To the Editor:
I would like to comment on Nidra Poller’s article, “Betrayed by Europe: An Expatriate’s Lament” [March], which I read with both sorrow and indignation. Nidra Poller, who has lived in France for a number of years, describes my country in a way that no doubt owes more to her imagination as a novelist than to reality itself.
At no point in the article did I recognize the France that I serve with pride, and where my family chose to live in circumstances similar to those of Nidra Poller’s own family. While it is true that anti-Semitic acts have been committed in France, I cannot accept her allegation that “Jews are being persecuted every day in France,” or that the French authorities can be accused of remaining silent. Nothing could be further from the truth, particularly when one is familiar with the commitment of the French president and the government to fight against all forms of racism and anti-Semitism, and when one observes the notable decrease in anti-Semitic acts. This is something that is recognized by all persons of good faith, from the president of Israel to the head of the Anti-Defamation League, both of whom have recently paid visits to France.
But did Nidra Poller really wish to demonstrate good faith? One might doubt it after reading certain passages of her article that verge on extremism (“We are not free in France”; “the Republic is under siege [by Muslims]”; “France is in fact an adversary of the United States”) and an astounding xenophobia, as when, describing the French people’s “cowardice,” she writes “they disgust me” and even calls on America to “come over here and colonize this place.” In France, we have a saying that “what is excessive is insignificant,” and perhaps I should have ignored Nidra Poller’s article for that reason. But when an article smacks of racism, I feel I have no choice but to respond. I am astonished that such a piece was published in your magazine, which is dedicated to combating such a scourge.
Jean-David Levitte
Ambassador of France
Washington, D.C.
To the Editor:
Reading Nidra Poller’s article, I ask myself whether I am the victim of a hallucination. It must be so, since her essay bears no relation to reality.
Anti-Semitism does indeed exist in France; to be precise, it is an Arab anti-Semitism, which has also turned into a more generalized anti-goyism (the goy in this case being the ordinary Frenchman). The phenomenon is very serious, but its dimensions are nothing like what one would imagine from reading Nidra Poller’s apocalyptic scenario. Publication of her article in a distinguished journal like Commentary is unfortunate; nourishing such fantasies serves the interest neither of the United States nor of the Jewish people, not to speak of France and Europe.
Alain Besançon
Paris, France
To the Editor:
I sympathize with the sentiments of Nidra Poller, but her account seems to me too darkly colored, a result perhaps of her experience living in the Parisian hothouse of the French elite.
My own experience of France, traveling and staying, goes back over 50 years and includes all parts of the country. Though I too have encountered the knee-jerk hostility described by Nidra Poller, it is not unanimous, even among the French elite. Jean-François Revel recently published a book condemning anti-Americanism, and the scholar Philippe Roger has published a superb account of the phenomenon’s history in France, dating all the way back to the 18th century.
In those days anti-Americanism took the form of a firm belief that the New World was, among other things, a poisonous land in which all the inhabitants were stunted, hermaphroditism was commonplace, and syphilis was contracted from eating iguanas. These were the ideas not of eccentrics but of respectable figures like Voltaire and Diderot. Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador to France, used the occasion of a dinner party to expose this absurdity. After steering the conversation around to the subject of the supposedly “stunted” growth of Americans, he asked everyone to stand up. The Americans towered over the Frenchmen and especially over the Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, who had been industriously spreading these cockamamie ideas. Raynal was not at all embarrassed; he dismissed the incident as “vulgar empiricism,” which in no way refuted ideas held by all the great minds of Europe.
The present form of elite anti-Americanism took shape during the 19th century, and was fixed in its expressions by the time of World War I. The hostile rhetoric used against Bush, Reagan, and other American presidents is essentially a recycled version of remarks made about Andrew Jackson. Plus ça change.
As for my own experience, I have never much cared for Paris, where the sort of sneering described by Nidra Poller is thick in the air. But in my extensive travels in la France profonde, I have, with rare exceptions, consistently encountered a deep and abiding warmth toward America, its culture, and its people. This is expressed both in personal friendships and in the astonishing kindness and helpfulness of complete strangers.
Herb Greer
Salisbury, England
To the Editor:
If Nidra Poller is looking for a country that is not “so vast I haven’t the faintest idea where I would put myself,” a country where it does not snow much, where the housing is more affordable than in New York and people do not firebomb synagogues or trash America, she is overlooking an obvious option. Sorry, but I cannot do anything about the shopping malls; we have them here, too.
