Frogs to Princes: Homeless

by Nidra Poller

Paris 8 October 2006

When the Redeker story broke, I suddenly felt homeless. Redeker—author, professor of philosophy in a lycée near Toulouse, and member of the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes — is running for his life since he published an op-ed in Le Figaro. In the wake of the Islamic uproar provoked by the Pope’s thoughtful reflection on conversion by the sword, Redeker expressed his opinion—that’s what op-eds are for—on a religion whose role model and spiritual guide lived by pillage, rape, and murder. It worked. Flushed out of the woodwork, a handful of erstwhile moderates—I’m joking—issued graphic death threats. It is so comical. But we’ll have to save our laughs for after the war.

Outraged Muslims with access to precise information on the professor’s whereabouts made convincing promises to submit him, his wife, and their children to the very bloodthirsty sharp-edged, head-splitting violence he had soberly described in a national newspaper. Result? The philosophy professor is now on the run. He cannot return to the Lycée Pierre Paul Riquet at Saint Orens de Garnieville on the outskirts of rose-tinted Toulouse.

Hearing this, I felt like the gangplank had been lifted; that France was no longer accessible; that I could not go home as planned at the end of my short stay in my native land.

Someone e-mailed me a petition. I snapped back, “What’s the use of a petition? They should find those guys and put them in jail for life!”

Later, another correspondent triumphantly announces that they’ve gathered two thousand signatures. My heart sinks. Two thousand? And what about the others? It’s OK with them to hold a knife to the author’s throat? One or two teacher’s unions have publicly defended Redeker’s right to express his opinion, however (uh) reprehensible it may (ahum) be. Philosopher André Glucksman and independent columnist Ivan Rioufol spoke out unambiguously, in the pages of the same Figaro, against this thuggish intimidation. No one mobilized the lycéens who so joyously demonstrated against that little job contract last spring. The hundreds of thousands of 2003 peace marchers found no cause to protest against the binding and gagging of…well, ultimately, everyone in France. Feminists? Pundits? Catholics? Anarchists?

No, this cause just doesn’t resonate.

Meanwhile, about 2,500 policemen are boldly attacked in French banlieues, brutally injured, jeered and mocked when they arrive in force to arrest the punk jihadis who have slipped back into the population and turned into victimized civilians like their Hizbullah heroes.

The basic details of the Redeker story have been spinning through the blogosphere and the MSM since it broke two weeks ago, but some of the drama is lacking. We have to hear the sound of a door clanging shut to really know we are in prison! If Redeker can’t say what he thinks of Islam — Islam not Islamism; the prophet, the book, and all it engendered, not a religion of peace highjacked by extremists — then we are all in prison and that can’t be anyone’s home.

Why are we in prison? It is not the work of Muslims alone. They are aided and abetted. By that velvet voice of reason, Le Monde, par exemple, expressed by way of an editorial, meaning the voice of the newspaper of record itself speaking with due solemnity and anointed authority. In it Redeker is described as a prolific (this is an insult) pamphleteer (this too), author of countless “papers” (meaning lightweight stuff Le Monde won’t touch); an excessive, half-baked provocateur. Redeker, it implies, like the US after 9/11, merely got what was coming to him.

Looking down its nose, Le Monde reminds Redeker, and all who would be tempted to follow his bad example, that we live in an era of instant communication. One thinks one is preaching to the choir (those nasty right wing Islamophobic readers of the rival Figaro), but the whole world is listening. And the reaction boomerangs. This seemingly innocent piece of friendly advice from a wiser, more sophisticated mind obscures the very fact that hits you in the gut when you discover that Redeker had to go into hiding: they aren’t burning French flags in Islamabad, mon vieux, these are local yokels who got the vital facts about the upstart philosopher. They took pictures of him. They know all about him, his family, the paths he walks, the doors he opens and closes. The hand that holds the sword lives down your street and mine.

Let the provocateur tremble, Le Monde is serene and the editorial ends with a smooth-talking copout: Freedom of speech? Yes of course. But…only within the limits of respect for others. As for blasphemy, the outer limit of free speech, it should be handled with care. However, nothing can justify these nasty “fatwas” on the author…the author of the blasphemy, n’est-ce pas?

The philosophy professor has no home, no job, no income, no security, no future in France, and Le Monde — comfortably seated in its armchair — talks out of both sides of its mouth and establishes blasphemy as a reality we must not ignore. It chills me to the bone.

Leaving the beaux quartiers of Le Monde, we duck down a cyber side street and land on the site of Bellaciao, a résistance collective that stands up against a grab bag of evils including globalization and Zionism, but nevertheless defends the right of the hateful, misguided, philo-semite, pro-Zionist, Islamophobe Redeker to speak his mind without having his head lopped off:

• Danielle Bleitrach, a Communist who admires the genuine shtetl Jew, who would rather perish than raise his hand against the Other, is disgusted by the inexplicable Zionist sympathies that push Redeker to pin the yellow star on Muslims.
  
• Another contributor picks out a dozen Jewish names among those who signed the petition and says this explains that.
  
• A philosophy professor named Pierre Tevanian declares that there is no justification for death threats but wonders why Redeker hasn’t been sued, sentenced, and fired by now for going over the edge, beyond criticism of religion, beyond blasphemy, to pure racism.
  
