It ain’t necessarily so

Monday 12th July a 23-year-old mother is surrounded by six youths of ‘North African appearance’ on a commuter train north of Paris. Her bag is snatched she is racially abused as they conclude from her address garnered from the contents of her bag that she is Jewish - “the 16th arrondisement, only Jews live there!” Her clothes are cut from her at knifepoint and swastikas are drawn on her belly. Her 13 month old baby is tipped out of his pram and – of the at least twenty commuters watching, no one does anything.
So, there you have it. A tale to make the blood boil. And it did. A wave of national and international outrage – the tabloids talked lynching and the broadsheets talked of Islamic disaffection in the new ghettos. The passive spectators who had failed to go to the woman’s aid came in for particular condemnation. We all seethed. Well, it got me. The receptors were ready and waiting for just such a story.
That was Monday. The airwaves were full of it. Come Tuesday, nothing. I search in vain then eventually a subheading somewhere back of something underneath something else – “Woman arrested for making false allegations.” CCTV footage had shown nothing. No youths, no incident, nothing. Apparently her boyfriend, also arrested, had drawn the swastikas. Apparently she’d made previous claims of this nature. As I say, unlike the blazoning of the original story this latter a mere footnote.

When British troops lead the march past the Arc de Triomphe for the first time in history on this sombre grey rainy north European Bastille day I for one will be watching it a wiser man chastened into emotional sobriety by this reminder of the power of prejudice to overcome reason in all of us. That story, give or take a change of costume and scenery has been around for a long time. Those charges have been levied at less powerful cultures forever, wherever an inkling for action required a causus bellus. The Irish were subject to the same accusations by the English preparatory to the first English invasion in the 12th century (“catholic by name pagan by nature”) and again in the 17th century by Cromwell. Engels in the condition of the working class in England made similar accusations. The one thing in common was that none of them were true. The problem has always been the readiness of some of us to accept them unquestioned. Time for us all to be vigilant around our own errant desire to blame and demonise. The key is not to suppress and deny our fears and the resultant fictions but to acknowledge and examine. Then anything is possible.