The week Radio France lost its credibility and the day it made the music die

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2026 Paul Ben-Itzak

Last week, a week that will live in infamy in the history of French public radio, Guillaume Erner returned to his job as host of  the anti-intellectual* chain France Culture’s morning show, a little over two months after using his valuable pulpit to broadcast a pastiched tape pulled from the Internet (or that well-known authoritative source  “The social networks” as Erner put it) which cut and pasted together comments by the Left’s leading candidate for next Spring’s presidential election, whose Insoumis (Unbowed) party has been the leading party in France to consistently criticize Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians (in which it has been joined by the Gaullist former prime minister Dominique de Villepin)  which falsely made Jean -Luc Melenchon — the best hope to stave off the victory of an extreme right-wing party whose predecessor was co-founded by the Waffen SS in next May’s presidential elections — sound like an anti-Semite.  

While it was not the first time Erner or other Radio France program hosts have invoked the false epithet of anti-Semitism to discredit critics of Israel’s ongoing genocide (not that you’d know this if your only news source was France Culture or its sister station France Inter, where Ukranian lives taken by Russia apparently have more worth than Palestinian lives taken by Israel judging by the comparative frequency of the respective reports, but Israel has killed more than 1200 people in Gaza, including at least 240 children, since the supposed cease-fire was signed in October, in a total of at least 73,000 including more than 20,000 children, children deliberately targeted by Israel according to a United Nations report), airing fabricated evidence (even if Erner didn’t know the recording was fake, applying a minimum of journalistic rigour would have revealed it) of anti-Semitism against the leader of a devotedly anti-Racist party who is not there to defend himself (while Erner eventually admitted his “grave fault,” apparently neither he nor Radio France have yet to apologize directly to Melenchon) in the live presence of the leader of an Extreme Right party whose party has a history of anti-Semitism was obscene. (And after the broadcast, to the apparent consternation of its employees, Radio France exacerbated the potential consequences by exceptionally providing Marine Le Pen’s party with a transcript of the broadcast containing this fake news about her leading opponent.) 

The incident late last June was only the latest instance of Erner using the public radio air-waves in apparent efforts to dismiss or at least decredibilize Israel’s critics including by painting them as being motivated by anti-Semitism. After broadcasting this recording of fake news pulled from an obscure Internet site, Erner faced no real consequences from Radio France management and was re-hired as the morning host, the only “penalty” levied on him being the suppression of his daily “humour” commentary, in which Erner more often resembles that uncle who laughs at his own jokes than the Gallic response to Will Rogers, Henry Morgan, or Mort Sahl. While Erner has also used this commentary segment to suggest critics of the genocide are motivated by anti-Semitism, he will still be conducting the interview segments, the venue in which he broadcast Melenchon’s fake anti-Semitic comments (during an interview with leading Extreme Right-wing presidential candidate Martin Le Pen in which the fabricated Melenchon remarks were juxtaposed with remarks by Le Pen’s late father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who once described the gas ovens as “a minor detail of history,” Erner also spoon-feeding Le Pen an opportunity to declare that her party no longer resembled that of her late father). Interview segments in which Erner has regularly tried to discredit critics or criticism of Israel’s ongoing genocide, notably by introducing United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories Francesca Albanese, who has meticulously and scrupulously documented the genocide as well as corporate complicity in the crime, as “a leading pro-Palestinian spokesperson,” in a transparent effort to discredit his guest’s legitimate neutrality before she could even open her mouth. (French public radio’s newshosts often describe critics of and demonstrators against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and, now, its ethnic cleansing in the West Bank it has illegally Occupied for 59 years as “pro-Palestinian,” as if we are motivated by some kind of political fealty or “campism,” as the College de France comparative literature professor William Marx once suggested on France Culture — according a kind of intellectual imprimatur to this intellectually lazy and politically evasive strategy for dismissing critics of a genocide which has been amply documented, albeit in comments made  when the current genocide was in its infant stages — and not outrage at a genocide and ethnic cleansing which is still happening today.) To another guest — I can’t remember whether it was Columbia University scholar Rachid Halliday, holder of the university’s Edward Said chair or Israeli-American genocide scholar Omar Bartov — Erner suggested that the only reason Hamas hadn’t committed genocide too was that it didn’t have the means, as if this theoretical genocide which only exists in his head somehow balances Israel’s real, and ongoing genocide. And on the heels of Israel killing another 3,200 people in Lebanon including children and journalists targeted by Israel, he suggested to longtime Druze leader Walid Jumblatt that Lebanon’s biggest problem over the past 40 years has been Hezbollah. (Which is not to indemnify Hezbollah.)

Most appallingly, in a commentary last Spring Erner turned what began as an ostensible tribute to historian and Resistant Marc Bloch on the occasion of  Bloch’s entry into the French Pantheon into yet another opportunity to suggest that those who criticize Israel’s ongoing genocide are motivated by anti-Semitism, effectively adopting the internationally wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu’s own defense against critics of the genocide and the international warrant against him for Crimes Against Humanity.

Contrast the lack of real consequences engendered by Erner — a journalist (as he never fails to point out, particularly when interviewing a guest with whom he disagrees, as if the soubriquet automatically accords him some kind of neutral objectivity, a self-qualification often accompanied by diminishing his guest’s responses he disagrees with, even when they’re factually based, with “That’s your point of view”) who in a news segment (or interview if you like, but if he presents himself as a journalist, he’s promising objectively presented news and interview questions uninflected by a personal point of view) presented a falsified tape pulled from the Internet that falsely painted a leading presidential candidate as an anti-Semite (falsifications which, giving him a benefit of the doubt he does not accord to Israel’s critics, Erner presumedly was not aware of but that’s not the point; it was shoddy journalism, in fact it wasn’t journalism, it was implicitly granting credibility to innuendo by uncritically passing it on, even if he did present the recording as culled from the “social” networks. Or as legendary journalist Daniel Mermet, France’s answer to Amy Goodman, put it in an editorial for his program La bas si j’y suis, “Guillaume was caught with his finger, and even his entire hand, and even the entire kid himself, in the cookie jar”), in a larger context of his continued efforts to dismiss critics of Israel’s genocide as either reflexively pro-Palestinian or motivated by anti-Semitism, and despite what was at best a lapse of basic journalistic standards was essentially re-hired for the same job — with the fate of the humorist Guillaume Meurice, who was suspended and ultimately fired by Radio France management after likening Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (albeit in October 2023, before the international warrant for crimes against humanity was issued against him and the bulk of the genocide has been committed) to “a kind of Hitler without a foreskin.” A *joke* perhaps in bad taste — and even offensive to Jews like me because it plays on a classic anti-Semitic trope pointing our difference, a difference also used to identify us for genocide — but nonetheless a joke, uttered on a show and in a context clearly identified as HUMOROUS not, as in Erner’s case, presented in a news-oriented segment.

The consequences here are grave, and go beyond one anti-intellectual* radio chain’s already dubitive claim of political neutrality. (While France Culture was renewing the contract of a man who broadcast fake news, not the first time Melenchon and/or the Insoumis party or other critics of Israel have falsely been accused of being anti-Semites on the public radio air-waves — on Alain Finkielkraut’s weekly France Culture Repliques program even apparently non-related topics inevitably devolve into pretences for accusing Israel’s critics of anti-Semitism, with Finkielkraut regurgitating Israel’s own tired claim that it can’t be genocide because Israel drops flyers on its victims before bombing them to smithereens ((my phrasing))  — it was cancelling, after 26 seasons, a unique program whose host, veteran journalist Sylvain Brumeau, whose legitimate journalistic and academic credentials go beyond his work on France Culture, applies a rigorous social-science perspective, not in forcing his own point of view on the listeners, but in the subjects he picks, the intelligence of his questions (which are real questions motivated by curiosity, not political statements disguised as questions) and in the catholicity and depth of his guest specialists. Brumeau even plays well-curated music, and, in its most recent incarnation, his weekly La Suite dans les idees program featured a substantive and authoritative segment on socially relevant cultural events. With the erudite host of the chain’s weekly Question d’Islam program, broadcast at the ungodly hour of 7 Sunday morning, Brumeau offered one of the last outposts of true and serious intellectual query on a station that pretends to present intellectual content.) In its continued efforts to falsely depict the Left’s leading hope and his party, les Insoumis (the Unbowed) as anti-Semitic, without ever producing any evidence — and evidently because of the party’s consistently criticizing a genocide recognised as such by leading international authorities and scholars including Israeli scholars — French public radio risks scaring away voters who might otherwise vote for Melenchon and paving the way for Le Pen’s “National Rally” party which in its previous incarnation as the National Front was co-founded by members of the Waffen SS to be elected to control the country. (The campaign to discredit Melenchon and les Insoumis as anti-Semitic because of  their criticism of Israel’s genocide has been so successful that even the famous Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld now supports Le Pen’s party.)

And if you’re saying, “Well, if you don’t like the news as misrepresented on France Culture (I don’t include Radio France’s erstwhile and intrepid correspondents, who do Yeoman’s work, in this qualification), you can always change the channel to France Musique,” Radio France’s classical, jazz, and occasionally even World Music chain, not any more. This summer, Radio France effectively cut off the signal to France Musique across rural France (if their doing this in my area is any indication), compounding the denial by claiming in ongoing messages on France Inter and France Culture that all you had to do was go to the Radio France website to find France Musique’s new frequency in your area; I did, went to the frequency indicated, and got Radio France’s all-news station. In fact, all I get now on my radio no matter where I turn is constant chatter, occasionally interrupted by bad music from the 1980s. (The control, voir monopoly of the radio frequencies in France is dominated by public radio stations, so it’s next to impossible to find anything else, at least outside the cities. And Radio France’s network of regional channels’ playlist has been stuck in the 1980s since, it seems, 2000.) France Musique was and is nowhere to be found on the dial since the changes were made early this summer, at least in my area, and certainly not at the frequency Radio France’s website said it would be (or any other frequency). And if you’re saying “Well, France Culture still plays music,” in yet another instance of a station which calls itself “Culture”’s disrespect and disdain for the most popular form of culture, whether in segments like last week’s noon “cultural” show on Dolly Parton which reduced “Jolene” to one minute or its weekend “The Musical Series” program (where the host cut off Roberta Flack’s “Killing me Softly” before it could die a natural death; even the top 40 *commercial* stations of my youth in San Francisco never did that), its hosts are more likely to play one-minute segments of songs than the entire … cultural… object.

