Writer and activist Farida Belghoul, a prominent figure in the early 1980s, has once again got people’s attention. Her campaign to get parents to boycott schools over unfounded claims that primary school pupils are being taught 'gender theory' with explicit sexual messages has catapulted her back into the limelight after decades in the wilderness. Although only a relatively small number of parents of children at around 100 primary schools obeyed the boycott and kept their children at home on January 24th and 27th, the issue quickly provoked a major political row. Last Wednesday education minister Vincent Peillon even felt obliged to tell headteachers to summon the parents concerned to explain the true nature of the 'ABCD of equality' lessons, which aim to promote equality between boys and girls.
For Belghoul, 55, it marked a return to prominence 30 years after she became a leading figure in the campaign for immigrants' rights and the 1984 equality march that came a year after the first Marche des beurs – beurs is French slang for Arabs – which is regarded as the first anti-racist movement in France. Now, though, the daughter of Algerian immigrants and former communist student has left her far-left background behind and gravitated towards the extreme right of French politics.
Having spent much of the last three decades, as someone close to her puts it, “slogging it out on her own in her neighbourhood” full of bitterness against her old political family, Farida Belghoul has found a new home at the other end of the political spectrum. And though she refuses to speak to the “sell-out” mainstream media about her views, the former left-wing activist is much more vocal on the internet and on camera. Alongside the anti-Semitic essayist Alain Soral – a fellow traveller with the controversial comedian Dieudonné – Belghoul has learned the explosive impact of videos that are made quickly, immediately posted on the web and then spread under the umbrella title of “télé libre” or 'free television' - 'free' as in independent of the “dominant and lying” mainstream media.
For several months Bleghoul has been venting her spleen at a number of favourite targets, from the failings of the national education system – her number one pet hate - to a Socialist Party “allied with homosexuals” and plots by French Jewish students pulling the strings of the anti-racist group SOS Racisme. The extreme right has offered an unexpected platform and she has now got a taste for it. For a woman from the far-left who never accepted the way that the Socialist Party and SOS Racisme hijacked the Marche des beurs movement in 1984, this is a form of renaissance – and also gives her a soapbox from which to attack her foes.
“I am saying this for the camera,” says Bleghoul in one such video made during a public meeting in the north-west Paris suburb of Asnières, on January 11th, organised by the group 'Touche pas à nos gosses' ('Hands off our kids'). This is one of the many such organisations thrown up in the wake of the 'pro-family' Manif pour tous demonstrations against same-sex marriage. In the video, which was immediately posted on the Dailymotion website, Bleghoul outlines her boycott campaign against “gender theory” to around 40 parents .
Listening to the former immigrant rights campaigner’s current pronouncements there is little room for doubt about her shift in political alignment. For example, she rails against France's Jewish students whom she says imported rap music into France's deprived suburbs “in an operation to destroy the youth [of today]”, and she also promoted the “year of the dress” on the right-wing radio station Radio Courtoisie, claiming that “gender theory wants us all to wear trousers!”
Her defection has been met with considerable glee in extreme right-wing circles, which has always welcomed those who have switched allegiance from other political camps. Proof of this is the way that Alain Soral, who set up the organisation Égalité et réconciliation ('Equality and reconciliation') expressly to build bridges between the extreme right and French people from immigrant backgrounds, looks after his latest convert. He is very aware of the propaganda coup involved in having brought this 1980s immigrant equality activist into such an unlikely alliance with the far-right.
Last autumn, for example, Soral, who runs publishing company Kontre Kulture, re-published Belghoul's novel Georgette! to “help our friend Farida”. This criticality-acclaimed prize-winning novel, published in 1986, tells the story of a young immigrant girl torn between two cultures and two views, those of her French teacher and those of her parents, leading to the “rejection of this France that has turned the children of immigrants into puppets that can be manipulated”.
