Abstract
This article aims to examine the genealogy of the discourse of islamogauchisme (sometimes translated as ‘Islamo-leftism’), provide a socio-historical analysis of its political functions in the French culture wars and highlight its relevance to an understanding of transnational, particularly transatlantic, opposition to antiracist and pro-Palestinian politics. The article will also place the islamogauchisme discourse within a deeper history of racialised conspiracy thinking.
This article aims to examine the genealogy of the discourse of islamogauchisme (sometimes translated as ‘Islamo-leftism’), provide a socio-historical analysis of its political functions in the French culture wars and highlight its relevance to an understanding of transnational, particularly transatlantic, opposition to antiracist and pro-Palestinian politics. The article will also place the islamogauchisme discourse within a deeper history of racialised conspiracy thinking.
By way of introduction, let us consider the following short passage. It is taken from a manifesto signed by 100 intellectuals and scholars in 2020 in support of the minister of higher education Frédérique Vidal's claim that ‘French society is gangrened by islamogauchisme’:
‘The indigenist, racialist and “decolonial” ideologies (transferred from North American campuses) (…) nourish hatred of “white people” and France; militantism of a violent sort attack those who bravely oppose the anti-Western orthodoxy and multiculturalist sermonising (…) The reluctance of most universities (…) to call out Islamism as responsible for the assassination of Samuel Paty illustrates the above (…) The wearing of the veil – among other symptoms – has increased in the past few years, it is now time to call things by their name (…) Importing Anglo-Saxon self-segregationist (communautariste) ideologies, intellectual conformism, fear and political correctness represent a genuine threat for our universities.’ 2
This condensed summary of the islamogauchisme rhetoric presents its target as a genuine and impending threat to France's institutions and – indirectly yet clearly – as complicit with jihadist violence, of which the Islamic veil is presented as a symptom. It ends with the usual incantational cries of “République !” and “Laïcité !”. Signatories are mostly older, male, and overwhelmingly white, scholars, whose link with French universities is sometimes tenuous (some are not in post, many others are retired), and whose research is often dated or irrelevant to the topic. 3 Yet, their concern for islamogauchisme is shared by powerful figures including government ministers and other high-ranking officials 4 from both the Right and the Left 5 , influential intellectuals and scholars often with access to the corridors of power 6 , widely read journalists and intellectuals 7 , and even leaders of large corporations. 8
Across the ideological divide, a petition critical of the islamogauchisme rhetoric was signed by no less than 23,000 university lecturers and PhD students. 9 For these dissenters, islamogauchisme lacks any objective reality and the accusation merely aims to stifle and police academic research that deviates from the official roman national. In other terms, it is typical of the conspiratorial theatrics of the French culture wars. Needless to say, many of the signatories are precisely those who are denounced as islamogauchistes and exposed to public condemnation. 10
Even though this critical manifesto has gathered far more signatures than the one warning against islamogauchisme, its substance is hardly reflected in the public sphere. Indeed, it is the alarmist histrionics of islamogauchisme that one finds in Le Figaro, Marianne, Valeurs Actuelles, L’Express, and other newspapers and magazines with wide circulation. Criticism is confined to only one comparable newspaper, the left leaning daily Libération, and internet-based outlets, particularly the website Médiapart. There are several explanations for this enormous imbalance and the sheer sway of the islamogauchisme paranoia over the media and state discourse. There is the divorce, consumed long ago, between critical intellectuals and the media, which has brought about a public sphere that is welcoming for, and less challenging to, identitarian discourses of the right and the far right. 11 This trend has of course been aided by French traditions of anti-intellectualism that have reached new heights in the twenty-first century, and the prominence of the right-wing media empire of Vincent Bolloré, the ‘French Rupert Murdoch’. 12
However, more than anything else, the islamogauchisme rhetoric owes its prevalence to the power of the elites promoting it. The power to narrate, promote and make visible, or on the contrary to obscure. These are elites who define state ideology, hold the keys to crucial ministries and important institutions, are a fixture of popular talk shows and best-selling authors, and whose combined presence in the press and compounded audience on rolling news stations dwarfs the number of readers of this article or its French equivalents, several million times over.
In addition to exposing elite power as key to the success of the islamogauchisme discourse, I aim to provide a systematic analysis of its claims. In doing so I will oftentimes succumb to the temptation of ‘deconstruction’ to expose fallacy. I like to believe that this slight infringement of the deontology of the historian of ideas is in fact invited by the islamogauchisme rhetoric itself, which even by the standards of French elitist discourse can be quite preposterous in its contentions and its distortions of an objectively observable reality. This endeavour will require some discussion of the individuals involved, chief among whom is Pierre-André Taguieff. 13 Under the current configuration of social power and capital in France, Taguieff is widely recognised by French elites as a scholar of racism and antisemitism. This is quite extraordinary for someone who has spent the better part of his career undermining the very foundations of antiracism. The core arguments that Taguieff has disseminated in his sizeable work can be summarised as follows: decoloniality is an ‘anti-white’ ideology, institutional racism is a ‘myth’, Islamophobia is a conspiracy to silence criticism of Islamism, antizionism is the new face of antisemitism, antiracists are in bed with jihadists, the Left (les gauchistes) ‘demonise the nation, the République and the state’ as ‘racist, and more recently that ‘wokeism’ is a menace to society and ‘cancel culture’ represents ‘hatred of intellectual freedom’. 14
As the main intellectual figure behind the islamogauchisme discourse and popularising it, Taguieff's work will come up for particular scrutiny in this article. However, I will be equally keen to show the strong consensus existing among all his associates about the identity of the islamogauchistes and what they are up to. To achieve this goal I will extensively but not exclusively analyse a special issue on the islamogauchiste peril published in the Revue des deux mondes journal, a mouthpiece for neoconservative politics recently marred in scandals. 15 Indeed, all intellectuals involved claim that an undifferentiated ‘left’ or ‘far left’, in an attempt to reverse its decline, has swapped the proletariat with the figure of the Muslim as the ultimate ‘Wretched of the Earth’, thus paying allegiance to ‘Islamism’. The target is any nuanced view of Muslims: for the promoters of the islamogauchisme discourse – as the epitaph of this articles makes plain – the ordinary practices of Muslims such as wearing the veil are symptoms of Islamism's ascendance and pave the way for jihadist violence in its crudest form, such as the savage beheading of Samuel Paty.
The article's main objective is not to expose the fallacy of the accusation of islamogauchisme, even though some unpacking will be inevitable. Its analytically more useful aim will be to show that the accusation serves a purpose, a function. First, in the current configuration of power in France, the islamogauchisme rhetoric serves to silence criticism of systemic racism, particularly of Islamophobia. This function is achieved by presenting antiracist politics as complicit with jihadist beheaders, shooters and bombers. At its simplest therefore, islamogauchisme can be understood as a rhetorical device that constructs moral panics to maintain the regime of racial disadvantage in place. 16 It is crucial to remember that this ideological stance transcends traditional political divisions. While the islamogauchisme rhetoric and more broadly the pushback against antiracism are generally located on the right and far right of the political spectrum, many of the central figures are self-professed leftists (Caroline Fourest, Manuel Valls, the late Laurent Bouvet) who consider it as part of their duty to name and shame those other leftists who have lost their way and erred by the side of France's Islamist enemies. 17 In that sense, the islamogauchiste is merely a new incarnation of the inner enemy.
