About the judicial decisions - France

Sunday, 12  March 2017

What makes hatred or incitement to hatred racist? ***

This is the story of the trials and tribulations of the highly regarded Jewish French historian and philosopher scholar Georges Bensoussan born in Morocco in 1952 who moved to France with his family at a young age. He is said to be one of the world’s leading experts on Jews in Arab lands and the Holocaust.

It so happened that in October 2015, during a debate on the much respected public affairs radio program, Bensoussan said:

“Today, we find ourselves at the heart of the French nation in the presence of another people, who take a backwards view of a certain number of democratic values which we have carried. There will be no integration so long as we cannot rid ourselves of the atavistic anti-Semitism which is hidden like a secret.”

He then went on to say:

“An Algerian sociologist ,Smain  Laacher ,with great courage, had just said in a film broadcast on [channel] France 3 ;’It is a shame that, in order to maintain this taboo, to know that Arab families in France-and everyone knows this but nobody wants to say it-anti-Semitism is sucked in with a mother’s milk.’” (Italics mine)

As it turned out, Bensoussan did not quote Laacher correctly.

Laatcher, by then a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg in turn, writing in the investigative journal Mediapart declared: “I have never said or written anything this ignominious nature”. He condemned Bensoussan for suggesting that Algerian anti-Semitism was created naturally. ”How could anyone believe for half a second that in these [Arab] families that anti-Semitism is transmitted in the end through blood [i.e. genetically].”

Of course that was not what Bensoussan said.

In turn, Laacher turned out to be misrepresenting what he had said .The transcription of what he had said in the film was:

“It is a monumental hypocrisy not to see that anti-Semitism is in the beginning domestic, and quite evidently, is without being reinforced, hardened, legitimated, almost naturalised with various distinctions…externally. He will find it at home and will sense no radical lack of continuity between home and the external environment .Because the external environment is, in reality the most often[experienced].It is to be found in what are termed ghettos, it feels as though it is in the air one breathes, it is not at all strange. And it is difficult to escape it in those places, particularly when you find it in yourself. (Italics mine)

While Laacher did not say “sucked in with mother’s milk”- in French, the expression is a metaphor employed to define something one acquires “in the atmosphere”, “in the language”, “on the tongue”. But the idea is much the same.

For his part, Bensoussan maintained that: “To say that one dinks in anti-Semitism, that it is transmitted culturally. I have not spoken of a transmission through blood, which implies a genetic transmission. And I maintain that in some families in France, anti-Semitism is taught.”

And again, he said: “I am speaking about a cultural notion, not genetic. To confuse milk with blood is bad faith or stupidity. Yes, in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is passed on. To speak of   a biological anti-Semitism would take me back to deny thirty years of my work. What culture can do, culture can undo: we can leave anti-Semitism behind…” 

The powerful and controversial Islamic (some say Islamist/Salafist) activist organisation “Islamist Collective Against Islamophobia” (Collectif Contre L’Islamophobie en France or “CCIF”) that seeks to defend Muslims from perceived attacks (“Islamophobia”) in the secular system of the country.

Bensoussan’s argument that Muslim communities contribute to the development of a society within society attracted the attention of the CCIF, which introduced the notion that he is both a racist and an “Islamophobe”


CCIF forwarded the passage dealing with mother’s milk to the public prosecutor.


The charge was simple: “mother’s milk was not a metaphor for cultural anti-Semitism transmitted through education, but a genetic and “essentialist” accusation. Mother’s milk”,   it claimed, means «all Arabs are anti-Semitic—in other words, that Bensoussan supposedly a racist.

The lawyer for the organization instrumentalised anti-Semitism as a further means of defaming Bensoussan when she stated: «What seems to us inadmissible is to attribute anti-Semitism to all members of a group. That is essentialism.” (Essentialism in this context means defining an entire community with a single “essential” or ”defining” characteristic

The public prosecutor opened a case against Bensoussan. Ultimately, he was charged with and prosecuted for “provocation a la haine raciale” (provocation to racial hatred)

The case made strange bedfellows.

The strangest and the most shocking of these turned out to be an illustration of  the old saying back home that “there is no village wedding without  the presence of a hunchback” .Nowadays, the hunchbacks have become “useful infidels” or “useful idiots“ some of whom  are increasingly  Jews and Jewish organizations in the U.S., Canada and now in France. 


In this case, the useful idiot turned out to be, the Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et L’anti-Sémitisme or "LICRA" (Jewish International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism) which is headed by a Jewish person.

LICRA was founded by a Jewish journalist in 1926 in an effort to defend a Jew charged with the Paris killing of a Ukrainian nationalist who was responsible for pogroms in Ukraine in which the accused`s  relatives perished.

They joined the proceedings independently of CCIF by filing an identical complaint.

Another strange bedfellow turned out to be a Holocaust denier and European Parliament lawmaker for the le Pen`s National Front party. He embraced Bensoussan` s cause.

And then, there were right wing supporters, which support progressively moved to the centre.

In due course, the charge and the trial of it came to be seen as a “judicial jihad” that supported the recurring accusation by advocates of several French thinkers, Jews and others, who have paid a personal price recently for speaking out against Islam or in defence of Israel.

At the conclusion of the trial, on March 7, 2017, the judges acquitted Bensoussan. The key reasons for the acquittal provided by the Court are;

1.”The impugned remarks [by the accused] were held in a very particular context [a radio debate on a hot topic] “in the heat of conversation”.

2. While the accused’s quotation of Laacher was not strictly accurate, “the idea expressed [by the latter] is almost the same, or even identical to that expressed by [the accused].


3. “Lastly and above all … the offence of incitement to hatred, violence or discrimination presupposes to be constituted, an intentional element, ” and the characterisation  of this intent is lacking and “ runs against the fact that [the accused] never ceased to deplore this constitution of two separate peoples[Muslims and non-Muslims in France…and never called for a separation of the faction[Muslims] supposed to have seceded, its rejection, its banishment or its eradication, but on the contrary, [the accused called]for their reintegration into the French nation.”

4. Since the accused rejected “any idea of destiny or essentialisation” there is no possibility that he could “be accused of having aroused or wished to arouse a feeling of hostility or rejection against a group of people [Muslims]

The CCIF said it would appeal the decision.

The one interesting or rather frightening thing about this case is the ease with which criticism of Muslims of wrongdoing  is equated with racism, although clearly

1. Islam is a religious- political system, not a race; and
2. Muslims belong to a considerable variety of ethnic and racial groups.

And indeed in Canada, the first and only constant characterisation of people accused of Islamophobia is that they are ”racists”, when in fact it is about the perceptions of a refusal  by Muslim immigrants to integrate into the Canadian society and for the more learned about some of the things preached   by their religion. 

Question: How do you think such a case would be decided by a Canadian court?

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*** This is not an original essay. It is based on already published materials; an edited amalgamation of various excerpts taken from a number of articles. The purpose of this piece is to introduce the readers of the blog to a French case that is interesting on (a) its facts; (b) the arguments advanced by the prosecution and the accused, and (c) the way the Court approached these arguments and the reasons for its decision. Cf. Denis MacEoin, France’s New Islamist Guillotine, February 7,2017, https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9895/france-islamist-guillotine ; Cnaan Liphshiz, French Jewish scholar’s hate speech trial leaves anti-racism activists bitter, divided  February 16,2017, JTA  www.jta.org/ ; Yves Mamou, France: The Taboo of Muslim Racism and Anti-Semitism  -Part I, March 9,2017 https://gatestoneinstitute.org/10025/france-muslim-racism-anti-Semitism