Half a Loaf

On April 26th, the French Court of Appeals in Versailles ruled against the establishment French Newspaper Le Monde, condemning the paper for "diffamation raciale" (racist slander) in connection with a June 4, 2002, op-ed called "Israel-Palestine: The Cancer." In particular, the court convicted the article's lead author, well known sociologist Edgar Morin,¹ his two co-authors, and Jean-Marie Colombani, Le Monde's publisher.

In particular, the Court pointed to two offensive passages:

• One has trouble imagining that a nation of fugitives, descendants of the people who have suffered the longest period of persecution in the history of humanity, who have suffered the worst possible scorn and humiliation, would be capable of transforming themselves, in two generations, into a dominating people, sure of themselves, and, with the exception of an admirable minority, into a scornful people finding satisfaction in humiliating others.



• The Jews, once subject to an unmerciful rule, now impose their unmerciful rule on the Palestinians.

The CRIF (Representative Council of French Jews) said it was satisfied, "The Court of Versailles has thus clearly set out limits to a deviance that involves incriminating ‘the Jews’ in the name of criticism of Israel."

CRIF's wrong. Though it convicted, the sentence shows the court thought the offense inconsequential: the individuals were fined a symbolic one Euro in damages and Le Monde was ordered to print a retraction. Over a month after the ruling, as Helen at EU Referendum noted today, Le Monde hasn't said a word.

Nor has anyone else, says Helen:

Interestingly, the court decision went almost entirely unnoticed. No coverage in the French press; Reuters and Agence France (in trouble in the past for their biased reporting from the Middle East) ran short stories in French but not on the English language news services. Associated Press did not run the story at all. Our own media [U.K.], obsessed with the importance of Tony Blair in Europe [and] the ritual hara-kiri of the Conservative Party . . . did not touch it.

Beyond the pretend punishment, the problem persists. As Tom Gross observed in Thursday's Wall Street Journal--Europe, the Le Monde article was "no worse than thousands of other news reports, editorials, commentaries, letters, cartoons and headlines published throughout Europe in recent years, in the guise of legitimate and reasoned discussion of Israeli policies":

In general, European countries have strict laws against such abuse and Europe's mainstream media are in any case usually good at exercising self-censorship. . . The exception to this seems to be the coverage of Jews, particularly Israeli ones. This is particularly ironic given the fact that Europe's relatively strict freedom of speech laws (compared to those in the U.S.) were to a large extent drafted as a reaction to the Continent's Nazi occupation. And yet, from Oslo to Athens, from London to Madrid, it has been virtually open season on them in the last few years, especially in supposedly liberal media.

Helen agrees:

[T]he basic antipathy to Israel persists, not least because of the erroneous European perception of that country as being an American client (more American money is pumped into Egypt and that is not investment) and the idea that somehow American foreign policy is motivated entirely by its desire to protect Israel. Actually it is motivated by a desire to protect America and its allies.

Somewhere along the line, the Europeans lost sight of the fact that Israel is a democratic pro-western state with a free media and free politics – a rarity in that part of the world.

Of course, any advance in reducing prejudice is helpful, and this milestone comes just a week after the U.K. labor union AUT rescinded its discriminatory boycott of Israeli universities. But both are barely victories, and neither will slow the torrent of European anti-Semitism. Tom Gross says the French decision should have triggered "the long overdue reassessment of Europe's attitude toward Israel." Similarly, Helen hoped for "some sort of a discussion about the way Israel and its people seem to be exempt from all other considerations of fairness, decency and honesty." Neither happened--because the media essentially ignored the case. That's what turned a win into a loss.

More:

LGF -- belatedly -- is on the case after the Tom Gross piece is reprinted at Defend Democracy.

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¹ Interestingly, the ruling confirms that French defamation law applies to extremist Jews (Morin is Jewish) as much as to non-Jews.