*The latest instance of which anti-intellectualism is the chain’s new International Press Review host’s citing, Friday morning, as one of the manifestations of Gloria Steinem’s impact on feminism, on the occasion of  her death, Steinem’s founding of “Mrs” magazine. Why would a principal founder of Feminism create a magazine with an appellation that eviscerates women’s franchise by subordinating their identities to their husband’s? THE WHOLE POINT OF CALLING HER MAGAZINE ‘MS’ WAS TO ANNOUNCE AND RECOGNIZE A REVOLUTION IN THE OPPOSITE SENSE. Simon de Beauvoir is rolling over in her grave. If a rare and welcome exception to the chain’s reigning anti-intellectualism was provided this summer by broadcasts of Michel Foucault’s ‘70s course at the College de France, meticulously curated and navigated by College de France and Rutgers professor Didier Fassin, it doesn’t begin to compensate — real and sustained intellectual content-wise — for the chain’s completely eliminating its daily early morning broadcasts of courses given by current College de France professors.  *WHICH MEANT YOU DIDN’T NEED TO LIVE IN PARIS TO ASPIRE TO INTELLECTUAL GREATNESS AND FLY AS HIGH AS HERMAN HESSE’S JOSEPH KNECHT. Listening to courses from Marx and from stolen art expert Benedicte Savoy  while holed up in rural France got me through Covid; I remember Marx once sharing, with relish and approbation, a letter from an 11-year-old girl disputing his contention that Tintin never laughed. That’s how much of a levelling force these broadcasts of France at its intellectual best were. Now they don’t even want us to listen to their own music station, in its national accessibility another cultural leveller. (Yes, I’ve tried downloading the courses from the College’s site, but my Macbook claims that they’re undesireable content.)

Coupled with the effective elimination of France Musique in rural France (all I can go by is they’re not doing what they claim to be doing, delivering the station on another channel, where I live) — sitting here in the Bled I was once able to audit the world premiere of a Samba opera by Gilberto Gil and other concerts from all over the world, and Nathalie Piolé’s nightly Bonsai world music cum jazz program provided an education in music and a catholicity that rivalled the legendary KSAN; my late father who didn’t speak much French was able to have a vital link to French culture and good jazz and classical music in general during his summers here, with us noting the predilection towards Chet Baker — it’s almost like these smug Parisian media elites are intentionally trying to dumbify France. (Which, like falsely accusing Melenchon and his party of anti-Semitism, will only increase the chances that the French will elect Le Pen and her party to control the country.)  The dumbifying extends to France Culture’s mid-day program which despite doubling the promise in its name, “Noon Culture,” this year has completely eliminated its daily critic’s corner in which two reviewers evaluated current cultural offerings. (It was the same program’s new host, who previously hosted the chain’s science program, who presented as experts on Dolly Parton three guests who couldn’t name more than three songs before taking “Jolene” off the turntable before Jolene could take Dolly’s man away.) Clearly, the mission now is not to critique the latest cultural offerings, usually from the same old cultural mainstream avatars, but to sell them. As the devolved summer series “Grande Traversee,” which devotes two hours per day for a week to a grand cultural subject, is no longer to satisfy the listener’s curiosity by delving into a new subject or at least finding a new angle to an old subject — years ago, a whole week was given over to Francois Truffaut’s interviews with Alfred Hitchcock — but to sell a certain vision of France which was old a hundred years ago: The Mona Lisa, the Battle of Verdun, Eleonore d’Aquitaine, and Saint Francis….

(Not to mention how insulting it is for pretend supporters of culture to butcher music by presenting 1-minute slices of artistic oeuvres so that they have more time to parade their ultimately superficial musical knowledge, Brumeau being the exception, at least until his show was cancelled.)  

This in FRANCE, which I grew up idolizing as the mecca for and acme of culture, literature, and intellectual discourse in general. This in FRANCE, the country where a novelist cum Resistance leader and more recently the president of the country’s leading publisher of literature in translation once served as cultural ministers. Where France Inter caters to the lowest denominator, France Culture is actually and actively trying to lower the cultural, intellectual, and political journalism barre. (For his debut last Monday, on a segment pretending to analyze the upcoming presidential campaign, the new host of the chain’s nightly “Questions du Soir” program invited the same old farts who have been pontificating on French politics for 20 years, one of whom shares the bias against Melenchon, and who all agreed that none of the candidates has a program because they’re all running against someone, i.e. Melenchon or Le Pen, *both of whom have very specific and exact programs.*

(Julie Gacon’s daily Culture Monde program is an exception to the chain’s now reigning anti-intellectualism…. except, on occasion, when it comes to Israel and Palestine; she once presented a confirmed Israeli Zionist, Denis Charby — French public radio’s house Zionist with a friendly face — as an authority on American Jewish response to Israel’s actions; of course he said the American Jews who objected to Israel’s comportment in Gaza just didn’t understand. Early on in the genocide, when Palestinian journalists were already being targeted by Israel, Gacon declared that there were no journalists in Gaza. Other programs on France Culture treating the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” have presented the Paris representative of the American Jewish Committee, whose express mission is to encourage American Jews to make aliya or emigrate to Israel, as an objective scholar on the subject, while Christine Ockrent, the host of the chain’s weekly Foreign Affairs program, maligned the anti-genocide demonstrations at Columbia University as pro-Hamas. France Culture’s new anti-intellectualism is not confined to this subject; a novelist appearing on the chain’s daily “Philosophy” program, asked why he didn’t like James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” mustered all his philosophical acumen to declare, “It’s null.” Come back Maurice Merleau-Ponty; all is forgiven!)

Death of a Dance Giant: The Importance of being Simone Forti

By Asimina Chremos
Copyright 2001, 2026 by Asimina Chremos.

(Following the death of dance giant Simone Forti at the age of 91, announced Wednesday by her gallery, the Dance Insider is revisiting what she meant to our critics. This Essay was first published on the Dance Insider Online on November 9, 2001. Special thanks to Mark Dendy, who remembers.)

Paul Ben-Itzak: Simone Forti is in New York for three nights starting Thursday. We are having the show reviewed, by Chris, but I would also like to get something up this week to goose people to the show. I know you’re quite familiar with her work. Would you be interested in writing a primer Flash? Something along the lines of, why Simone Forti matters to young choreographers/dancers, such as yourself?

Asimina Chremos: Why does Simone Forti matter to me? Simone Forti has had a huge, positive, even liberating impact on my approach to dance as an activity and an experience. In the late ’80s, I had recently left a ballet company, had entered a college dance department, and was beginning to explore the world of Modern Dance. I took a two-week summer improvisation workshop at the Naropa Instititute with Simone, Barbara Dilley, and Nancy Stark Smith.

For Simone’s class, the students split into groups and did explorations of outdoor spaces, and then showed little site-specific compositions. I remember sitting in a stream with the water up to my waist, wearing a brown cotton leotard that changed color when wet. I performed a repetitive action of waving my right cupped hand under the surface and scooping it up to throw an arc that started near my right hip, arched high over my head, and splashing down somewhere several feet to my left. I don’t quite remember what my classmates were doing in this dance, but the sheer sensual pleasure of performing this action remains strong in my memory, along with the deep green light coming through the tree leaves, the rich browns of the stream banks, and the sun-glistening gleams.

Several years later, I was wheeling around a large and crowded room at the American Dance Festival in Durham, moving through space like an awkward, flightless bird, dodging others of my kind, who soared and flopped, folded and unfolded through the space. Simone was teaching and she had talked about the structure of the arm, and likened it to a wing.

I went to New York to see my friend Eric Schoefer perform with Simone and several others, in a beautiful arboreal yard; perhaps it was Wave Hill. Was it Simone who poked her torso out of the leafy plane made by a low-hanging tree branch, smoothing her palms along the leaves like a 17th century lady at European court would smooth her broad skirt?

Just last year I was at a technical rehearsal of the White Oak Dance Project in Chicago, and Simone was doing a run of one of her dancing and talking improvisations with an object. The object she chose was a huge puffy blanket that was white on one side and black on the other. Appearing on the stage at ease in her comfortable pants and t-shirt, somehow she became a most graceful jellyfish, her movements and her use of the blanket creating the illusion she was underwater. Rolling along the floor, she flowed, expanded and contracted with utmost elasticity, flow, and beauty.

Simone is now over 60 years old. Whenever I begin to stress over being a has-been old lady dancer at 35, I think of Simone and my neurosis disappears. Simone embodies humor, curiosity, and wit as a dance artist. Her respect for the human body and the environment set an example of openness, acceptance, and possibility. Through her teaching and performing she offers students and audiences awareness of changing systems, gentleness, and joy.

This is not to say Simone is all butterflies and sunshine. Especially in her moving and talking work, she sometimes tackles situations of immense darkness. There is a practice I’ve seen her perform that uses newspapers and she moves and talks through news stories and current events.

Death of a Dance Giant, 2: When Forti filled the Danspace

By Chris Dohse
Copyright 2001, 2026 by Chris Dohse

(Following the death of dance giant Simone Forti at the age of 91, announced Wednesday by her gallery, the Dance Insider is revisiting what she meant to our critics. This Flash Review was first published on the Dance Insider Online on November 13, 2001.)

NEW YORK — Simone Forti filled the Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church on Thursday night with a quality that is hard to describe. It’s something I once called “palpable acuity.” Can you learn this? I doubt it. But perhaps, after a lifetime of mindfulness, it can be acquired. Each of Forti’s phrases is made immediately and just to her liking. In her first improvisation, “Logomotion,” she asks for three words from the audience. Since we are sitting in the middle of dance history, Jackson McLow says, “Cold.” Someone else adds, “Threw” (or “Through?”). Lastly, “Falcon.” So Forti makes up poems from aleatoric actions and she sort of tells little stories while she’s at it. Memories, recollections of the heat and the hawk. Dreams and fears and curious whatnots. The lighting instruments hum as she pauses and the hum becomes a world, as Carol Mullins tweaks a level or two to accommodate the dance.

The score of “Illuminations,” Forti’s 30-year-old ongoing collaboration with minimalist composer Charlemagne Palestine, features an incessant hammering of piano keys that becomes the tintinnabulation of bells. A little nauseating in its intensity, actually. Gut-churning. (Palestine didn’t attend the performance due to fear of flying, so the score was a recording made last week in Brussels.) Forti circles and circles; she is open to everything, making us aware of what there is to be open to. Too much, most of the time in real life, but Forti makes order of plenitude. She escapes the habits of her body; she becomes her hologram. (A 1977 hologram of Forti called “Angel,” accompanied by Palestine’s “Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone,” was on display before the performance.)

Returning to the center as the piano dwindles, Forti’s articulate body crawls, a human flak suit. She stands swaying, arms idly flinging. I realize I won’t be able to remember accurately anything that just happened. Forti is an ephemeral trickster who defies capture on the page.

A third improv, this one a frisky and somewhat ribald collaborative version of “Logomotion” with Danny Lepkoff, is less successful. Still it is a pleasure to be allowed to watch these two compadres enjoy each other.

P.S. Since Mina Chremos gave her wonderful Forti reminiscences last Friday, permit me to add one of my own as a postscript.

In 1978, I was taking Modern Dance 101 at Wright State University in Fairborn, Ohio. Patricia White, my beloved first teacher and a person with great foresight, brought Simone in as a guest artist for a week. At the time, my ideas about dance focused on wearing shiny unitards and kicking my legs as high as possible. All we did for a week in Simone’s workshop was walk in a circle, around and around and around the perimeter of the dance studio. (She’s still walking in that circle, meditatively now.) I believe she talked a little about holograms.