The second function of the islamogauchisme discourse is to serve the interests and international standing of a foreign state: Israel. Indeed, among the intellectuals under review, the discourse is deeply imbricated with the promotion of Israeli impunity in its treatment of Palestinians. Taguieff first formulated islamogauchisme to describe the pro-Palestine movement, and as part of what he and others call the ‘new antisemitism’. This is the well-known equation of antizionism with antisemitism, which throws a simplistic opprobrium at an undifferentiated Left, while disproportionately stigmatising as antisemitic the groups in Western society that are likelier to feel affinities with the Palestinian cause: young Muslims. The ‘new antisemitism’ dimension in turn reinforces the pushback against antiracism: what they see as rabid antisemites, the islamogauchistes see as victims of Islamophobia. This reveals structural collusion between the politics of racism denial and the demonisation of the Palestinian cause. It also brings to light a rather counter-intuitive fact: that the movement campaigning against the ‘new antisemitism’ is in fact involved in undermining antiracism, therefore dismantling protections that all minorities benefit from, including Jews. 18 Taguieff, the anti-antiracist scholar of racism, personifies this contradictory project in France. 19
A word will be said of the strategies implemented to achieve the objectives of the islamogauchisme discourse: an inversion of objective and observable reality, whereby the regime of racial power as it exists in France is turned on its head. Racialised minorities and antiracist activists become the ‘true racists’ tormenting and stigmatising their white French victims. This inversion of reality is only made possible by the accumulated power of Taguieff's coterie, particularly their unrestricted access to the public sphere and the support they receive from the intellectual, media and state elites. Truth itself becomes malleable in the hands of the elite, in an enactment of Michel Foucault's power/knowledge nexus. 20 This state of affairs tells us as much about the discourse itself as the configuration of power in French society.
Finally, this article will show the historical linkages between the French islamogauchisme discourse and transnational racialising conspiracy theories. Islamogauchisme is only the latest iteration of an ancient conspiratorial tradition that posits an alliance between a racialised minority and an antagonistic political movement. From its initial ‘Judaeo-Masonic’ and ‘Judaeo-Bolshevik’ forms, this discourse has evolved through several stages until its latest Islamophobic incarnation in today's theories of the Islamisation of Europe. 21 A notorious example is the Eurabia theory, developed by Bat Ye’or, an Islamophobic conspiracy thinker whose outlandish claims include that European integration (anathema to her) has been fomented by Hitler and his Arab allies, that Arab states control European governments and institutions, and that their objective is to banish European nation-states and replace them with a unitary Sharia state called Eurabia, an aim that is today nearing completion. 22 An alliance between a nebulous Left and the forces of jihad is central to Bat Ye’or Eurabian conspiracy, a remarkable intersection with the islamogauchisme discourse. These intersections can even be personal or textual. For instance, Taguieff, who had in times past produced valuable research on antisemitic conspiracism 23 , today legitimises Bat Ye’or as an expert, promotes her Eurabia thesis, lists one of her books in a collection that he edits, and sits on the editorial board of a magazine where her name comes up frequently. 24 It will be shown that the affinities between the islamogauchisme discourse and conspiratorial Islamophobia are not accidental, but rather signal that both belong to the same ideological universe.
It is hoped that these lines of enquiry will contribute to our knowledge of the islamogauchisme discourse, and its cognate ideological constructions. Currently, the French scholarship on this topic is thin, certainly compared to the literature that invokes islamogauchisme. 25 It is confined to low circulation, generally online, outlets and specialised publications, thus reaching only a small section of the French public. Most of it is concerned with archiving the occurrences of the term in the public sphere, or nuancing the claims of alliance between the ‘radical Left’ and ‘Islamism’ as put forth by the elites. 26 While this literature is valuable, especially in countering the mythology of islamogauchisme, there is little analysis of the political context of its utterance and its function within that context. This is the gap that this article aims to address.
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The origins of islamogauchisme
Infinite islamo-iterations
It is widely accepted that Taguieff coined the term islamogauchisme in the early 2000s. 27 The context of that first utterance was his critique of the pro-Palestine movement during the second Intifada, which, he claims, represented the paragon of a ‘new antisemitism’ or ‘Judeophobia’. 28 To make his point, Taguieff describes pro-Palestine gatherings where ‘Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists’ and their ‘Trotskyite’ left-wing allies called for the destruction of Israel and equated Zionism with Nazism. Visceral rejection of the Palestinian cause, which he often places between scare quotes, is central to Taguieff's definition of islamogauchisme, which runs as follows: ‘a de facto and activist alliance (alliance militante) between Islamists and far-leftists in the name of the Palestinian cause, established as a renewed revolutionary call deemed universal’. 29 He adds: ‘Unconditional pro-Palestinianism functions as the foundation or acceleration factor of the islamogauchiste alliance’. 30
Between 2002 and 2022, Taguieff published extensively on his theory of islamogauchisme. Even so, he has been mindful to keep his accusation sufficiently hazy to be adapted to new situations and used against virtually anyone. Many fit into the islamo- prefix: young Arab Muslims (arabo-musulmans) who are for practical reasons presented as ‘islamistes’, virtually any organisation representing Muslim interests, particularly the Collective against Islamophobia in France (Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France; CCIF, a very effective anti-Islamophobia outlet with consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council, disbanded by the Macron government 31 ), and even Christian Arabs who are ‘not to be outdone’ (ne sont pas en reste). 32 Moreover, islamogauchiste ‘Judeophobia’ is supported by ‘the Arab-Muslim world’ seemingly in its entirety. 33
On the -gauchiste side of this ‘Judeophobic’ alliance, we have an equally wide group, comprising the ‘neo-Christian humanitarian movement’, the ‘anarcho-Trotskyites’, ‘revolutionary and anti-imperialist Third-Worldism’, ‘the Greens’, the media, a number of Jewish figures insufficiently pro-Israel (Edgar Morin, Alfred Grosser, Emmanuel Todd and Étienne Balibar), and large sections of the left-wing ‘social-democratic’ elites. 34 This convenient exhaustiveness allows Taguieff to coin hyphenated neologisms as he goes: islamo-communiste, islamo-trotskiste, islamo-altermondialiste, islamo-tiers-mondiste, islamo-progressiste, islamo-communautariste, islamo-révolutionnaire, islamo-décolonial. 35 One can hardly keep track of all the -islamos as new ones are coined each time Taguieff publishes an op-ed or is interviewed.
While supposed islamogauchiste complicities are highlighted, historically documented liberal collusion with jihadism, for instance American logistical and financial support for the mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s under a Republican president (Ronald Reagan) are carefully passed over in silence. Yet, keen to maintain his prerogative to hand down sentences, Taguieff does include a ‘fraction of the elites’ from ‘the liberal Right’ to his long list. 36 And as Godwin's law also applies to neo-republican discourse, Taguieff points to the possibility of Islamo-rightist alliances, islamo-droitiste, islamo-nationaliste, islamo-fasciste and islamo-nazi. 37 Indeed, he claims that ‘Islam’ has also been in bed with Nazism and this is even the subject of a book, suggestively entitled Liaisons dangereuses : islamo-nazisme, islamo-gauchisme and (extraordinarily) published under the aegis of the Race and Antisemitism Research Network (Réseau de Recherche sur le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme)! The core argument is nothing new, as it rehashes well-known Zionist tropes aiming to discredit the Palestinians’ experience by claiming that they (and by extension Arabs, and by a further extension Muslims) are at best implacable antisemites, at worst complicit with the Holocaust, a topic I will return to in the next section. In sum, nobody is safe from Taguieff's inquisitorial enterprise, except perhaps Taguieff himself.
