Capitalism is devious. It recognizes no limits when its power is threatened. Whence the relentless campaign by Emmanuel Macron’s ruling neo-liberal government to smear a new coalition of progressive parties, unions, and civil society including star athletes and artists which promises to restore a tax on the rich, increase the monthly minimum wage to 1600 Euros net, reinforce staffing at hospitals and schools, and block prices on products of first necessity and energy at a moment of corporate greed-fueled out-of-control inflation if it wins legislative elections called by the French president for this Sunday by waving the red — and false — flag of anti-Semitism to try to silence the clarion call being sounded by the New Popular Front for progressives in France and around the world. And which coalition is the only — the only — hope for blocking a xenophobic and historically anti-Semitic party, the National Front (since re-dubbed by its anti-Semitic founder’s daughter with the complaisance of a prone mainstream media the National Rally but if it walks, talks, and spews bile like a Xenophobe, it’s still a Xenophobe) party from arriving in power.
I am a Jew. I am a foreign Jew. I am a foreign Jew who first came to France 24 years ago not because he had to but because he wanted to (and not for the cheese or the wine), and who has tried to play his small role in promulgating the value of the culture and the cultural, intellectual, literary, and moral values of France he was weaned on growing up in San Francisco (where Albert Camus’s “The Plague” was required reading, Babar was king, Hergé’s Francophone journalist Tintin the role model, the Jewish immigrant Pissarro the artistic apex, the Paris of Ludwig Bemelmans’s “Madeline” Valhalla and “The Red Balloon” the fastest way to get there while singing “Frere Jacques,” which we learned at three) not because he makes loads of money doing so (which is not to say he has not been richly rewarded in other ways), but because, as an aspirant intellectual and passeur of literature and culture, he viscerally had no choice. This is what a quest is about. I moved to France in 2001 because the siren called me.
And as a Jew, as a foreign Jew, as an apostle (and grateful beneficiary) of French literature and culture for a quarter of a century, as a spreader of that artistic, intellectual, philosophical, and moral gospel and tradition, as a champion of that legacy, and as a foreigner pure and simple I am not only not threatened by the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front), I am vindicated, validated, and reinvigorated by the values, engagements, progressive and anti-racist agenda, and history of this coalition, whether it’s the heritage of Socialist party founder Jean Jaures (assassinated two weeks before the outbreak of the World War he was trying to prevent) or the progressive politics of NFP member party Les Insoumis — the Unbowed — including its righteous, founded-on-international-law-and-moral-principles, and ethical critique of Israel’s conduct in its war on Gaza, in which this so-called Jewish state has shat on Jewish (and just plain Humanist) values by killing more than 37,600 people, the majority civilians including at least 16,000 children, at least 118 journalists of color and 400 health workers, teachers, and poets in deliberately attacking schools, hospitals, refugee camps, food distribution points, mosques, churches, ambulances, U.N. facilities and refugee centers, six-year-old girls trapped in their cars, fishermen trying to feed their starving families because this so-called Jewish state is blocking food and water deliveries in illegally using starvation as a weapon of war, and private homes and deliberating starving a civilian population whose safety and well-being as the occupier it has the legal obligation to assure — *the very critique for which State-controlled French public radio is taxing les Insoumis and by association the NFP with anti-Semitism because of course if you criticize a putatively Jewish state, even for the risk of committing a genocide, that makes you an anti-Semite.
How dare they. How dare they call me and the countless other Jews, including Israeli Jews, who are and have been condemning and unmasking this ongoing genocide and other war crimes — by the very last people who should be committing genocide, especially on another Semitic people — anti-Semites. What is grave about this — what is racialist and insulting and demeaning to we Jews who try to live up to the Humanist values in which our parents steeped us by calling out a genocide when we see it — is the assumption that we ourselves are so bereft of Humanist values, that our moral compas can be so easily compromised by our ethnic affiliation, that we would countenance a genocide, that we the legacy-bearers of Anne Frank would countenance a genocide just because the Monsters of the Israeli Id perpetrating it claim to be Jewish.
And what is even more grave about them doing this at this perilous political juncture in France, about them perpetuating these completely fabricated charges of anti-Semitism against the Insoumis and by association the NFP at a decisive moment when the country is on the verge of the moral precipice, is that by fabricating this fake threat to us as the Jew or Other they have opened the door to the election of a party, the National Front/National Rally, which actually is racist in its Xenophobic discourse and promised program (among other things, binationals will be eliminated from consideration for certain ministries and jobs), which has demonized the migrant and the Other on the basis of factually false charges of “an immigrant submersion” (read: Grand or Great Remplacement/Replacement, of a Christian/White people by a Muslim/African — by inference Black and Brown — people, the exact same fabricated charge of an imagined threat and moral/ethnic inferiority, diabolicness, and corruption of White blood which has been used against the Jews for centuries), and which has a real and actual history of anti-Semitism, its founder and the father of its current leader having once dismissed the gas chambers as “a minor historical detail.”
By his insistence that, in part because according to him it has refused to denounce anti-Semitism, what he calls the “extreme left” (the Nouveau Front Populaire because it incorporates the Insoumis) and the extreme right are on the same level, it is Emmanuel Macron, enabled by State-controlled public radio, who risks paving the way for this xenophobic party with anti-Semitism in its DNA to take control of the French legislature and government if it wins an absolute majority of the 576 seats up for grabs in the June 30 election and July 7 run-off and implement a genuinely xenophobic agenda. He’ll have to live with those consequences.
What I, as a Jew in whose pretended defense Mr. Macron is agitating, and as a journalist, have to reckon with is the role that public radio journalists have played in enabling this completely fabricated charge of anti-Semitism on the Left which risks to elect real Xenophobes with a real history of anti-Semitism on the Right.
Because I try to stay informed, on Wednesday I tuned in to the 6 p.m. newscast of the public radio chain France Culture, only to hear it continue to propagate the myth that anti-Semitism has increased in Germany, a myth because Germany now qualifies criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism (thus including this in the overall tally of anti-Semitic incidents which it claims are on the rise); the report from Radio France’s Berlin correspondent, based on a report by the German government, specifically cited “hostility towards Israel” as one piece of evidence that “anti-Semitism” was on the rise. “Hostility” towards a country which has killed nearly 40,000 Semitic people, the majority civilians including at least 16,000 children, is not hostility towards me as a Jew, it is “hostility” towards war crimes, crimes against humanity, and particularly genocide, which a people, Germany, with a history of genocide has the moral and political responsibility to oppose thus those in Germany who are leading this fight are, if anything, saving Germany’s honor. One would think they would be embraced instead of being calumnied by being falsely charged with anti-Semitism because they dare call out these crimes including when they are being committed by a so-called Jewish state. Indeed, at least a third of those whose awards ceremonies, events, and appearances — including a school tour by an 87-year-old German-American survivor of both the concentration camps and the Allied bombing of Hamburg who denounced Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza — have been cancelled by Germany authorities are Jewish. This false equivalence of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism is not confined to Europe, and is not only particularly “hostile” towards Jews but Israeli Jews who dare to criticize the ongoing genocide as well as a system of Apartheid which has been amply documented by Israeli, Palestinian, and International human rights organizations. In Minnesota last week, the noted Israeli-American genocide scholar Roz Segal, one of the first to call out Israel’s genocide in Gaza, had his appointment as director of a center for Holocaust and genocide studies rescinded under pressure from two board members.
When I switched Wednesday evening to another French public radio station, France Inter, it was only to hear the newscaster perpetuate the myth of another fake anti-Semitism incident which, she said, triggered a French Senate investigation of alleged anti-Semitism at French universities, a fake anti-Semitic incident previously debunked by reports on this same radio chain, in which students occupying an amphitheater at the University of Political Science in Paris temporarily refused entry to another student not because she was Jewish but because she was carrying a video camera, and militant pro-Israel groups have a history of ‘docsing’ critics of Israel by putting their images online and thus potentially placing them at risk. (Meanwhile, coverage of demonstrations in support of Gazans and critical of Israel has been so scant on French public radio that we only heard about a Paris demonstration calling for an arms embargo of Israel in a report long after the event that a journalist allegedly arrested while covering it has filed a complaint.)
The tragedy here is that if enough of the voting public buys the public radio fake news campaign (in parlaying charges rarely documented or simply substantiated by pointing to the criticism of Israel) to label the New Popular Front coalition of the Socialist, Ecologist, Communist, and Insoumis parties — a coalition which has anti-Racism in its blood as well as its platform — as anti-Semitic to not vote for the NPF for this reason* the result could be the election to control of the French legislature and thus government and future of a party, the “Rassemblement/Front National,” with a genuine history of anti-Semitism and a current pattern in its pronouncements of Xenophobia. While this kind of frontal anti-Semitic discourse advanced by Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen has moved under the water somewhat, the party’s central campaign strategy is still a Xenophobic appeal based on a factually false “immigrant submersion” which, like the National Socialist Party in Germany in the 1930s and like Trump today, exploits people’s real economic pain to stigmatize and target a racial or ethnic group which has nothing to do with it, yesterday the Jews, today immigrants, as being responsible for that pain be they from Mexico, Haiti, Muslim, or other African countries. (Just the other day, a French neighbor — a French neighbor whose generosity towards me and friendship I value — blamed migrants, or if you prefer, undocumented migrants for her own economic suffering because according to her their getting services, notably free medical care, is why she is deprived of them. And when I pointed to undocumented migrants both of us know who have always paid for their own medical expenses, she essentially responded, “I’m not talking about them.”) Also because — like the Jews before — “they don’t share our values.”
Against this fear-based, real-pain exploiting and ultimately Xenophobic platform, the platform of the “Rassemblement/ Front National” and the even more extremist “Reconquest” party of Great Replacement myth-stoker Eric Zemmour — who once again was given free range to spread his factually false statements about an immigrant submersion on France Inter’s midday news broadcast yesterday, without challenge from the newscaster (a professional fault which isn’t anodyne, given national polls which identify a concern about immigration which is factually unfounded and which would not be there if the journalists had done their jobs and pointed this out) — I prefer the anti-racist, hope-based platform of the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front, which takes its name from an earlier and successful progressive coalition, the 1936 Front Populaire, headed by Leon Blum, a French Jew and disciple of Jaures, and which ushered in the 40-hour work week and paid vacations.) It is a coalition which will take France into the future with an agenda worthy of its rich cultural, intellectual and politically vanguard past — and inspire the world.
