him. But they did nothing. They did nothing partly because they were scared of the gang who kidnapped him. This was 15 youths from Bannu who were part of a gang called Libaba, the Barbarians. There were a loose coalition of hard cases, drug dealers and girls who were drawn together with the hatred of what they called rich Jews. The alleged leader of the Barbarians, Yousif Fafana, is now serving a life sentence in Clareville in the east of France. He published videos in which he praised Al Qaeda and from his cell in Clareville he described the capture and torture of Al-Halimi as a symbolic trophy for the Zionists of New York. And during his trial he described how he doused Al-Halimi in petrol, set fire to him with a cigarette lighter and he said that he was proud of what he'd done. Well, again, what is the political, is there a political significance to all of this horrorism? Well, this is what took place in France. There were a lot of theories about the crime but they're pretty confused. Was it a bungled kidnap? Was it a clockwork orange style act of pure sadism? Or was it anti-Semitic? It seems bizarre to even have to ask that question. But the police didn't ask it. The police were in fact very reluctant to link the crime with anti-Semitism. The only thing that was visible was that Yalda, the girl who'd, you know, entrapped him, had said in her testimony that she'd been specifically instructed to capture a rich Jew. But while the police and then the government were denying that anything happened, and this is what I discovered when I was, again, out in the bonnier interviewing people, was the murder itself took on a skewed new meaning. The word was that what had begun as a heist and kidnapped to extort a ransom for a rich Jew was actually a form of revenge. Revenge for crimes in Palestine and revenge for crimes in Iraq. And in particular, and this is what these kids acted out with Elan Halimi, the scenes from Abu Ghraib. They re-enacted the stuff that they'd seen in Abu Ghraib on Halimi. They put him in the hood and all this kind of thing. This is where it gets weird and I'm interviewing these kids. This made the Libaba, the torturers, martyrs, soldiers. This is the language that people were using. And there were soldiers in a war and there were soldiers in a war against France and by extension against Europe. And it wasn't me, it was them, these kids who actually used the language of the interfather. And they openly identified with the Palestinians who they saw as prisoners in their own land exactly like themselves that dispossessed of the Prisian Bonnier. Now this sounds very odd and it gets odder still because this was in 2007 and I spent a couple of weeks exploring Bannier walking through the streets chatting to hip hop kids footballers, football fans self-proclaimed caser who were kind of wreckers or rioters. I talked to these people in sports centres shops, bus stops and this is very hard but a lot of it was fun. There was a lot of serious laughter and benign mischief and I enjoyed talking to the kids about football and politics. Bit by bit I kind of started picking up on a secret code in the slang and in the language and the secret code was there were references to synagogues, references to Jews and references to Israelis and they were all kind of refracted through the algo through the slang of the Bonnier and this is where it was interesting, people very casually these expressions sal bif sal id sal fferzio yw pan yw tre now these two final terms yw pan yw tre are particularly poisonous because these were words that were used in 1930s and in 1940s to describe Jews being sent off to the camps. For all this it was very hard to meet anybody who actually met a Jew and we don't need to meet Jews I was told by Gregor Lee a would-be rapper a Muslim from La Chapelle we know what they're like well that's the problem nobody actually did know what they were like it seemed to me that this was a form of youth revolt that was what was happening that hating Jews like supporting Arsenal or listening to a rap band like NTM it just became a defining motif of identity in the Bonnier people started to get angry Jews started to get angry when in the wake of all of this it was then the Shirak Government which dissembled about social problems in the Bonnier and if you like this was a sort of vignette of a wider problem that right up until the end of the first decade of the 21st century everybody knew what was happening in the Bonnier but the media and political elites would not admit what was happening that this is no more than social problems and to his credit I've got to say it was only Nicolas Sarkozy who was then the ambitious Minister of the Interior whose mother was a Sephardic Jew and he was the only one who actually came out and denounced the murder of Ylan Halimi as an anti-Semitic crime but this was interesting because at the moment of Sarkozy's intervention the terms of the debate were suddenly changed and nobody answered this question but they started to ask it was the killing of Ylan an isolated act or was it a political murder in the largest sense and what I mean by a political murder is an act that expressed a collective hatred so did this act belong to individuals or did it belong to the whole community well I can't answer that question but I can