Twenty years or so later, at the Judson’s memorial performance for Bob Dunn, a man who touched my dancing life deeply, I approached Simone and cheekily told her that I had learned nothing that week in 1978 (explaining of course that that was because her ideas were so far ahead of my limited understanding). We shared a hearty chuckle, for she swore she had never heard of Wright State University and could remember nothing about being there!

“I am an American”

Taken by Dorothea Lange — hired by the War Department of the United States to document the forced incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II — the above image, posted by the Oakland Museum on July 4, shows the facade of a grocery store owned by a Japanese-American man and graduate of the University of California at Berkeley who painted the words “I AM AN AMERICAN” on his storefront the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Just weeks after Lange took the photo in 1942, the man was arrested and imprisoned because of his ancestry. Dorothea Lange, Japanese Owned Grocery Store, Oakland, March 30, 1942. Film negative. Gift of Paul S. Taylor © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California and part of the public domain.

1,000 Days of Genocide in Gaza: Palestinian lives are not disposable*

Statement by the Jewish Union for Peace, Paris 
Translated by Paul Ben-Itzak

(To read the original French version, please click here.)

The 1000th day of the Gaza genocide, July 2, marks an unbearable threshold and an indelible stain on humanity. For more than two-and-a-half years, the Palestinian population has been subjected to bombing, forced displacement, systematic destruction of vital infrastructure, orchestrated starvation, and repeated attacks against civilians, healthcare workers, journalists, and places of life and memory. As international organisations and numerous NGOs — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Médecins sans frontières, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights — have attested to for many months, this constitutes a genocide. This situation is not an abstract “tragedy,” but the result of an intentional policy of extermination conducted before our eyes, in absolute immunity.  

The (French) Jewish Union for Peace re-affirms  its unwavering refusal to be complicit in this genocide, because it refuses to let anti-Semitism, our special history, and the destruction of the Jews of Europe to be used to justify the horror committed by the State of Israel, and this supposedly in our name.

The UJFP re-affirms that international law cannot be invoked in variable geometry. In Gaza, the genocide continues despite the cease-fire, with children particularly targeted. Deliberately targeting children constitutes one of the key elements that establishes  the genocidal intention of  Israeli authorities and security forces,  intended to destroy in part or in whole, the Palestinian population of Gaza. In the face of this situation, Western governments and the European Union, who have the power to act, content themselves with issuing ineffective declarations, with diplomatic pretenses or active complicity. The silence, the inaction, and the arms deliveries are part of the criminal mechanism.

We demand:

**An immediate and permanent cease-fire and the permanent halt of this barbarous killing.

**The end of the Gaza blockade.

**A halt to all arms deliveries to Israel.

**Unfettered access to humanitarian aid.

**The restitution of the totality of the Gaza Strip to Gazans and therefore the suppression of the yellow line which corrals Gazans like animals.

**Immediate sanctions against the State of Israel, including the suspension of Israel’s special trade status with the European Union.

**The criminal pursuit of political and military officials implicated in these crimes….

Solidarity with the Palestinian people is not a moral option, it’s a political, judicial, and human obligation “for this planet to remain habitable for humanity” (Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Gallimard, page 1243.).

After 1000 days of genocide, it is urgent to put an end to the impunity, to protect the survivors, to accord them reparations, and to ensure that international law is finally respected.

— The National Coordination of the Jewish Union for Peace, Paris, July 1, 2026

**In the French original, “sacrificeable.”

A wrinkle in time: To be young, gifted, and bussed to the Compensatory class in the Black neighborhood

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2026 Paul Ben-Itzak

Where real names are used (and even where they are dissimulated), it’s because the author’s primary intention — besides unravelling the wrinkle to better savour the time and try to comprehend why it lingers in memory — is to signify the importance in his life of those named and for whom he has only love.

“Give me liberty, or give me death.”

— Patrick Henry, prelude to the Declaration of Independence, Marcy 23, 1775

“Give us the liberty to spend the whole day trading baseball cards, with breaks to go get ice cream. And don’t forget to give us money for the ice cream.”

— Declaration of Independence, Gifted class, Patrick Henry Elementary School, San Francisco, 1971.

“It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together. Though I care as little about riches as any man, I am a friend to riches because they are capable of good. I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene.”

—Thomas Paine 

“Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose.”

— Janis Joplin

In 1954, back when it was more invested in righting racially-rooted injustice than denying it, the Supreme Court of the United States, ruling in favor of a lawsuit brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and passionately argued by the future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, ordered the desegregation of public schools in the United States, recognizing that the argument that children could be racially separated and still receive an equal education was a sham. It was, after all, less than 100 years after the abolition of slavery, itself in part enabled by the cultivated ignorance of African-American slaves, who were prohibited from learning to read and punished when they violated the prohibition.

In 1971, when Court-ordered desegregation finally hit San Francisco, rather than joining the rest of the upper-grade kids at Alvarado Elementary School in middle-class Noe Valley in taking the yellow schoolbusses across town to Starr King in a majority Black neighbourhood, I and a handful of other boys from Noe and nearby Eureka Valley, with the benediction of our parents, decided to take the municipal busses to the new Gifted class at Patrick Henry Elementary School in Potrero Hill, another majority Black neighbourhood. If we had ambitions of exploiting our elite status (conferred by IQ tests in which in my case I was unable to describe the difference between North, South, East, and West) to rule the school with a municient if benevolent hand, they were quickly quashed when we were placed in Room 14, which the previous year had housed the Compensatory class. The result was that our schoolmates thought we were the opposite of what we actually were, mental abilities-wise, and looked down on us accordingly. Unable to dominate our fellow students we turned our tyrannical tendencies to our foppish teacher, Mr. C., summarily intimidating him into submission in what became known in the annals of the San Francisco Unified School District as the Great Baseball Card Trading Coupe of 1971, on account of that’s what the ruling junta spent most of the school-year doing, with occasional breaks to cross the street to Leroy’s general store after Mr. C. not only gave us permission to leave the school grounds to get ice cream but furnished the funds to pay for the It’s-Its, mint ice cream sandwiches stuffed between two chocolate-coated oatmeal cookies. Our soundtrack was Diodato’s version of Bach’s “Joy,” which we never tired of asking Mr. Connell to play on the classroom’s turntable.

The baseball card trading coupe was lead by Dean M., Ron Quintana, David Stone, and me, all from Noe or Eureka Valley (I’d met Dean the previous year in the weekly Gifted class at Alvarado taught by a high-booted Karen Valentine clone, Miss Estrella), and our Chinatown homeys Gerald Tom and Sherman Yee, one of the year’s highlights being visiting Gerald and Sherman in their digs off Grant Street, which we turned into our own form of Opium Dens, puffing on giant dollar cigars sold to the tourists at Chinatown tchotchke shops as we wheeled and dealed baseball cards and tried to chew the stiff slabs of Topp’s chewing gum that came with them until we were nauseous.  Between the ice cream and the baseball card trading, at the expense of the three Rs (unless you count arithmetic; “What? Mike Ivie for Willie Mays? You must be off your rocker!”), I always figured I skipped a grade.  Which isn’t to say that nothing stuck.

Something must have, because as opposed to Princeton, where there’s no one from my graduating Class that graduated without me who I can remember — I don’t count Michelle Obama and Jeff Bezos, neither of whom I crossed paths with at the time (although I did cover the exploits of Michelle’s older brother Craig with the Ivy champion Tiger basketball team for the AP) and only learned later had been part of my class — I can remember the name of almost every single one of my 16 classmates from Room 14, and am even still in touch with three of them, Ron, Dean, and Julia Rosenthal, who would later become part of my Senior Prom party at Mission High School after appearing with me and Dean in the Center for Theatre Training’s production of “Godspell,” where the director, apparently oblivious to the year squandered at Patrick Henry, academic-instruction-wise, had her sing “You better learn your lessons well.”  (Despite or maybe because of being a religious or as I prefer to think of it ethnic half-breed — I’m needling him in the fashion we all did at the time; at least he didn’t make the costumer Kathleen Feinblum sew a Star of David on his rear end as I did — Dean played Jesus, which made it easy for me to trigger Stanislavski’s Magic If during the crucifixion scene as we held him aloft and wailed “G*d is Dead / Long live G*d.” Julia also played one of the women in our production of Euripides’s “Trojan Women,” in which I played the heavy, a Greek lieutenant who pitches Andromache’s infant son over the cliff. Andromache, and my alternatively sublime and strife-torn relationship with the girl who played her over a span of 37 years, is another story for another day, the wound still too fresh to tell it without pangs of regret.)

Another thing I remember from that year is Danny S’s mother Grace, a pretty hippy chick with long straight black hair and a blue down jacket, trying to hypnotize us (a trick which apparently didn’t work with Danny, who was constantly throwing temper-tantrums; unless of course that’s what she hypnotized him to do), and me faking it, keeping my eyes open under my folded arms; “I’m not falling for any of that hippy mumbo-jumbo!” (Half a century later, it occurs to me that the recourse to a hypnotically beautiful hypnotizing mom may have been a desperate ruse by Mr. C..) Occult arts-wise, I preferred the Magic 8-ball, which I employed to tell fortunes while manning the Gypsy booth at the school fair. Our only other effort to mix with the general population ended in a debacle when we lost a kickball match to an all-school squad led by the school bully, Tommy C. (school-bullies’ names I retain in a whole separate category) 181 to 7.  I also remember an African-American girl named Regina, which she ensured by permanently imprinting her finger-nails in the back of my hand. And a small annoying blond-mopped-haired kid named Tom Payne, who sticks in my memory because I knew him before I knew who Thomas Payne was so whenever I read a citation from the latter (the one above was recently posted by my signature teacher from the following  year, Ernie Baumgarten) I always visualize the snotty annoying kid we used to pick on saying it. Then there was Anna Karney, a hearty  red-head full of gusto, which she made good use of years later playing Gypsy-Rose Lee’s mother in a production at Lowell High School which I reviewed for the Mission High School West Wing. Anna hung out with Julia, a blonde girl named Meagan, and a tinyer girl whose name is the only one I can’t remember from that year but it just came back to me as if triggered by this writing, Winona. 

