For essayist Samuel Fitoussi, wokism is based on the same logic as the old anti-Semitism. The idea is the following: if some groups succeed better than others, it is because of a privilege they enjoy and a wrong they would inflict on others. The success of a community would thus not only be an injustice to be fought, but also proof of its guilt. Hence the notion of white privilege. If we follow woke logic, there would be something worse than white privilege; Jewish privilege: according to woke logic, which does not believe in merit but only in privilege, Jews are just oppressors.

France and woke extremism

The most militant faction of Wokists defines itself as ‘intersectional’. This theory aims to bring together the struggles of all minorities who feel discriminated against and offer arguments to destabilise western societies and multiply conflicts between identity groups. France has been particularly affected by woke totalitarianism and has become a favoured target of Islamists and all those fighting Western society.

In 2016, Hourja Bouteldja, spokesman for the PIR, the far-left indigenous party of the Republic, published ‘The Whites, the Jews and Us’, a book that earned him the accusation of anti-Semitism. For the PIR, North African immigrants would have the status of natives in France. The PIR wanted to associate Maghrebi immigration and the Muslim religion in a single unconditional defence of a community whose members would be considered a priori as victims. No longer victims of big capital, nor of neo-liberalism, but victims of whites and Jews. The struggle of the races replaces the class struggle and trespasses towards a radical Islam that flows into anti-Semitism, with peaks of homophobia.

Bouteldja declared that ‘there can be no homosexuals among Muslims’ and coined the slogan ‘Mohammed Merah is me’. Mohammed Merah was a French jihadist who killed seven people, including three Jewish children, before being neutralised by the RAID, an elite unit of the French police, on 22 March 2012 in Toulouse. The anti-racist left, for fear of stigmatising Muslims and for fear of finding itself side by side with the xenophobes of the extreme right, remained silent.

Islamo-Guchisme and its drifts

The political scientist and historian Pierre-André Taguieff coined the term ‘Islamo-gauchisme’ to describe the third-worldism of the extreme left in the 1960s, the pro-immigrant tropism of the 1980s, and the pro-Muslim version of Wokism today. Islamists see the defence of secularism as a means to ‘stigmatise Muslims’. Feminist Françoise Vergès, in her eulogy of ‘decolonial feminism’, considers positions against the Islamic headscarf to be declarations of war against Muslim women.

Wokism and Islamo-Gauchist neo-feminism accuse secularism of being sexist and racist. This is a perverse reversal of reality: the partisans of secularism are accused of stigmatising women when it is Islamism that instrumentalises them through their dress code. Jean-François Braunstein, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, explains in his essay ‘The Woke Religion’ that Wokism is a religion based on the critique of rationalism, the Enlightenment and humanism; opposing Woke totalitarianism means defending fundamental republican values such as universalism, rationality, freedom and secularism.

The words of the philosopher Judith Butler, who in France, during a public meeting dedicated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, described the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 as ‘an act of armed resistance’, have caused debate. In the past, Butler had declared that ‘Hamas and Hezbollah are an integral part of the global left’. Elisabetta Fiorito, of the Observatory on Anti-Semitism, criticises the conformism of woke thinking that describes Israel as absolute evil, saying: ‘Hamas is against music, against art, against cinema. If it could, it would kill musicians, directors, actors. Too bad all this is always forgotten’. Hamas started this war with the 7 October massacre, in which 1,200 people, including children, were brutally murdered.