Caroline Valentin is a co-author of A Submitted France, The Voices of Refusal (published by Albin Michel, 2017).

On the night of April 4, 2017, in Paris, Sarah Halimi, a Jewish woman of 65, is savagely murdered. His murderer, Kobili Traoré, a radicalized Muslim of Malian origin with a long criminal record, bursts on her for 40 long minutes, first in the living room of Sarah Halimi, then on his balcony. He yells "Allah Akbar", insults his victim, treats her as "fat whore", "sheitane" (demon in Arabic). Several neighbors hear and then watch, from their windows or the courtyard, terrified at the massacre. Din the excellent article that Noémie Halioua devoted to this case in the last issue of Causeurshe recounts the testimony of one of them: "The first thing that woke me up was the moans of a living being in pain. It was torture. At first, I think it's an animal or a baby. But then, opening the curtain and opening the window, I understand that it is a woman who moans under the blows she receives. Every time I hear a groan, it does not even have the force to cry out. " Kobili Traoré beats so hard that his right fist is swollen. Then, seeing in the courtyard the light of the torches of the police, he screams "be careful, there is an old lady who will commit suicide", grabbed her victim - still alive - by the wrists and tilts her over the balustrade from his balcony. Sarah Halimi lies in the courtyard, dead, bleeding.

Sarah Halimi knew Kobili Traoré, he was his neighbor, he threatened her constantly, she was afraid of him. Five years ago, his sister had jostled one of Sarah Halimi's daughters as a "dirty Jew." A few days after the death of Sarah Halimi, some five hundred people who participate in the white march organized in Belleville in his memory will march under the - "now traditional" says Noémie Halouia - "dead Jews" and "we have the kalash "that fuse neighboring cities.

"Now traditional" ... Yes, because the precedents are now numerous. The "dead to the Jews" had already marked the parades of the "pro-Palestinian" demonstrations organized, despite their ban, in July 2014, particularly in Paris and Ile-de-France. In the same vein, the reactions that followed the murders of six people including three Jewish children in 2012 by Mohammed Merah: the imam of Bordeaux Tareq Oubrou explained having spent weeks of preaching on this case because of the empathy for Mohammed Merah demonstrated by the faithful of his mosque; Mohammed Merah's brother Abdelghani, for his part, testified about the you-yous who accompanied the death of his brother and the congratulations that some neighbors came to present to their mother, regretting that Mohammed did not kill any more. Jews. But this goes back even further: Between 1999 and 2000, the year of the Second Intifada, the number of antisemitic acts increased ninefold, from 82 to 744. Since then, it has remained at an extraordinarily high level given the low number of of Jews in France, oscillating between 400 and 900 years depending on the year, depending mainly on the ups and downs of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2002, the publication of "Lost Territories of the Republic", shows with strong witness the preeminence, the magnitude and the violence of the hatred against the Jews in certain sensitive districts. These are just a few examples, among so many other proofs that have accumulated for almost twenty years now. Nevertheless, none of these alerts managed to break the omerta political and media.

The atrocious murder of Sarah Halimi has not broken this silence either. France is then in the middle of the presidential campaign, the four candidates in the lead of the polls are in a handkerchief. We must treat its voters and, let's face it, Jews are far fewer than Muslims - less than 500,000 against nearly 6 million. In addition, the Institut Montaigne report on "Islam of France" published in September 2016 indicates that "anti-Semitism was a marker of belonging" for a quarter of Muslims and the November 2014 Fondapol survey, that " Responding Muslims are two to three times more likely than average to share prejudices against Jews. The proportion is even greater as the respondent declares a greater commitment to religion. "