But here’s what I don’t get: Except for Dean, who would go on to be my on-again, off-again best friend for the next 24 years (we’re currently in dormant status, and even that feels fragile after Dean forgot my 65th birthday, or rather omitted to send me a note on the occasion, the significance of this omission in my own head a sign that I’m searching for manifestations that I still matter to him ((never mind that I didn’t send him a note on his reaching this marker either)); things have never been the same between me and Dean ((note how the elusive characters in American memoirs of youth are often named Dean)) since our second two best friends and a girl episode, not so much due to the girl but that our own life traumas at the time were the opposite of complementary and it destroyed our friendship or at least meant it would never be the same again); Ron, who I ran into intermittently in San Francisco in the ’90s when we were both plying the DJ trade (he specializing in Metal, me in World, Reggae, and Funk) and with whom I’ve recently re-connected on Facebook, where Ron’s hilarious retro and music posts are my favorite daily diversion; and Julia, from our Center for Theatre Training days and from the Prom, for which she graciously agreed to be the Prom date for a friend of mine she didn’t know well (which I benefited from by having Julia, a tie to younger days, thus be part of my Prom, which started at a French restaurant named Cyrano’s out in the Avenues and ended, like most Proms in San Francisco did those days, at IHOP, the International House of Pancakes) (the only real hump in our friendship came when Julia didn’t invite me to her wedding, for which she might well have had any number of valid reasons, to an older man, Charlie, she met at the Exploratorium founded by J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brother Frank and where Dean, Julia, and I had all been Red-Jacketed Explainers, for which reason Dean, who’d had a relationship with her in high school, boycotted the wedding) (Ron is a one-man Wayback machine for at least two cultural troves, ‘70s and earlier and hard-rock memorabilia, the former often including family pictures and lore from which I’ve learned how ensconced his family is in San Francisco history, legend, and lore…. Whenever I venture a quip on one of his posts, I’m also reaching out to my own past and becoming that wide-eyed child again, like Howard the Duck gifted and trapped in Compensatory class which at least had the benefit that the biggest regret one had to deal with was whether one had under-traded a 1961 Stan Musial. Ron now runs a record shop in Gold Country. Ron, you are the gold.) Except for the longevity and durability of my relationships with these three from that class — as I was saying before I interrupted myself — nothing particularly significant happened that year, at least that I can remember, particularly when I compare it to the year that followed, when I and a new gaggle of Noe and Eureka kids (including Dean’s younger brother Dave and my own brother Aaron) became part of the inaugural student body of Rooftop School, one of San Francisco’s first two alternative schools. Setting aside the possibility that despite my resistance Grace S succeeded in hypnotizing out of my head a possible trauma that may have occurred, if I nonetheless remember Patrick Henry so vividly,  it might be because this was the year the theater bug bit me; we put on a production of “The Litter Bug” from Scholastic magazine and re-enacted Captain Spaulding’s opening monologue in “Animal Crackers,” with Dean of course interpreting Groucho: “I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas; how he got in my pyjamas, I’ll never know.” We presented this double-bill for the entire school.  If the idea was to win over our schoolmates, the performance had the opposite effect; we were not only retarded, we were artists. With this double-stigmata, the schoolyard bullying only accelerated afterwards. I also remember that Ron’s mom was always playing Sinatra when we went over to his house before playing touch-football on slopey 20th Street, down the street from Dean’s pad on Seward Street. And that later Ron fell off the roof of the Edwardian house. And I remember discovering Vermont Street, the real curviest street in San Francisco.

It could also be because this was the year before my parents separated.  For some reason, I associate being put on a no-milk diet by my doctor (this was the year when I also became phlegmatic, manifest in a chronic cough I still have today much to the consternation of fellow audients who have had the misfortune to sit next to me in the theaters of New York and Paris, and my doctor was trying to find solutions), specifically that this meant being deprived of Mom’s banana bread, with coming upon my father sitting at a round table in the front of the Acme Metal Spinning Works Cafe — one of the first restaurants of the New California Cuisine of which my Dad was made co-owner in return for remodelling the site, which had actually housed a metal spinning works — having a very good time smiling and lauging with a woman i didn’t know. Completely inocuous of course, but in the mind of a 10-year-old who already senses the winds of divorce….

Of course, if you read Louise Hay, that I started having trouble coughing at exactly the same time my parents’ marriage started dissolving and just before, with the best intentions, we started splitting time between Mom and Dad’s house, a to-and-fro that wasn’t alway easy for me, may indicate that I was suppressing my feelings, e.g. about my parents separation and its consequences on our domestic life.

That I remember this year so vividly might also have something to do with it being the first year I was granted some form of autonomy, in being able to take the regular municipal busses across town  with Ron and Dean and the other Noe / Eureka Valley kids. Or maybe for the scratch-marks inflicted by Regina, which triggered a certain innate fear of Black people in my head which still hasn’t entirely gone away.

It doesn’t have anything to do with any romantic traumas I may have had that year; while I had crushes on girls before Patrick Henry — going back to kindergarten (a girl whose name I remember as Claudia Triola and another named Teresa Castaneda who was my crush through third grade) — and had a thing for Julia later on, in high school — and the next year at Rooftop would be the setting for the biggest crush of my life, on a girl named Christine LaMar with whom I used to have stare-out contests across the aisle on the 24 Divisadero until she cheated by showing up one morning with dark glasses due to an eye operation, and to whom I dedicated my first novel, “The Problem Cops,” about a team of police who fought racial crimes,  I don’t remember having a crush on anyone that year at Patrick Henry.  Although as I wrote that, it seems to me that this was the year I really fell in love for the first time, with a girl whose name may have been Jacky Singer, and who was a niece of my dad’s best friend from the Florida years. (The Acme had been co-founded with another member of the Florida mafia, Joel Kuperschmidt, which was taking over 24th Street that year; across the street was Books Plus, co-owned by Larry Alperstein, who would also give me my first job, stocking books in the back of the store. Larry’s daughter Susan, with her younger brother Michael, was my first baby-sitting client; I’d be devastated later to learn that she had dropped dead at the age of 37, leaving a young daughter behind.)

And of course, of my parents, I remember nothing of that year, I mean of them together, as I remember nothing of them together from any time before they separated, with the exception of my mom’s frantic fear during a lightning storm in 1970, when we were living in the country near the Northern California coast waiting for my dad to come home along a treacherous mountainous road between us and the Indian reservation, where it seems he had some business.

The most likely explanation, by contrast, for the elevated place that wrinkle in time at Patrick Henry has in my memory is probably for its role in the immaculate conception (inside San Francisco joke) of my friendship with Dean. After (in my memory) he and Ron excluded (maybe ostracised is a better word) me from the tightest trio in baseball since Tinkers-to-Evans-to-Chance after we left Patrick Henry and they entered the big leagues at Everett Junior High School,  at least that was the way I took it, Dean and I re-found ourselves and cemented our best-friendship for the next nearly 20 years — a pretty good run by any standards — at CTT during a long walk back from our job interviews to become Red- (or maybe it was Orange; Dean?) Jacketed Explainers at the Exploratorium, for whom CTT was a natural source given that the high-school students who constituted the Explainer corps were also required to entertain the public for whom they did the explaining. I became known as “the guy who does the cow’s-eyes,” for the routine I’d developed when I dissected the bovine eyes which had been preserved in formaldehyde to respond to the public’s sometimes stupid questions. (“Where do you get the cows-eyes?” “We have a pasture out back.”) I also enjoyed doing the laser demonstration, which included pointing out that “Lasers are also used in surgery,” a factoid I’ve recalled lately as I now await laser-surgery on my penis to clean out my fat prostate in the hopes that I will be once again able to pee freely at last. 

But we’re concerned here with Patrick Henry and the Wrinkle in Time that year represents… which reminds me of something I’d forgotten until now (I came up with the headline after remembering it), a bit of teaching which Mr. C. did actually attempt, reading to us from Madeleine L’Engle’s book of children’s science-fiction. Although here my memory may be playing tricks, as it seems to me the reader was a woman. It couldn’t have been Mrs. Braun, my Old-School-style teacher for fourth grade (the highlight of which was debating whether Krakatoa or Kilhouaya was the superior volcano), the last at Alvarado, whom I must have detested because one afternoon when my mother showed up with my younger brother in tow for a teacher-parent conference at a time when he was pronouncing “truck” as “fuck” I nudged Jordan into the room after goading him to tell Mrs. Braun “Truck you.” Nor could it have been Ms. Ide (pronounced Ee-day), one of my three teachers at Rooftop, as she was famously soft-spoken. It might have been Ms. Mirtha, our short-lived first teacher at Patrick Henry before she was replaced by Mr. C. and mirth became the order of the day.

Another day, another Arab journalist tracked down, targeted, and assassinated by Israel, as “Jewish state” continues to sully Judaism, including Jews’ reverence for the word

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2026 Paul Ben-Itzak

For Ernie on his birthday.

You’d have needed to be up at 7 a.m. to hear about it in any detail on French public radio*, but yesterday, once again flouting both the “ceasefire” it agreed to in Lebanon — as it’s ignored the ceasefire it agreed to six months ago in Gaza where it’s since killed  more than 750 people  for a total of more than 72,000 in its ongoing genocide and that’s not counting five more civilians killed yesterday, among them three children — not to mention international law which prohibits both the targeting of civilians and journalists, Israel tracked, targeted, killed, cornered, and then stopped the Red Cross for 7 hours from rescuing another Lebanese journalist (it’s already targeted and killed at least 262 journalists in Gaza and Lebanon, some targeted along with their families). Veteran al Akhbar Journalist Amal Khalil and her colleague Zeinab Faraj, Al Jazeera noted,  “were reporting on an earlier Israeli attack on a vehicle on Wednesday, when they were targeted while fleeing towards a building to take shelter. Paramedics rescued Faraj and recovered Khalil’s body from the rubble hours later. The journalist was last heard from at about 4:10pm local time (13:10 GMT), when she called her family members and the Lebanese military…. She had taken cover inside the house after an earlier Israeli air raid killed two people near the car in which she was travelling with Faraj. Rescue workers initially tried to reach the veteran Al Akhbar journalist, but came under Israeli fire and were forced to withdraw, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health. A second strike then hit the house where the two journalists had sought refuge. Khalil’s body was recovered shortly before midnight, more than seven hours after the attack. Khalil was killed in what Lebanese officials described as a ‘double-tap’ strike in al-Tayri. Rescuers were able to pull Faraj, who was seriously wounded, from the scene and recover the bodies of two people killed in the first strike. But efforts to reach Khalil were delayed after Israeli forces fired on emergency workers, the ministry said.”

If you have any doubt why Khalil, the ninth journalist Israel has killed in Lebanon this year, was slain, here’s what she told The Public Source earlier this year: “I debunk the enemy’s narrative of targeting only military sites by showing evidence of them bombing homes, farms, and killing children. Through my work, I have tried to be in solidarity with these people – the people of the land.” Her most recent reporting, al Jazeera related, “focused on Israeli demolitions of homes in villages where Israeli troops are positioned inside Lebanon.” Al Jazeera’s Heidi Pett said Khalil had received direct threats during the last war from an Israeli phone number on WhatsApp, warning her to stop reporting. “In fact, [they were] telling her that she should leave Lebanon if she wanted her head to remain on her shoulders,” And the Committee to Protect Journalist’s Sara Qudah told the chain, “The Israeli military’s obstruction of medical crews from rescuing wounded civilians is a brutal and recurring crime we have already witnessed in Gaza and now again in Lebanon. Khalil, an unarmed civilian journalist, remained trapped under the rubble for more than seven hours while the Red Cross was prevented from reaching her.”  Lebanese president Joseph Aoun, in a post on X cited by al Jazeera, accused Israel of the “deliberate and consistent targeting of journalists” in an effort to “conceal the truth of its aggressive acts against Lebanon”.