At no point does Taguieff, or any of his avid readers among the French elites, interpret the malleability of Islam/islamo- as to mean that the quest for an ideological essence shared by most Muslims/Islamists is perhaps futile. While claiming that Muslims/Islamists can just as well be the allies of Nazis, Taguieff maintains that it is to the Left that they are naturally attracted. There is a historical parallel with Interwar antisemitism, and the belief that Jews were at one and the same time Bolsheviks and Wall Street financiers, beliefs that were upheld despite their inner contradictions. The reason why such a plain contradiction does not undermine the credibility of Taguieff's iteration of the islamogauchisme discourse, is that its aim is not to represent reality in an objective fashion. Islamogauchisme has a function, one of dual containment: it discredits the demands for equality of a racialised minority and one's political opponents. I will return to the function of islamogauchisme in the next section, but before that, we need to make a detour by other definitions of the islamogauchiste peril to get to a more complete picture.
The history and character of islamogauchistes
Other authors are marginally less exhaustive than Taguieff in defining the islamogauchiste enemy within. Jacques Julliard, a historian who references and praises Taguieff as often as Taguieff references and praises him, derives his credibility on matters islamogauchiste from his bygone anticolonial activism (‘I have fought for Muslims’) and the fact that he has Muslim friends (‘as my friend Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi was telling me…’). 38 Julliard defines islamogauchistes by reference to their motivations and character. First, they favour communautarisme (self-segregation), a much-used French phrase, which in the past has come in handy to otherise non-Parisians (Auvergnats, Bretons, Jews), and the first wave of European immigrants (Italians, Poles). 39 In its most recent coinage, it claims that the concentration of poor non-white populations in the French banlieues (suburbs) is rooted in the Black and Muslim residents’ own unwillingness to join the national community. The function of the accusation of communautarisme is thus to erase the historical causes of racial and economic segregation, and systemic racism as manifested in the politics of housing. Concurrently, it prevents the emergence of autonomous voices from among the racialised minorities, as they can then conveniently be accused of communautarisme, all in the name of Republican colourblindness and universalism. Additionally, as pointed out by Fabrice Dhume, the accusation of communautarisme follows a logic of suspicion against the enemy within, which is disciplinary in nature and can be used to justify interventions of a military nature, for instance when the army intervened to confront the 2005 riots. 40
As versatile as the catch-phrase communautarisme may be, for Julliard the islamogauchistes are not only that, they are also defined by their ‘hatred’: ‘hatred of Christianity and particularly Catholicism, which they putatively identify with colonialism, the West’, but also ‘hatred of economic liberalism, which leads to hatred of political liberalism’, and most importantly ‘hatred of French identity’, just ‘like’ Pétain (as already mentioned Godwin's law also applies to the islamogauchisme rhetoric). 41
History can be an alternative way to define islamogauchisme. For the prominent journalist, writer and actor Christophe Bourseiller, this history starts as far back as the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East, organised in Baku by the Comintern. 42 Their objective in organising the Baku Congress was never clear, contrary to what Bourseiller suggests. According to H. G. Wells who was in attendance in Baku, the Comintern's motivation was no more ‘than a vague idea of hitting back at the British Government through Mesopotamia and India’, in other terms supporting anticolonialism in Asia. 43 While many of the delegates were Russian Muslims, the main points of discussion revolved around the Comintern's strategy in India and China, as well as Iran and Turkey. In fact, the term ‘Islam’ occurs only a handful of times in the proceedings and many of the attendees were openly hostile to pan-Islamism. 44 Moreover, the Baku Congress was followed by an anti-Islamic campaign in Soviet Central Asia: so much for the early days of islamogauchisme. 45 Yet under Bourseiller's pen, the Congress morphs into the first instance of an enduring alliance between Marxists and Islamists. Extraordinarily, this alliance is forged eight full years before the official birth of ‘Islamism’ or political Islam, which most scholars trace to the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. Granted, in Baku, Comintern Chairman Grigory Zinoviev called for ‘holy war’ against British imperialism, however the meaning of ‘holy war’ in those days was quite different as it referred to Muslim uprisings against colonial powers in the Middle East and North Africa. Be that as it may, for Bourseiller the Baku Congress launched a seemingly timeless alliance, and cemented a political ‘line’ that has been religiously followed ever since, even – quite puzzlingly – by Brazilian Catholic liberation theology… 46
After this curious detour by Zinoviev and the shores of the Caspian, Bourseiller's history of islamogauchisme aligns itself with other authors, such as the anti-Third-Worldist essayist and critic of supposed anti-white-racism Pascal Bruckner, who like Julliard makes extensive use of Taguieff's ideas, but unlike Julliard never acknowledges his source. 47 In Bruckner's reading, islamogauchisme is rooted in a gradual change in the leftist imaginary, which saw the ‘proletariat’ replaced by ‘Muslims’ (or the ‘Islamists’, the boundary being always deliberately blurred) as the main martyrs of globalised capitalism and imperialism. Indeed, for Bruckner Islam and the Left are essentially the ‘losers’ of modernity: Islam ‘systematically resorts to violence’ because of its ‘impotence’, while the ‘far left courts totalitarian theocracies’, hence the ‘solidarity’ of the two groups. 48 He goes on: ‘In the category of the good revolutionary subject, the mujahid, the fedayee, the jihadist, the Hamas or Al-Qaeda martyr replace the proletarian, the guerrillero, the wretched of the Earth, the Palestinian’.
The outlandish claim, for anyone familiar with the recent history of the Left, is first supported by one reference to Michel Foucault's positive appraisal of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. 49 And then by reference to a single article by Chris Harman, a political activist affiliated to the UK Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In 1994, Harman wrote an article entitled The prophet and the proletariat, which criticises two Leftist approaches to the emergence of political Islam, one perceiving it as a new manifestation of fascism, the other as a progressist reaction against imperialist domination. For Bernard-Henri Lévy, the influential leader of the group known as the New Philosophers (les nouveaux philosophes), the islamogauchiste alliance started right there and then, and brought together ‘old Trotskyites inconsolable with the disappearance of the proletariat’ and the anti-Iraq war coalition. 50 His old friend Bruckner cannot agree more: this was an attempt to set up a formal alliance between the left and ‘radical Muslim associations’. 51 As Bruckner's argument goes, Harman was conscious of the insignificance of his own movement (SWP), therefore aimed to ‘take advantage’ of ‘one and a half billion Muslims’ (seemingly all islamistes) by infiltrating them in classic Trotskyite style. Corinne Torrekens has shown that this is based on a misreading of Harman's article. 52 Additionally, Timothy Peace has confirmed that this article was not well known, even within the wider membership of the SWP, and reminds us that this organisation represents a tiny fraction of the British left. 53
Yet, as the title of Harman's article lends itself to the rhetoric, Bourseiller cites it to show the trail of islamogauchisme in the ‘Respect Coalition’ that included the SWP and the Respect Party. A number of leaps of faith are required from the reader as Bourseiller claims that the Respect Party is ‘allied’ with ‘some members’ of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), which in turn serves as a ‘front for the Muslim Brotherhood’ therefore the Respect Party is islamiste. 54 Quite unlikely in fact: according to the main expert of Muslim activism in the UK Timothy Peace, while the Respect Party did indeed have a significant Muslim constituency, it was hardly exclusively Muslim and had to appeal to other voters as well. 55 Moreover, the SWP never adopted an official stance vis-à-vis Muslims in Britain or elsewhere, and while it was an important far-left organisation in the 1980s and 90s, it never became a mass party. The Respect Coalition, of which the SWP was a key component during the height of its popularity in 2004–2007, mustered only one MP and 19 local councillors. Since then, SWP membership has dwindled, particularly since a sexual harassment scandal tore the movement apart in the early 2010s. 56 As a result, the SWP today is an insignificant political force, something that Bruckner recognises. How the long-gone Respect Coalition in the UK is supposed to translate into an islamogauchiste threat to French institutions today is anyone's guess. Maximalist and ahistorical claims do not seem to tally with the facts.
