Finkielkraut’s Plain Talk On Race
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

L’affaire Finkielkraut, as one might label the controversy currently swirling around the French-Jewish thinker Alain Finkielkraut, is not quite the Dreyfus Affair, but it does tell us something about contemporary French political culture and about the duplicity of the media, even of its most supposedly respectable representatives.
It all started when Mr. Finkielkraut, a well-known intellectual who has for many years now attacked the Left – his original political home – for its hypocrisy, gave a long interview to the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz on the subject of the recent riots in France.
In this interview, he sharply criticized France’s media, intellectuals, and politicians for viewing the riots as the understandable protest of a discriminated-against social and economic underclass while turning a blind eye to their true ethnic and religious nature – that is, to their being an expression of the deep hatred felt for France by a generation of French-born children of Muslim and Arab immigrants that has given up trying to integrate and does not identify with the French Republic. France, Mr. Finkielkraut told Haaretz, must stop treating these youngsters as victims of imaginary injustices and demand that they think of themselves – as did Jewish immigrants in the past – as French citizens with all the opportunities and responsibilities that this entails.
This interview appeared on November 18. On November 23, excerpts from it were published in the French liberal daily Le Monde in an article slanted to make Mr. Finkielkraut appear anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and racist. A public outcry ensued and the prominent French civil rights organization MRAP threatened to take Mr. Finkielkraut to court for violating France’s anti-racism laws. Mr. Finkielkraut then chose to defend himself in two more interviews, one to Radio Europe and one to Le Monde, in which he accused the November 23 article of selectively distorting his views. As he put it to Le Monde:
“The person portrayed by the [Le Monde] article would cause me to feel disdain and even disgust for him ….To my stupefaction, however, ever since [the article’s publication] there are now two of us with the same name.”
Although Mr. Finkielkraut did not recant his opinions – on the contrary, he made it clear that he stood behind what he had said in Haaretz – these remarks were taken by MRAP as an apology and the threatened lawsuit was dropped. At which point, Haaretz decided to get back into the act. On November 27, it ran a front-page article with the headline, “After Threats, The Philosopher Finkielkraut Apologizes.” There followed a news story explaining that, faced with a lawsuit and vociferous criticism, Mr. Finkielkraut had expressed “disdain and disgust,” not for Le Monde’s distortion of his views, but for those views themselves. The clear – and false – implication was that he had buckled ignominiously under pressure.
Of all the parties involved in l’affaire Finkielkraut, Haaretz undoubtedly comes out looking the worst. For the sake of a sensational and incorrect story, it vilified a man courageous enough to accept an invitation to be interviewed in its pages and express unpopular thoughts there.
Le Monde does not come out much better. What it excerpted from the Haaretz interview was deliberately chosen to represent Mr. Finkielkraut in the worst possible light. Both newspapers, each generally considered the best in its country, illustrate a truth that anyone who has frequent dealings with journalists and the media knows well: They are often not to be trusted – not only to get the facts straight, but even to want to.
Over and above this, however, l’affaire Finkielkraut is a sad illustration of how the culture of political correctness, as stultifying as it is in the United States, is even more so in Europe and especially in France. Whether or not one agrees with Mr. Finkielkraut’s analysis of the French riots, they are racist only if it is racism to look the facts in the face. As a French friend of mine, who knows the immigrant suburbs of Paris well, put it in a conversation with me: “I could never get away with publicly saying this in France, but it can’t be an accident that the rioters were all Arabs and African Muslims. There are plenty of other poor immigrant groups in France, including many African Christians, but none of them were out there torching schools and their neighbors’ cars.”
True, many social commentators have been smeared as racists in America, too, for arguing, as does Alain Finkielkraut, that it is not so much prejudice that keeps disadvantaged youngsters from escaping the ghetto as it is their own anger and sense of victimization, which cause them to turn their backs on the education and job training that might enable them to get ahead in the world.
Yet in America such propositions are nevertheless legitimate subjects for debate; one certainly does not face court proceedings, let alone a possible conviction, for advancing them. In France, on the other hand, virtually the whole subject of ethnic minorities is taboo. No one in France has even the vaguest idea of what, say, the average per capita income of a North African immigrant family is, or how immigrants from Mali do relative to immigrants from China, because astonishingly enough, it is illegal to compile government statistics on such things.
You can’t deal with a problem unless you first identify it – and l’affaire Finkielkraut is one more indication that the French have yet to identify their problem. In a country in which the official line is that everyone is a Frenchman and that ethnicity and religion have nothing to do with anyone’s status, ethnicity and religion will come more and more to define the status of many French citizens, since there is no way to ameliorate what one refuses to acknowledge. As Alain Finkielkraut says at the end of his Haaretz interview, as long as this continues to be the case, things will only get worse.
Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.