This woman, this journalist, this writer — this witness to its war crimes and crimes against humanity — was hounded down and murdered by Israel, just as it has murdered so many of her colleagues in Lebanon and Gaza, to prevent her from telling the truth about its crimes. 

This is the outlaw (by its acts, not because of its religious identity) country, the country contemptuous of international laws and morals, that proposed legislation in France would have effectively shielded, in a law proposed last week before being tabled by the French government, from certain forms of criticism under the patently false pretense that anti-Zionism, including certain forms of criticism of Israel, is just anti-Semitism in disguise, motivated by a “hate of Israel today coequivalent with the hate of Jews. The call for the destruction of this State, because it forms a collective of Jewish citizens, is a disguised manner to attack the Jewish community in its ensemble.” (Shielded because make no mistake: Israel uses Judaism as a shield against factually legitimate accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity the same way it falsely accuses others of using hospitals in Gaza as human shields, so that it can attack those hospitals and kill, kidnap, and torture their doctors and medical personnel, so that it can go on committing these crimes with impunity. The problem many of us, including Jews around the world, have with Israel is not that it forms a collective of Jewish citizens, but its constant profanation of Jewish values which threatens to stigmatize the global collective of Jews, to say nothing of its war crimes and crimes against humanity.)

No one here’s calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. We are calling for it to be held to account once and for all for its genocide of at least 72,000 Palestinians including at least 20,000 children and, by one reckoning, 38,000 women and children. For the more than 2,300 people it has killed in Lebanon over the past six weeks, including at least 254 children according to Lebanese authorities, in repeated bombings of villages and homes. For its illegal bulldozing of homes and entire villages in the south of  Lebanon. For the thousands of Hind Rajabs, cut down before they could grow up, for the thousands orphaned in Gaza after Israel killed their parents. And for the Jews among us, apart from the  inherent condemnability of the acts themselves, we are also verbally attacking this so-called Jewish state because by these acts it is a stain on Judaism, it has made itself a pariah, it is our modern Cain slaying its Arab brothers and sisters, and it has betrayed Jewish values.

Among those values which Israel has shat upon and for which it has shown, by its targeted killing of poets, of teachers, and of journalists it has only disdain is the value of the word.

I grew up with Jewish parents (excepting our step-mother) in a family which, except for celebrating Chanuka and Passover — which are as much cultural as religious holidays, in both cases vaunting miracles achieved by or for a persecuted people — might be considered a non-practicing family. When we were born, our parents — all three of us were boys — decided that we would only get the medical part of the bris, the circumcision ceremony, leaving us to decide later if we wanted to be accorded Jewish (or Hebrew) names.

I made this decision during a cross-country trip our father and step-mother took us on in 1977, whose initial destination was Miami Beach and my grandparents’ home, while reading Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen” by lantern- and candle-light on the campgrounds across America.  I was 16, and not only had I not been given a Jewish name, I’d not  had a bar-mitzvah, which Jewish boys usually get at the age of 13 and which consecrates them as adults. (I wrote ahead to ask my grandpa or Papa, Morris Hertzon, if he could arrange the name-giving ceremony; that clever man not only arranged that, he convinced the rabbi to throw in a bar-mitzvah.) What moved me about that book (which was a best-seller, and not only among Jews) — what gave me pride in my Jewish heritage and made me want to affirm it and be part of it by getting a Jewish name — was not so much the religiosity but the hours and hours the two principal characters, Jewish adolescents in Williamsburg in the 1950s, spent discussing and debating the Torah and Talmud with their fathers, one a writer on Jewish subjects including Talmudic questions, the other a tzadik or Hassidic rabbi and the leader of his community. With the latter, this consecration and devotion to and belief in the importance of words was so essential that these Torah and Talmud debate sessions were the only time the rabbi broke his general policy to not speak to his son (a measure ultimately intended to address a lack of empathy in the intellectually curious young man).

I have a friend, teacher, and mentor, Ernie Baumgarten. Ernie was born in that New York of the 1950s, going on to co-found with six other teachers, at the age of 23, one of San Francisco’s first two alternative public schools, Rooftop. (Where one of my classmates in its founding year was the son of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, which is just to demonstrate the reputation Rooftop already had from its founding.) While I can’t remember whether it was a direct subject of Rooftop’s alternative but still rigorous curriculum, central to Rooftop’s implicit mission was not just the acceptance, not just the appreciation, but the celebration of difference, including by the multi-racial (and multi-background) composition of its faculty and of its student body. 

One of the handful of Facebook’s redeeming graces is that it recently allowed me to ‘retrieve’ Ernie, my former teacher (is a teacher really ever ‘former’?)’s contributions providing some of the rare posts on the social network which are not centered on silly pictures or jokes or self-promotion but devoted to contemporary and historical political, literary, and philosophical citations, reflections, and ruminations which actually illuminate what is happening, or what is being inflicted upon, our world now by Trump, the Republicans, their supporters who enabled this, and others. We often dialogue over the ideas advanced in these citations, and sometimes disagree. In a way I feel like I am Danny and Reuven back in their fathers’ studies in Williamsburg discussing and debating the interpretation of obscure points in the Torah or Talmud (only the subjects here are hardly obscure, rather they combat the obscurantists; but the link to moral values is the same) with Reb Baumgarten. Ernie claims — smile — to be an atheist or what the French would call, mistakenly in my view because it still defines and circumscribes a person by his lack of religion as opposed to acknowledging that he might believe in something else, by a negative and not a positive, a ‘non-believer,’  And yet by, or in choosing the metier of teacher he nonetheless belongs to one of the 12 “tribes,” and by being a leader of thought (which should not be confused with an indoctrinator) in his community, he is a tzadik, as he is in his cultivating and nurturing of other would-be tzadiks like me.

And, atheist or not, non-practicing Jew or not, he still carries on and promulgates the Jews’ fundamental and essential belief in the potency — and, dare I say, sacredness — of the word. (A belief which is not exclusive to us; one of my favorite passages in Emil Ajar / Romain Gary’s “Your whole life is ahead of you” is when an older French-Arab man, going blind, who spends his days on a bench in front of the Belleville apartment building in Paris where the hero and other children of prostitutes are being raised by an old Jewish woman tells the narrator, “I have the Koran in one hand and Monsieur Hugo in the other.”)

Ernie has been heartbroken over what, in his view which I respect, Israel has *become*. I would say that we agree on the diagnosis of what Israel has currently become. Where we might disagree is on whether this denouement was in the cards from the beginning. Ernie often talks about one of his teachers, a woman who fought with the Haganah in the war for Israel’s independence, and how she, too, would be heartbroken to see what Israel has become.  In Ernie’s view as I understand it, it did not have to end up this way; in the beginning, the Zionist dream of creating a home for Jews in their historic home was a worthy and pure dream. “If you will it,” Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl famously said, “it is no dream.” I used to think this way as well. Like Ernie (if through a different medium; he at Sunday school in New York, me as part of a State Department-sponsored delegation of American high school students to Israel in 1978 which I only realized later was organized by an arm of AIPAC, the Israel lobbying group, and in which cute Israeli girls challenged me with “Why aren’t you here?” and insisted, as they were no doubt taught, “The Arabs hate us”), as a teenager (during that trip, not by my parents) I was inculcated with this, what I’d now call propaganda. While I initially thought — the turning point was Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 — that the dream had just gone bad, I am now convinced that the seed was there from the beginning, that Zionism, in its denial of the Palestinian Other, was and is an inherently racist dogma, and which has about as much to do with Judaism as what’s referred to in France as “Islamism” has to do with Islam.

Despite the good work of groups like Jews for Peace and, in France, Tzadik and the Jewish Union for Peace to counter the destruction being wielded and the death including by genocide and war crimes too numerous to list being wreaked by Israel on the people whose well-being it is charged by international law to protect and on its neighbors, and to counter the utter contempt for the word revealed by its breaches of the cease-fires it agrees to then lethally violates daily, as by its targetted assassinations of poets, teachers, and journalists (often in double-tap strikes, where it creates an initial crime scene in bombing civilian targets, then kills the journalists who show up to cover the initial crime), and the good work of indigenous Israeli journalists like Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, and by numerous Israeli scholars like Omar Bartok to call a genocide a genocide, and like Ilan Pappe to call ethnic cleansing ethnic cleansing (including of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the war of independence, what Palestinians call the Nakbah, or disaster), I don’t know if I will ever be able to recuperate the pride I once took in being (in part; I don’t exlusively define myself this way) Jewish, so much has Judaism been sullied by the attempts of a supposedly Jewish state to use the Star of David as a shield to cover its crimes, including by profaning, in its continued targetted assassinations of journalists, poets, and teachers, the value Judaism and Jews puts and put on the word, in Israel’s own hatred of the word and persecution of its avatars.

*France Culture, the middle-brow station, featured a correspondent’s report at the top of its 7 a.m. newscast, including the name of the journalist hunted down and assassinated by Israel; on France Inter, in all the news broadcasts of its morning show, the journalist only merited one one sentence mention, without a name. This is what is known in France as “service minimum,’ which we all know would not have been the same if the journalist killed had been Israeli or Jewish, or if the chase had been part of a sporting match.

Chevalier de la Barre: Tabled French law could turn Arendt & Einstein into outlaws or, How shouting BRAUSEBAD at a crowded Gaza “food distribution point” might land you in the hoosegow

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2026 Paul Ben-Itzak

Under a new proposed law equating anti-Zionism and certain forms of criticism of Israel — notably, drawing comparisons between Israel and the Nazis —with anti-Semitism, a legal offense in France, proposed by legislators from French president Emmanuel Macron’s Centrist party and temporarily tabled Thursday after 707,000 electors filed a petition against it on the legislature’s website (the second highest number of signatures ever gathered for a petition filed on the site), were they alive today Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, two of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century, would risk being sanctioned for their words.

“In 1948,” Masha Gesson wrote in a December 9, 2023 article in the New Yorker addressing in part  attempts by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) to promote a revised definition of anti-Semitism incorporating anti-Zionism and certain critiques of Israel, notably those drawing comparisons to the Nazis, a definition which was the basis of  the proposed new French law, “Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, ‘Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.’ Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part by the Irgun, a paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a military objective. The attackers ‘killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.’

