Eric Zemmour's Position

Eric Zemmour, France's most outspoken journalist, weighs in on the Piss Christ controversy. Despite the many good things he says, he seems to have missed the boat on several points:

The video (above) lasts for three minutes. He speaks rapidly, and I know I missed some nuances, but the essential is here:

If Piss Christ is labeled provocative, the work itself is not trash. It is a very beautiful photograph in red, in Cibachrome melded into plexiglass.

This is how the reporters at Libération , in their best art catalog style, describe the work. For them, the attackers are vandals, "illuminés", fanatics. The rest of the world gets into the act and denounces the fanatical Catholics led by their fulminating archbishop of Avignon whose remarks had already triggered the polemic.

Now let's imagine for a moment other works showing a body soaked in piss, a Mohamed defecating, Michelangelo's Moses immersed in his excrement, a Torah in a blood bath, and let's imagine what the headlines would be: Unbelievable sacrilege! A scandalous return to Nazi methods! Islamophobia! A new French illness! Let's imagine the reactions of the youth of the JDL decrying impious works, or Muslims demonstrating at the four corners of the globe against France - The Great Satan. A fatwa from Tehran or Cairo against the blasphemous trash. And embarrassment when the same newspaper is caught between the defense of artistic freedom and the legitimate reaction of offended minorities.

Here the host interrupts Zemmour and asks him to stop hypothesizing and get back to the issue at hand.

Zemmour goes on:

Catholics can legitimately fulminate against this double standard, but they should not necessarily rejoice that certain among them refuse to turn the other cheek. First, is not such violence in period of Lent contrary to dogma? Second, accepting parody, caricature and even blasphemy is proof of great maturity, both spiritual and democratic. Ever since La Religieuse (1) by Diderot, the Christian world has made progress. The majority religion in Europe has gotten used to living with mockery and even hostility. The anti-clericalism of Little Father Combes (2) no longer shocks the Church. It has even become the dominant ideology of the media. We can't count the number of campaigns against the Pope. But other religions, when offended, vehemently refuse to adopt the Catholic placidness. Judaism and Islam forbid the representation of God and do not have images - those sensual products of ancient guilds that Catholics have known from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

Note: His argument in the preceding paragraph is fallacious. He is attributing to Catholics an unlimited supply of tolerance on grounds they have "matured" since the 18th century. But part of maturity is to know when and how to defend oneself against those forces seeking your capitulation. And he should add that not only is the Church no longer shocked by anti-clericalism, the Church has become itself largely anti-clerical in its submissive position to Islam and other destructive forces. This is not a sign of maturity, but of weakness. It follows that the actions by the protesters were in a sense an attempt to offset the weakness of the Church.

But some Catholics are now aping the vehemence of others and adopting the behavior of the super-sensitive besieged minorities - no doubt the ultimate consequence of the de-Christianization that has now turned Catholicism into a minority religion.

And there's the climate - Christianity is today the most assaulted religion. In France the Christian churches and tombs are by far the most vandalized. Throughout the world, Christians are persecuted and assassinated in Iraq, Sudan, Egypt and elsewhere.

That is the explanation. But it is so much easier to denigrate the awful Catholic fundamentalists.

(1) La Religieuse is a novel by Denis Diderot, left unfinished by the author who died in 1784, about the oppressive life in a convent and the fate of a young woman forced to live there. The essential theme is the belief that an individual must be free to choose his own destiny.

(2) Emile Combes (1835 - 1921) was a French politician of the Radical Party. Dedicated to anti-clericalism, he was instrumental in passing the 1905 law separating Church and State.

Zemmour's remarks are themselves almost as controversial as the photograph, at least to some Catholics. At the website Christroi, Zemmour's position is sharply criticized:

Pity that Zemmour questions the use of violence during Lent which he says is "contrary to dogma" - this is Talmudic pharisaism; we are not Jews that have to be handed this sort of religious interdict. Saint Joan of Arc waged war on Sundays and on "religious holidays", even though, it is true, she would ask her soldiers to confess first. It is not forbidden to wage war during Holy Week, and one can even wonder if the operation was not deliberately set to fall during Holy Week, just as the English, during the Hundred Years War, imagined that on certain dates of the year the enemy would not defend himself… There's nothing new here.

As for Diderot's La Religieuse and "the Christian world has made progress. The majority religion in Europe has gotten used to living with mockery and even hostility" (as if persecution was a natural and desirable condition for French Catholicism…) let's recall that Diderot is not a reference point for us. He was a fundamentalist freemason, instructed by Freemasonry to corrupt "opinion" with "philosophical" and "encyclopedist" ideas. (…)

Let us grant nonetheless to Zemmour his explanation for the violent reaction of Catholics by comparing it to the reactions of other communities. Still his speech was so ambiguous, we would like it to be clearer, so that we can know if he is defending us or criticizing us.

One last remark: Eric Zemmour used against Catholics an admonition that is often used against Jews, especially Israelis, namely, to "turn the other cheek". Jewish people become angered (and rightly so) when told to desist while being bombarded by their enemies. Jewish people often complain (and rightly so) that the world loves them when they don't fight back and hates them when they do. Now that the Catholics have fought back (in such a small way), they are being told they should have turned the other cheek. Zemmour seems to have missed this important connection.