*The other day a French acquaintance who said she has not yet decided who to vote for Sunday recounted a supposed video circulating in which, as she understands it, a member of les Insoumis uses a pizza carton in front of an oven to invoke the gassing of Jews, an association targeting a Jewish legislator. While France Inter’s brief reporting on the incident later was even more murky, as usual, the legislator in question — the one making the charge of anti-Semitism — was, as the newscaster didn’t mention, a legislator known for his unwavering support of the Netanyahu government (and who thus has a vested interest in painting the party which has led all French parties in criticizing Israel’s war on Gaza, called for an arms embargo until there’s a ceasefire, and says it will recognize the State of Palestine as anti-Semitic); the Insoumis member accused of anti-Semitism says the video in question was of a NFP campaign meeting, the pizza carton from the dinner they consumed.
“It is never wrong to listen to the people’s voice.”
— French president Emmanuel Macron, upon dissolving the French National Assembly and calling snap elections for June 30 and July 7.
“[Emmanuel Macron] has plunged France into chaos. He is playing with fire.”
— European MP Raphael Glucksmann, whose Socialist Party has joined the Communist, Ecologist, and Unsubmissives parties to stave off Marine Le Pen’s Far Right National Rally (formerly National Front) party from being elected to power in the snap legislative elections called by French president Emmanuel Macron, June 12, France Inter public radio.
“Il ne faut jamais essayer la fascism.” (We must never give fascism a try.)
— Young woman demonstrating against the Far Right in Paris, June 15, interviewed by French public radio.
“We can transform our country. We can re-illuminer our country, as the great Jaures said.”
— Manon Aubry, European MP, whose Insoumis (Unsubmissive) party has joined the Socialists, Ecologists, and Communists to form the New Popular Front and field a unified candidate for each of France’s 576 congressional districts in the upcoming elections, France Inter, June 18.
Disclosure: In addition to his genuine concern for France’s future, the author has a vested interest in his adoptive country’s choice.
On June 30 and July 7, a nation that rightly takes pride in being the birthplace of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and whose reigning motto is Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty faces an existential choice: Will it become grander or will it shrink?
Will the country of Voltaire, a cradle of the Age of Enlightenment, continue to be a phare (beacon) for humanity and for the life of the mind, or will it help lead the way back to the caves of Obscurantism?
Will French voters be conned by an intense, slanderous, irresponsible, nauseabonde (sickening) propaganda campaign actively abetted by State-controlled public radio, bolstered by pro-Israel lobbyists such as the American Jewish Committee (whose express mission, never explained on public radio, is to get Jews to emigrate to Israel, thus it has a vested interest in scaring French Jews into incorrectly thinking France will not be safe for them if a coalition which has critiqued Israel’s actions, falsely depicted as anti-Semitic by Israel’s supporters, is elected****) and the self-appointed, pro-Netanyahu representative organization of Jews in France, to scare French Jews and others into not voting for the leading anti-Racist and social justice political force in this country by falsely branding the Nouvelle Front Populaire (New Popular Front or NFP) coalition of Leftist parties as anti-Semitic *purely because it has dared to criticize Israel for the war crimes and crimes against humanity, including a possible genocide as identified by the leading international court, this putatively Jewish state has been perpetrating for the last eight months against another Semitic people in which it has killed nearly 40,000 people in defiance of all international laws and moral norms, the majority civilians including 16,000 children, through deliberate, targeted attacks on homes, hospitals, schools, refugee camps, churches, ambulances, universities, food-distribution points, and mosques and by illegally using starvation and water deprivation as a weapon of war,* a propaganda campaign whose perverse effect could be the rise to power of a genuinely racist, fear-mongering extreme right-wing party whose founder once described the gas chambers as “a minor historical detail” and in which the only difference from the classic Jew-baiter is that “Jew” has been replaced by “Immigrant” or “Islamist” as the scapegoat for people’s real economic woes (sound familiar?) — a party which thus every Jew should be revolting against with every fiber of his being?
Will the country which abolished the slave trade in 1848 choose to be governed by a devoutedly anti-racist coalition, the New Popular Front — named after another coalition of the Left forged 90 years ago to fend off fascism (itself inspired by the Spanish Frente Popular forged to fight off Franco) — or by a party whose president, Jordan Bardella, has observed that “anyone who walks around (the cosmopolitan, racially mixed Paris suburb of) St.-Denis knows this isn’t Amelie Poulain‘s France,” a statement left unchallenged by Bardella’s interviewer on French public radio, which has also (in my view) shamelessly collaborated with Marine Le Pen’s effort to de-demonize the National Front party founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen by re-Christening it the Rassemblement National (RN or National Rally) party and pretending to care about the poor (among other ways by simply providing a platform for this party long decried by political leaders both on the Right and the Left* for its anti-Republic values), at the same time actively demonizing Jean-Luc Mélonchon and his anti-racist Insoumis (Unsubmissive) party — the leading party on the French Left which has joined with the Socialist, Ecologist, and Communist parties to form the NFP and field unified candidates in each of the 576 circumscriptions for the June 7 legislative elections — with patently false charges of anti-Semitism because the party has been out front in criticizing Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza and never challenging the National Front’s factually false claim that France is being “submerged by immigration,”** the great fear-stoking lie upon which it hopes to be elected to power?
(If you believe French public radio reports — a big if — even the famed Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld now says that if he has to choose in the July 7 run-off between the party whose founder once called the gas chambers “a minor historical detail* and the New Popular Front, whose platform denounces anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of racism as well as transphobia, he’d choose the former because of the latter’s alleged anti-Semitism, an unfounded accusation unfortunately nurtured by French president Emmanuel Macron, also a sincere anti-Racist, who claims, inaccurately, that the Insoumis party has not denounced anti-Semitism — and who has suggested that original Front Populaire president Leon Blum would be “spinning in his grave” over the other Left-wing parties’ alliance with the Unsubmissives — and who, after using the vote on the Left to help defeat Marine Le Pen in the last two presidential elections has since not only attempted to put what he calls the “Extreme Left” (Mélonchon is France’s answer to Bernie Sanders) and the Extreme Right on the same level, another campaign abetted by the mainstream media, but has risked legitimizing the RN’s scape-goating of immigrants by describing the New Popular Front or its platform as including a gesture that is “totally immigrationist,” according to French public radio. This from the same French president who commendably designated for the Pantheon Josephine Baker, and this on June 18, the 84th anniversary of the famous call to resistance of General de Gaulle that “France has lost a battle but not the war,” a call to resistance to which Josephine Baker responded heroically, putting her life on the line, Josephine Baker an immigrant, Josephine Baker whose Blackness would make her suspect in Jordan Bardella’s France.)
Will France — this great country on whose literary, intellectual, civil liberties (France abolished the death penalty in 1981, while my own country continues this barbarism), political, and artistic culture and heritage, a heritage of political liberation and mental emancipation and expansion, I like so many Americans was weaned and in which I still believe and champion — continue to stand on the shoulders of and promulgate the Humanist heritage and values of Voltaire, Moliere, the Chevalier de la Barre, Eugene Sue, Hugo, Zola, Anatole France, Clemenceau, Jean Jaures, Leon Blum, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Josephine Baker, Marie Curie, Georges Sand, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, the Impressionists, Boris Vian, Charles de Gaulle, Romain Gary,Michel Ragon, Charles Trenet, Yves Montand, Jean Renoir, Chris Marker, Charles de Foucauld, Jacques Prevert, Claude Cahun, Maximilien Luce, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Eluard, Paul Signac, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, or will it return to the age of Edouard Drumont and the anti-Dreyfusards (“La France Juivre” replaced by an imaginary and menacing “La France Musulman”), of the Xenophobia of Vichy, with immigrants replacing Jews as the “boucle emissaires” or convenient scape-goats?
Will this rich bouillabaisse of a multi-cultural nation whose cultural virtues I have been proud to share, praise, promote, and trumpet for 25 years continue to take pride in having provided a haven and cultural/artistic/literary petri dish for ‘etrangers’ (‘Strangers’ or ‘Foreigners’) like Picasso, Montand, Apollinaire, Irene Nemirovsky, Romain Gary, Chantal Akerman, Georges Simenon, Camille Pissarro, Vincent Van Gogh, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Nicolas de Stael, Marie Taglioni, Rudolf Nureyev, Richard Wright, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, and others who gave back by enriching and internationalizing its culture on a global stage, or will it vote for and bring to power a party which has cultivated a fabricated fear, based on lies (rarely challenged by journalists on State-controlled media) that France is being ‘submerged’ by immigrants and who threaten its very identity with a ‘great replacement’ of a people with Christian roots by non-Europeans? (I am not saying there is not a problem with those who would seek to impose their sectarian practices on others in a country which strives for lay values; witnesses I trust who report personally being intimidated by fundamentalist Muslims have recently informed me otherwise. And the decapitation of a brilliant and dedicated middle-school teacher, Samuel Pati, who loved and was devoted to his students, by an Islamist extremist in 2021 for simply teaching those values and the stabbing death of another teacher by another extremist were shamefully under-reported outside of France. What I am saying is that these real atrocities are being shamelessly exploited to sow irrational fear of the ethnic Other — in a manner and for motives which should make every Jew revolt — by a political party which does not care about Jews and which, if elected to power, will not keep its economic promises and which, based on past practices in other countries risks to do everything possible to hang on to that power once it has it.)
Will my adoptive country — a country I adopted because it fostered and inspired my own creative, intellectual, and literary flowering just as its soul seemed to reflect my own and whose culture I have been blessed to be a part of and proud to promote to an Anglophone audience for a quarter of a century — continue to grow and blossom in hope, to grandir, or will a portion of a people in whose fundamental goodness, intelligence, maturity, and decency I have always believed devolve into xenophobic resentment, hoodwinked by Far right populists and a complicit mainstream media, and misdirected by a sincerely and proven anti-racist president who has so lost his way that he is apparently no longer able to distinguish between (as I interpret his putting them on the same plane) an earnestly anti-racist coalition and a jingoistic, racist, and potentially fascist party into believing that the Other is responsible for its real economic pain?
Will it pursue the path set out by Leon Blum, an intellectual and librarian and the pupil and collaborator of Jean Jaures (the founder of Modern French Socialism), the president of the Popular Front Leftist coalition elected in 1936 to stave off fascism and which accorded French workers paid vacations and the 40-hour work week, a legacy which has inspired a new coalition of Socialists, Communists, Ecologists, and Unsubmissives to form the New Popular Front not just to head off a new Far Right-wing threat to liberty, fraternity, and equality to which Emmanuel Macron opened the door when he dissolved the legislature on June 9 and called snap elections (in his defense, Mr. Macron, who did so after the National Rally party lead voting for the French delegation to the European Parliament in the June 9 E.P. elections, argued that it is never wrong to give the people a voice in their destiny) but to offer a new program of hope, or that set out by Jean-Marie Le Pen when he founded the National Front, which despite in its current made-over incarnation as the National Rally catering to real popular concern about soaring inflation, still has that racist gene in its DNA as it exploits people’s real economic pain and suffering to nurture resentment and fear against and of the Other so that it can be elected to a power which, history teaches us, the Far Right once elected is loathe to relinquish?