“The occasion for Arendt’s letter was a planned visit to the United States by the party’s leader, Menachem Begin. Albert Einstein, another German Jew who fled the Nazis, added his signature. Thirty years later, Begin became prime minister of Israel. Another half century later, in Berlin, the philosopher Susan Neiman, who leads a research institute named for Einstein, spoke at the opening of a conference called ‘Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.’ She suggested that she might face repercussions for challenging the ways in which Germany now wields its memory culture. Neiman is an Israeli citizen and a scholar of memory and morals. One of her books is called ‘Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.’ In the past couple of years, Neiman said, memory culture had ‘gone haywire.’”

One of the ways that culture has gone haywire is the leveraging, by Israel and enabled, in France, by many program and newshosts on French public radio, of the real pain and loss of Jews inflicted by the Nazis in the Holocaust and the lingering (and, I’d argue, misplaced) institutional and media sense of culpability of European states like Germany and France for, respectively, their direct parts in the Shoah or the Deportation, to protect Israel at a time when, under the direction of the current president of Begin’s Likud party, who has an international arrest warrant on his head for crimes against humanity, it is still targeting and killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians and dispersing and destroying entire villages while illegally displacing their populations, be they in Gaza, the West Bank which Israel has illegally occupied for 59 years, or Lebanon. This pre-stamped get-out-of-war-crimes and crimes-against-humanity jail free card accorded to Israel by its apologists on French public radio (I don’t mean the correspondents, whose intrepid work if anything contradicts the indemnity granted to Israel by these news and program hosts) extends even to denying the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 75,000 since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre of between 1200 and 1400 people (after killing 2100 in Gaza in 2014), including 38,000 women and girls and at least 20,000 children overall (a Palestinian diplomat appearing on France Inter public radio yesterday with an Israeli diplomat — as if the only way a Palestinian can be allowed on French public radio any more is if he’s accompanied by an Israeli —  put the figure at 40,000) and 750 people since Israel agreed to a ceasefire last October, among them a three-year-old child attending a funeral the weekend before last killed in an Israeli drone attack, effectively disabling any criticism of Israel by enabling Israeli propagandists’ claims that such criticism is just anti-Semitism in disguise. And including by the proposed law’s adapting the IHRA’s revised definition of anti-Semitism which incorporates anti-Zionism as have, according to Gesson (writing in 2023), 25 European countries and many American states. Specifically, this definition — which could have serious consequences where it’s incorporated into the law — includes as anti-Semitic comparisons of Israel to the Nazi regime such as those drawn by Arendt, a German Jewish refugee and a darling of French intellectuals including on French public radio,  and given the benediction of Einstein, also a German Jewish refugee; and, potentially, what’s referred to as “the diminution” or “banalization” of the Holocaust, which might include, say, comparing the current genocide perpetrated by a Jewish state with a genocide perpetrated against Jews.

Among the most cogently expressed oppositions to France’s proposed “Yadan law,” after the authoring legislator, which was tabled Thursday after mounting dissent notably as manifest by the petition signed by 707,000 electors(with the government proposing to submit a revised version by the end of June), was that posted by Left-leaning legislator Francois Ruffin, a potential candidate in next. year’s presidential election, on the social networks Wednesday, which adresses several of the proposed bill’s problematic elements. The commentary (translated by me) reads in part:

“The Yadan law promotes a confusion: Throughout its ‘exposition of motives,’ the proposed law links, mixes together, and confounds French Jews and the State of Israel: ‘This detestation to which the State of Israel is subjected is utilized as a pretext to go after our Jewish fellow citizens,’ ‘This hate of the State of Israel is today cosubstantial with the hate of Jews,’ going after ‘this State, which forms a collective of Jewish citizens, is a backdoor way of attacking the Jewish community in its entirety,’ etc.”

(What’s also incredible here is that the law’s authors, echoing some of the hosts on French public radio, make it sound as if Israel was just walking along minding its own business when people spontaneously decided to start detesting and hating it because of its Jewish identity. The day the petition was “classed” by a legislative committee — also meaning that despite having received the second most signatures of any petition filed on the site, and this despite the all but total radio silence over a proposed law which menaces free speech, the legislators declined to discuss it — Israel targeted and killed 20 more civilians in Lebanon, including four emergency workers targeted in a “triple-tap” attack, for a total of 2300 Lebanese killed by Israel since March 2 among them at least 180 children, and 1 million civilians illegally displaced by Israel, and killed another five Gazans in a cafe at a refugee camp. Last week-end, and notwithstanding having signed a cease-fire agreement, Israel began illegally mowing over homes in villages in the south of Lebanon with tractors and destroyed the last bridge linking the region to the rest of the country. In effect, these legislators would pass a law effectively shielding from criticism a state which has absolutely no respect for international law, on the pretense that those who would criticize this contempt for international law and human lives are doing so because they’re anti-Semites.  One of the reasons this is offensive to Jews like me is because it creates a lower standard for us because of our ethnicity. Ruffin continued:)

“This assimilation of the Jews of France with the State of Israel, we contest it: It seems to us highly dangerous for the Jews of France themselves. Every act and insult against our fellow Jewish citizens, against their places of worship, against their beliefs, must be pursued and punished. They must, like every Frenchman, feel secure in our country, free in their beliefs and convictions. In turn, criticism of the State of Israel is completely legitimate, and is today absolutely necessary.”

(It’s worth noting that Ruffin assigns responsibility to “the State of Israel”; where they do allow critiques of Israel’s actions to squeeze through and make it onto the public radio airwaves — I’m not referring to the reports of Radio France’s correspondents on the ground, which if anything substantiate criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon — program hosts on French public radio typically try to assign responsibility to “the government of Benjamin Netanyahu,” as if the genocide and Apartheid are just aberrations attributable to one man’s derives, which conveniently immunizes Israel as a whole from criticism and avoids discussing the question of whether the problem is one leader or inherent in Zionism itself. And they usually leave out that Netanyahu has an international warrant for crimes against humanity on his head. Ruffin goes on:)

“The massacres committed in the Kibbutzim October 7, 2023, against women, children, Israeli civilians, we condemned them without reservation the same day. But what followed, and which we’ve condemned every day? Organized, planned massacres, Gaza become a scorched terrain, transformed into a field of ruins, with millions displaced, the bombs and the hunger, a ‘genocide’ as the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations and numerous NGOs denounce it. Against international law, against all the U.N. resolutions, the State of Israel pursues, accelerates the forced installation of settlers in the West Bank. A chaos Tel-Aviv has now extended to Lebanon, where it sows fire and blood, promising to turn it into a new Gaza.” 

Noting the international arrest warrant issued against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, Ruffin goes on to criticize what he views as the lack of sanctions against Israel. “Not even the symbolic sanction of depriving Israel from participating in sporting competitions and cultural encounters, that its national hymn will no longer resonate (in French theaters and stadiums), that its flag will no longer be brandished, as as been done in the case of Russia.” Indeed, while the mainstream media largely supports bans on Russian artists, Israeli artists continue to be programmed  in France while disruptions of performances of Israeli national performing arts ensembles like the Israeli Symphony are treated as anti-Semitic. (On the other hand, appearing yesterday morning with his Palestinian counterpart on France Inter public radio, Israel’s former ambassador to France Eli Barnabi was asked about and endorsed the European Union’s suspending Israel’s favored trade status.)

… Which leads us to the continuing instances of some program hosts on France Culture public radio  effectively shielding Israel, even as it continues bombing and killing its neighbors (which incidents are duly reported by Radio France’s intrepid and objective correspondents) and Gazans who under international law it is obligated to protect as the Occupying power. Including, just last week, the hypocrisy of Culture Monde, the middle-brow public radio chain’s daily world affairs program, in a focus on how some countries use culture to create a public image countering the image suggested by their acts, discussing Russia but not Israel, whose “Brand Israel” program of cultural exportation funding touring arts organizations is explicitly intended to present a kinder, gentler image of Israel than that communicated by its acts: the 75,000 killed in Gaza, the 2300 killed in Lebanon in little over a month, what several human rights organizations including Israeli human rights organizations have documented is an Apartheid state, the torture of prisoners as verified by both the U.N. (in a report still not mentioned on France Culture or its sister station France Inter) and the Israeli human rights association Bet S’elem….

But the the most forceful example of the implicitly pro-Israel bias (by which I mean here the relative rarity of a Palestinian or even Jewish perspective critical of Israel) of some France Culture program hosts last week was the host of the nightly “debate” program — which often does present real debates with opposing points of views on any subject but Israel and Palestine — once again Thursday, in the immediate wake of the Yadan law’s flop in the face of the doubt sowed by the force of the 707,000 electors who signed the petition opposing it amongst large chunks of legislators, presenting as a “debate” a conversation in which both the guests invited and even the misleading framing of the debate itself resembled more an effort to save the Yadan law than a genuine debate (by genuine I mean in which both sides are represented) over whether anti-Zionism as manifest in critiques of Israel is anti-Semitism and should be legally sanctioned as such. Even before the debate got started and despite a promised discussion of a law where opponents and proponents recognize that the central question is whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and should be legally sanctioned, the title itself given by the host of the “debate,” “Can one legislate against anti-Semitism?” (as opposed to, say, “Is it worth sacrificing free speech to protect a state in the process of committing a genocide in territory it illegally occupies and which has killed 2300 people and illegally displaced a million more in a neighboring state in six weeks, just because it happens to be Jewish?”) implicitly endorsed the proposed law’s problematic and in my view false premise:  that its intention was to combat rising anti-Semitism, where its effect if passed would be to stifle criticism of Israel in a time when Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and has already killed 2300 in Lebanon (and, earlier this month and as reported by a Radio France correspondent, a 17-year-old shepherd in Syria), including by qualifying comparisons like those proposed by Arendt and endorsed by Einstein, two survivors of Nazi anti-Semitism, as anti-Semitism. As for the three interlocuteurs invited to participate in the “debate,” one was a Jewish (you’ll see why this is pertinent) activist who by her own definition supports the notion that anti-Zionism is a pretext for anti-Semitism (and if the anti-Zionism or critique of Israel comes from a Jew, the Jew must be a self-hating Jew or, as she put it “Even firemen can be pyromaniacs”); the other two scholars who suggested a more nuanced answer to the question which incorporated in one case the notion that the legitimacy of criticizing the establishment of a Jewish state stopped the moment Israel was recognized by the United Nations in 1948.  As for inviting an interlocuteur who might actually dispute the notion that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism — with 707,000 signatories opposed to the proposed law not to mention eloquent and popular legislators like Ruffin, there was no embarrassment of choice —  let alone a Palestinian, as usual on most of France Culture’s talk shows including those presented as being “debates” this perspective was conspicuous by its absence. I don’t count the host’s playing a brief clip of a guest on a previous show from a Leftist Jewish organization, which incited the pyromaniac comment from the pro-Zionist guest, the Jew in question conveniently not being present to defend himself. This was not a debate, in this instance it devolved into an occasion for gutter-sniping, with the victim unable to defend himself because neither he nor the point of view he represented — a point of view echoed by at least 707,000 French electors — were welcome at the table. Once again, a program host on France Culture had effectively muzzled debate — a phenomenon which *only happens on this subject* — both by implicitly endorsing the Yadan Law’s false claims that the intention of the law was to combat anti-Semitism when it reality they were to stifle anti-Zionism and impeach or at least inhibit and intimidate legitimate criticism of Israel and excluding any guest who might dispute this notion. (Including Jewish critics; representatives of the Jewish Union for Peace, which has actively militated against the genocide and has a presence in Gaza, are never invited. This refusal to invite Jewish guests critical of Israel — and I don’t mean French public radio’s house Zionists like Denis Charbit who wrack their hands and rend their garments over Netanyahu — is particularly insidious because it promotes the false narrative that Jews in France entirely support Israel.) Despite its grave implications for free speech in France, the Yadan law itself was all but ignored by French public radio until public outcry against it made it impossible to ignore.

