Both sides in French antiracism disputes weaponized the accusation of particularism.

Evidence

In 1971, for example, when a fifteen-year-old Algerian, Djellali Ben Ali, was killed by the husband of the concierge of his apartment block, Le Droit de Vivre seemed to place an equivalence between the two parties. Also in 1971, the LICA denounced the Association de solidarité francoarabe for targeting only anti-Arab racism, arguing that ‘Antiracism does not divide’. Ironically, this was exactly the same argument used against the LICRA in 2004 for singling out antisemitism, except that it was being used by pole two against pole one rather than vice versa. Similarly, in 1981 the LICRA was accused in the immigrant-leftist magazine Sans Frontière of making an artificial distinction between racism and antisemitism, leading to a ‘morbid competition between peoples so as to know which has the most deaths’. So, typically of the broader discourse of French antiracism, both the LICRA in 1971 and its critics in 1981 and 2004 sought to claim the moral high ground of universalism for themselves, attributing baser, particularist motives to the opposing side. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1356

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the universalism-vs-particularism framing of antiracist movements generally, and to the moral-panic literature (Cohen) about how movements claim moral high ground.
• QUESTION: The phrase ‘morbid competition between peoples so as to know which has the most deaths’ — worth comparing to contemporary debates over which victimhood outranks others.