Will French voters buy Emmanuel Macron’s continued efforts to put the New Popular Front, specifically the Unsubmissive party, on the same level and thus suggest that they are just as dangerous as Le Pen’s party (a “both extremes” moral equivalence and nomenclature French public radio has for the most part uncritically adopted) with the disproven charge that it has refused to denounce anti-Semitism and is too radical, a suggestion countered by former president François Hollande’s joining the New Popular Front’s electoral list as well as by the NFP’s platform, which unequivocally condemns all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, as well as Hamas’s terrorist massacre of October 7, at the same time demanding the release of all Israeli hostages as well as Palestinian political prisoners, critiques what it considers the French government’s support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s “supremacist government,” and calls for France joining 145 other countries in recognizing the State of Palestine?
Will they vote for hope, or will they let their fear and economic suffering be cultivated and harvested by the hate-mongerers of the FN/RN selling false promises, because (as a friend and neighbor explained to me),”Why not? We might as well try something different.” You do not just give potential fascism a try because once it is in power, it does not yield.
Like too many Germans in 1933 and too many Americans in 2016, too many French people in 2024 are economically suffering, the victims of a rampant neo-Liberalism which has seen hospital emergency rooms shutting down intermittently for want of doctors, energy and grocery prices soaring, retirement allocations lagging behind inflation, rent prices going up, and medicine co-payments increasing. Like the National Socialist Party in 1933, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s National Rally party is attempting to exploit a people’s real economic pain to be elected to power, and yes, like the National Socialist Party it has found its ‘boucle emissaire,” yesterday the Jews, today Immigrants and “Islamists.”
I want to be crystal clear on two things:
1) Real Islamist extremists — or religious extremists, a term I prefer because the problem is not the religion, it’s a violent, ultimately nihilistic extremism which is religion-blind — have killed and massacred innocents in Israel, Gaza, the Occupied West Bank, New York City, Boston, Spain, India, Pakistan, Brussels, London, Norway, New Zealand, Oklahoma City, Pennsylvania, and — most pertinent here — France and most resonant for me, Paris. I was in Paris on November 13, 2015, when they massacred 130 innocents. I still remember the smile of one of them, Naomi Gonzalez, peering out from a print-out taped on the bullet-ridden window of a café in my neighborhood, and reading that her parents had taken her from Mexico to the United States, where she was a 20-year-old student at UCLA studying that semester in Paris, and thinking: Her parents took her out of Mexico for this? To be gunned down while having a beer with friends on a terrace in Paris — in my neighborhood? And another print-out on a nearby tree for a 27-year-old music student from Algeria, gunned down by these cowardly monsters firing Kalashnikovs on unarmed defenseless civilians because he happened to walk by with his dog. And all the insouciant smiles on the print-outs taped on a fence around the park opposite Baticlan, where they mercilessly gunned down 80 people for the ‘crime’ of listening and dancing to live (American) music, as well as a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” the clarion call for an earlier generation of Naomi Gonzalezes who came to Paris because Paris is where you go to live and experience life and its emotions to the maximum. You don’t go there expecting to be killed, not in a war but for living and enjoying life to the maximum. For talking and exchanging and dancing with others. (“They hate our spirit of ‘Vivre Ensemble'” is how Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo adroitly framed it at the time.) And under the photos of one of the insouciant smiling young men, the words, “Morte pour la France,” “He died for France.” This last stirred controversy among some, who muttered, “It’s not like he died fighting in a war.” Maybe not, but he, but they, did die for France because France’s identity — the identity which beckons like a siren to the world, particularly the artistic, literary, and cultural worlds and particularly the young — is not just about the Liberation, and the Resistance, it is about a quality of life, enveloping and exuding values and exchanges including exchanges between people of different backgrounds and it is that quality of life which is now threatened, not by the parties on the Left but by the extreme Right-wing National Front / National Rally and everything it represents.
2) If the National Front / National Rally led French polling for the June 9 European Parliamentary elections with 31 percent of the vote (the spur for Macron to dissolve the legislature and call snap elections — after insisting before the elections he would not do so — because, he said “it is never wrong to let the people speak”), with Macron’s Centrist Renaissance party garnering 15 percent of the vote followed by Raphael Glucksmann’s Socialist list with 14 percent, it is not because millions of French people suddenly became racists. Many (if not most) of them voted for the FN/RN because they are hurting, struggling to make ends meet. By “they” I mean good, generous, loving and decent people (I’m not being sarcastic) like a retired friend in my village who worked 40 years on a clothing factory assembly line (before the factories in the village shut down and many of the manufacturing jobs moved abroad) and is now living on a retirement pension of 1,000 Euros per month, like her husband, and who drives 30 kilometers out of town every week to buy groceries because the chain store here has a monopoly which shows in its astronomical price increases over the past two years, including on basic commodities like eggs, pasta, chocolate (we are in France), cheese (ditto), sugar, and cooking oil. Her financial lot was already difficult under the previous government (whose finance minister was a certain Emmanuel Macron) and has only gotten worse since under the hyper-drive neo-liberal “reforms” Mr. Macron has instituted since he was elected in 2017. (Among other things abolishing a tax on the super-rich enacted by Hollande, and which the New Popular Front promises to re-instate, also promising to block prices on fundamental necessities and energy, a hike in the minimum wage to 1600 Euros net monthly, class size reductions, free lunches for school-children, 1 Euro meals for college students, and investment in French hospitals. It has also promised to annul Mr. Macron’s increase of the retirement age from 62 to 64 with a view to lowering it to 60, and to abrogate his rigorous immigration law passed with the cooperation of Le Pen’s party.)
I can beg my friend not to vote for the National Front / National Rally party because they will hurt me, other migrants, and the poor, because they will continue to stigmatize Muslims and people of color in general, because they are simply lying when they say France is being ‘submerged by immigrants,’ because they are a racist and possibly a fascist party, because of the real risk, born out by history in other countries like Hungary, that once they are elected to power (the party or coalition of parties which wins the most seats in the June 30 legislative election and July 7 run-off, if it garners an absolute majority, picks the next prime minister, who designates the next government) they may be loathe to relinquish it and because of what an Extreme Right victory will do to French society and culture and thus its image and reputation abroad, but I cannot argue with her. I do not have that right. I did not spend 40 years working on an assembly line, my Social Security if I choose to retire in two years will be $1500 per month, and I have paid no or little rent over the past ten years thanks to the grace of a generous family. (If you are wondering why my friend, rather than believing the empty promises of the National Front / National Rally, does not turn to the New Popular Front, which offers a real program of economic equilibrium, it is partly because Jean-Luc Mélonchon’s Unsubmissive party, the leading party on the Left, has been slack in establishing a presence outside urban areas, and partly because of the right-wing propaganda my friends are fed every night by C-News, the French answer to Fox “News,” owned by the French version of Rupert Murdoch, which night after night hammers them with the fake news that delinquency in France has increased when it has actually decreased over the past 30 years, as the College de France and Rutgers sociologist Didier Fassin has pointed out, and regularly maligns with false charges the Left, particularly the Insoumis (Unsubmissives), who won the most votes in the 2022 legislative elections after the National Rally. And also because of the mainstream media’s enabling of the de-demonization of the National Front (who my friend insists are not the Extreme Right, but the Right) and active complicity in the demonization of the Unsubmissives and, now, daily efforts to de-credibilize the genuinely anti-Racist New Popular Front with false and unfounded charges of anti-Semitism while rarely talking about the NFP’s program of economic justice and liberation.
So let’s finish with that, the program that the NFP promises to enact within the first 100 days of its election, as reported by Le Monde.
“We want to change people’s lives with concrete measures,” Marine Tondelier, national secretary of the Ecologist (formerly Green) party told a Paris press conference last week.
Those measures include:
** Price blocks on grocery products of premiere necessity as well as energy.
** Creation of a “menstruel leave” in all enterprises and administrations.
** Reduction of the work week from 35 to 32 hours for “difficult metiers” and night work.
** A moratorium on major highway infrastructure projects as well as dams.
** A plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
** Filling staff gaps in public hospitals, schools, the Justice department and other state agencies by ‘revaluing’ salaries.
** Opening 500,000 new places in public nursery schools.
** Reduction of class sizes so that they improve on the European average of 19 children per class.
** Taking the first steps towards being able to offer free lunches (which I and my brothers benefited from going to public schools in San Francisco; “Soylent green is people!”), material, transportation (ditto), and after-school activities in public schools.
** Organizing a conference to “save public hospitals,” including by revaluing salaries for working nights and weekends.
** Banning all PFAS’s (the non-stick surfaces you find in some pots and pans), notably in kitchen tools.
** Implementing a zero tolerance policy when it comes to racist, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic “acts and words,” the propagation of all of which the platform notes has seen a “disturbing explosion” in French society.
** An inter-ministerial plan to analyze, prevent, and combat anti-Semitism and another to fight Islamophobia, the NFP platform noting that “Anti-Semitism has a tragic history in our country and must never return. All those who propagate hate against Jews must be fought.” (This past weekend, two middle-school boys are alleged to have raped a 12-year-old Jewish girl while crying “Dirty Jew!”)
** Reviving the “Tax on the Rich” installed by Mr. Hollande and later abrogated by Mr. Macron, with the addition of a climate aspect.
** Setting aside a third of positions on corporate boards for employees.
** Supporting the annulment of the free trade agreement between the European Union and Canada.
** Re-establishing higher pesticide standards dropped by Mr. Macron’s government (which adopted the more problematic European standards) under pressure from farmers and farming industry groups.
** Constructing 200,000 new public housing units per year over the next five years and pushing for a “right to housing” law which would include imposing mandatory rent control in zones with a high housing demand or a “universal right to rent.”
** Limiting media monopolies.
** Abrogating “asylum and immigration” laws approved under Emmanuel Macron with the support of the NF/RN as well as “regularizing” undocumented workers, students, and schoolchildren and giving preference to “cartes de sejour” or residence permits valid for 10 years.
** Creating a new refugee status of “climate displaced.”
** Creating a “legal and secure” route to immigration and putting in place a “sea and land rescue agency,” as well as “guaranteeing access to free State medical aid” for foreigners. 27,000 would-be migrants have lost their lives at sea over the past ten years while trying to cross from Africa or North Africa to Europe to seek a better life.