In early April 2017, Emmanuel Macron is in difficulty by the case Mohammed Saou. We have just discovered that this referent "En Marche" Val d'Oise shared Facebook posts of Marwan Muhammad, founder of "the scary" - as Alain Finkielkraut said - CCIF (Committee against Islamophobia in France, organ close to the Muslim Brotherhood who are one of the bridgeheads of fundamentalist political Islam in France); that he supports the Erdogan regime in Turkey; that he said he "never was and would never be Charlie". Emmanuel Macron tackles, temporarily removes Saou from his duties while praising his remarkable work and postpones the decision concerning him to that of the ethics commission of his movement ... Decision of which we obviously will never hear. (The same Saou has just been reinstated in his departmental duties.) François Fillon, entangled in his family and costumes, dares not move an ear for fear of losing the few hundred thousand votes that could make the difference for a qualification in the second round. Jean-Luc Mélenchon makes great declarations on secularism but unabashedly contests Muslim community voting and surrounds himself with who it takes for that. (For proof, a few weeks later, it will be learned that Danièle Obono, freshly elected deputy of France Insoumise, is close to the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic, a group of identity whose spokeswoman, Houria Bouteldja, was particularly illustrated in declaring "Mohamed Merah, it's me, and me, I'm him." These revelations will not diminish the enthusiasm of the support that Ms. Obono has from Jean-Luc Mélenchon.) In this collection of tartuffes, it is only Marine Le Pen, yet the heiress of a party founded in particular by anti-Semitic barely repented, to condemn - to a small recovery, and without either making it his warhorse - this crime and asking that we finally tackle the subject of "Islamist anti-Semitism".

Finally, what is the subject? Indeed, it would be time. But who will dare to do it again? Georges Bensoussan, historian of the Shoah, specialist of the Arab world, paid dearly for having mentioned it during the show "Replicas" of Alain Finkielkraut at the beginning of October 2015: extraordinarily violent forums multiplying to condemn the so-called "racism" of Georges Bensoussan's words, emanating not only from the usual police of political thought innervated by the university left but also from that fringe of Jewish intellectuals (such as Bernard Schalscha in the Rule of the Game) who undoubtedly thinks that by acting as if this anti-Semitism did not exist, it would eventually disappear; warning of the CSA sent to France Culture; and, finally, a trial initiated by the Public Prosecutor's Office, which will see the main anti-racist associations, including the Licra, and commune with the political Islam represented by the CCIF in denouncing the historian's comments.

The latter's release is exemplary, especially given his clear motivation. Pointing out that it was not for the historian to express a hatred, but rather an anxiety, to call "not a separation of the fraction supposed to have seceded, its rejection, its banishment or its eradication, but on the contrary to its reintegration into the French nation ", the court has somehow put the clocks of anti-racism on time and heard Alain Finkielkraut who, speaking at the bar, had lamented" an anti-racism misguided which calls for the criminalization of a concern instead of fighting the reality on which it is based ": to fight against racism, to allow the integration within the nation of populations of foreign cultures, it starts by fighting what constitutes an obstacle to this integration and, in this respect, fatality does not exist.

It seems to be really politically very difficult today to coexist, in the same speech, the fight against racism and anti-Semitism. The main culprits of the second are recruited among the main victims of the first. The appearance of this anti-Semitism, new under our skies, is part of a powerful resurgence of Muslim fundamentalism that does not spare France. This resurgence does not only translate into frightful attacks but, as Elisabeth Badinter says, by the appearance of "a second society" which "attempts to impose itself insidiously on our Republic, turning its back on it, explicitly aiming at separatism or even secession. "

The hostility of this counter-society does not only concern secularism, it also aims more broadly at our principles of freedom, equality and fraternity. For there is no equality in a fundamentalist counter-society defined by an identity principle, for which the Muslim individual, the Ummah, the dar al-Islam are superior to any other individual, community or non-Muslim nation. There is no universal brotherhood but a fraternity reduced to a community of believers who define themselves in conflict with the West in general and France in particular. No freedom in a clan-based group, imposing on each of its members submission to God, to Islam, to his dogmas and his struggles, including the confrontational positioning vis-à-vis the Western civilization. This political Islam does not recognize one and the same humanity but different humanities. Some men are worth more than others in his eyes. And in the paroxysmal forms of this religious fundamentalism, some men are worthless.

We understand very well why anti-Semitism thrives within this fundamentalist Islam. It is only one of the forms of a rejection of the other which is consubstantial with this Islamism and which is also declined in the form of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism.

