or ("Who?" or "But who?") is an antisemitic French Internet meme which appeared in 2021 and was later used as a slogan on placards at demonstrations in France. One of the first "" placards was held up at an August 2021 demonstration in Metz by Cassandre Fristot, who was later convicted of incitement to racial hatred and received a six-month suspended sentence. (In France, incitement to hatred is punishable by law.Site de la République française .) After this, other placards appeared at demonstrations: "". The far-right movement Civitas invited demonstrators to march with "" placards.« À Metz, l'ombre de la pancarte antisémite plane sur la manifestation anti-pass » , L'Express, August 14, 2021. The meme was widely used worldwide on discussion forums hosting politically incorrect content, such as 4chan.
Origins
Marc Knobel, a specialist in Internet racist and antisemitic propaganda, notes that "things started well before the appearance of the slogan 'Qui?', a classic strategy of the far right to designate a scapegoat without naming him or her head-on ... From the beginning of the pandemic, there was some trash talk on certain platforms targeting Agnès Buzyn ..., Yves Levy, or ... Jérôme Salomon. Then these accusations were extended to Jews as a whole".
The first occurrence of with antisemitic undertones was on 18 June 2021, during an interview on the French television channel CNews. Retired General Dominique Delawarde (signatory of the controversial in the far-right newspaper Valeurs actuelles) referred to a minority which controlled the "media hordes". To make this more explicit, the columnist Claude Posternak (a member of La République en marche and president of the polling agency La Matrice) insisted on asking for greater clarity: "Who? But say who?" Delawarde replied, "The community that you know well". Host Jean-Marc Morandini then interrupted the interview. Shortly afterwards, the Paris public prosecutor's office opened an investigation of Delawarde for "public defamation and incitement to hatred and violence on the grounds of origin or belonging to an ethnic group, nation, race or religion". In November 2020, Delawarde had mentioned in a blog "the hypothesis of major fraud" in the American presidential election, "the Western 'media pack', which we know who controls it".
Meaning and development
Meaning
French commentators offered interpretations of the phrase. According to political scientist and Conspiracy Watch director Rudy Reichstadt, is antisemitic language trying to dodge "quite clumsily, the reproach of antisemitism". Reichstadt said that since the end of 2018 and the yellow vests protests, accusations of conspiracy have become commonplace on the web and take the form of antisemitic slogans which denounce a "dictatorship" that would prevail under a "totalitarian regime" in France.
Dominique Sopo, President of SOS Racisme, said that "there is no doubt about the meaning of this placard". According to Sopo, "The question ... is a falsely-coded question that refers to the accusation that the Jews are an evil community and the cause of all our ills", and he sees this as an attempt by the far right to lead a new protest movement. Lawyer Patrick Klugman said that becomes a rallying sign for people who want to target the Jewish community as an overpowering community whose interests are hidden and different from the rest of society".
According to sociologist Michel Wieviorka, this "seemingly innocent pronoun that actually targets 'the Jews' ... accuses them of benefiting from the health crisis". For historian Marc Knobel, "The message, stigmatizing, is simple. Who are the ones responsible for the pandemic, and who would benefit from all this? The Jews".
Political scientist Jean-Yves Camus identified the subtext of the question: "Who is trying to make people believe that a pandemic exists and to take advantage of this 'lie' to enact exceptional health measures in terms of public freedoms?" "suggests a malicious intent born in the brain of a group of individuals who are considered to hold such power that together they would pursue a hidden plan of domination, in which the so-called 'health pass' would be only one step towards a dictatorial world government". The formulation of the question without naming the Jews also implies that it would be forbidden to do so (Reichstadt noted that Raphaël Confiant, in defense of Dieudonné, described the Jews as "unspeakable" in 2006), and "this taboo exists only in the paranoid worldview of antisemites".
Spread
became an Internet meme, notably on the French video-game forum Jeuxvideo.com and internationally on 4chan. It also found root among antisemitic groups such as the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, supporters of Alain Soral and Dieudonné, and activists who focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. The antisemitic website Jesuispartout.com, was created in 2020 with an associated Telegram channel which positioned Jewish (or supposedly-Jewish) personalities on an interactive map; Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced on Twitter that he would take the website to court, calling it "deeply scandalous and nauseating". Its founder, Samuel Goujon, was indicted on 21 August 2021.
A few weeks after the interview with Delawarde, several anti-sanitary-pass demonstrators marched with placards reading "". They were especially visible at rallies organized by Florian Philippot on 17, 24 and 31 July, along with yellow stars and references to the Vichy regime and Nazism, in what Michel Wievioka called an "absolute contradiction". Historian Emmanuel Debono said, "With all these references, we have an illustration of the specificity of antisemitism". explains the h. Interviewed for a far-right YouTube channel, several demonstrators carrying the signs voiced antisemitic tropes about "well-poisoners" and "greed".