Michael Gerver
Raanana, Israel
To the Editor:
Please let Nidra Poller know that she is welcome in Atlanta. My wife and I would be happy to put her up until she’s back on her feet. My wife is originally English, I am originally Irish. Though we both are now thoroughly American, we come with a squadron of Russian, Bulgarian, French, Spanish, Italian, and French friends, so she will even have a European ambience.
Patrick Carroll
Atlanta, Georgia
To the Editor:
The trajectory of Nidra Poller’s life is exactly the reverse of my own. She left the U.S. in 1972, at the time of the Vietnam war, because she was sick of American “imperialism” and attracted by the “intellectualism” of the French Left. I left France in 1981, at the beginning of the Mitterrand years, because I had been disillusioned by the very same spirit of the French Left and saw in the “American dream” the cultural matrix for greater personal achievement.
Yet these two opposite trajectories have left us in the same place. Thirty years later, shocked by the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and particularly in France, Nidra Poller is considering a return to the U.S. As for me, having spent a quarter-century here as a resident alien, I finally took the oath and became an American citizen. The reasons for our respective decisions seem quite different, but when we look at them more carefully, they are related.
As I explained in a recent article in the French journal Commentaire, there were many reasons for my voluntary change of nationality, but they can be summarized under a single heading: the apathy and complete lack of solidarity in French society. The French care for only one thing—their individual welfare and comfort.
Consider what has become one of the main expressions of the exception française: the national penchant for going on strike. One may think that all these people marching and chanting in the streets of French cities are passionate and generous progressives, struggling for the improvement of collective life. But the reality is quite different: they are struggling only to keep everything in place, to preserve their own so-called avantages acquis (“acquired benefits”). The strikers’ only passion is for the status quo.
Regarding the anti-Semitism described by Nidra Poller, the French behave in the same way. I do not consider French nationals to be more anti-Semitic than their European neighbors. With a Muslim community in France of five million, anti-Semitism there inevitably feeds on international events. According to official statistics, one act of anti-Semitic violence occurred in 1998, nine in 1999. At the end of September 2000, after Arafat launched the second intifada, the number jumped suddenly to 116, and then it increased again after 9/11.
How did French public opinion react to these hate crimes? With indifference, by looking the other way. The hatred and persecution of the Jewish community go unnoticed by the French as long as it does not disturb their daily routine and comfort. This attitude of laisser-faire is not new; it is the same as the one that permitted the Vichy government to collaborate with the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Another component in this special brand of anti-Semitism is directly connected with anti-Americanism and concerns France’s continuous mourning for its past “grandeur.” In the French psyche, Israel and America are seen as states with messianic visions, as contrasted with France’s inability to project an ambitious future for itself, laying bare the secondary role France now plays on the international stage. In France, apathy and nostalgia are two sides of the same pusillanimity.
I regret that I cannot fix Nidra Poller’s shattered French dream. But her account reminds us that even when history does not accommodate our romantic mirages, it is never too late to take the future back into our own hands, and to build it again.
Jean-Michel Heimonet
Catholic University
Washington, D.C.
Nidra Poller writes:
Let me begin in reverse order by thanking Jean-Michel Heimonet most warmly for his endorsement and his very instructive amplification of my argument, and Patrick Carroll and Michael Gerver for their kind offers of hospitality. After reading my confession—a serial expatriate, an unregenerate gadfly—it takes courage as well as generosity to think of letting me come and live in your town.
I agree with Herb Greer that Paris is sometimes the capital of sneer, but I did not have the luxury of pursuing my career elsewhere in France. Besides, although I have roots in the Midi, and although I am the last to deny the joys of Mediterranean light, the sad fact is that things have changed there, too. José Bové has done his work, and the phenomena I describe in my article are to be found not just in the capital but in the provinces. As I hope I made clear, however, the hostility is directed not so much at individual Americans or Jews as at “the enemy,” those world dominators, the plotting Elders of Zion and the looming, God-fearing U.S.
Mr. Greer’s delicious anecdote about Benjamin Franklin leads me from one witty ambassador to the humorless letter by another and rather different ambassador, Jean-David Levitte. Not that Ambassador Levitte is necessarily humorless himself; I can easily imagine the job description that he has been assigned to fill. Still, I am a little embarrassed for la France, hitting me with the full, awesome power of the Foreign Ministry. But so be it.
My article began with these modest, rather self-effacing words: “It is not so easy to know when you’re deluding yourself and when you are finally seeing the light.” They apply to me, and to everything that followed in my article. And they are pertinent to Ambassador Levitte’s reaction, too. I am surprised thata sophisticated European could so radically misread the tone of my essay, written from the heart—albeit a broken heart—and steeped in love for a country where I have lived not “for a number of years” but for over three decades. But I permit myself to wonder where Ambassador Levitte has been living during those years. If he honestly feels threatened by the “extremism” in my wistful, half-jocular invitation to the Yanks to come over and colonize France, I suggest that he ponder the French media, where, in dead seriousness, the Yanks are vilified for already doing just that, from morning to night, seven days a week, ad nauseam.