start to think about history Hating Jews is one of the oldest motifs one of the most defining motifs in French history and here's part of the theory that informs that there is a theory the hatred of Jews anti-Semitism often emerges in French history when you have a class that feels under threat that feels that its identity is under threat and it's about to be annihilated and one of the classic examples of this is at the end of the 19th century with the Dreyfus Affair and you get an anti-Semite like Louis Ferdin on Selina emerges out of this generation for those who don't know when Selina was the novelist who wrote Wajob Rulani in the 1930s his books, his pamphlets against the Jews are still semi-legal in France and they were so anti-Semitic they actually shocked the Nazis when they came to Paris in the 1940s to my mind Selina is the most brilliant writer in France in the 20th century he's more important to my mind than Proust why? he captures the emotion and the emerges from that generation the pitted bourgeoisie where he feels that this class is losing itself and must express its identity in hatred he was a pessimist he was obsessed by disease and filth and he saw no hope for the poor of the Bonnier in the end Selina blamed nearly everything on the Jews this is a quote actually from one of the semi-legal books war in the name of the bourgeoisie was shitty enough he wrote but now war for the Jews half-negroid, half-asiatic mongrel pastiches of the human race who's only aim is to destroy France well, this is history but it's history which is resurfacing Selina's actually become an inspiration bizarrely enough to a generation of rappers in the Bonnier because of his use of street language because of his stylised slang but there's also something very dangerous there because Selina as the voice of a dying inauthentic working class also expresses antisemitism in the most violent language and it's clear that that has an appeal as well there's actually a track called Selina by the rapper Abdul Malik which is a very good track in which he warns of the dangers of following Selina but I think it's true that you know these extreme emotions are now starting to infect contaminate and actually dominate a whole if you like political discourse in France and that's what's taken us towards this notion of a politics of atmosphere so I don't have any concluding remarks but I will say this and I'm going to return to Pierre Bernbound and Pierre Bernbound in the book I described before he looks back to the 1930s as well and specifically he returns to the Stavisky Riots of 1934 and he sees for those of you who don't know the Stavisky Riots were a series of riots that convulsed Paris in 1934 and it was the alleged crimes of a Jewish financier called Stavisky and left and right were fighting it out in the streets and Bernbound interestingly saw in the violence of 1934 the legacy of Edward Moumont who galvanised the Pianoir in Algeria by promoting the noble races of Arabs and Berbers over what he called the parasitical Jews and Bernbound interestingly sees this at work in the discourse of the National Front the right-wing Catholic groups who opposed gay marriage and one of those dangerous things is the so-called comedian Dieu Donné and what Dieu Donné does he promotes holocaust in Isle effectively and I'm sure that you know that the Rwagu Siw of 1992 is under French law a law which forbids the denial of crimes against humanity and what Dieu Donné brings on to the stage well-known in the Gassian East and the Gatianist holocaust deniers like Robert Fourier-son Now, kids in the Bonnier don't know who Fourier-son is necessarily but what he's transmitting Dieu Donné is this it's one thing to have anti-Semitism as a weird occult conspiracy theory but it's another thing to transmitting out into a wider community and what you get when you do that is that you have this occult conspiracy theory becoming an accepted mass belief now the comparisons with the 1930s are obviously very clear the journalist Michel Dreyfus in Le Monde describes this as the mass so Dieu Donné is doing two things he's attacking the Rwagu Siw he's taking on the French government with the Rwagu Siw and at the same time he's promoting a belief system that everything that's wrong with France everything that's wrong with Europe everything that's wrong with democracy is to do with the Jews and this is I would suggest how the very disparate forms of anti-Semitism in France right now speak to each other because that's what's happening and these elements came together in the January attacks in 2015 with the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the kosher hypermarket then of course the Bataclan which in 2008 have been targeted by radical groups in the Bonneas as an Israeli funded front so if you like due hatred anti-Semitism is a way of attacking French universalism French democracy from this marginalised underclass you see France and this is a quotation as a totalitarian democracy where Jews hold a privileged and controlling position and to my mind it's like the poison of anti-Semitism which dominated French history has never actually gone away and that's why I would finally suggest this is one of the reasons that these are such dangerous days for France and of course this applies to the rest of Europe