** Re-establishing specialized local police or community units.
** Banning use by law enforcement of what the platform describes as “defense launchers” and a certain class of “grenades.”
** Replacing the government’s police review board with a new independent organism operating under the aegis of the office of the Defender of Civil Rights. (It should be noted that France’s government police review board has much more strict and neutral standards than many of its American counterparts, with police sometimes placed in ‘garde a vu’ simply for using their arms when a death results, pending an investigation of whether the use was justified under French law.)
** Revising standards over when police have the right to use their arms.
Footnotes
*In the 2002 presidential run-off, Jacques Chirac refused to debate Jean-Marie Le Pen. Invited with other party leaders to meet with president Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac’s successor, Hollande, refused to participate alongside the National Front.
** For the actual facts, or statistics, on immigration, see François Heran’s lectures at the College de France.
*** In “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you,” Romain Gary, writing under the pseudonym of Emil Ajar, describes an older Muslim resident of the Paris quartier of Belleville who every day sits on a bench with “a copy of the Koran in my right hand, a copy of Monsieur Hugo in my left.”
**** This morning, public radio chain France Inter, on the heels of an incident in which two junior high school boys are alleged to have raped a 12-year-old girl in calling her a “dirty Jew,” cited a poll — co-commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, whose mission is to get Diaspora Jews to make aliya to Israel, which mission French public radio newscasters never mention — presumably including French Jews (they never explain how they’re able able to find them, given that keeping such statistics is forbidden in France) — which allegedly found that a majority of French Jews say they would leave France if Les France Insoumis (the Unsubmissives) party, part of a Left coalition including the Socialists, Communists, and Ecologists running in the June 7 legislative elections, comes to power. (This is what is known in the trade as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but not for the reason cited by the AJC: If enough voters fall for the lie that criticizing Israel for what it is doing to Palestinians makes one, or a party, anti-Semitic that they don’t vote for the Left coalition, the most likely result is the election of a party, the Front / Rassemblement National, with a real history of anti-Semitism.) The station then interviewed the president of the “Representative Counsel of Jewish Institutions in France” (it only claims to represent Jewish institutions, but public radio typically presents the organization, which has a long history of supporting Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, as representing the opinions of all Jews, and never interviews representatives of organizations like the Jewish Union for Peace, which have clearly condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank), who effective blamed LFI’s criticism of Israel and defense of Palestinians for what he described as the increase of anti-Semitic incidents in France.
In memory of Larry Bensky, a journalist who never abdicated. And for Sidney, for giving me my history and giving me back my smile. Pour m’avoir appris mon histoire et pour m’avoir redonner mon sourire.Update to the story below: On Wednesday, an Israeli attack on an UNRWA school and shelter in the Nuseirat refugee camp killed at least 40 Palestinians, including 14 children and a large number of women and elderly, injuring 80 more, according to UNRWA. The school was being used to house displaced persons. Israel claimed members of Hamas were at the U.N. school (as if this would justify attacking a school serving as a refuge for civilians), but provided no evidence to back this up — a fact that went unmentioned in French public radio’s fleeting reports on the attack.Since the beginning of the war, more than 170 UNRWA buildings, most of them serving as shelters, have been hit, killing more than 450 people, according to an UNRWA spokesperson interviewed Thursday on Democracy Now.
So it has come to this: Notwithstanding another rare anecdotal report from Gaza by way of Jerusalem Wednesday morning, the earlier dispatches from Ramallah of the intrepid Alice Froussard (who we don’t hear from anymore), the occasional remote from Paris Gaza telephone interviews from Etienne Monin and the conscienteous interviews of evening news host Fabienne Sintes, the (predominantly) ersatz (at least on this subject) journalists of Radio France have become so enthralled by the Israeli army’s version of the genocide this rogue Apartheid state has been perpetrating on the people of Gaza for eight months (a people that as the Occupying Power it has the obligation to protect), killing more than 36,500 Palestinians (not counting the 7,000 still buried under the rubble of buildings leveled by Israel, which has also set fire to rescue tractors), the majority civilian including at least 15,000 children, with thousands more children maimed and orphaned; so determined to sell their listeners a timeline which sets the historical cursor at October 7, 2023, conveniently negating 76 years of forced expulsions and ethnic cleansing, massacres (in its 2014 invasion of Gaza alone, Israel killed more civilians, 1,462 including 551 children, then the total civilians and soldiers massacred by Hamas on October 7), the ‘administrative detention’ of 8,100 Palestinians by the army illegally occupying their territory (inevitably referred to as ‘prisoners,’ implying some degree of penal culpability, whereas Hamas’s 142 captives are ‘hostages’), illegal land seizures, and murders of journalists and medics which preceded the October 7 massacre; so willfully blinded to and thus obscuring the truth on the ground by their own constant on-air declarations that “there are no journalists in Gaza,” effectively negating the genocide by negating the existence of the more than 100 journalists who have been killed by Israel while documenting it, most of them Palestinians, sometimes targeted along with their families; so inebriated by the Israeli Kool-Aid (here meant to facilitate not collective suicide but to manufacture collective consent for a genocide) which would have you believe that protesting the genocide of one Semitic people by another makes you an anti-Semite that they no longer know how to recognize genuine anti-Semitism when it hits them in the face — especially when it is being spewed by one of their own.
So it was that on a recent Sunday, these public radio “journalists” many of whom have shamed our metier so essential and vital to informing, alerting, and activating the public by violating its principal credo — to report the news without fear or favor — in large part by insinuating or directly, and falsely, claiming that those who object to an ongoing genocide are anti-Semites, be they American or French college students or Left-wing parliamentary deputies, these journalists who have shamed our profession by abdicating their professional responsibility to tell the truth went on strike to defend the author of a comment which actually was anti-Semitic, “in the name of defending freedom of speech.”
In October, after Hamas massacred between 1200 and 1400 people of all ages and persuasions in Israel, the majority of them civilians and including lifelong defenders of Palestinian rights and kidnapped around 200 others of all ages, Guillaume Meurice, a “humorist” at the public radio chain France Inter (which boasts the largest listenership in France), described Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu as “a sort of Nazi without a foreskin.” Convoqued and then dismissed without being charged by French authorities, Meurice repeated the “joke” in April, whereupon he was suspended by Radio France management with a view to possible termination of his contract, with a final decision expected this week. On Sunday, May 12, journalists and hosts at both France Inter and France Culture went on strike to defend Meurice’s resurrection in the flesh of a classic anti-Semitic trope.
So let’s break down the “joke,” as embarrassing as it may be for an American journalist to have to explain to the sons and daughters of Albert Camus, a philosopher and novelist who snuck back into Occupied Paris so that he could risk his life to commit journalism — to tell the truth — and who understand the importance of naming things, what anti-Semitism actually looks like.
This particular anti-Semitic trope — like the general racist trope of which it is a subset — involves connecting a real or imagined evil with a distinct or distinguishing stereotypical or real Jewish ethnic, religious, or physical trait, with the intention of implying that the evil in question is a patently Jewish evil, here doubled in the toxic force of its anti-Semitic vitriol because the evil in question is Nazism, and Nazis used the absence of a foreskin to identify and assassinate Jews who were trying to pass as gentiles to save their hides.
French literature is replete with examples of this genre of anti-Semitic trope, the connection of evil or malfeasance with a real or stereotypical Jewish physical trait. (In American literature, the target is more likely to be African-Americans, who come off even worse in French translations of ‘Blackspeak’ from 20th-century White novelists such as Carson McCullers or Richard Brautigan, which consists of dropping specific vowels and consonants and simply makes the characters’ speech sound stupid, as opposed to, in the case of McCullers, arguably colloquial.) Here’s one — from Emile Zola’s novel “Money,” published in 1891, three years before the French military brass falsely accused a Jewish captain of treason and railroaded him into prison on Devil’s Island and seven years before George Clemenceau published Zola’s letter accusing the military of railroading Alfred Dreyfus and protecting the real traitor. The hero, a venture capitalist named Saccard, has just exited the Bourse, the French stock market in Paris, and finds himself in a sort of outdoor sub-stock market where dealers trade in the stocks of dead companies:
“There he found, in a tumultuous group, an entire dirty Jewry, with fat sweaty faces and the dried out profiles of vultures, in an extraordinary meeting of typical noses, the ones nestled up against the others like hovering birds of prey, relentless amidst guttural screams, as if they were ready to devour each other.”
Given his protagonist’s endemic hate of the Jews he perceives as his real enemies — the denouement involves Saccard using stock his Universal Bank has illegally bought in its own company, using straw men, to create a false demand to counter a selling frenzy induced by the Jewish banker who is his main nemesis — emphasized by internal monologues in which he rails against the Jews, and notwithstanding other characters, notably a particularly merciless debt collector, who reinforce age-old Jewish stereotypes, I think we can give Zola the benefit of the doubt in assuming that the anti-Semitism is his character’s not his creator’s and accurately reflects the ambiance of the era in certain circles. If the action is set in the period immediately preceding the downfall of Napoleon III in 1870, the novel itself was published in 1891, just five years after Edouard Drumont’s self-published popular success “La France Juivre,” whose ‘optic’ is best encapsulated by Anatole France’s contemporaneous review (in La Vie Litteraire, May 9, 1886):
“Monsieur Édouard Drumont sees Jews where no one else sees them. He sees them among the Christians, he sees them among Catholic priests. For him, Marat was a Jew, Napoleon was a Jew, Gambetta was a Jew. ‘The war of 1870,’ he says, ‘was a Jewish war.’ Jews are responsible for the Tunisian and Tonkin affairs. It’s for them alone that Monsieur Disraeli waged war in Afghanistan. He sees the hand of Jews in the industrial crisis and in the advent of Socialism. He’s haunted.”
Just as Drumont’s “La France Juivre” goosed the anti-Semitic atmosphere that made it acceptable for some in the military hierarchy to falsely accuse a devoted military servant of treason even after French military brass had evidence (unearthed by another brave military officer) that he was not guilty and even knew who the real traitor was — until Zola and others, including Anatole France, stepped in and campaigned for Alfred Dreyfus’s exoneration — so Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s 1937 pamphlet “Bagatelles for a massacre,” a sort of Drumont-on-steroids ballet scenario followed by paranoid invective (among other things, the narrator, “Ferdinand,” blames the Jews for the rejection of his libretto and thus depriving him of being able to examine up close all those fine ballerina legs; it’s hard to tell sometimes if Céline is a genuine anti-Semite or is mocking through grotesque his own anti-Semitism) helped grease the wheels for too many good French people to collaborate in the Deportation of 74,000 Jews, including 11,000 children (my dentist’s cousin was one of them), to the death camps, from which only 3,000 returned, because, after all, good riddance. This resentment or image of the Jews as sucking the blood from ordinary Frenchmen and women and depraving French society was nurtured by caricaturists in the collaborationist Vichy press with their portraits of large-nosed Jewish beasts of prey… which brings us back to Meurice’s doubly anti-Semitic description of Benjamin Netanyahu as “a sort of Nazi without a foreskin,” for its connection of evil with a particularly Jewish physical trait, thus implying the evil in question is a manifestation of the Jewish character, this particular connection doubly insiduous for the reason explained above, that it was the very fact that Jewish males had their foreskins spliced off by religious custom which made them more vulnerable to exposure and assassination by the Nazis or their collaborators.