BRAUSEBAD

Notwithstanding the excellent and objective reports from Radio France’s correspondents in Israel, the Occupied Territories, and Lebanon, by the on-air evidence, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, the evident preeminent desire of certain program hosts on France Culture, as on France Inter to a lesser degree (there notably by relentlessy vehicling, without citing any proof, the distortion of a leading Left-wing party’s critiques of the genocide as anti-Semitism) is, in my opinion, not to protect French Jews from anti-Semitism, it is to protect Israel from being called to account for its actions against its neighbors and against the Occupied population it is obligated by international law to protect, apparently out of some perverse notion that because France deported Jews to their deaths in a genocide 80 years ago it (France Culture and, in some instances, France Inter) must now protect a state lead by a man wanted for crimes against humanity  because that state happens to be Jewish, a protection which has the tragic effect of buttressing what Israel’s victims in Gaza have referred to as the world’s silence in the face of Israel’s acts including genocide and letting it go on committing them.  Including by their dissembling the law’s real intention, through both their radio silence over the law and one-sided ‘debates,’  which is not to protect Jews but to muzzle Israel’s critics. A law which pretends to be motivated by the need to protect Jews that, if passed (even if the government has tabled the Yadan law, it’s promised to submit a new law before the end of June), would prevent people like me, even Jewish people, from fully criticizing it, especially if we were to do so like Hannah Arendt did 80 years ago, supported by Albert Einstein,  and draw analogies between Israel’s acts and those of Nazi Germany. And yet — as one cartoon I saw on a “social” network at the time suggested — when a state that exploits both its putatively Jewish nature and the memory of the Holocaust to garner immunity from criticism for its war crimes and crimes against humanity profits from its own starvation of innocent civilians by shooting them down like rats at a food distribution point they’ve come to thinking they’ll get food only to get shot to death (at least 600 Gazans, including women and children, were killed including by Israeli soldiers last year at food distribution points organized by the fake Gaza Humanitarian Foundation where they’d been promised food), if the scale doesn’t come close to mirroring the Germans’ disguising gas chambers as showers, certain comparisons cry out to be pointed to, particularly in the minds of Jews still haunted by this memory, and particularly when it is Jews who are mowing down civilians who came in response to the promise of food. Such historical resonances not only call out to be identified, they are essential in sounding the alarm that what we swore would never happen again is now happening before our eyes and we are doing little to stop it. Was it intentional? I don’t know. But the question merits to be discussed, a discussion which would be interdicted by this law.

When I was in high school, my theater conservatory group presented a production of “The Diary of Anne Frank”; I played Peter van Daan, Anne’s boyfriend. Whenever we got to fooling around too much during rehearsal  — we were after all high school students (my best friend, who played Anne’s father, and I would sometimes dissect Peter’s invisible cat Mouschi) — our director Lewis Campbell (who as an American soldier in Germany in the 1950s had been to a performance of the play whose ending was met with silence by the shattered audience) would shout “BRAUSEBAD!,” the German word for shower room, to remind us  of the gravity of what the play was about and get us back on task. (We even took to mocking him behind his back by imitating his cry.) One of the things this play and that diary were about was that this should NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN, not just to Jews but to anyone. That no more Anne Franks would be martyred by racism and intolerance. In a time when Israel has now martyred between 20,000 and 40,000 Palestinian Anne Franks and some program hosts on France Culture, a public radio chain whose mission is to inform the public, continue to abet efforts by Israel’s protectors and enablers to reverse the culpability and penalize those who would call this genocide out by labelling us anti-Semites (and the Jews amongst us self-hating Jews when in fact our motivation is the opposite, we treasure our Jewish soul and we condemn those who would profane it),  even to enabling the potential criminalization of what Hannah Arendt and Einstein said before and what I am about to say now in the interests of protecting a genocidal state, it is time to climb up on the highest rafters and cry out 

BRAUSEBAD.

Speaking of Anne Frank: What I also remember from that high school production is the author’s admission that she was “a little bundle of contradictions.” While the above, thus, would be a neat place to end this article, I can’t do so without exposing another deleterious effect the Yadan Law would have produced, and that its resurrection in a simliar form by the government might yield: to preclude exposing real instances where legitimate resentment towards a Jewish state for its acts not because of its ethnicity is exploited to resurrect genuine anti-Semitic tropes by having them aired and even debated in public where they could thus be openly combatted.

In October 2023, thus not long after Hamas’s massacre *and before any quantitative evidence of the genocide to come existed, even if remarks by the Israeli defense minister announced it*, a French radio humorist, Guillaume Meurice, went on France Inter, the most listened to radio chain in France, and quipped: “Netanyahu is a kind of Hitler without a foreskin.”

The problem — and where, in my opinion, the inherent and in the past deadly form of anti-Semitism of this “joke” is exposed — is that the lack of a foreskin is not just a typical anti-Semitic trope signalling difference, it is how many Jewish males were identified, presumably including in France, to be deported and ultimately sent to the gas chambers. So here, the “humorist” is effectively using (consciously or unconsciously; I can’t get inside his head) the guise of criticizing a head of state who has or is about to commit condemnable acts to resurrect a more than condemnable classic variety of anti-Semitism *because it set Jewish men and boys apart as different*, and *in a country where the lack of a foreskin* was likely used to identify Jews and deport them, with many of them ultimately ending up in the gas chambers.

(Ironically — given the global reluctance on French public radio, exempting as always the correspondents sur place,  to criticize Israel and the general connivance among some news and program hosts in promoting the false idea that critiicizing Israel makes you an anti-Semite — when Meurice was warned by his supervisors and then suspended when he repeated the offense, here involving a joke that actually did evoke real anti-Semitic tropes and with a deadly history including in this country, the majority of his public radio colleagues rallied around him.)

And even before Gaza, or at least Gaza this time around (this is not the first war on Gaza in which israel has massacred vast numbers of civilians including women and children; the other problem with the vast majority of coverage on French public radio when it comes to Israel and Palestine is that they set the historical marker on October 7, 2023; the question is not whether that massacre was condemnable — it is and was and nothing Israel did before can justify it — but the double standard), a close friend of mine in Paris *and who lost relatives deported to the gas chambers,* *and whose father hid out during the war* thus who would never had been born if his father had been caught, was particularly upset about bumper stickers which started sprouting up around town whose slogan I forget but it either called for freeing Palestine or criticized Israel; perhaps the slogan was “Zionism = Racism.”  What triggered my friend’s alarm, and rightly so, was not necessarily that sentiment but that *the stickers were printed on yellow background” — the same color as the Jewish star which Jews in France and other Occupied countries including his grandfather were required to wear to set them apart as meriting discrimination and, later, deportation.  In other words, under the pretense of condemning Zionism as racism the signs’ authors were resurrecting another, provedly deadly form of racism, targeting Jews, with a tragic history in this country.

My friend also told me about returning to his car parked on a high-way to find someone had painted a Swastika on it. When a service station attendant asked if he wanted him to paint it over, my friend said no. 

The Chevalier de la Barre: You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie: Hungarians show Orban the door after Vance visit and Trump “aid” offer; Guest on France Culture describes diversity as a “problem”

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2026 Paul Ben-Itzak

“Hit the road, Vic, and don’t you come back no more no more.”

— Ray Charles, as re-interpreted by the Chevalier de la Barre.

If you had any doubt that despite having heavily rigged the system in his favour including by having his cronies take over powerful media companies an authoritarian, corrupt aspirant dictator could be tossed out on his keister by the determined will of the people, the Hungarian electorate, 78 percent of whom turned out to vote in yesterday’s national elections, did just that to prime minister Victor Orban, with centrist-conservative opposition candidate Péter Magyar’s Tisza Partyparty winning 53 percent of the vote and a two-third majority in the legislature. Even a last-minute visit by American vice president J.D. Vance — in a kind of curtain-raiser for his Iranian negotiation debacle (and probably not helped by an illogical speech in which the veep inveighed against the European Union’s trying to interfere in a sovereign election by trying to interfere in a sovereign election, a hypocrisy that is being broadcast all over Europe, even further diminishing U.S. credibility, after Orban praised him for being the first American vice-president to visit the country in 35 years;  I don’t know J.D. Vance, but he’s no Dan Quayle.) — exhorting Hungarians to vote for Steve Bannon’s other famous soldier in order to save Western Civilization in the name of “the father of our fathers” (so much for the separation of Church and State) and Donald Trump’s promise of financial aid if they did so couldn’t save Private Orban. Jesus may love you, J.D. (despite your boss’s disparaging remarks about his representative on Earth), but he couldn’t snatch Orban, Victor from the jaws of defeat at the hands of Heathen Hungarian democrats.

Authoritarian affinities aside, How can someone be this stupid? How can a vice president of the United States (or anyone) be this clue-less? Indications were already strong that Hungarians were set to reject Orban *because of his governmental, institutional, and financial corruption* and more than incipient authoritarianism, and this guy, whose boss is already subject to accusations in all four of these categories, makes a special trip to Budapest to try to interfere in the election by cheerleading for someone like this and urging people to vote for him.

… Speaking of stokers of fears of submersion by immigrants, if extreme-right Rassemblement National (Let’s All Get Together) party leaders were conspicuous by their reticence to acknowledge Magyar’s victory (the party president’s contenting himself to pay tribute to Orban), State-supervised French public radio continued to hedge its bets in case of an RN victory in next April’s French presidential elections, a guest on middle-brow chain France Culture’s “Public Spirit” program declaring  Sunday that cultural diversity is a “problem” in France as in Europe, counter-intuitive claims left unchallenged by the host. As were another guest’s putting the RN — a political party  (in its original incarnation as the National Front) co-founded by members of the Waffen SS — on the same level as the leading Left-wing Insoumis (the Unsubmissives) party by saying there was no difference between the former’s call for native-born French people to be given a “national priority” (presumably over more recent immigrants or those not yet naturalized, in itself not an unreasonable proposition) and participants in a recent Insoumis rally chanting, “Nous sommes chez nous” (This is our home), as the mainstream media here continues to go bonkers over the idea that a leading French city, Saint-Denis, could have actually elected a Black mayor, the mayor belonging to the Insoumis party, here by perversely distorting a simple claim by the descendants of immigrants to the right to be considered as part of the nation (one of the original mandates of the French Revolution) as a demand to exclude others, presumably White indigenes, from the same, as they’ve tried to deform the Insoumis’s appeal to “the New France” in exactly the same way.  They might well and good continue to cite Albert Camus as a guiding influence (as recently as this morning on France Culture, before it descended into a discussion of the Eurovision contest as a tool of national identity), in their apoplectic reaction to the multi-cultural population of a major French city electing a Black mayor (whose reference to his city’s reputation as the “ville des rois” or City of Kings was deformed by the French equivalent of Fox “News” into “ville des noirs” or City of Blacks) France Culture (or at least some of its voices) and its sister public radio chain France Inter seem to be taking their ideological guidance more from another Camus, Renaud, and his theory of the “Great Replacement,” absent the George Soros (read: Jew)-baiting exercised by Orban, Victor (several years ago I heard an otherwise intelligent Franco-Hungarian friend complain about the Jewish plot to take over her country), and Trump, Donald.