Authors also refer to the imprisoned Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and the French Holocaust denier turned Muslim Roger Garaudy, as individuals that personify islamogauchisme. 57 The ‘history’ of islamogauchisme before it infiltrated French institutions stops there. It is a short history, certainly compared to the interminable lists of institutions and individuals that the righters of islamogauchiste wrongs provide to discredit their enemies. That so much emphasis is placed on one single article written in 1994 by an all but forgotten British Marxist tells us more than we need to know about the substance of the islamogauchisme claim. However, focusing on the objective reality versus fallacy of islamogauchisme is missing the point. The more relevant question is the following: what is the function of islamogauchisme?
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The function of the islamogauchisme discourse
The accusation of islamogauchisme is tied to two ideational sub-contexts. The first is an elitist pushback against the politics of antiracism and inclusion in the name of universalism and the infallibility of a sanctified République. 58 Any discussion of Islamophobia is particularly anathema in this context. The second is commitment of the elites under study to Israel and international impunity for its crimes against the Palestinians, which follows Zionist leads in criminalising domestic and international support for Palestinian rights and nationhood. The two will be analysed in turn.
The politics of anti-antiracism
First, it is worth noting that for all the claims of the exceptionality of French republicanism, and all the outrage at the alleged importation of decolonial and antiracist ‘ideologies’ from American campuses, the French elites’ rhetorical assault on the antiracist movement and its analytical framework (Islamophobia, institutional racism, racialisation, whiteness, privilege, etc.) is largely inspired by similar trends in the United States. The jargon is one of ‘colourblindness’, of excessive ‘political correctness’, and now increasingly of ‘wokeism’ and ‘cancel culture’, terms that are generally used as they are, in English, which gives away their American origins.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that American ‘colour blind racism’, although ‘kinder and gentler’ than the overt racial violence of the Jim Crow era, remains an effective tool for the perpetuation of racial inequalities. 59 He defines some of its central elements as ‘mechanisms to reproduce racial inequality’ legitimised by ‘the avoidance of racial terminology and the ever-growing claim by whites that they experience “reverse racism”’. Ironically, despite the French elites’ externalisation of racism as a primarily American problem 60 Bonilla-Silva's model is remarkably well adapted to the French discourse of ‘universalism’. 61
Even though the French constitution and legislation promote equality and sanction discrimination, and notwithstanding the elite's conviction in the righteousness of the French assimilationist model, discriminatory practices disadvantaging racialised minorities in education, housing, health, the labour market and more generally in political representation, not only exist in France but are endemic and well documented. 62 For instance, a famous study by David D. Laitlin and his team has shown that a French individual with a Muslim-sounding name will need to send as many as 2.5 times more CVs before securing an interview, which is a very significant disadvantage leading to the overall pauperisation of Muslim families. 63 Racial discrimination in hiring in France is in fact higher than in many other Western societies according to a comparative study. 64 In another noted study on housing practices in Marseille, Valérie Sala Pala has highlighted the extent to which discrimination derives from frames of mind that are neither individual, nor ideological, but entrenched in institutionalised imperatives and practices, made significantly worse by the ‘low penetration in France of notions such as (…) institutional racism’. 65 Lastly, Rachida Brahim's study has highlighted the sheer extent of racially-motivated crimes, including premeditated murder, and their systematic concealment by the authorities. 66 While these realities and the racial structure that they underlie are readily observable, the ideologies of colourblindness and universalism make them invisible to the untrained or indifferent eye.
Colourblindness dictates the erasure of the word ‘race’ itself. As human races do not objectively exist, the French intellectual and state elites insist that the term race should be banished from the dictionary, hence the National Assembly's move in 2018 to remove it from the Constitution. As scholars and antiracist organisations do use ‘race’ to name the problem and make racialised injustices visible, they are accused of reifying race and even of being the ‘true’ racists. 67 A corollary of this semantic policing is that the collection of ethnic or racial data is illegal, which makes the work of researchers more difficult. 68 While the reality of racialisation is denied, a variety of seemingly nonracial terms continue to be used, for instance ‘français de souche’ (native French) for white, and ‘jeunes de banlieues’ (suburban youth) for young Blacks and Arabs, though far more negatively charged terms such as ‘young savages’ or sauvageons also have currency; these allow a lightly covert racial discourse to develop legitimately. 69
While the reality of racism is minimised, the public sphere is saturated with claims of ‘reverse’ (à l’envers), ‘anti-white’ (antiblanc) or anti-French (antifrançais) racism. The idea of anti-white racism has a long history in colonial France and is commonplace across political parties, in judicial practice and even among antiracist organisations. According to Abdellali Hajjat, the claim of ‘anti-white racism’ is best analysed as part of an endeavour to ‘symbolically reverse’ the structure of racial domination, in other terms to present the white majority as the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of racism. 70 This inversion of reality requires one to be blind to observable systemic mechanisms highlighted by French race researchers, which explains the consistent attempts to discredit the scholarship on race. For Bruckner, who is convinced that white men are the real victims of racism, and who is not one for moderation or plausibility, postcolonial thinkers like Aimé Césaire are comparable with the Ku Klux Klan. 71 Similarly, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right Front National party claimed in 1998 that antiracism ‘does not equate an absence of racism [but] it is a reversed racism, an anti-French, anti-white, anti-Christian racism’; groups affiliated with his party have consistently lobbied French tribunals to recognise anti-white racism. 72 However, claims of anti-white-racism are hardly the preserve of conservative or far-right figures: they are also shared by state-aligned antiracist organisations such as the Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour l’Amitié entre les Peuples (MRAP) and La Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme (LICRA). 73 Moreover, mainstream elite and political discourse incessantly presents white ‘français de souche’ as victims of non-white delinquency, religious extremism and even territorial conquests, with their zones de non-droit (no-go zones), bastions of communautarisme where state sovereignty is supposed to have been replaced by the law of antisemitic, Islamist and misogynistic hordes of North African youth, a discourse that owes as much to colonial policing than to the American neoconservative critiques of European multiculturalism. 74 As usual, Godwin's law is applicable, and references to 1938, appeasement, and even pogroms abound. 75