(As for Céline’s descendants — I’m not talking about anti-Semitism now but racialism — at the Front National / Rassemblement National or “Reconquest” parties, if the imprecations are more subtle, specific causality replaced with false claims of France being submerged by immigration and the threat posed by “Islamism” to a society with Christian roots — the former a false claim rarely challenged by public radio journalists when it’s made on the public radio air-waves by politicians, for example by pointing out that the threat of France “being submerged by immigration” is a myth belied by the actual statistics, as amply noted by the statistician Francois Héran, the latter stigmatizing Muslims in general, or by asking FN president Jordan Bardella what he means when he says that anyone who walks around the French suburb of Saint-Denis “knows this is no longer Amelie Poulain’s France” — replace Jews with immigrants and you have the Front National and “Reconquest,” both of which are poised to elect deputies in Sunday’s European parliamentary elections, once again thanks in no small part to public radio journalists falling down on the job and not calling them out for making non-Christian cultures ((Reconquest)) or Immigrants ((Reconquest and the FN)) the new Bogeymen.)
This is the kind of doubly-toxic anti-Semitism these public radio journalists would defend in the name of freedom of speech — at the same time many of them are using the precious privilege of free speech accorded to journalists to label those taking exception to the genocide of one Semitic people by another as anti-Semites.
But it is not just to denounce this apology — because that’s what it is when you try to dissimulate patent anti-Semitism as “free speech” — for the resurrection of a dangerous anti-Semitic trope by one of their own that I’ve borrowed the title of Zola’s celebrated screed for mine. (Meurice’s is not the only genuinely anti-Semitic trope these ersatz journalists who have become so duped by the fake anti-Semitism of criticizing a real genocide that they can’t recognize real anti-Semitism even when it hits them in the face have missed recently: Donald Trump’s attributing his recent conviction in New York on 34 felony counts of falsifying financial records to dissimulate another potential crime to “a Soros-backed judge” — which should have set off five-alarm anti-Semitic alarm bells for any journalist worth his kosher salt who’s been paying attention to Hungary, where the Hungarian-born American philanthropist’s name has become the anti-Semitic code for premiere Victor Urban — went completely unmentioned in French public radio’s coverage of Trump’s comments.)
I accuse these ersatz journalists of placing more value on (White) Ukrainian and Israeli lives than (Brown) Palestinian lives, specifically by denying the very existence of the (mostly Palestinian, thus Brown) journalists documenting the genocide on the ground with their repeated on-air declarations that “there are no journalists in Gaza”; what they really mean is that there are no Occidental journalists in Gaza. And because whereas every handful of (White) Ukrainian civilian victims of Russia or (Jewish and mostly White) Israeli victims of Hamas merits non-stop coverage on French public radio chains France Inter and France Culture, when it comes to paying attention to the (Brown) Palestinian civilians killed by Israel (in Gaza or the West Bank), the threshold seems to be about 45 before they start paying attention.
I accuse these ersatz journalists (when I say ersatz journalists, I don’t mean them all — recent reports from Jerusalem correspondent Thibaut Lefevre, notably including Wedneday’s co-produced with a reporter in Gaza, have improved — but rather what seems to be a guiding preference for and deference to the Israeli government point of view, rarely demanding proof, and a stunning deficit in the Palestinian point of view as well as a repeated failure to offer detailed reports on Israel’s continued bombing of civilian targets, a gap in coverage fueled by some news anchors and program hosts repeated and false declarations that “there are no journalists in Gaza” while others have said it can’t be a genocide because Israel supposedly warns people to get out of town before it bombs their homes to smithereens — my wording — or systematically and falsely attack student protests as being pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic when they are just pro-Peace and anti-genocide; there are exceptions, including those noted above such as Sintes, who has consistently interviewed guests representing the Palestinian point of view or with NGOs working in Gaza. But institutionally, France Culture and France Inter have fallen down on the job and above all this is a problem of abdication of the journalist’s fundamental obligation to inform, of omission of the victim’s point of view beyond the occasional anedcotal vignette, and of consistently favoring the Israeli army version of events… like the U.S. State Department) of dissimulating that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians by adopting the genocidal perpetrator’s nomenclature in describing the war as the “war between Israel and Hamas” when the facts reveal it as a war *on* Gaza and by consistently attributing the casualty figures variously to “Hamas,” or “the Islamic movement of Hamas,” or “the Islamists of Hamas” — in other words, the same folks who brought you 9/11, November 13, and July 14 — and only mentioning once that the United Nations has consistently confirmed the figures provided by the health ministry of Gaza for this and the previous five wars Israel has waged on this occupied territory.
I accuse these ersatz journalists — not the journalists on the ground but the management which has directed the coverage, or lack of coverage — of placing more value on (White) Ukrainian and (Jewish and mostly White) Israeli lives than (Brown) Palestinian lives in their recent (lack of) reporting on Gaza, which except for the rare anecdotal reports and citing of United Nations or other N.G.O. declarations, consists of saying Israel is bombing Rafa again with no mention of whether and how many (Brown) civilians Israel has killed with those bombs (an exception being last week’s bombing of a refugee camp outside Gaza which killed 45 civilians, and even then one Radio France journalist who has consistently favored the Israeli army version of events seemed to imply that the tents were responsible).
I accuse these ersatz journalists of all but completely ignoring the ongoing Israeli army and illegal settler repression in the West Bank illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, only recently reporting that Israel has killed 500 Palestinians there since October 7, and that only because the report came from the U.N., and distorting the repeated and lethal raids by Israel of Jenin in which it has targeted and killed teachers, doctors, and children as “affrontations,” when as a people whose own country has been occupied they know that an occupied people has the right to resist the Occupants (not to mention that the teacher, doctor, and child killed in a recent Israeli raid weren’t even resisting, they were just walking on the street). Or do Brown people not have the right to resist Occupation?
I accuse these ersatz journalists, and specifically those of a public radio chain which calls itself France Culture, of completely ignoring that among those besieged by the Israeli army in its most recent deadly incursion into Jenin were the actors and administrators of the Freedom Theater, one of whose directors has also been imprisoned by Israel for six months, and completely ignoring an S.O.S. sent out by another director. When we shared a simple letter of thanks from the students of the Freedom Theater to the students around the world who have been demonstrating against the genocide on Facebook, Facebook responded by banning us. I don’t have the protection of an influential, public radio network. Why have they abdicated?
I accuse these ersatz journalists of not only, and falsely, variously accusing students in the United States, France, and around the world protesting against the Israeli genocide and calling for a ceasefire of being supporters of Hamas and anti-Semites (belittling the Jews amongst them as nostalgic Maoists) motivated by “Woke-ism” as opposed to their consciences which is the only thing saving ours, but never, never pointing out that this genocide has been accompanied by a scholasticide, with Israel destroying every single university in Gaza and 70 percent of its schools, a fact which suggests a direct connection between what’s happening in Gaza and the students protesting it.
I accuse these ersatz journalists of describing Israel’s opening fire on people simply searching for food at a food distribution point because Israel’s war crime of using starvation as a weapon of war has left them hungry as a “food riot” followed by a bloodbath (because of course this is what Black and Brown people do, the savages, they riot), and of being silent about the numerous other occasions Israel has fired on and killed people seeking food and assassinated Palestinian officials organizing the food distribution, which makes this massacre sound like a one-off.
I accuse these ersatz journalists of attempting to protect a war criminal by (some of them) being more outraged over the fact that the procurer of the International Criminal Court, a court vested with its authority by 127 countries including France, announced he is seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu at the same time he announced he is seeking one for three Hamas officials than the comportment which necessitated that warrant, and by failing to point out that the Palestinians have been seeking that mandate since 2014 and it took the ICC ten years to act on it. (The logic in their outrage being, How dare the ICC procurer put the leader of a Democratic country on the same level as the leaders of a terrorist organization?, to which one can only respond: A) An Apartheid state is not a Democracy and B) Terrorism is as terrorism does.)
I am not accusing these ersatz journalists of deliberate, conscious racism. But when there is less outrage over — or even simple reporting on, and if they don’t report it, how can their listeners be activated to oppose it? — killings of (Brown) Palestinians than there is over the killings of (largely White) Israelis or Ukrainians, the effect is the same because it anesthetizes the public from feeling the pain over the killings and sufferings of people of color to the same degree they feel the pain over the killings and sufferings of Jewish or White victims.
This week, the public radio air-waves here in France are being inundated with coverage of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, including over the thousands of Americans and other Allied soldiers who lost their lives on June 6, 1944, and the days succeeding the Normandy embarquement. And yet what did those young men fight and die for? They died to free the world of the scourge of racism. They did not wade into those waters so that 80 years later, these ersatz journalists could protect a colleague who abused the public radio air-waves to make a hateful, racist, and anti-Semitic joke, and then repeated it when he thought he could get away with it. They did not wade into those waters so that racist politicians could use those air-waves to spew their hateful anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim racism without being challenged by public radio journalists. They did not wade into those waters so that Israel, in the name of defending me and with bombs supplied by my country, could wage a racist war on another Semitic people, a genocide, a scholasticide and, with rare and intermittent exceptions, effectively be covered for it — lately, by the all-but-total French public radio silence over the ongoing victims — by journalists who have fallen down on the job, who have abdicated.
In memory of Aaron Bushnell. And of John Franklin and Ruth Asawa, two teachers who knew the Horror and who tried to teach their children well so that it would never again come back. And with thanks to JK.
“Have we learned nothing?”
— I.F. Stone
As Israel, refusing a cease-fire proposal formulated by Egypt and accepted by Hamas, intensifies its bombing and genocidal killing in Rafa, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, an Anglo-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon who returned in April from 43 days operating on civilians wounded and maimed by Israeli bombardments in al-Shifa hospital, the majority of them children, as a volunteer with the French NGO Doctors without Borders — before Gaza’s largest hospital was completely leveled last month by Israel, which left more than 300 bodies buried in mass graves — was prevented by Germany Saturday from entering France, where he had been invited to testify before the French Senate.