• Maxime Vivas first met Redeker at the yearly Communist festival, La Fête de l’Humanité, thought he was a comrade, almost became a friend, but when Redeker started pounding away about Israel. Vivas decided to keep him at arm’s length. He concludes “as an atheist respectful of believers, a friend of Palestine and of all the Arab peoples whose lands have been trampled by Tsahal, I don’t hesitate to express my support for the ‘philosemite’ Robert Redeker.”

When will it dawn on Europeans that there is no Europe if provocateurs can’t provoke? There is no thought if thought can’t be freely expressed. Theo van Gogh got the manifesto pinned to his chest with a knife. Karsenty was dragged into court. Redeker got booted out of his frame of reference. And Le Monde warns against blasphemy like the cigarette packages warn against cancer.

Riding uptown in a NY bus on the 1st of October (on my way back to JTS for the last part of Yom Kippur service) I catch bits of lively conversation. It started, apparently, before the bus pulled up, and continues between a standing Haitian and a very large two-seater black man elegantly dressed in black, with a beautiful red tie. The Haitian gives some details on the current kidnappings and crime situation, punctuated with flashbacks to the days of Papa Doc and Baby (still living on the Côte d’Azure if I am not mistaken) and the ups and downs of Aristide which, as far as I can gather, brings in the question of American involvement.

As the Haitian is about to get off, a woman across the aisle chimes in with a fervent defense of US governments past and present. I think she says she is from Latvia, and credits Americans with liberating her country, allowing her to come and live in this land of freedom. I am so astonished by the ease with which people express their opinions in public, that I miss parts of the conversation.

The talk is not fancy, but the participants are aware, informed, and free-thinking. The Latvian woman is getting off the bus, the double-decker elegant black man asks her if she is fasting. Fasting? Oh no, she says, I’m not Jewish. If I were, I wouldn’t be here. (Meaning, I assume, her family would have been exterminated…she looks too young to have been alive during the shoah).

As we approach 122nd St. two men sitting behind me comment casually on the Jewish Theological Seminary training rabbis. I can’t remember what color they were, but they surely weren’t Jewish.

Charles Jacobs, founding director of the David Project, can never forget hearing me tell an audience that I wouldn’t take the chance of saying shabat shalom when speaking to a friend on my cell phone in a Parisian bus on a Friday.

Waiting for a downtown bus on Broadway I say to a fellow impatient passenger that I live in Paris, sometimes I have to wait 20 minutes for a bus. Small sacrifice, she comments, for living in that beautiful city. Yes, it is beautiful, but troubling things are happening. She knows why: it’s because of George Bush.

Mearsheimer, Judt, and Khalidi do their thing in front of an enthusiastic audience at the Cooper Union. Speaking to a full house, they trash Israel and claim you can’t say these things in the U. S. It’s more than the Lobby, says Khalidi, playing on his 100% American accent, it’s the whole discourse in this country that is skewed in favor of Israel.

Judt has two new feathers to put in his martyr’s cap: he got dumped in short order by the Poles and Manhattan College in the Bronx. What’s the real gripe of the Israel lobby crowd? Not that they can’t speak, write, be heard, be read. They can’t convince. They aren’t winning the debate. Could there be something wrong with their discourse?

I know they showed it on prime time news in France (but to be honest I haven’t had time to check): the WorldCan’tWait demonstration at Union Square on October 5th. The bus took me two blocks from the Square. When there’s a demonstration in Paris the buses stop running hours before and after, traffic is stopped for miles around, there are gigantic traffic jams, the whole world really has to wait.

A small grungy crowd was gathered in one corner of the square, sawing the same old tunes, speaking for the whole wide world, claiming to be we the people, and lugging around ten times more posters than they could ever sell or give away. Here they were standing up against the fascist government of George Bush that doesn’t represent the people, and people passed by, totally indifferent. Speakers harangued in short order, enthusiasm was forced. Cynthia McKinney roused a bit more rabble than the others. It was all so tired and scraggly.

Brigitte Gabriel at the Heritage Foundation brought the audience to tears as she described getting dressed in her prettiest dress, putting ribbons in her long black hair, preparing to die at the age of thirteen in Marjayoun because the Muslims were going to make their final assault. She and her parents had lived in a bomb shelter for most of the past seven years, they wouldn’t be able to hold out any longer. Brigitte was not killed. Lebanese Christians were saved, temporarily, by the Israelis. She sheds a bright new light on the Israeli “invasion” of Lebanon, and she directs that light, today, on the Islamic threat to the West (Because They Hate, St. Martin’s Press). The Muslims who invaded Marjayoun appeared abundantly on French TV during the latest Hizbullah war, cast as innocent victims of a disproportionate Israeli reaction.

When the Redeker story broke, it was as if the graceful streets of Paris turned into a river of fire. The charm, the rooftops, the leafy squares, the fragrant bakeries shriveled and died. A prolific author spoke his mind as any free citizen would do. And he was thrust out of the universe. How will we live, how will we think in the face of such danger?

The raunchy streets of New York looked so peaceful.

Of course, there’s another free speech issue I’d like to raise one day, after the war is over. How can you speak and how can you hear over the noise of a New York restaurant? All those fantastically interesting conversations I engaged in remain suspended, as if trapped in stone, to be released one fine day when my agile mind finds a way to etch them out and retrieve them whole and intact like the precious jewels that they are.