Letter Criticizing Islamophobia and Lack of Scholarly Merit of Article Published in The French Review

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Dec 23, 2017 France
Letter Criticizing Islamophobia and Lack of Scholarly Merit of Article Published in The French Review

Letter Criticizing Islamophobia and Lack of Scholarly Merit of Article Published in The French Review

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[On 27 November 2017, a group of over fifty scholars addressed a letter of concern to Edward Ousselin, Editor in Chief of The French Review. The letter criticized the journal’s publication of S. Pascale Vergereau-Dewey’s "L'islamisme à la conquête de la République française" ("Islamism’s Conquest of the French Republic") in its October 2017 issue. The signatories argued that the article (abstract below) is an explicitly racist attack on French Muslims, and that it substituted Islamophobic cliches for arguments and unfounded stereotypes for evidence. The signatories also requested the right to publish a direct response to the article. Ousselin’s response was to deny the request to publish a response. He advised the group to submit an article for peer-reviewed publication without specifying a timeframe for publication. He justified this position by claiming his priority was to defend the author of the original article and the external reviewers from the signatories’ “insults.” Much more troubling, Ousselin apparently punished one of his editorial team members for signing on to the letter, removing him from the position of Review Editor at the journal. Inside Higher Ed recently published a news story about the issue.]

Abstract of Original Article (French and English)

"L’islamisme à la conquête de la République française"
S. Pascale Vergereau-Dewey 

Les valeurs républicaines étant incompatibles avec la charia que veulent imposer les islamistes, la France doit donc lutter contre une nouvelle forme d’islamisme haineux et envahissant. La France compte désormais, en son sein, des “fous d’Allah” qui, déterminés à fomenter une guerre civile, visent à imposer la dictature politico-théologique d’un nouveau Califat en Occident. Par aveuglement, lâcheté, voire de vils calculs de politique électorale, tous les gouvernements du post-colonialisme ont laissé faire et portent une lourde responsabilité dans la déliquescence actuelle.

"Islamism’s Conquest of the French Republic"
S. Pascale Vergereau-Dewey

Because republican values are incompatible with the Sharia law that Islamists want to impose, France must combat a new, hateful and invasive form of Islamism. France now includes in its midst fanatical Muslims who, determined to foment civil war, seek to impose the political-theological dictatorship of a new Caliphate on the West. Through blindness, cowardice, even through the sordid calculations of electoral politics, all the governments of the post-colonial period have allowed the development of the current state of decay, for which they bear a large part of the responsibility.

Letter to the Editor

Re: "L'islamisme à la conquête de la République française" (Vol. 91.1)

Dear Editor in Chief of The French Review:

We are writing to express our deep concern about the publication of S. Pascale Vergereau-Dewey's article "L'islamisme à la conquête de la République française" in the latest issue of your journal.

The article fails to meet elementary academic standards of objectivity and argumentation based on evidence: it ignores the many bodies of scholarship that any academic in French/Francophone Studies would identify, address, and apply; instead the article relies on overgeneralizations and a set of stereotypes identical to those employed by the far right in France, particularly in their campaign to demonize French Muslims. We wonder how an article that falls so far below accepted standards of scholarship and critical thinking could have been accepted for publication. We are also concerned that the publication of such a piece will compromise the reputation of The French Review. Furthermore, because it is published under the research arm of the American Association of Teachers of French, the article has the potential to be read - and used in class- by thousands of instructors across North America who may have little knowledge of the colonial and postcolonial history of France, in which the issues of immigration, racism, Islam, and labor struggles play a central role.