Colourblindness and universalism are deployed by the authors under study to excoriate islamogauchiste antiracism as ‘divisive’. Julliard, who for the occasion takes on the mantle of spokesperson of the ‘people’, states that the ‘will of the French’ is ‘to be united’, therefore the antiracists and islamogauchistes must ‘stop going on and on about the origins of some and the others’, their ‘identitarianism’ being ‘stigmatising and exclusivist’ (in the same breath he refers to immigrant children as ‘culturally retarded’). 76 For Bourseiller, islamogauchiste antiracists and the far-right are one and the same: they both ‘play on the same ground’, that of ‘ethno-differentialism’. 77 With the socialist academic Laurent Bouvet whose position on the matter is aligned with the state, we get closer to a claim that antiracists support Islamism or even jihadism. Indeed, for Bouvet, islamogauchiste 'indigenist' and 'decolonial' thought are based on one ‘simplistic’ premise, that ‘the white, European, Western, Christian (or Jewish) man’ is ‘racist, imperialist and domineering’. 78 Bouvet claims that this is to ‘deny’ the rise of Islamism to justify Muslim ‘violence’ as a ‘legitimate reaction’ to ‘colonial domination’, therefore antiracists are in bed with global jihad, no less. 79 Similarly, Bernard-Henri Lévy chastises ‘intersectionality’ and ‘gender studies’ coming out of ‘American campuses’ for ‘strengthening (…) antifeminist [readings of] Islam’. 80 For Caroline Fourest, representative of a hyper-secular and universalist feminist movement, the islamogauchistes, whom she calls the ‘obscurantist Left’ (la gauche obscurantiste), are the ‘useful idiots’ and ‘guard dogs’ of Islamism (intégrisme musulman). 81
The denial of Islamophobia, which this author has analysed elsewhere, is a manifestation of this covert racial structure and the belief system that underpins it. 82 While Islamophobia denial is the default position across the Western world, the specific arguments that are mobilised to drive the point home are tributary of the French polemics of Islam, particularly a cluster of ideas popularised by Fourest and her partner and collaborator Fiammetta Venner. Fourest and Venner claim that the term Islamophobia was ‘invented’ as part of an Islamist conspiracy to discredit as racist ‘legitimate criticism of Islam’. 83 This iteration of Islamophobia denial is universally accepted among French elites despite its multiples flaws 84 , and has become a dogma of sorts that is costly to question as the smear campaigns following the 2019 march against Islamophobia amply demonstrate. 85
There is a deep level of imbrication between the texts under study here and Islamophobia denial. For all the authors, the islamogauchistes and those who invoke Islamophobia are essentially the same. For Taguieff, the only islamo- that does not exist is Islamophobia. The very possibility of Muslim victimhood is abhorrent to him, as it would represent what he describes in his tedious style as ‘pseudo-antiracist victimizing mythology’. 86 Taguieff also uses his position as a scholar of racism to discredit the invocation of Islamophobia in one of the only French spaces where it is largely recognised: the academy. In the Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme that he has edited, the entry on ‘Islamophobia’ rehashes the main lines of Islamophobia denial developed by Fourest and Venner. 87 Similarly, Bruckner has written a whole book devoted to the delegitimisation of the idea of Islamophobia (Un racisme imaginaire, 2017). He claims that the term is ‘a weapon of mass destruction of the intellectual debate’. 88 For Valérie Toranian, former editor-in-chief of the Revue des Deux Mondes, the islamogauchistes minimise Islamism to oppose Islamophobia. 89 Bourseiller lists organisations and academic conferences dealing with Islamophobia as representative of the Left's alliance with ‘Islamist clerical forces’. 90 Didier Leschi, a senior official dealing with ‘immigration and integration’ considers that the islamogauchistes’ preoccupation with Islamophobia must be read in parallel with their blindness to antisemitism. 91 For the sociologist Shmuel Trigano, the invocation of Islamophobia is ‘inseparable’ from islamogauchisme. 92 Examples could be multiplied.
The ‘new antisemitism’ thesis
The second historical sub-context of the islamogauchisme discourse among the intellectuals under study is a form of Zionism, which considers any criticism of Israel's policies of military aggression, dispossession, discrimination, and oppression as ‘antisemitic’. As mentioned earlier, Taguieff claimed in 2002 that we were witnessing the rise of a ‘new antisemitism’ (or in his words ‘Judeophobia’), which was ‘without precedent’ in ‘intensity and scale’ in the ‘post-Nazi period’. 93 The ‘novelty’ of this new antisemitism is that it is aimed at Israel instead of Jews, it is politically located on the left rather than the far-right, and it is espoused by young ‘arabo-musulmans’, whom Taguieff almost invariably describes as 'islamistes'. 94 Taguieff is very clear that the ‘new antisemitism’ is the defining characteristic of islamogauchisme. 95
This is partly the old paradigm equating antizionism with antisemitism. In the 1960s, already, pro-Israel scholars and advocates started describing international criticism of Israel's wars as a ‘new antisemitism’. Examples include Jacquet Givet's Essai sur le néo-antisémitisme following the 1967 Six Day War, Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein's The new anti-Semitism, published after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and Alain Finkielkraut's La reprobation d’Israël in the aftermath of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. 96 The now-defunct United Nations Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism ‘a form of racism and racial discrimination’ heightened the need for Israel and its friends to shore up the state's legitimacy. The result was the further institutionalisation of the antizionism-equals-antisemitism claim, now propagated by organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and – increasingly – the Israeli state itself. 97 The cognate claim that the Islamic world's opposition to Israel is largely, mostly, or exclusively attributable to its antisemitism, has also been made long before Taguieff jumped on the bandwagon. 98 Yehoshafat Harkabi, chief of Israeli military intelligence turned scholar made similar assertions in 1965 already, and a string of scholars including Bernard Lewis followed suit in the subsequent decades. 99
This brings us to the function of the ‘new antisemitism’ paradigm. In the specific context that is of interest to this article, it functions to defend Israel's wars against its neighbours, indirectly justify the occupation and appropriation of Palestinian land, and pass Israel's militarised system of surveillance and repression as legitimate defence against the Palestinians’ antisemitism. As such, I simply describe this discourse as anti-Palestinian. 100 The most radical strand of this ‘blaming the victims’ strategy is to be found among a group of post-Historikerstreit German historians including Matthias Küntzel, Martin Cüppers and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, who present the Palestinians (and by extension Arabs, and by yet another extension Muslims) as not only rabid antisemites but also complicit with the Holocaust. As Gilbert Achcar argues, it all happens as if Palestinians only oppose Israeli policies because they have read Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and not because of the annexation of their land, the forced eviction of a section of their society from its homeland, and the subjection of another section to Israeli military rule and apartheid. 101
Many scholars have exposed the deep flaws of this literature. 102 The paradigm equating antizionism and antisemitism has also received its fair share of criticism. According to Brian Klug, while it is conceivable that antisemitism might take on the mantle of antizionism, one can be antizionist for a range of other reasons, including opposition to military occupation. 103 Moreover, Peter Beinart highlights that one can be pro-Zionist and an antisemite at one and the same time, take for instance some American born again Christians or Robert Spencer, the leader of the American alt-right movement ‘who leads crowds in Nazi salutes’, yet calls himself a ‘white Zionist’. 104 In Europe, Farid Hafez has shown that far-right parties with the most incontrovertible antisemitic origins (for instance the Austrian FPÖ, the Belgian Vlaams Belang, the French Front National or the Sweden Democrats) are so ardently pro-Israel that they are signatories to the 2015 Jerusalem Declaration for ‘Judaeo-Christian cultural values’ against ‘the totalitarian threat’ of ‘fundamentalist Islam’. 105 I have elsewhere shown that the world-renown Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci fervently supported Israel out of profound aversion towards Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians, yet at the same time defended Holocaust deniers. 106 While one can be an antisemite and pro-Israel, one can also be Jewish or sensitive to Jewish interests and an anti-Zionist. Examples abound but perhaps the most famous examples in the US are the advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace (JWP) and the Hasidic sect of the Satmar, who actively support boycotting Israel. One is of course entitled to disagree with these Jewish groups, but one cannot claim with a straight face that they are ‘antisemites’. 107
