Poller on Finkielkraut and the Bobos

Finkielkraut's attackers are making a spectacle of themselves. But they don't even realize it. They've gone berserk.Why berserk? Why now?


Nidra Poller writes on Alain Finkielkraut for American Thinker. Below is part of what she writes.


French Intellectual Tells Truth, Faces Consequences
December 13th, 2005

In the aftermath of November's street fighting, French opinion-makers have pounced on an expiatory victim: philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, a man of integrity who seeks to shed light on events as they happen. His intelligent analysis of, in his words, the "pogrom against the Republic," [1] conveyed in an interview with two journalists from Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has triggered an explosion of intellectual violence against his person, his ideas, his thought process, his very existence.

A dishonest patchwork of excerpts from the Haaretz interview, deliberately slanted to make Alain Finkielkraut look like a Le Pen in philosopher's clothing, was published in the leading French newspaper Le Monde. Stupidly re-translated from the Hebrew translation of the original French, it became the basis for merciless criticism, as if those few paragraphs were the entire interview, or a fair résumé of eight pages of careful reflection on a phenomenon that no one—then or now—could claim to truly define.

Eschewing sociological stereotypes Finkielkraut analyzes the uprising as an attack against France within France. The perpetrators, French Blacks and Muslims born in France, often third-generation, are anchored to an ethnic-religious identity that precludes integration. They feed on a diet of anti-French gangsta rap, in a culture that seeks instant gratification. Instead of being shamed for their brutality, they are being flattered as victims of society, rebels with a cause. Distorted anti-racism is becoming a totalitarian ideology, that will be the bane of the 21st century as was Communism in the 20th. Competition for victimhood leads to negation of the singularity of the Shoah and its redistribution to the victims of slavery, colonization, Palestinian "genocide."

The scope and intensity of negative reactions to this analysis, or to the distorted remnants thrown out as bait, defies the imagination. Commentators blustered and choked, sputtered and fumed, could hardly find words to articulate their outrage at Finkielkraut, that racist, reactionary, neo-conservative enemy of Blacks and Muslims. They called him a schizophrenic madman. An ignoramus who knows nothing about what's happening on the ground. An evil thinker whose ideas are one of the causes of the disturbances.

Read it all below: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5070