Qui? or Mais qui? ("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 "Mais qui" 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.) After this, other placards appeared at demonstrations: "Mais qui? Je suis Cassandre". The far-right movement Civitas invited demonstrators to march with "Mais qui" placards. 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 Qui? 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 tribune des généraux 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, Mais qui? 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 Mais qui? 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?" Mais qui? "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".
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