By rehashing an entire discursive field, Taguieff was thus no maverick. In France, he was in fact surfing on a well-established wave. With a few exceptions such as Maxime Rodinson and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the French intelligentsia since 1948 has been generally supportive of Israel and in equal measure impervious to Palestinian suffering. 108 Since the emergence of the nouveaux philosophes, particularly Bernard-Henri Lévy, Pascal Bruckner, André Glucksman and Alain Finkielkraut – whose support for this foreign state has been beyond unwavering – prozionist politics in France have become more unrepentantly anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and Islamophobic. 109 Given the linkages shown above, it is no accident that Lévy, Bruckner and Finkielkraut are dedicated promoters of the islamogauchisme discourse in their own right. 110 This discourse has trickled down into the general public thanks to the efforts of a coterie of popularisers including Philippe Val, who at the helm of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo until 2009, quite consistently pushed an editorial line that defended Jews and Israel, and stigmatised Muslims, while complaining of the islamogauchiste scourge. 111 He also initiated a high profile manifesto ‘against the new antisemitism’, condemning the ‘silent ethnic cleansing’ of Jews by Muslims in France. 112 The collective efforts of these intellectuals and media personalities have paid off as under Emmanuel Macron, the state has officially formalised its commitment to blurring the lines between antizionism and antisemitism by joining a string of Western governments in adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism. 113
All the promoters of the islamogauchisme rhetoric under study subscribe to the ‘new antisemitism’ thesis. For Bruckner, it is inconceivable that Muslims could be victims of racism, as they are in their very essence antisemites, potentially murderous ones, both as Palestinians fighting Israel and as foot soldiers of the ‘new antisemitism’ in Europe. 114 Toranian and Julliard agree that the ‘stigmatisation of Israel’ parading as ‘antizionism’ is ‘a form of antisemitism’. 115 Shmuel Trigano, claims in Dogma, a magazine edited by Taguieff among others which publishes interviews of the Swiss-Israeli Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Bat Ye’or, that the objective of islamogauchisme is to exonerate jihadists by laying the blame for their violence by the doorstep of Israel and Jews more generally. 116 He also claims that the Nakba is at one and the same time an invention, and ‘a failed attempt to exterminate Jews’. 117 Visceral opposition to the Palestinian cause can take many forms. For instance medical: Georges Gachnochi, a child psychiatrist absolutely impervious to the suffering of Palestinian children murdered by Israeli soldiers, argues that the Palestinians, are an invented ‘neo-people’, and their islamogauchiste allies, are ‘pathological and irrational’ haters of Israel. 118 As the ‘new antisemitism’ is an elitist discourse that permeates the state, it is also to be found in the higher echelons of the French bureaucracy, even among officials dealing with issues of integration. For instance, Didier Leschi, Director-General of the French Office of Immigration and Integration (Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration; OFII) reminds his readers that antisemitism and Holocaust denial pose as antizionism in the ranks of the far left, and are particularly ‘powerful’ among ‘sections of the population with an Islamic background’ thanks to ‘Islamist and jihadist propaganda’, to which those populations are apparently globally receptive. 119
The more specific claims of Taguieff in regard to France have also been quite thoroughly demolished. Nonna Mayer has shown that at the time when Taguieff was writing, antisemitism in France, far from being on the rise, was at a historical low. 120 Moreover, she shows that people with a negative opinion of Jews tend to equally have a negative opinion of Muslims. Finally, antisemitism remains more common on the right, rather than on the left or far-left, of the political spectrum. Data from the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme; CNCDH) corroborate Mayer's claim and shows that the only group where overt antisemitism is higher than 50% are practicing Catholics, and there is no basis for the claim that antisemitism is more prevalent among France's minorities, Muslim or otherwise, as compared to the wider population. 121 Mayer's findings are not palatable to Taguieff's clique, reason why she has been unsurprisingly called an islamogauchiste, and virulently attacked by the Observatoire du décolonialisme, a website devoted to undermining antiracism and to which Taguieff contributes. 122
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The power to produce untruths
Inversion of reality
As discussed earlier, the islamogauchisme discourse must be analysed within a specific configuration of power in French society. What I mean by power, quite simply, can be observed in the diffusion of the islamogauchisme discourse in both the media and state practice. That a handful of intellectuals’ rhetoric finds such an echo in the French media, when the views of 23,000 scholars critical of that same rhetoric are hardly represented, that is power, the power to shape truth. That it is the islamogauchisme rhetoric that finds favour among high-ranking officials from the ruling party (En Marche), including government ministers, in addition to being part and parcel of the vocabulary and worldview of two important opposition parties (Rassemblement National and Les Républicains), that is power, the power to shape state practice, regardless of which of the main parties is in power (the only exception to this rule being La France Insoumise). Other ideological stances that were here analysed as part of the broader ideational context of islamogauchisme, i.e., colourblind racism and the ‘new antisemitism’ thesis, are also part of the dominant ideology of the French elites and state. The power of this coterie involves very tangible consequences for those accused of islamogauchisme. At the very least, they are offered to public condemnation as the inner enemy, as the Nonna Mayer case shows. 123 And needless to say, inequality, discrimination and the systemic production of disadvantage continue, unchallenged by an elite that consciously maintains the racial status quo.
This power imbalance can be partly attributed to this elite's outsize influence over state ideology and practice. The case of the scholar Laurent Bouvet, founder of the political movement Printemps Républicain, is representative of this influence. Before his sudden death in 2021, and while in post as a professor of law, Bouvet was also a member of the somewhat pretentiously named Council of the Sages of Secularism and the Values of the Republic (Conseil des sages de la laïcité et des valeurs de la république) within the Education Ministry. 124 Along with other scholars critical of antiracism, Bouvet was also a member of a Scientific Council advising the Inter-Ministerial Delegate to the Fight against Racism and Antisemitism (Délégué interministériel à la lutte contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme; DILCRA), appointed by the Prime Minister. 125 His widow Astrid Panosyan is a successful businessperson, an MP and one of the founders of Macron's political party, En Marche. The Élysée palace made him the honour of an official obituary upon his death. 126 As mentioned previously, Didier Leschi – another promoter of the islamogauchisme rhetoric – serves as the Director-General of the Office of Immigration and Integration (Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration; OFII). Philippe Val, the former editor of Charlie Hebdo, closely associated to the ‘new antisemitism’ and islamogauchisme discourses, is also connected to former president Nicolas Sarkozy's family, particularly his wife Carla Bruni, to whom he owes his appointment as director of Radio France Inter. 127 In 2018, his Manifesto ‘against the new antisemitism’ was signed by 250 personalities, among whom Sarkozy and three former prime ministers.