On 7 August 2021, the slogan was used on a sign at a demonstration against health passes in Metz. The sign asked the question in red and answered with thirteen names of families or individuals in blackThe names were, from top to bottom and left to right: Rothschild, Fabius, Attali, Buzyn, Attal, Véran, , Macron, Salomon, Soros, K. Schwab, B.H.L., and Ferguson. who were allegedly Jewish or "accomplices of the Jews":« Les accusations d'empoisonnement par les Juifs avaient disparu depuis le Moyen Âge », Le Monde, 18 août 2021. politicians, intellectuals or economists, some of whom were unconnected with the pandemic or vaccine policy, but many of whom were real (or supposed) members of the Jewish community. The names (including Rothschild, B.H.L., Attali, Soros and Drahi) are "recurrent targets of antisemitic propaganda for years - and, in the case of the Rothschilds, since the 19th century", and were labeled "traitors" in white in white. The letter Q (from "Qui?") is surmounted by black, demonising horns, "emblematic of anti-Jewish passion".
The person holding up the placard, Cassandre Fristot, is a part-time German teacher in Moselle and was a member of the Front National, briefly head of Louis Aliot's cabinet, a candidate in the 2020 municipal elections, and close to the Party of France. Fristot was arrested two days later and suspended from her duties pending "disciplinary action". On 10 August, the Metz public prosecutor announced a trial for "public incitement to racial hatred" scheduled for 8 September. During her hearings in police custody, Fristot said that she did not understand what she was accused of doing; she said that she had been inspired by a model on the Internet to denounce the government's health pass through "the powerful, and not to undermine a community". About the flag she held in her other hand, which read "Sacred heart of Jesus, hope and salvation of France", she said: "Despite the fleur-de-lis, even if it may allude to a royalist flag, it is above all a message of peace." Fristot was defended by Paul Yon, former lawyer for Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, and François Wagner. She was tried by the Metz criminal court on 8 September 2021, and did not appear at the hearing. The prosecutor requested a three-month suspended prison sentence, Fristot's lawyers pleaded for acquittal; the court reserved judgment until 20 October 2021. Cassandre Fristot was sentenced by the Metz Criminal Court to a six-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay sums ranging from €1 to €300 to anti-racist associations. After seeing the sign in Metz, journalist Éric Naulleau wrote that through this "casual antisemitism in which nothing is missing, [...] in the name of the fight against the health pass; ... the foul beast knows how to vary the masks".
On 14 and 20 August, demonstrations in French cities against the health pass continued to be peppered with provocative slogans, comparisons with Nazi horrors and signs of antisemitism and support for Fristot (including more "Qui?" signs with pictures of Jacques Attali and Claude Posternak or lists of names). Eloi Fauvergue, who had displayed on his torso "Qui?" with the "Q" topped with horns and carried a royalist flag during a 14 August demonstration in Compiègne, was sentenced in January 2022 to a three-month suspended sentence by the criminal court for "public provocation to hatred or violence" towards the Jewish community. Fauvergue said, "My aim was to support Cassandre Fristot for her courage to demonstrate. There was no interpretation. I was supporting freedom of expression. I found it beautiful and original to put horns on the Q of the "Who", but public prosecutor Marie-Céline Lawrysz noted "a perfidious racism that feeds on good feelings". Although the slogan's antisemitic character is unambiguous ("there is not much more antisemitic than this sign "), Reichstadt acknowledges some public ignorance; the sign, however, "provides, as in a game of Cluedo, a certain number of clues, leaving them to connect the dots by themselves ".
Essayist Tristan Mendès-France wrote that the marches "are suitcase demonstrations, organized behind vague terms, which allow communities that have nothing to do with each other to agglomerate"; "There is an extreme heterogeneity of social profiles, many people who have a whole series of grievances that accumulate".
Despite the reaction against antisemitism, other demonstrators saw the controversy as a way to divert attention and discredit their movement. For Reichstadt and others, it is about minimising or trivialising antisemitism.
Persistence and apathy
Dominique Sopo cites "the recurrent and assumed nature of things ... From now on, the sign bearers do not hide and there is an absence of reaction from other demonstrators. Now the sign bearers do not hide, and there is an absence of reaction from the other demonstrators". Yet the slogan "Who?" and its antisemitic meaning were widely publicised". Michel Wieviorka also notes this visibility, which is a novelty through this "resurgence of antisemitism": "In these anti-sanitary pass demonstrations, ... antisemitism is inserted in a way that is not complicated within the crowd itself and ... no one tries to distance themselves from it or to denounce it". Even if not all the demonstrators are antisemitic, this expression "finds its space ... and is not immediately, strongly rejected by all those around".
Simplification and fantasy