The hatred of the Jew, however, remains the most intense. Some attribute it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to Israeli policy and in particular to the continuation of Israeli installations in Palestinian territory. But they do not know or pretend they do not know it's rooted in a much older story. In his reference book "Jews in Arab countries - The great uprooting: 1850-1975", Georges Bensoussan reports the violence of this anti-Semitism in the Arab countries and this time immemorial; he explains how, from the Maghreb to Iraq and from Egypt to Yemen, the life of dhimmitude of the Jews in the Arab world had nothing to envy, in terms of oppression undergone, imposed misery, under-citizenship from humiliations and occasional pogroms to that of the Jews in the tsarist empire. This anti-Semitism is not born of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it feeds on it. This conflict does not create this hatred, it does not increase its intensity; on the other hand, by giving him the support of a whole left which, as Jean Birnbaum demonstrates, does not really include anything in the religious realm, it legitimizes its expression. By putting its networks, its culture, its verve, its access to the media, its privileged place in the university and in the world of research at the service of Arab-Muslim struggles, both in France and abroad, the left - extreme, moral, "anti-racist" by psittacism rather than conviction - is not only stupid, it is extraordinarily harmful. It provides our opponents (which it refuses to see that they are also, and in a certain way especially, hers) a humanist facade that their motives and their goals do not have. Our alliances with Saudi Arabia or Qatar, our failed military interventions in the Middle East, and 19th and 20th century colonization are also exploited to justify what is portrayed as legitimate resistance to oppression. But again, it is our Western brains who are sensitive to these brilliant, reasoned, rational arguments; in the conquering spirit of political Islam, the fight against the West does not need these justifications.

The support of these "useful idiots" is largely the cause of the state's silence on the anti-Semitism of "neighborhoods". Because despite its low electoral representativeness, this left is extremely influential in the intermediate bodies, it has its inputs in a large number of media, is a master in the art of manipulating language elements rights-of-the-dripping pathos. Today, it is permissible to say certain things which, twenty years ago, ten years ago, or even five years, had earned their authors the pillory of the moral left: we can say that it is possible to being extreme right without being anti-Semitic; we can even say that there is far-left anti-Semitism; but we can not yet say that there is Arab-Muslim anti-Semitism. To speak about it, it is more prudent to refer to the "new" anti-Semitism and to remain in allusions, periphrases and innuendos. At the slightest error, at the slightest direct reference, the obscurantist cabal of these modern inquisitors is unleashed and the offender is immediately sent to roast the hell of racism, without any guarantee of his morality and real motivations, as irrefutable he can not get out of it. Because responding to such serious accusations and justifying them requires lengthy, step-by-step explanations that are incompatible with the immediacy of the media and their inability to translate subtlety and complexity. And, as we well know, denial has much less impact than the accusation: once the doubt looms, it is dead, and our politicians have understood it for a long time.

"The further a society moves away from the truth, the more it hates those who say it," warned George Orwell. The political incapacity to designate this anti-Semitism for what it is forbidden to make the historical, anthropological and religious analysis and consequently to undertake the specific and targeted actions that would be necessary to overcome it. France sinks a little more every day into a multiculturalist policy with hints - involuntarily, but inevitably - racialist. Racialists not to say racist because this culturalist attitude that claims to be inspired by respect for different cultures is nothing more than the low-noise abandonment of our integration model, deemed inaccessible for these populations, presumed by our political leaders chaperoned by some of our anti-racist associations, as incapable of going out of their archaic ways of thinking and functioning. We have given up helping these people, reaching out to them. By abandoning the Jews, we also abandoned the latter and, in doing so, we lost ourselves.

The murder of Sarah Halimi must be understood as an alarm that reminds us of ourselves, of what defines us. This inertia is unworthy of us. France, country of the Enlightenment, cradle of the universal values ​​of the humans right, can not be a country where the Jews are attacked and kill, because Jews, in the general indifference. We are all heirs to a story, we are all accountable for a legacy that goes from Salomon de Troyes to France Vichy through the emancipation of the Jews in 1791 (that France was the first in Europe to consent ) and the Dreyfus affair. Out of respect for who we are, for what we pride ourselves on representing, we have no right to attend without reacting to the rise of hatred against our Jewish fellow citizens. It is our admiration for France and, ultimately, our pride in being French.