Taguieff's influence among state officials is so unquestioned that he can find a platform to make virtually any claim, no matter how unsubstantiated or fallacious. Here is an example: in one of his books Taguieff suggests that in addition to Islamophobia, ‘police violence’, the notion of a ‘glass ceiling’ and even ‘patriarchy’ lack ‘social reality’ and are in fact elements of a ‘leftist’ and ‘Islamist’ propaganda. 128 Let us ponder this claim: patriarchy does not exist, but Islamists want you to believe that it does. Of course, the claim is outlandish to the extreme, even laughable, but my point here is that Taguieff manages to put it out, in a book published by a reputable publishing house (Hermann), under the sponsorship of a racism and antisemitism research network (Le Réseau de recherche sur le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme, RRA). Any scholar who has had to pass the filters of peer review and assessment to publish their findings, would take this as testimony of a rather exceptional amount of clout. Not only does Taguieff get away with his deeply flawed scholarship, but he also gets praise in the mostly right-wing media. 129 Taguieff's ability to turn fallacy into social reality is testimony to his social capital as a member of a powerful elite that is aligned with the state. The social reality thus created is political, and to be more specific, profoundly antagonistic to antiracism. To put it in Michel Foucault's terms, the antiracist, islamogauchiste invoker of Islamophobia is an object of power and knowledge.
Now, what do the promoters of the islamogauchisme rhetoric try and achieve with their power to represent? At a fundamental epistemic level, the main strategy is one of 180-degree inversion of reality, which is applied to several inconvenient yet easily observable relationships of power. For instance, the authors turn over its head the power dynamic between the elites that they represent and the racialised masses underneath them. For instance, Julliard claims that it is the islamogauchistes who are racist, because they ‘stigmatise’ and ‘exclude’ the French. 130 According to him, the French are not entitled to having an identity, identity being the exclusive preserve of the formerly colonised populations in benefit of some sort of identitarian privilege. 131 Similarly, he claims that one can only criticise Islam in the presence of one's lawyer, which is a uniquely disingenuous statement, but assertable within the inverted reality of the islamogauchisme rhetoric. 132 This self-victimising stance is quite common, and typical of Bruckner, who equates the status of victim of racism with a ‘nobility title’. 133 During a televised debate with the antiracist activist Rokhaya Diallo, he stated point blank that ‘as a woman, Muslim and black’ she had ‘privileges’ that he did not have, presumably as a white, well-known, best-selling male author courted by the media. 134 Inversion of reality goes hand in hand with demonisation, as he then accused her of having called for the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo staff. How? By signing a petition critical of the magazine. As these inversions of reality represent, even are, racial violence, one should not be surprised by the sheer amount of gratuitous vitriol in this discourse. Take Taguieff, again, who pours scorn on racialised minorities: he first calls them ‘imaginary’ and then in the next breath accuses this ‘imaginary’ population of ‘justifying their social failure by nullifying their own responsibility (…) [and blaming] “systemic racism”'. 135
In this upside-down world, it becomes plausible that it is the islamogauchistes who have taken over the media. 136 The website Médiapart is singled out for criticism and its founder Edwy Plenel is unanimously taken to task. Several like Onfray take character assassination to absurd levels. 137 Plenel is not alone, as our authors relentlessly name and shame islamogauchistes, and provide long lists of their media outlets, publishing houses, and academic conferences. 138 For what is the point of a moral panic, if one does not use it to strike at adversaries? In that sense, the debate around islamogauchisme is a boxing ring where scores are settled, and reputations and careers ruined. Needless to say, in such a battle, victory is on the side of the objectively and quantifiably more powerful, not their critics, no matter their numbers.
The islamogauchisme discourse displays a propensity to abuse, and abuse with abandon. Islamogauchiste adversaries are repeatedly called ‘guard dogs’, ‘idiots’, and ‘stupid’. 139 Taguieff and his coterie can insult those disadvantaged by the power to narrate, without ever endangering their own credibility or career, quite the contrary in fact as insulting the islamogauchistes is part of their trade. That being said, the centrality of ad hominem attacks to the islamogauchisme discourse has another explanation as well. I would like to suggest that the promoters of the rhetoric are conscious of the multiple leaps of faith that their claims require, and to some extent even of the fallacy of their inversions of power. As a result, they carefully avoid engaging with the scholarship on race and the evidence it presents. What lacks in critical engagement with research is then made up with attacks against the personal integrity of race scholars and antiracist activists. Relatedly, while many of them complain about Godwin's law, the reality is that the islamogauchisme rhetoric is replete with Nazi analogies. Taguieff's islamonazisme and Bruckner's islamo-fascisme aside, Julliard calls his enemies ‘intellos collabos’ (‘collabo’ was used to describe Nazi collaborators) and accuses them of ‘neo-Vichyism’. 140 Hardly any article is published without accusations of appeasement and references to totalitarianism and pogroms.
Conspiracy and the inner enemy
This section broadens the study of the islamogauchiste discourse by interrogating its transnational dimension, while at the same time considering its deeper history. It therefore will require some mental gymnastics on the part of the reader, for which I apologise. I would like to argue that the islamogauchisme discourse can also be analysed as part of what I have called ‘conspiratorial racialisation’ 141 . To make sense of conspiracy thinking in this context, let us consider conspiracy theories as more than just fanciful explanations of complex events, but rather as statements of belief in the forces that secretly control history. For instance, nineteenth-century French antisemites such as Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux and Édouard Drumont believed that Jews, acting secretly yet effectively thanks to their unlimited financial means and total control over the press, were in the process of taking over France and its institutions. 142 This is a statement about the power of Jews to control minds and the balance of political power at the level of, at least, a nation.
Both antisemitism and Islamophobia are characterised by a conspiratorial gaze, which suspects Jews and Muslims, and sometimes both in tandem, to conspire to bring about the total domination of the nation, of Europe, or of ‘Western civilisation’. 143 Historically, antisemitic conspiracism is more ancient, as it develops in the nineteenth century when Jews were seen as benefitting from, therefore suspected of having instigated, the many dislocations of the modern age, from the French Revolution to the advent of industrial society. Without claiming that this literature should be understood as a template for more recent Islamophobic conspiracism, I have tried to highlight the striking discursive similarities between myths of Jewish domination on the one hand and theories of the ‘Islamisation of Europe’ and ‘great replacement’ on the other. 144
What this analysis shows is that conspiracy thinking is not ancillary, but central to antisemitism and Islamophobia, and in fact represents a process that I call conspiratorial racialisation. Indeed, Jews and Muslims are racialised, imagined as groups sharing immutable and inherited moral, psychological and behavioural characteristics. 145 Conspiracy theories contribute to this racialisation process by ascribing at least two additional racial characteristics to the targeted populations. First is the imperative to conspire, even unconsciously, as if each individual was but one cell of a larger consciousness. This racial assumption is encapsulated in Hitler's belief that Jews ‘always pursue the same aims and without previous agreement even use the same methods’, as if conspiring was a biological imperative. 146 The same conspiratorial racialisation is at play in Renaud Camus’ claim in his influential 2012 pamphlet The Great Replacement (Le grand remplacement) that Muslims are ‘an army, the strong arm of the conquest [of the West], whether they are conscious of it or not’. 147
The second racial characteristic that conspiracy theories attribute to the target population is their inborn and visceral enmity towards ‘us’ (the French, Christians, Europeans, Westerners), which combined with their ability to conspire makes them an existential threat. These assumptions have deep historical roots that go back to medieval apocalyptic thought as well as the forms of ethnic cleansing specific to the Iberian Reconquista. 148 In the modern period, the domination of gentile European institutions by Jews, as predicted by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, effectively represents the death of Europe, the end of its existence as a sovereign politico-cultural entity. Similarly, an Islamised Europe, as predicted by, for instance, the Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Bat Ye’or, is a dystopia in which European nation-states have been abolished by the forces of Islam, and where Sharia law rules over multitudes of dhimmi Christians and Jews: Bat Ye’or calls it a ‘post Judeo-Christian civilization (…) subservient to the ideology of jihad’, in other terms, a non-Europe, therefore a dead Europe. 149
A central point here is that in racialised conspiracy thinking, the minority never acts alone, but always with the help of collaborators from among the ingroup. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, Jews were assumed to be conspiring with Freemasons and the Illuminati. But in later iterations, the traitors invariably represented some manifestation of the Left: in their Protocols, the Elders of Zion enlist internationalists, socialists and communards. 150 The perceived threat of Judaeo-Bolshevism in the twentieth century can be seen as a continuation of these putative associations. 151 In all Islamophobic conspiratorial texts, from Oriana Fallaci and Douglas Murray to Bat Ye’or and Renaud Camus, the Left is consistently accused of connivance with the Islamic invasion. 152 As such, the comparison that has been made between Judaeo-Bolshevism and islamogauchisme is not as illogical as Taguieff and others would have us believe. An exact comparison would be missing the point, but as a conspiratorial discourse that posits complicity between the racialised threat and the political adversary, Judaeo-Bolshevism can indeed be taken as ideationally related to islamogauchisme.
