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I’d like to start by reminding the audience that French consciousness is strongly structured around the memory of the genocide of the Jews which is commonly referred to as the Shoah and that this consciousness is the backbone of French antiracism.

  At this point of my presentation, I’d like to mention what I call « state Freudian slips », which are akin to unconscious truths. I have numbered three of them: 

The first one was made by Raymond Barre, on October the third, 1980. A bomb killed three people in front of a synagogue located in Copernic Street in Paris. The Prime Minister (Raymond Barre) claimed it was «  a horrible attack which meant to hit Jewish people going to the synagogue and which hit innocent French people who were walking across the Copernic street ». Consequently, for the Prime Minister, Jewish people are not French since they are opposed to « innocent French people » here.
 
The second one comes from Jacques Chirac, President of the Republic, when he declared in his televised speech on the fourth of July in 2004: « We are facing a time when racist incidents (…) endanger the safety of our Jewish and Muslim compatriots or sometimes just French people… ». This time again, the Jews as well as the Muslims are discriminated from the French national body.

The third slip was expressed by François Hollande last week, a few days after a Jewish cemetery had been desecrated. In the speech he delivered during the gala dinner organized by the CRIF (Jewish institutions representative council in France), he claimed : «  I was in Sarre-Union last week, in the cemetery which was devastated by young high school students, who are French of old stock (« Français de souche »), as we say. ». When the President of the Republic uses this phrase « French of old stock », he exclusively refers to white Christians (and the ones who committed this crime were indeed white Christians) and excludes the Muslims as well as the Jews from the old stock.
 

L’atac contra Charlie Hebdo ha suscitat una legítima convulsió a tot el país. Res no justifica un crim com aquest; res no justifica emprendre-se-les contra una redacció; res no justifica que s’assassinin periodistes, policies, simples ciutadans, alguns pel fet de ser jueus. No sabem si hi haurà un “abans” i un “després” d’aquest 7 de gener, però és vital que s’obri un debat sobre el futur en comú que volem.