“I’m at Charles De Gaulle airport,” Dr. Abu-Sittah, rector of Glasgow University, tweeted Saturday morning, according to the Agence France Presse as reported in Le Figaro. “They’re preventing me from entering France. I’m supposed to speak before the French Senate today. They’re telling me that the Germans have banned my entry in Europe for a year.” A police source confirmed to the AFP that Germany had placed an “interdiction [to circulate in] the Schengen zone” order on Dr. Abu Sittah which effectively prevents him from entering any of the European countries covered by the Schengen convention, meant to regulate immigration and protect member states from terrorists.
In April, police in Berlin raided and forcibly shut down a three-day Palestine Congress whose co-organizers included Jewish Voice for Peace an hour after it had begun and banned from entering the country scheduled speakers including Dr. Abu-Sittah and the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, citing concerns about “anti-Semitism”; governments in Germany, the United States, and other countries have informally adopted, as the New Yorker’s Masha Gesen has revealed, new standards for defining what constitutes anti-Semitism which include criticism of Israel. “This is not about protecting Jewish lives and Jews from anti-Semitism,” Varoufakis told Democracy Now April 16 after he was banned from entering Germany, also contending that among those arrested were a young Jewish Voice for Peace activist with a handmade sign reading “Jews against genocide.” “It’s all about protecting the right of Israel to commit any war crime of its choice.”
As for Dr. Abu-Sittah, he recounted to DN in the same broadcast that “upon arrival” in Berlin to participate in the congress in April, he was stopped at the passport office. “I was then escorted down to the basement of the airport, where I was questioned for around three-and-a-half hours. At the end of three-and-a-half hours, I was told that I will not be allowed to enter German soil…, and that this ban will last the whole of April. And not just that, that if I were to try to link up my Zoom or FaceTime with the conference, even if I was outside Germany, or I were to send a video of my lecture to the conference in Berlin, then that would constitute a breach of German law and that I would endanger myself to having a fine or even up to a year of prison.” Varoufakis said he was also warned by German authorities about participating by remote video-stream in the congress.
Following Dr. Abu-Sittah’s tweet that he was being prevented from entering France, where the Ecologist (formerly Green) party senatrice Raymonde Poncet had invited him to participate in a colloquium she’d organized at the Senate’s chambers in the Luxembourg Gardens, the president of the party’s Senate group tweeted, «Scandalous, Ghassan Abu-Sittah, plastic and reconstructive surgeon, has been prevented from participating in a Colloquium at the Senate. We are in discussions with the office of (interior minister) Gerald Darmanin and that of (foreign minister) Stéphane Séjourné,” the senator estimating nevertheless that Dr. Abu-Sittah would probably be sent back to Grand Britain, for which he already had an airline ticket for Saturday night.
His testimony before the French Senate having effectively been vetoed by the German government, the Dance Insider would like to share some of what Dr. Abu-Sittah might have said.
In an April 1 interview with Democracy Now after he returned from Gaza (and before Germany raided and pre-empted the Berlin event and banned him from German and effectively, it now appears, European soil), where he spent 43 days working at al-Shifa as a volunteer for the French NGO Doctors without Borders, Dr. Abu-Sittah said that half of the eight to 12 daily surgeries he conducted at al-Shifa involved operating on children, and that “the sheer ferocity of the bombing, the fact that the Israelis were targeting people’s homes, meant that a lot of these children, either their limbs were blown off at the explosion or were crushed beyond repair as a result of the debris and the collapsing buildings that they were taken from underneath,” and that “as the war progressed, as the health system became so overwhelmed, previously reconstructable limbs became unreconstructable and required amputation to save the patients’ lives from gangrene and infection.” As of April 1 (the time of the DN interview), Dr. Abu-Sittah estimated, between 4,000 and 5,000 of the Gazan children injured by Israeli bombing were “left with disabilities that will change the course of their lives” in what he decried as “a war Israel (has) declared on Palestinian children…. Israel wants to wipe out Palestinian children, because Palestinian children represent the Palestinian tomorrow that is incompatible with the Zionist settler-colonial project.”
Of the 35,000 Gazans Israel has killed (not counting the 7,500 still buried under the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israel) — the majority civilians according to Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the defense secretary of the United States — since Hamas massacred 1,400 people October 7, also mostly civilians, at least 14,500 are children.
As for those children the Israeli bombing has maimed, Dr. Abu-Sittah told DN, “We know from the medical literature that each child with a lower limb prosthetic will need a new prosthetic every six months, because their body outgrows the length of the prosthesis, and will need between eight and 12 surgeries by the time they’re of adult age, because the bone grows faster than the soft tissues, or the nerves attach themselves to the skin and they can’t wear the prosthesis. And so, this is a lifelong trajectory of surgery and of disability and of mental health scarring as a result of the deformity. Take into account, in addition to that, that a lot of these children are orphaned. You know, there are 17,000 children in Gaza who have lost their parents, and many of these are wounded children. And so, to go through all of this with no family to look after you is just — the legacy will be the legacy of this war.”
Following Israel’s deadly siege of al-Shifa hospital — Gaza’s largest — last month, Palestinian civil authorities discovered hundreds of bodies buried in mass graves. One of those slain by Israel in an earlier attack on the hospital was Dr. Ahmad Maqadmeh, a “young, brilliant plastic surgeon” to whom Dr. Abu-Sittah paid tribute on Democracy Now on April 1.
“His body, alongside that of his mother, was found today when the Israeli troops withdrew, and they had been executed by the Israeli army while trying to escape Shifa. Dr. Ahmad was a brilliant and dedicated young surgeon who had won the humanitarian fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. And it’s critical that we remember their names and we remember their stories. And today I want to send my love to his wife and to his children, both under the age of 5, who are now left without a husband and a father. Along with so many of my colleagues who we’ve lost, this is the second plastic surgeon who I had worked with at Shifa who has been killed by the Israelis, and over 345 doctors and nurses and paramedics who have been killed by the Israelis….”
During their April 1 interview, DN host Amy Goodman quoted an interview with Dr. Abu-Sittah in the New Yorker in which Eliza Griswold writes of his operations on children maimed by Israeli bombs, ““To mark the gravity of these procedures, and to mourn, Abu-Sittah and other medical staff placed the severed limbs of children in small cardboard boxes. They labeled the boxes with masking tape, on which they wrote a name and body part, and buried them.” Dr. Abu-Sittah elaborated to DN:
“There was one night when I was in Ahli Hospital when the Israelis had targeted a mosque which had been used by the internally displaced, where, by five that morning, I had performed amputations on six children. And such is the aim, to dehumanize these children, the aim of the settler-colonialist genocidal war, to dehumanize these children, that my colleagues and I wanted to maintain their dignity and wanted to not just bear witness but to hold on to anything that makes us and them human in the face of this dehumanizing war machine. And so we insisted that whenever there was a limb that was amputated, that it gets the right burial and that this child’s name is on that amputated limb and that we maintain the dignity of our patient to the extent that we can.”
You can read, listen to, and watch more of Dr. Abu-Sittah’s interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, in which the doctor describes his eye-witness view of what he qualifies as Israel’s “genocidal machine,” here.
What I’d like to address now is the harrowing potential implications of the German government now not only cracking down on free speech critical of Israel’s war on Gaza in Germany (including by Jews), under the guise of any criticism of Israel being anti-Semitic (by all evidence, purely because the state implicated is putatively Jewish), even when backed-up by evidence and international court, UN, and NGO findings, but apparently also being able to prevent even eye-witness testimony from being heard in any European country in the Schengen zone, even when the witness is a doctor working with a European charity and even when he has been invited to testify by a European governmental body, by using a convention, the Schengen zone, which was set up to control immigration and protect European countries from the real physical threats posed by terrorists, not to protect them from by clamping down on free speech and thus stop legislative bodies from hearing evidence of potential war crimes, in this case preventing an expert witness from telling the French Senate what he saw while working as a doctor as a volunteer with a French association, Doctors without Borders, in a Gaza hospital later destroyed by Israel and where the French government itself has called for an investigation after 300 bodies were found buried in mass graves; a convention meant to protect European citizens from bodily harm, and not from hearing testimony that might make them uncomfortable, challenging them to disrupt the consent largely being manufactured by the mainstream media (although recent coverage is more balanced, at least in this domaine; no one here in France, even in the mainstream media, is any longer trying to blame the death and destruction Israel has reigned down on hospitals in Gaza on Hamas’s allegedly using civilians as human shields or having tunnels under the hospitals) — and activate them to engage their governments to do more to stop the war crimes and to stop what the International Court of Justice, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and others have agreed is at the least “plausibly” a genocide in progress.
I’m not going to mince words. As a Jew — thus, one of those on whose behalf and for whose ostensible protection Germany is putatively blocking an expert witness to what the IJC has described as a “plausible” genocide and other war crimes from entering not just its soil but that of any E.U. country governed by the Schengen convention and testifying to what he’s seen, perhaps (I can’t see any other reason) doing so because that genocide is being perpetrated by a purportedly Jewish state (purportedly because Israel’s complete and devastating devaluation of Palestinian lives does not represent Jewish values) and Germany (I guess) still feels (I don’t) it has to make up for the genocide it perpetrated on Jews yesterday by protecting a “Jewish” state committing genocide today — as a Jew I have the right (which doesn’t mean others don’t) to not mince words when it comes to giving my opinion on an action, in this case constriction of freedom of speech and especially where that speech bears witness to an ongoing genocide and the maiming for life of children, being conducted in my name, supposedly to protect me but in reality protecting no one but a rogue state in the process of committing a genocide, protecting it by blocking this witnessing from being heard in the country where I live and which I love. And where it goes to censoring eye-witness testimony of war crimes — including against children — and doing so not just in their own country, Germany, but even in the country where I live and which I love — as a Jew I have the moral obligation to speak out. (Not that there’s anything particularly courageous in doing so; I’m not one of the 140 journalists, the majority of them Palestinian, who have been killed by Israel documenting its war on Gaza on the ground, I’m just a commentator on the side-lines. And if in Germany even Jews denouncing genocide are sometimes muzzled — such as the 87-year-old American survivor of German concentration camps and the Allied bombing of Dresden whose speaking tour of German schools was “postponed” after she denounced the genocide being perpetrated by Israel, or the young male Jewish Voice for Peace member referred to above by Varoufakis who he claims was “apprehended, arrested, manhandled” outside the raided Palestine Congress for carrying a handmade placard reading “Jews against genocide” — in France, by contrast, the courts (if not all politicians and hardly all journalists) have been air-tight in drawing the distinction between anti-Semitic speech and free speech (including free speech critical of Israel), which is sacred in a country where journalists, cartoonists, psychologists, policemen and women, and teachers have been killed by fundamentalist terrorists for defending and practicing it, the courts even recently dismissing allegations of inciting anti-Semitic hate against a radio humorist after he made remarks which, in my view, actually are anti-Semitic, describing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on two occasions as a “sort of Nazi without a foreskin.”)