It didn’t work in Hungary  and — let’s hope — it won’t work in the United States or France, no matter how much (some voices on) the State-directed public radio here continues trying to grease the wheels of (including by giving pseudo-intellectual cover to) the Extreme Right-wing express and to relentlessly defame the Left-wing Insoumis party, which may offer the best chance to stop it (if its mercurial leader can stop provoking counter-productive quarrels and the party can instill a bit of democracy in its presidential nominating process) as anti-Semitic because it has taken the lead in criticizing Israel’s genocide and other ongoing war crimes.

PS: Even when it comes to covering strictly cultural domaines, France Culture does not seem to have a lot of respect for cultural objects. On Saturday’s “Le Series Musical” program — which would be more aptly called “The series where we talk a lot and play short musical clips so we can show off our musical knowledge” — which she presented as an homage to Roberta Flack, the hostess actually cut off Flack’s rendering of “Killing me Softly,” THE song for which along with “The First Time ever I saw his Face” she’s best known, after the first stanza. Meanwhile, when the chain’s Friday “philosophy” program recently asked a pseudo-philosopher to name the oeuvre he disliked the most he answered “Ulysses,” when she asked him why he answered in high philosophical language “Because it’s Null,” and when she asked why it’s Null he explained that James Joyce’s oeuvre, published in 1926 and published at all thanks to the grace of the Parisian American bookseller Sylvia Beach, did not adequately criticize the patriarchy.

The Chevalier de la Barre: And the award for journalistic betise of the year goes to…. ; France Inter public radio continues its radio silence over Israeli genocide & Netanyahu arrest warrant; & France Culture’s separatist deforming of Black mayor’s election

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2026 Paul Ben-Itzak

“If there’s a loser this morning, it’s without doubt the Iranian people.”

— Benjamin Duhamel, speaking on France Inter public radio after Donald Trump announced he was not going to blow Iran and its population of 90 million people back to Kingdom Come, April 8.

Interviewer Benjamin Duhamel made the remark cited above to his guest Wednesday on the most listened to radio chain in France (the high frequency public radio chain France Inter is granted may have something to do with this),  in a segment whose announced intention was to anaylze Donald Trump’s decision not to “destroy an entire civlization,” including by the pre-announced war crimes of blowing up bridges and electrictic power facilities, with the American president refusing Tuesday to rule out committing the war crimes within war crimes of bombing schools and hospitals, the former not an empty threat considering that this illegal war started with the U.S. bombing an Iranian elementary school and killing 175 people, the majority of them schoolgirls. As for his guest, presented by Duhamel as an expert on strategy, he appeared to be disapointed that Trump had not carried out his threat to destroy an entire civilization, saying that Trump had “chickened out.”

Besides revealing a global ignorance on this subject and suggesting an appalling apparent indifference to the  Iranian lives which have been lost in this war (many executed by the regime itself) and might be saved by the ceasefire, Duhamel’s comment indicates that the journalist — whose metier requires being cynical about anything a politician states — has swallowed lock, stock, and barrel the Kool-Aid Trump has been serving up, that this war is about regime change (the American president even offering Tuesday the lie within a lie that the regime has already changed and is less radical, when every expert has said that the reverse is true) and not a war against the Iranian people, more than 3,000 of whom including children have been killed by Israel and the U.S. in the past five weeks, according to Iranian authorities. And that’s not counting (as Israel does not), the more than 1,887 Lebanese killed by Israel in the same period, including three dozen last week-end and at least 357 in Israel’s deadly pell-mell bombing raids Wednesday, at least 130 children (before Wednesday’s carnage), and at least four journalists deliberately targeted by Israel (which targeted and killed another in Gaza Wednesday, which you wouldn’t know about if your only news source was French public radio,  making 262 it’s killed in Gaza since October 2023; as you wouldn’t know about the 9-year-old girl Israel killed in Gaza Thursday outside of a make-shift school, Ukranian lives lost to Russia apparently having more value on French public radio than Palestinian lives lost to Israel). Israel’s deadly assault on Lebanon has also targeted health workers, killing 57 since March 2 (before Wednesday’s death toll is added in) according to Human Rights Watch and 250 since October 2023 (ibid) in deliberate attacks on ambulences, hospitals, and civil defense centers.

…. Neither the international arrest warrant for crimes against humanity against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued by the International Court of Justice for his actions in Gaza, nor the word genocide, nor the more than 75,000 Palestinian lives Israel’s genocide in Gaza has taken so far were mentioned on France Inter Friday morning when a much more intelligent and erudite journalist (on any subject but Israel, where, like France Culture’s Guillaume Herner, he resembles more a sports announcer analyzing the home team’s errors for its own good than an objective journalist, with narry a mention of Israel’s victims), Ali Badou, in his first program since Israel’s latest massacre in Lebanon invited, not any Lebanese, not any objective scholars, but… two Israelis: Radio France’s house Zionist Denis Charbit (the second time in a week this Israeli Zionist has been France Inter’s go-to source on Israel’s wars with its neighbors, on both occasions with no Palestinian or Lebanese counterpart who might contradict him) and the soon to be departed editor of the Left-wing journal Liberation. Apart from this last’s deploring, as part of a general deploration of Netanyahu, the “thousands” Israel has killed in Lebanon (without any reference to the 75,000 it’s genocided in Gaza) and as often on France Inter and France Culture, the guests and host seemed more concerned with the damage Netanyahu is doing to Israel than the damage and deaths Israel is inflicting on the rest of the world particularly its neighbors and the Palestinians whom under international law it is obligated as the Occupying power to protect. Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre of between 1200 and 1400 people, the majority civlians and including longtime backers of the Palestinian cause, was mentioned and (rightly) condemned four times; Israel’s Gaza genocide and the international warrant for crimes against humanity against Netanyahu, 0. Its targeting of humanitarian aid workers — Israel having killed 560 over the past three years according to a new United Nations report — 0.  The illegality of the Israeli-American war against Iran, 0. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories Francesca Albanese’s new report on Israel’s torturing of prisoners, 0. The 262 journalists deliberately targeted and killed by Israel in Gaza and the at least four in Lebanon, 0. Israel’s new law singling out Palestinians for the death penalty was discussed and deplored, but apart from that and the journalist’s deploring of the thousands killed by Israel in Lebanon, the concern was, as usual, more with Israel’s soul than with the lives of its victims.

Meanwhile, France Inter has yet to apologize for its erroneous report that illicit drugs were found in the purse of the Franco-Palestinian European Parliamentary deputy Rima Hassan — who, of course, is never invited on either France Inter or France Culture, as are rarely invited any Palestinians.

French public radio’s pro-Israel bias is often insiduous, inserting itself even in the form of terms presented as neutral. France Culture’s evening newscast host regularly describes a war in which Israel and/or the United States have killed more than 3,000 and levelled schools and universities and sent unhealthy gas fumes into the air endangering civilian populations  as a “war against the regime de mullahs.” When France Culture finally got around to discussing the illegality of the Israeli-American war on Iran — albeit in a roundabout way and global discussion which adressed simply whether international law was still respected, on Friday’s “Culture Monde” program  — the host in her introduction put Israel’s flagrant violations of international law (not that Israel was mentioned) on the same level as “using human beings as shields” (as another type of violation of international law), an evident reference to an Israeli propaganda myth deployed to defend the Gaza genocide which has been repeatedly debunked by resident and visiting doctors in Gaza, thus giving tacit recognition to the lie Israel uses to try to cover its war crimes. And in a segment this morning on New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first 100 days — and notwithstanding his guest’s clearly ascribing part of Mamdani’s electoral success to his opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza — France Culture’s Nicolas Herbeaux was quick to describe the mayor as “pro-Palestinian,” in other words his views aren’t due to a natural opposition to genocide and Apartheid (that would involve employing the word ‘genocide,’ verbotten on France Culture when it applies to Israel), but to “Campism,” the term France Culture has been using for two-and-a-half years to dismiss legitimate concern over genocide and Apartheid, unfortunately enabled and given moral credence by intellectuals like the College de France’s William Marx.

And there’s an even larger context, a kind of racialism exhibited by some in some sectors (what I mean by this is a racialism which, as distinct from racism, is not necessarily malevolent, but rather involves viewing things and people through the prism of race) from which France Culture is not exempt. At 7h50 this morning, France Inter was reporting that a new poll commissioned by the  International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (or LICRA) has found that 46 percent of French people perceived by others as being non-White (they have to couch it this way because keeping racial statistics is officially forbidden in France) say they have experienced racism at least once in their lives. (Mind-bogglingly, the president of LICRA — also known for dismissing even the hint of criticism of Israel or presentation of a Palestinian perspective as anti-Semitic — was reported by Badu as insisting that this didn’t mean racism was institutionalized in France.) A little more than an hour later, the host of France Culture’s Sunday public affairs program Esprit Publique was promoting an upcoming discussion on whether France is being “morselized,” citing as examples of this potential morselisation the French colony of New Caledonia, which has a strong independance movement; the Alsace, which the French assembly recently voted to re-accord regional status; and…. the Parisian suburban city of Saint-Denis, which recently elected a Black mayor. Never mind that by his biography and his proclamations, this mayor descended from Malian immigrants is clearly a child of the Republic and a champion of its universalist values. Never mind that the recent deforming on Right-wing television channels of his description of his city as the “ville des rois” (city of kings, for the royalty buried under its basilica) into “ville des noirs” (city of Blacks) was quickly debunked; for this France Culture host, this multi-cultural city’s election of a Black mayor apparently may suggest that secession cannot be far behind. (If you want a more subtle analysis: The inclusion of Saint-Denis in her list of possible morselizations of France may also have been based on the distorted way French public radio has interpreted the mayor’s party’s appeal to “the New France” not as being a France which includes everyone but a France which excludes Whites — feeding into the fantasy of the “Great Replacement Theory,” a theory now apparently being vehicled even on France Culture.)