PUBLISH AND PERISH
by Eric Walberg
Al-Arabiya
/2008/04/23/48765.html
April 23 2008
United Arab Emirates
A French civil servant was sacked in late March for publishing
what has been widely reported as a "violent anti-Israeli diatribe"
on the oumma.com website, a crime that was investigated by no less
than Interior Minister Michele Alliot- Marie. Bruno Guigue, deputy
prefect of Saintes, wrote that Israel was "the only state where
snipers shoot down little girls outside their school gates." The
author of several books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Guigue
also wrote of "Israeli jails where — thanks to religious law —
they stop torturing on the Sabbath."
"This is just the tip of the iceberg," Russian-Israeli author Israel
Shamir told Al-Ahram Weekly. "There are thousands of people sentenced
and imprisoned for similar ‘crimes’, mainly in Germany and Austria,
more than all the dissidents ever imprisoned in Soviet Russia. The
majority of these cases never reach public awareness."
That a lowly sous-prefet became the subject of the interior minister’s
personal intervention for stating the above is astounding, just
one example of the heavy hand of the Israeli lobby in Europe. Bruno
Guigue’s real "crime", it’s quite clear, was to criticise the state
of Israel.
Though not a "Holocaust denier", Guigue is suffering a similar fate as
his fellow anti-Zionists who are prosecuted under the anti-Holocaust
denial laws, currently on the books in 12 European countries. The most
notorious victims of these laws are writers David Irving and Ernst
Zundel, who were jailed for questioning the extent of the death toll
of Jews during WWII and the insistence that the Nazis had a plan to
kill all Jews (Roma, homosexuals and Communists are forgotten in the
brouhaha) as opposed to ethnically cleansing Europe.
Though an essential weapon in Israel’s political arsenal, according to
Shamir, these laws are not usually invoked; they are intended more as
a warning. Rather, writers and their publishers are sued under broader
libel laws, as was Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors,
and his French publisher Aden Brussels in 2004, when he was accused
of Holocaust revisionism and incitement to antisemitism. The Simon
Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Liaison Shimon Samuels
testified: "Finkelstein’s thesis is an extremist attack on Jews in
general, and American Jews in particular, accusing them of exploiting
the suffering of the Shoah as a ‘pretext for their crimes in the
context of the Middle-East conflict’. This thesis constitutes the
principal credo of modern antisemitism. He exploits his own Jewish
antecedents in order to attack as ‘racist’ specific Jewish leaders,
their organisations and the Jewish people. I am convinced that only a
judicial penalty will contain the damage wreaked by this particularly
offensive libel."
Samuels compared Finkelstein to Roger Garaudy, a respected Marxist
philosopher who himself spent three years in a concentration camp
in WWII, who was convicted in France under the Gayssot Law in 1996,
which he argued "restores the law, abolished after Vichy, that defines
questioning of official truth as a criminal offence. It restores
discrimination against anybody who does not submit to one-track thought
and to the cult of politically correct taboos imposed by American
leaders and their Western mercenaries, especially the Israelis."
The French edition of "Flowers of Galilee" by Shamir, "a book teeming
with incitement to racial hatred" according to Prosecutor Marc Levy,
was seized and actually burned, and his publisher Cherifi fined in
2005. At the request of the International League Against Racism and
Anti- Semitism (LICRA), French judges indicted him for arguing that,
"the very concept of Holocaust is a concept of Jewish superiority",
and for referring to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a
"political pamphlet". Ironically, the arrest warrant, if honoured,
would have meant deporting him from Israel to France "to be tried for
my stand against Jewish hegemony". He told the Weekly he considered
the conviction a compliment, putting him in a class with "the great
list of authors whose books were burned and banished in France, from
Voltaire to Baudelaire, from Nabokov to Joyce, from Wilhelm Reich to
Vladimir Lenin."
None of the above writers convicted in this witch hunt has ever
advocated physical violence against Jews. Shamir and Finkelstein are
Jews themselves, though, true, Shamir converted to Christianity. Shamir
told the Weekly that "where public criticism of Israel is absent
from public discourse, painting a swastika on a Jewish grave is not
an act of racism, but rather a protest against Israeli atrocities,"
and argues that the stranglehold of the Zionists in European society
actually incites anti-Jewish sentiment. He went on to argue that this
is precisely what they want, in order to complete the ethnic cleansing
of Europe that Hitler clearly intended. "If Jewish fears of racism
can be stoked, Jews will migrate to Israel, the Zionists’ goal."
Vichy thought crimes, book burning, ethnic cleansing — all recall
the policies of the very Nazis that the Zionists rail against.
But there are signs that the jig may be up. Even pro-Israeli writer
Deborah Lipstadt, despite her legal battle with British historian David
Irving, is against the Holocaust denial laws, as are most historians
and prominent writers such as Timothy Garton Ash, including Jews such
as Noam Chomsky.
In1996 Garaudy wrote: "In the flood of insults, nobody has contested
my analysis of the control of American politics by the Israeli lobby
and of the financing of the state of Israel as a proxy of American
politics in the Middle East." Yet this is now the core of a bestselling
American analysis of the Israeli lobby, and the outspoken belief of
US law professor Richard Falk, who as a UN advisor, compared Israeli
policies with regard to the Palestinians to the Nazi-Germany record
of collective punishment. Despite shrill condemnation by Israel, he
was nevertheless appointed in March to a six-year term as UN Human
Rights Committee investigator of Israeli actions in the Palestinian
territories.
For journalist Ash, the turning point was in 2006, when the French
national assembly approved a law making it a crime to deny that the
Turks committed genocide against the Armenians during the first
world war. He wrote in exasperation that perhaps the European
parliament should make it obligatory to describe as genocide the
American colonists’ treatment of Native Americans. "No one can
legislate historical truth. In so far as historical truth can
be established at all, it must be found by unfettered historical
research, with historians arguing over the evidence and the facts,
testing and disputing each other’s claims without fear of prosecution
or persecution."
After an appeal, Shamir launched a new French edition of his banned
book (which was always available on the Internet anyway) in 2006 and
published a French edition of essays "Our Lady of Sorrows" with much
more interest than if it had been simply ignored by the establishment.
The Holocaust denial law was repealed in Slovakia in 2005 and Spain
decriminalised Holocaust denial in October 2007. However, though
Holocaust fatigue appears to be setting in as Israel celebrates
its 60th anniversary of independence, Zionist cultural hegemony in
Europe is still strong. After decriminalisation of denial in Spain,
Spanish courts meted a long jail sentence to publisher Pedro Varela
of Barcelona and demanded the pulping of thousands of books, including
one of Shamir’s.
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