Le Monde's jihad
Published in: Melanie's Blog
Since the intensification of the Palestinian jihad five years ago, Britain and Europe have been convulsed by an eruption of virulent anti-Jewish hatred based on systematic lies, libels and demonisation directed at Israel by the media and intelligentsia.
Still reading? Well done. Others will no doubt already have thrown this article across the room in disgust. For conventional wisdom has it that there has been no upsurge of anti-Jewish hatred, only legitimate attacks on Israel which are being labelled anti-Jewish prejudice by those who are either suffering from advanced paranoia or are Zionist zealots attempting to sanitise the crimes of Ariel Sharon.
Now, however, agreement that hatred of Jews is indeed umbilically linked to the current attack upon Israel has emerged from a most unlikely quarter. In France, everyday violence and intimidation has left French Jews in a state of siege.
Yet two weeks ago, the French appeal court in Versailles ruled that in a comment piece published by Le Monde in 2002 entitled 'Israel-Palestine: The Cancer,' the paper was guilty of 'racial defamation 'against the Jewish people. In other words, under cover of an attack upon Israel in language which is replicated every week in Britain and Europe, the most prestigious newspaper in France had been whipping up hatred of the Jews.
The appeal court ruled that the article, written by a well-known sociologist, a university lecturer and a member of the European Parliament, contained comments that 'targeted a whole nation, or a religious group in its quasi-globality'.
The article was the usual farrago of untruths, libels and distortions about Israel. It described it as 'oppressing and asphyxiating the Palestinian population', repeated the lie about the massacre of Jenin that never was, and claimed that Israel was imposing apartheid beneath the shroud of the Holocaust.
In particular, the court singled out two paragraphs which explicitly defamed the Jewish people as a whole:
'It is hard to imagine that a nation of fugitives born of a people who have been subjected to the longest persecution in the history of humanity
