By Jihad Wachill,
In Memoriam, Jihad Wachill, President of the Franciscan Peace Movement Council, died on 8 July 2026.
Contrary to popular ideas, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are intimately linked in France.
The question was asked: is Islamophobia today a « new anti-Semitism »? Or is it not a return to the Arabophobic sources (and Islamophobic) of a « anti-Semitism to French »?
The political-media debate tends to compete with anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Nothing more artificial. In fact, in France, tolerance towards religious minorities has not always been obvious, far from it. And one can see a thread between crusade against the Cathars, religious war against Protestants, anti-Semitism, and today Islamophobia. Each time, the country’s main religious minority is targeted.
The settlement of the wars of religion in the 17th century by the Westphalian treaties of 1648 enshrines in Europe the principle « such sovereign, such people ». Transposed to France, this principle marked a regression from the 1598 edict of tolerance, and its repeal in 1685.
A « French-style » anti-Semitism marked by arabophobia.
Worse still, between this Westphalian principle « such sovereign, such people » imposed by the German Protestant princes and the Nazi slogan « ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer », a continuum is even more obvious.
If, in the whole of Europe, once this inter-Christian dispute has been settled, it is to the Jewish communities that intolerance turns, with an acceleration in the second half of the 19th century, in France there are sinuosities on the part of antisemitism in gestation between Judeophobia and Arabophobia (hate of Arabs).
Thus, almost until the Dreyfus case, the French anti-Semitic movement hesitates on the Semite to fight between the Arab and the Jew.
The French writer Ernest Renan, assumed and claimed anti-Semitic, even theorized that European Jews were not or were more truly Semites and that they had to be removed from the field of anti-Semitism.
How can we explain this « anti-Semitism to French » marked by the Arabophobia? In the 1850s, when anti-Semitism began to develop in Europe, France had just conquered Algeria under extremely questionable conditions. The reason for this war is unfavorable (to settle a debt owed to Algeria by liquidating the creditor…).
And the way it was conducted strongly criticized by the press (Algeria reportedly lost between 1830 and 1860 more than half of its population, about a quarter having been killed and another quarter forced into exile). Hence the need to justify a posteriori this conquest and then its colonization.
Thus racialist and anti-Semitic theories were put at the service of war propaganda, with the priority of denigrating, inferiorizing, or even dehumanizing, Algerians in public opinion, but also, already, dividing them between Arabs and Kabyles.
Islamophobia, the true « new anti-Semitism »?
It is in this context that the gestation of anti-Semitism in France, taken initially in the literal sense, the hatred of the Semite, and for which the Semite enemy to fight is at the origin rather Arab (and already his majority religion, Islam…) than the Jew. It was only from 1870 and the humiliating defeat against Prussia that French anti-Semitism experienced a clear translation from the Arab into the Jew, this in stages until the Dreyfus case.
Two elements explain: Algeria was « pacified » (in blood…) first and the moment is rather in search of an « inner enemy » to explain an unexpected and traumatic military defeat. And the Jew, diasporic and cosmopolitan, is then a scapegoat. But today we have the right to wonder if we are not going to attend this cross-hunt again, but this time in the other direction.
The fact is that current Islamophobia largely recycles the substrate of imagery and anti-Semitic language elements: denunciation of a supposed « double allegiance », existence of a supposed « complot » for world domination, supposed impossibility of integration because of their difference, etc.
From the Islamophobic resumption of the anti-Semitic (and anti-Communist) caricature of the octopus by Rachel Khan to the unfounded assertion by Florence Bergeaud-Blacker on supposed links between « Muslim Brothers » and Freemasonry (an Islamic-phobic update of the anti-Semitic poncif of the « Jewish-Masonnic complot ») to the background music on the theme of « Islamo-Gauchism », avatar brought to the taste of the Islamophobic day of the anti-Semitic fantasy of « Judeo-Bolshevism », the examples are now spreading in a disconceived way, targeting Palestinians in particular for the past two years.
NDLR
In Jewish Redeem. The end of a reciprocal laundering pact (La Découverte, 224 pages, 16.50 euros), Michel Feher, philosopher, founder of the New York publishing house Zone Books and the online media Diagrams, considers that the strategy of assimilating anti-Semitism to anti-Zionism is at the heart of the reactionary international project. Which act. End of note
Article published in the April 2026 issue of « Planète Paix » (monthly published by the Peace Movement)
To go further on this theme, see this link
- https://www.madaniya.info/2026/04/16/de-la-loi-irha-a-la-loi-yadan-la-pesanteur-de-vichy-a-la-captation-de-l-imaginaire/
- https://www.renenaba.com/philippe-val-or-revisionism-anti-arab-en-guise-de-bas-de-commerce/
- https://www.renenaba.com/de-l’accusation-dantisemitism- comme-arme-de-dissuasion/
- https://www.madaniya.info/2025/10/06/de-what-the-judeo-christianism-is-the-name/
West Islamophobia: a 4-part file
Hate preachers
- https://www.madaniya.info/2024/03/07/islam-western-2-4-the-predicators-of-the-haine-according-larabi-saoudite/
- https://www.madaniya.info/2024/03/15/islam-occident-3-4-les-predicateurs-de-la-haine/
- https://www.madaniya.info/2024/03/22/islamophobia-western-kingdom-of-disstraction-4-4/
- https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2026/04/24/danny-trom-sociologist-la-loi-yadan-revele-un-etat-de-l-opinion-or-any-repression-de-la-parson-antisemite-equivaut-a-une-censure 6683043 3232.html
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