Thursday, July 24, 2014

Vive la France!

French Prime Minister Denounces Anti-Zionism as Anti-Semitism
"Against the backdrop of large anti-Semitic riots in Paris, and the murder of four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels by a French Muslim killer (Emphasis mine), Mehdi Nemmouche, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls made a resoundingly firm connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that other world leaders—and many Jews—are afraid to make. As is his style, he went straight to the point: “Anti-semitism, this old European disease,” he said in a speech, has taken “a new form. It spreads on the Internet, in our popular neighborhoods, with a youth that has lost its points of reference, has no conscience of history, and who hides itself behind a fake anti-Zionism.”

The occasion was the 72th anniversary of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup—the arrest of 13.000 Jews in Paris, by the French police under German authorities during World War II on the 16th and 17th of July, 1942. Valls’ strong, clear words are a breakthrough that separates him from the general complacency on the subject among most European politicians—and separates France from its growing reputation as a beacon of hate.

The Prime Minister justified his decision to forbid last Saturday’s “anti-israeli” demonstration by stating that the recent acts of violence against Jews “justify the choice to forbid,” and not the other way around, as so many critics had claimed. And without naming Dieudonné, the minister attacked the rancid French performer when he pleaded that “the historical reality of the Shoah should not be denied, or diminished.(…) To laugh at the Shoah is to insult the dead.”

Before those words, Valls reminded his countrymen of the responsibility of the French state, under Pétain’s government, for the fate of France’s Jews during the fatal years of the Occupation. “The honor of a Nation is to recognize what once was his disgrace.” he said hinting at France’s long-time denial of its responsibility during the Holocaust. “The disgrace of France is to have been a accomplice of the occupier when it sent to a sure death women, men and children, because they were Jews.” He also praised the (right wing) ex-president Jacques Chirac for being the first to officially recognize France’s responsibility in his address at the 1995 commemoration. That day, said Valls, Chirac “had the courage to free us from ourselves.”

It was a strong speech and, given the context, it took real courage for Valls to stand up and say words that other European politicians have been too cowardly to speak. Friends of France who have been nauseated by the growing wave of violence against Jews, and appalled by the even more common mainstreaming of anti-Zionism as the socially and intellectually acceptable mask for the crude anti-Semitism of the streets, can take heart from Valls’ words."

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