What we have here, then (here’s where I don’t mince words), is the country whose ancestors gave us the worse genocide of the 20th century trying to stop witnesses to the worse genocide of the 21st century from testifying — and not just in Germany — even when government bodies have invited them to do so, as was the case in France last week-end with Dr. Abu-Sittah, apparently (I can’t see any other reason for such drastic action) because the ancestors of today’s perpetrators were yesterday’s victims, because, perhaps out of some kind of twisted, ill-placed (I as a Jew am over it and don’t blame today’s Germans for what some of their ancestors did to some of mine eighty years ago) residual guilt complex, Germany (or its government anyway) seems to think it has to make up for its ancestors killing Six Million Jews eighty years ago by letting a supposedly Jewish state do to another Semitic people what the Germans did to them, or their ancestors, in the last century. (The pretense — or well-intentioned motivation, if you prefer — of such a draconian and geographically over-reaching free-speech crackdown being that any criticism of Israel, including for war crimes and plausible genocide amply documented by various governmental bodies, including the United Nations and various NGO’s, among them Amnesty International, is anti-Semitic.)
Germany (or at least its present government), which we thought — which swore to us — had learned from its ancestors’ criminal mistake (or rather deed; it was not a mistake, it was intentional) lethal to Six Million human beings, has in fact learned nothing.
If it had learned its lesson, it would recognize that the malady, the sickness, the pathology which was at the root of the crime its ancestors committed against the Jews in the last century is now at the root of the crime a supposedly Jewish state is perpetrating against another Semitic people in this one, today, right now: The dehumanization — the racist dehumanization — of the victim by the perpetrator (enabled by the rest of us, because after all they’re only Arabs, “used to living in filth,” as the acclaimed Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa ironically put it on Democracy Now after returning from Gaza, just as they were only smelly, usurious Jews before) to justify the killing, the forced starvation, the maiming for life of children, the assassinations of journalists and medical workers and teachers and poets, the destruction of universities and schools, the attacks on mosques, churches, homes, refugee camps, refugee refuges, hospitals, of those seeking nourishment desperately needed thanks to Israel’s blockages at food distribution points, of six-year-old girls fleeing with their families, of ambulance drivers sent to rescue the six-year-old girls with Israel’s approval, of other families killed while driving on routes or sheltering in places Israel has told them are safe. Of the “collateral damage” victims. I mean, my God, Israel has created, as the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham has revealed (in the Israeli magazines 972 and Local Call), one artificial intelligence program, “Lavender,” which enables it to augment the “collateral damage” allowance it accords itself to as many as 300 civilians for one individual target deemed legitimate by Israel (even there there is what Israel acknowledges is a 10 percent error rate), and another, “Where’s Daddy?,” which enables it to locate its “targets” in their homes, killing their families along with them. Because this is the other horror of what Germany did to Jews and that a self-proclaimed Jewish state, enabled by the German government in its muzzling of critics of and witnesses to the ongoing genocide, is now reproducing on Palestinians (and another comparison we’re not allowed to draw, according to the new unofficially expanded standards of what constitutes anti-Semitism): Wedding feudal barbarism and racist hate to modern technology to yield the maximum results, enabling the persecuting state to increase its genocidal killing exponentially, in plain English, to kill as many people as possible, including civilians, women, entire familes and generations of familles, and children. We are not allowed to make this historical comparison — to say that Jews are doing to Gazans now what Germans did to Jews then, but my God, what does the writing, study, consideration, contemplation, teaching, understanding, and regard of history exist for if not to keep us from repeating our mistakes or, in this case, from repeating the moral abdication of preceding generations because “we didn’t know,” in once again enabling the atrocities of new states when thanks to witnesses like Dr. Abu-Sittah, we cannot make this claim today? To paraphrase the dying words of Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old marine who burned himself to death in front of the Israeli embassy last February: What would you do if you were alive then and knew? You’re doing it now.
Because at the root of that crime, of the Holocaust committed by Germany against my people (and against the world by the way the barbaric crime, and the usage of modern technology to commit it on a mass scale, debased all civilization) was exactly the same mindset (or lack of soul-set) that is at the root of this one: The dehumanization, fueled by racism, of one people by another, with the end of justifying and enabling the first’s annihilation by the second, yesterday the Jews by the Germans, today the Palestinians by a state that calls itself Jewish.
Germany did everything it could to hide its crime of 80 years ago while it was perpetrating it, not just from its own citizens not serving in the military but from the world.
Now it is doing everything in its power to hide this one, not just from its own citizens but from all the 550 million citizens of Europe.
“…. bombardments which have caused 29,000 deaths in Gaza according to the minister of health of Hamas who, in the absence of journalists on the ground, is the only source we can cite.”
— “Culture Monde,” France Culture public radio, February 27, 2024
“Every single time I walk one step in Gaza, I always imagine myself being blown up by an unmanned drone or by an F-16 missile or by a quadracopter or by whatever weapon that is used by Israel. Every time I’m walking and every single home I pass by, I feel that this home might be targeted, and I might be ending up dying and killed under the rubble of that house….”
— “Culture Monde,” France Culture, February 23, 2024
“It was really important to elevate the stories coming from Palestinian photo-journalists, who are the only window into what is going on in Gaza…. It’s one thing to say there’s a war and it’s horrible, and it’s another thing to see an image of a child being pulled out from the rubble. It really hits you differently. It was really important to elevate the stories coming from Palestinian photo-journalists, who are the only window into what is going on in Gaza.”
— Charlotte Cans, head of photography at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which recently culled work from 14 Palestinian photo-journalists in Gaza, each of whom was asked to share one image “capturing the devastation of the Gaza Strip over the past six months” for the Gaza Collective Photo Essay project, speaking on Democracy Now, April 19, 2024
“Unfortunately, we’ll have to decline on this one. Arrangements for publication in various countries have already been made, and we have to respect those.”
— Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, responding to the Dance Insider’s request to furnish photos and text from the Gaza Collective Photo Essay project to share with its international audience in 165 countries.
“Since October 7, we have documented a plethora of violations committed, first by Hamas and then by the Israeli authorities. But in particular, the Israeli authorities have been — … have committed an extraordinary amount of violations of international law, the indiscriminate and targeted bombing of civilians. We know now that there are at least 30,000 of them that have been killed. 70 percent of the infrastructure of Gaza has been destroyed. I’m talking civilian infrastructure — schools, hospitals, cemeteries, cultural institutions. We know that there has been the highest number of journalists killed in any conflict, the highest number of humanitarian workers killed in any conflict. We know that famine is being used as a weapon of war. We know that collective punishment has been waged against the Palestinian people. And we also know of… clear evidence of extrajudicial killings, as highlighted by the discovery of those mass graves, that are coming on top of all the detentions and use of torture and ill-treatment. So, the scale of the violations committed over the last six months is unprecedented. And I want to insist on that. It is unprecedented. The harm to civilians is unprecedented.”
— Agnès Callamard, Secretary General, Amnesty International, April 25, interviewed by Democracy Now, April 25
A genocide is being committed in front of the eyes of the entire world. Last time we claimed we did not know. This time we cannot make that excuse.
Governments or politicians in at least three countries (ironically including Germany, which brought us the last century’s worse genocide) and university presidents across the United States are trying to suppress legitimate, peaceful, and burgeoning contestation of that genocide, in the case of the universities including by sending in police and suspending students, often by mischaracterizing as “anti-Semitic” any criticism of Israel (including by Jews) and the defending of the worth of the lives of the 34,000 Palestinians, the majority civilians including at least 14,000 children, which have been taken by Israel (including some under an artificial intelligence abetted tuerie, as the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham has revealed, in which Israel has expanded its own collateral damage allowance to as many as 300 civilians for one targeted Hamas commander*) over the past six months in retaliation for Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1400 people and the right to food and medicine of the two million still living which Israel by its blockades continues to subject to famine, disease, and amputation, illegally using starvation as a weapon of war. In Berlin earlier this month, police raided and shut down a conference on Palestine and banned a former Greek finance minister participating in the conference from Germany. In France, the University of Lille cancelled a conference on Palestine co-organized by the country’s second largest political party (reportedly because of an objectionable poster for the event which called to free Palestine and painted the entire territory of Israel and Palestine green, admittedly an objectionable message because it can be interpreted as calling not only to free occupied Palestine but for the obliteration of Israel); when the Insoumis (Unsubmissive) party found another location for the conference, the government (via the local prefecture, which reports to the Interior ministry) then tried to ban the event from taking place anywhere in the northern city on the basis of its potentially “troubling public order,” only to be over-ruled by the courts. At least one animator on French public radio, meanwhile, has maligned an Insoumis candidate for the upcoming European parliamentary elections, Rima Hassan, as being “controversial,” by all appearances (because they rarely cite specific evidence) for the sole reason that she is Franco-Palestinian. When Hassan tried to bring up the genocide that Israel is “plausibly” committing in Gaza according to the International Court of Justice, an interviewer on the public radio chain France Inter cut her off by declaring (inaccurately given the ICJ ruling) “there is no consensus on that word.”
At Columbia University, where Jewish Voice for Peace (whose courageous young members given the potential suspension they face are driven, if you believe French public radio, not by their consciences but Maoist nostalgia or generalized “Wokeism”) has been banned, just days after kow-towing to radical Congressional representatives in a performance that conjured the ghosts of the Kefauver and House UnAmerican Activities Commissions of the late 1940s and 1950s, the university president sicced the New York Police Department on a peaceful student encampment in support of Gazans by invoking a “clear and present danger,” language straight out of the Red Scare (and a threat quickly debunked by an NYPD patrol chief who found the demonstrators peaceful and cooperative), this in a citadel of intellectual inquiry that should stand for the opposite of everything McCarthyism represented, and has been suspending students and kicking them out of campus housing, leaving them to fend for themselves in a city where it’s impossible to find housing.
At the University of Southern California, meanwhile, authorities cancelled a commencement speech by pro-Palestinian Valedictorian Asna Tabassum, citing the same concerns (safety; since when did these citadels for learning decide that healthy, rigorous debate is not safe? Not safe to the manufacturing of consent for genocide, perhaps.) as the French prefecture which tried to impeach the Lille conference. In Jerusalem, meanwhile, Israeli police arrested internationally renowned Palestinian-American feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who had earlier been suspended by Hebrew University before being restored.