The history of conspiratorial racialisation sheds a useful light on the islamogauchisme discourse for two reasons. First, the authors studied here do claim that a multifaceted conspiracy is being enacted by an identifiable cabal of islamogauchistes. This conspiracy is one of takeover and infiltration not only of the university and other French institutions, but also of the media and society at large, which is, according to Frédérique Vidal, Minister of the Education under Macron, ‘gangrened’ by islamogauchisme. Second, islamogauchisme structurally converges with Islamophobic conspiracy thinking, as both posit an alliance between the Left and the forces of Islam. For instance, in her Eurabia conspiracy theory, Bat Ye’or claims that Arab states (invariably described as the forces of jihad) are in an alliance with the treacherous European institutions infiltrated by the Left, in an endeavour to transform Europe into a Sharia state called Eurabia. Thus, islamogauchisme and conspiratorial Islamophobia broadly belong to the same ideological universe.
This common baggage is observable in our French authors’ penchant for Islamophobic conspiracy theorists, chief among whom Bat Ye’or. As mentioned earlier, Taguieff approvingly cites her and has published one of her books. 153 Trigano references her conspiracy theories with deference, and the Observatory of the Jewish World (L’observatoire du monde juif) that he presides over publishes her Eurabia material and recognises her as a ‘specialist of the dhimmi condition’ (Christian and Jewish minorities under Islam). 154 Toranian's 2018 interview of Bat Ye’or in La Revue des Deux Mondes is quite revealing about the intersections of islamogauchisme and Eurabia; in the interview Bat Ye’or's theories are promoted, Arabs are collectively presented as supportive of Nazism and organisers of pogroms, the ‘pro-Palestinian’ position is equated with antisemitism, the supranational European Union is described as complicit with global jihad, the invocation of Islamophobia is presented as a conspiracy, and it is claimed that Europe is waging war against Israel via the Palestinians. 155 Hardly any aspect of the islamogauchisme or Islamisation discourses is missing. Taguieff and Finkielkraut have also praised and legitimised the boorish Islamophobic tantrums of Oriana Fallaci. 156 But the affinities run deeper: Bat Ye’or herself references Taguieff several times in Eurabia and praises him for his clairvoyance in working out that ‘Palestinianism’ is ‘Nazism’ in its Arab form. 157 These references and counter-references are not insignificant; they point to a shared ideological core: that Islamism aims to take over the West; that ordinary Muslim practices such as the Islamic veil are a sign of that takeover's success, which suggests that most if not all practicing Muslims are the foot soldiers of that project; and that the Left has paid allegiance to jihad and willingly supports it, which is the reason why they have integrated Muslim antisemitism and oppose Israel so vehemently. In fact, the two discourses are one and the same, the only difference lies in the element that is emphasised.
Finally, let us stress that the same Islamophobic conspiracism that is supported by the advocates of the islamogauchisme discourse, has very tangible and tragic consequences in real life. Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass killer and terrorist, was a firm believer in Bat Ye’or's theories. In the manifesto that he left behind before murdering 77 people in Oslo and Utøya, he mentions Bat Ye’or 62 times and Eurabia 159 times. In 2009, he named Bat Ye’or as one of his main sources of inspiration. 158 Breivik's affinities with the islamogauchisme discourse are evident in the choice of his victims: the youth movement of the Norwegian Labour Party. Indeed, it was Breivik's belief that this leftist party was to be blamed for the Islamisation of Norway.
Conclusion
Clearly, Islamogauchisme does not represent a real political group or an identifiable ideology. Its history is either bogus (the Baku Congress) or so thin as to betray its fallacy (Carlos the Jackal and Chris Harman). Its applicability to large swathes of French society reveals instead that it has been designed as a flexible instrument of racial violence. It is very effectively put to use in the context of the French pushback against the politics of antiracism to demonise non-compliant groups as the accomplices of jihadism. These include antiracist activists– particularly those dealing with Islamophobia – supporters of the Palestinian cause, and more generally the French population of Muslim background or perceived as such. Islamogauchisme freely borrows rhetorical strategies used in the American whitelash, particularly its concern with ‘political correctness’, ‘wokeism’ and ‘cancel culture’, while dismissing antiracist concepts as ‘American imports’.
In essence, the islamogauchisme rhetoric serves a far-right, socially conservative agenda aiming to maintain existing privileges and opposed to the politics of inclusion. Taguieff downplays the success of the islamogauchisme discourse in far-right polemics to save face 159 , but analyses of online activism make clear that the invocation of islamogauchisme is historically situated on the far right of the political spectrum before becoming generalised more recently. 160 What this shows is that the identitarian discourse of the French elites is compatible with far-right exclusivism, which in turn explains the respectability that the Rassemblement National has acquired in the twenty-first century. 161
To reach their goals, the promoters of the islamogauchisme discourse exploit their tremendous social and political capital to obscure racism, particularly Islamophobia, and offer a lease of life to the unequal production of privilege in French society. Rhetorically, this involves an inversion of reality, as far as structural forces and social regimes of domination are concerned. To achieve that goal, they can rely on both a privileged relationship with the media, which allows them to shape public discourse, and unfettered access to the corridors of power, which allows them to influence state practice. Their militancy has succeeded as President Emmanuel Macron accused antiracists protesting the murder of George Floyd of inciting ‘secessionism’. 162
The islamogauchisme discourse cannot be dissociated from broader transregional trends in Islamophobic conspiracy thinking. Taguieff and co. would have us believe that French institutions are on the brink of an ideological takeover, a conspiracy hatched in the Baku Congress or the writings of Chris Harman. The alliance that they see between the Left and the forces of jihad is at the basis of Islamisation theories. The promoters of the islamogauchisme discourse use their power and credibility to promote and legitimise Islamophobic conspiracy theorists like Fallaci and Bat Ye’or, which have influenced Breivik's enterprise of mass murder.
Rather than truth speaking to power, the islamogauchisme discourse represents the power to turn fallacy into truth.