'Our schools are creating criminals'
Today Farida Belghoul readily attacks the effects of feminism and the “homosexual lobby” as part of her assault on “gender theory”, even though people close to her say she had no interest in such questions before joining Alain Soral's movement. But her real fight, her obsession, and one that she has had for many years, concerns French schools. “It is the place where nothing works,” says Belghoul, who is herself a secondary school history and geography teacher on permanent leave. Indeed, she believes that the school system has failed so badly, breaking all its promises to children from immigrant backgrounds, that she ended up taking her own three children out of school and teaching them at home.
In a poignant film made in 2007 the director Samia Chala documented this aspect of Belghoul's family life (see below), an option chosen by a mother who feared that school would turn her children into “barbarians”. When her teenage daughter points out yet again that she misses school and her friends, Belghoul replies: “I can't save my pupils but I can save all of you.” On another occasion she states: “Bogus teaching methods, bogus programmes. We're creating criminals, tomorrow it will be barbarians.” It is a remark that sheds new light on the school boycott campaign she started in mid-December and which was spread via extreme-right networks. It eventually led to a number of children – many of them from immigrant backgrounds - being kept from school in a handful of French cities, including Clermont-Ferrand in the centre of the country.
“At the time she opened my eyes to what was happening in schools, the way in which poor and immigrant children were treated,” recalls Samia Chala. “The scornful look, the condescending attitude of the institution towards Arab mothers, I felt that too,” adds the director, who refuses to say anything more about a woman to whom she was close, to avoid fuelling the media hysteria.
“The moral postures of the elites don't interest me,” says another person close to Belghoul, who has known her since the days of the 1984 equality march and who asks not to be named. He fears that the media will use her current stance to suggest: “There you are, all Arabs are fascists.” With the risk, he says, of creating more Farida Belghouls in the future. He is also critical of the media and the internet who “give too big a platform to wild talk from characters such as Dieudonné, Belghoul or members of the Manif pour tous, increasing the idea that France is anti-Semitic and fascist, whereas that just reflects the views of a minority”.
He argues that what has happened to Farida Belghoul raises questions for the whole of society and refuses to condemn a “monster created by the Left”. He says: “The question that should be asked is why does a woman of Maghrebi [editor's note. North African] origin who fought racism and anti-Semitism join the extreme right 30 years later? Belghoul is certainly taking her revenge today because the socialists and SOS Racisme betrayed her, they did not reach out to her. It's a bit like the French kids of Maghrebi origin who join the jihad and decide to go off and fight Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria because in France they're not wanted, they've been excluded and marginalised. It's the same phenomenon.”
Another veteran of the 1984 march has a similar analysis. “Our society is in the process of producing a generation of schizophrenics,” he says. “Farida's an illustration of that. And it's the Left who bear the biggest responsibility. It's they, first of all through [President François] Mitterrand and today Hollande, who abandoned deprived areas, cooped up a generation of immigrations in ghettos and made them second-class citizens, increasing the feeling of exclusion.” This activist says he is “very worried” about France and what he calls the “uniting of fundamentalists”. He says: “Seeing the bearded men, veiled women and Catholic fundamentalists hand in hand against 'gender theory' makes me want to vomit, as does Belghoul's talk of fighting, of going to war.”
Indeed, Alain Soral's new friend now regularly punctuates her talk with the warlike phrase “conquer or die”, an approach that not even all her own supporters appreciate. One of these is Fatima, a member of the school boycott network at Colombes, in the north-west suburbs of Paris, who kept her son off school last Monday January 27th because she considers that “the practice of homosexuality can't be a matter of choice for her children” and thinks that the school should not meddle in such issues. However she does not identify herself with the violently anti-Semitic outbursts made by Farida Belghoul, and is angered by the “sectarian” nature of some of her comments, as when she uses Arabic expressions in her talk. “I don't think she's a good spokesperson,” says Fatima. “Muslims are today being stigmatised from all quarters, and now people will again say that they want to create havoc.” At the same time, though, Fatima cannot bring herself to accept that the 'ABCD of equality' teaching is simply about promoting equality between boys and girls.
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English version by Michael Streeter