We are struggling to understand how an article with an inflammatory title like "L'islamisme à la conquête de la République française," was even sent out for peer-review. It is in fact an advocacy piece that endorses the Islamophobic views of French writers such as Renaud Camus, Caroline Fourest, and Elisabeth Schemla. It is even more difficult to understand how, having gone through peer-review, if indeed that is the case, Vergereau-Dewey’s text was accepted for publication. The article exhibits a profound ignorance of Islam, Islamism, and the culture of Muslims in France. The author takes her personal biases as arguments; she repeatedly refers to the "French values" of individualism and secularism without the slightest acknowledgement of the large body of recent scholarship devoted to a critical examination of these values, above all French secularism. This is precisely what any competent peer-review would have identified as a serious problem. Instead, left to her own devices, Vergereau-Dewey hinges her arguments on simplistic, binary oppositions between secularism and religiosity, between the so-called native French and the “immigrés”, as well as on such questionable assumptions as male-female equality as a French value and the headscarf as an automatic sign of female oppression. The article exhibits little or no familiarity with the gender and identity theory that its analysis would seem to call for. Vergereau-Dewey’s lack of familiarity with a broad range of theoretical discussions that touch on her topic leads her to minimize the role of persistent French colonial racism in the rising appeal of fundamentalist Islam in France. Even her discussion of the feature film La Haine overlooks its central focus on police racism and brutality to claim that the film shows that the police are afraid to enter certain no-go zones. Most worrisome of all is the resemblance between the author's unwillingness to grapple with the complexity of France’s postcolonial condition and the crudely simplistic xenophobia of the far right Front National.

For all these reasons, we are therefore asking for space in The French Review to address the article’s problems.

 

Sincerely,

 

Hosam Ahmad
Colorado State University

Omar H. Ali
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Anita Alkhas
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 

Abeer Aloush
American University

Talal Asad
Graduate Center CUNY

Cheikh Baboo
University of Pennsylvania

Ziad Bentahar
Towson University

Taïeb Berrada
Lehigh University

Noé le Blanc
Université Paris 13

John R. Bowen
Washington University in St. Louis

Andrea Brazzoduro
St Antony's College, Oxford

Eloise A. Brière
University at Albany - SUNY

Lauren Brown
Occidental College

Lia Brozgal
University of California Los Angeles

Abdelkader Cheref
SUNY Potsdam

Sarah Davies Cordova
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Michael Cronin
University of Dublin

Edward E. Curtis
Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis

Simon Dawes
Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

Souleymane Diagne
Columbia University

Sylviane A. Diouf
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Anne Donadey
San Diego State University

Nabil Echchaibi
University of Colorado Boulder

Hanan Elsayed
Occidental College

Renaud Epstein
Sciences Po Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Nouri Gana
University of California Los Angeles 

Susan Grayson
Occidental College

Nacira Guenif
Université Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis

Olivia C. Harrison
University of Southern California

Marcia Hermansen
Loyola University Chicago

Mohammed Hirchi
Colorado State University

Noureddine Jebnoun
Georgetown University

Jill M. Jarvis
Yale University

Touria Khannous
Louisiana State University

Katelyn E. Knox
University of Central Arkansas

Farid Laroussi
University of British Columbia

David Lloyd
University of California Riverside

Mohamed Shahid Mathee
University of Johannesburg

Sarah Mazouz
French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

Najib Mokhtari
Université Internationale de Rabat

Aurélien Mondon
University of Bath

Warren Montag
Occidental College

Valérie K. Orlando
University of Maryland, College Park

Najat Rahman
University of Montreal

Alison Rice
University of Notre Dame

Arthur Saint-Aubin
Occidental College

Ryan K. Schroth
Eastern Illinois University

Luste Boulbina Seloua
LCSP Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot

Dana Strand
Carleton College

Julien Talpin
CERAPS - Université Lille 2

Cheikh Thiam
Ohio State University

Gavan Titley
Maynooth University

Soraya Tlatli
University of California Berkeley

Sarra Tlili
University of Florida

Corbin Treacy
Florida State University

Mary Vogl
Colorado State University

Sabra Webber
Ohio State University

Donald R. Wehrs
Auburn University 

Peter Matthews Wright
Colorado College 

 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412