In France, with the exception of the latest discovery in Gaza of more than 300 bodies in a mass grave on the grounds of one of the many hospitals deliberately destroyed by Israel, public radio continues to ignore all but the occasional anecdotal story coming out of Gaza (with the exception of the increasingly rare reports from Radio France’s intrepid Ramallah correspondent Alice Froussard and the from Paris interviews by the chain’s former Jerusalem correspondent Etienne Monnet, both an oases of objectivity in the Radio France universe when it comes to covering Israel and Palestine), largely relying on the Israeli version of events, always attributing casualty figures to “Hamas” or “the Islamist movement of Hamas” or, at best, the “health ministry linked to Hamas,” rarely pointing out that the UN and other international authorities typically confirm these figures, lately modifying the occasional canard that the figures can’t be verified because “there are no journalists in Gaza” to “there are no Occidental journalists in Gaza,” effectively (if unintentionally) negating what the International Court of Justice has declared a “plausible” genocide by negating the messengers, here because they’re not European; if you’re not white (or in any event don’t come from the Occident), you’re not right. (In recent weeks, Radio France seems to have all but stopped reporting the casualty figures, which now stand at 34,000, not counting the 7,000 still buried under the rubble of homes and other buildings destroyed by Israel.) Never mind that as many as 130 journalists have lost their lives covering the war in Gaza, at least 79 of them deliberately targeted by Israel according to an investigation (already dated) by the Palestinian Journalists Association, often killed with their families in their homes when Israel bombs them. (For more on how the racial regard has figured into the consent that has been manufactured — my terms, not hers — for this genocide, with less mainstream alarm over lost Brown Palestinian lives than White Ukrainian lives, to the same form of state terror ((ditto; the latter observation is mine, not necessarily hers)), my colleague Susan Abulhawa’s March 6 comments on Democracy Now upon returning from a stay in Gaza are instructive. “The food that does come… into Rafa, is primarily canned food,” Abulhawa, an acclaimed Palestinian-American novelist and executive director of Playgrounds for Palestine, explained to Amy Goodman. “And most of it — I’ve seen it and tasted it myself — has clearly been sitting on shelves for decades. And all you can taste… is the rancidity, the metallic taste of the can…. People … plan their days around trying to get to a single bathroom that’s shared by hundreds of other families. They try to do their best with hygiene, but it’s impossible. And when … people succumb to living in filth… I think maybe people in the West… have this impulse thought that most Black and Brown people… live like this. So it’s a little humiliating to have to explain that we don’t actually live in filth. And it’s degrading, beyond anything you can imagine, to be forced to live like this months on end, to have no way to protect your children, no way to give them hope, no way to calm their fears.” Abulhawa’s comments implicating the bias of the racial regard when it comes to Black and Brown people might also apply to French public radio’s coverage of Israel’s attacks on people waiting for food in the context of Israel’s illegally using famine and starvation as a weapon of war by blocking most food shipments from entering Gaza; when they are covered at all, they are sometimes characterized as food riots gone bad or, at best, food riots followed by bloodbaths. White people wait for food; Black and brown people riot for it and trample each other to get it — the savages.)
In this context, then, one might think that when 14 Palestinian journalists risk their lives to attempt to capture these ongoing war crimes; when an agency of the United Nations organizes an exhibition of their work; when the director of the exhibition, interviewed in Paris (thus in a country where, like Germany, those who organize and speak out against this genocide — even and up to the leader of the country’s second largest party — risk to be repeatedly calumnied on the mainstream media as anti-Semites) vaunts the “importance” of “elevat(ing) the stories coming from Palestinian photo-journalists, who are the only window into what is going on in Gaza..,” you’d think that her organization would welcome a request by a 26-year-old France based international cultural-political journal like the Dance Insider, directed by a veteran Jewish-American journalist who previously wrote for the New York Times, Reuters, and others to furnish some of those images and texts so that they could be shared with the DI’s culturally and politically informed audience, a readership which stretches across 165 nations.
Instead, the Dance Insider’s request was refused, and we have an international, public, publicly funded organization, an agency of the United Nations, shutting the window to this eye-witness testimony of a crime.
Instead, you have this publicly funded United Nations agency refusing to share the photos and accompanying texts provided by the 14 Palestinian journalists who risked their lives to take those photos, thus effectively stifling those journalists by refusing to distribute those images and texts beyond a handful of unidentified media with whom it has “already made arrangements,” its spokesman responding to the DI’s request as follows: “Unfortunately, we’ll have to decline on this one. Arrangements for publication in various countries have already been made, and we have to respect those.” (Those publications presumably including Rolling Stone, whose presentation was preceded by a disclaimer that essentially demeaned the work of the journalists who had risked their lives to get it as biased and which surely sent Hunter S. Thompson spinning in his grave.)
In other words, in a mainstream media and campus climate where this story or this perspective is constantly being downplayed, dismissed, deformed, denigrated, censored, negated, or simply ignored — notably by the mainstream media, including where I live — we have a public, publicly funded institution playing the exclusivity game. I have been a cultural editor and journalist for more than 40 years, working with hundreds if not thousands of artistic, governmental, and social institutions, and this is the first time anyone has refused to send me photos for a public exhibition or essay; the first time anyone has played the exclusivity game (here, not just with art but with photos whose wider dissemination could save lives). This agency possesses eye-witness testimony of war crimes (at least that’s my deduction based on the events in question, given that they’re refusing to share the photos with us) collected by brave journalists who risked their lives to do so and whose very existence is being effectively negated (“there are no journalists in Gaza”) by the mainstream press in the country in which we would be publishing them, and they are playing the exclusivity game, in our case with a journal based in France, where this information is simply not getting out. (French public radio has not said a word about this important exhibit at least that I’ve heard; perhaps not surprising here as it contradicts its narrative that “there are no journalists in Gaza,” assumedly unnegating the genocide by unnegating the messenger.)
We at the Dance Insider have been trying to do our small part, in this context of White-out Mainstream Media Conditions, to get this information out. We won’t win any awards for this coverage. (If anything, as a Jew shouting “GENOCIDE” in a contemporary political landscape where pronouncing that word in connection with Israel lays one open to charges of anti-Semitism — as another Jewish journalist, the New Yorker’s Masha Gesen, has revealed — I personally expose myself, even if the risk is nothing compared to that being taken by those 14 journalists in Gaza, by the Susan Abulhawas and the many Palestinian, Palestinian-American, Palestinian-British, Palestinian-Canadian, and other journalists and doctors and other humanitarian workers who have travelled to Gaza to bear witness or try to salve the damage being inflicted by Israel largely with American bombs, or by those brave young women and men across campuses in the United States to whose ranks were added, last night, the students of the University of Political Science n Paris.)
We don’t to it because it’s pleasant for a Jew to accuse a so-called Jewish state of committing genocide. (En passant, amen to Naomi Klein’s admonition at this week’s Sidewalk Seder in Brooklyn near the home of Senator Charles Schumer, as reported on Democracy Now, that it’s time for Jews to stop worshipping the false idol of Zionism.) We do it because it is our role — our job — as journalists (as journalist-activists if you prefer) to avert the public, to sound the alarm, so that the universities will have the information needed to determine whether it is time divest from Israel, so that the politicians will disarm the Israeli killing machine, at a time when all but 19 of 100 senators voted last weekend to send Israel $14 billion more in arms (at least $9 billion of that illegally, as dissenting, and Jewish, senator Bernie Sanders pointed out, given that Israel is using American arms to prevent the distribution of American humanitarian aid).
And now this publicly funded, United Nations agency tells us, when we try to help them get out the information these 14 Palestinian journalists risked their lives to obtain, that they can’t provide the photos and texts provided by these brave journalists because “arrangements have been made.”
As a public, publicly funded agency — as an agency of the United Nations — they do not have that right. They do not have the right to refuse to share these images with all but a favored few. They do not have the right to hoard evidence as if it were bon-bons, to be parceled out to their chou-chous. They do not have the right to restrict distribution of potential evidence of war crimes (again, as they won’t provide them to us, I haven’t seen the actual photos and am going by their description on Democracy Now), thus throttling the voices of these eye-witnesses by playing personal favorites.
They — a public, publicly funded agency of the United Nations, whose mandate includes the protection of civilian populations in times of war — do not have the right to treat potential evidence of war crimes against a civilian population as private property to be doled out to personal favorites, particularly when that evidence is provided by journalists on the ground who risked their lives to get it, and particularly in France, where the mainstream media is effectively justifying its relentless favoring of the Israeli perspective on events (a predelection which began long before October 7)** with the false narrative that “there are no journalists in Gaza,” effectively negating the genocide by negating the messenger, even as 130 journalists in Gaza have sacrificed their lives trying to get the story out, with at least 79 of them deliberately targeted by Israel, which has also wiped out the families of at least one prominent al Jazeera journalist.
This United Nations agency has done Yeoman’s work by collecting the photographs and texts of some of those brave journalists. Now it needs to complete the job by sharing this eye-witness testimony of war crimes as broadly as possible. It does not have the right to hoard this evidence. This evidence — this temoignage — does not belong to them. It belongs to the world.
*For an article published in April in the Israeli magazines +972 and Local Call, Avraham writes, “… In order to assassinate Ayman Nofal, the commander of Hamas’s Central Gaza Brigade, a source said the army authorized the killing of approximately 300 civilians, destroying several buildings in airstrikes on Al-Bureij refugee camp on Oct. 17, based on an imprecise pinpointing of Nofal. Satellite footage and videos from the scene show the destruction of several large multi-storey apartment buildings.”
** French young people, at least, aren’t duped. Students at the University of Political Science in Paris (who apparently don’t listen to French public radio, where the theories of Gil Capel — who, thinking he knows better than the 15 international judges of the International Court of Justice, claims South Africa’s accusations that Israel is committing genocide are driven by rank anti-Colonialism — are given free reign) this morning ended their three-day occupation of a school facility, inspired, they say, by the movement on American, British, and Irish campuses (variously dismissed by at least two French public radio hosts as “pro-Hamas” and “Woke-ist”, although this appears to be shifting if Gallagher Fenwick’s commentary of this morning is any indication), after Sci-Po administrators agreed to meet in five days to consider student demands that the university come out with a clear position on Gaza and stop collaborating with Israeli univerisities (at a time when Israel has levelled all universities and a majority of schools in Gaza as well as killed prominent academics in what Palestinians accurately describe as a “scholasticide.”).
The Dance Insider & Paris Arts Voyager 