Is it false to say that “Jews are being persecuted every day in France”? If so, it is no less false for Ambassador Levitte to contend categorically that the French government is fighting racism and anti-Semitism. It is false to claim that everyone of good faith acknowledges the “notable decrease” in anti-Semitic acts. All such affirmations are too general to be confirmed. But I, at least, cited examples of types of persecution, while testifying as well to a widespread absence of persecution. I also pinpointed the stunning silence of French officialdom in the face of the single worst anti-Semitic crime so far—the atrocious murder and mutilation of Sébastien Selam last November. So which is the truer description of the condition of Jews in France at the dawn of the 21st century? A notable decrease in the number of incidents—or a notable increase in violence?
And where exactly is the bad faith of which Ambassador Levitte accuses me? I did not say the Republic was under siege from Muslims but that it was under siege from “Muslim rage,” from “political Islam on the march.” I was talking about undeniable and specific acts of violence in schools, hospitals, streets, and stadiums. I was speaking of the unconscionable demands by Islamist leaders for what can be fairly described as a creeping imposition of shari’a law, complete with the oppression of women. If this is “racism,” if we are not free to identify the source of danger, then I have all the more reason to fear for the future of my French grandchildren.
The recent conference of the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations in France) is a perfect illustration of what I mean. Why has this offshoot of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood been allowed to develop and prosper? If laïcité is indeed the core value of the French Republic, and if the UOIF is clearly, openly, and aggressively challenging that laïcité, is the Republic not besieged? As I noted in my article, the government has promulgated a law against “ostensible signs of religious affiliation” in schools; it is to go into effect in September. But we are already seeing indications that the government may bend under pressure from radical Islamic forces and allow Muslim girls to wear a bandana in place of the hijab, or Islamic veil—the main such “sign” that the law was drafted to proscribe. This will fool no one, least of all those Christians and Jews whose discreet crosses and yarmulkes will still be forbidden under the same law.
As for French-American relations, France is an adversary of the United States, however sincerely my French compatriots may be convinced otherwise. I can understand why the government would prefer to cloak this issue in a fog of discourse, but please do not expect me to play along. What do allies do in wartime? They join together and fight the common enemy. (In peacetime they compete—peaceably.) But what do you call an ally who in wartime does not fight by your side, who opposes you on every crucial point of policy connected with that war, who bends over backward to convey his friendly intentions to the enemy, and who, when convenient, denies the very reality of the conflict?
During the recent outburst of violence in Iraq, French anchormen stood unprotected and unmolested in the midst of ranting jihadis brandishing RPG’s and promising to slit American throats, burn Americans alive, spill American blood, mutilate American bodies. Nor were these vain promises, but merely a rundown of what had been carried out in Falluja the day before. Was French TV simply reporting the news, or was it dutifully relaying the insurgents’ propaganda? In the meantime, French citizens who seem to have worked happily enough in the Iraq of Saddam Hussein were being advised by their prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, to pack up and leave; the prime minister concluded his speech with a bombastic, “We have always been for a free Iraq and we are always for a free Iraq!” Yes—just so long, evidently, as someone else pays the price of the freeing.
Where is the fiction, where is the reality? Fiction is a way of capturing reality without denying the subjectivity of the observing eye; scholarship, journalism, and official pronouncements, despite heroic attempts at objectivity, are constantly in danger of fictionalizing. I may well have a novelist’s approach to the reporting of current events, but every single detail of my portrayal of France has been developed elsewhere by reputable journalists, political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, community leaders, and even government officials.
Both Jean-David Levitte and Alain Besançon accuse me of imagining things. In correcting me, Mr. Besançon calls attention to the “Arabness” of French anti-Semitism. But the “Arabs” of France are French citizens or residents, and to place all the blame on them seems to me to “smack of racism” (to borrow from Ambassador Levitte). Without the implicit collaboration of a good portion of the intellectual elite, and the apparent failure of the police and judicial system to punish the actors and squelch their ever growing ardor, they would be seething but impotent grumblers instead of the mortal danger they are to themselves and others.
Am I imagining things? Would that it were so. Would that my worst fears were the figments of a wild and overwrought imagination, and the denials of Messrs. Levitte and Besançon a magical force that would make their version of French reality come true.
