The Culture of Critique in France: A review of Anne Kling’s books on Jewish influence, Part 4
“At the Heart of Debates” on Censorship
The CRIF and the LICRA have assumed a leading role in undermining free speech in France. As then-CRIF President Richard Prasquier said in February 2010:
The Jews are at the heart of debates where limits on free expression are asked … . Internet is a multiplier of racism and anti-Semitism. … We want penal policy to be extended to ordinary racism on the Internet by making convictions known, improving surveillance, by helping the sentinels which are antiracist associations.[1]
During a meeting with the Justice Minister, Prasquier called for state surveillance to extend to “discussion boards, chat messages, emails, web sites and blogs,” an open assault on the right to privacy.[2] And he has argued that “free speech must be subordinated to the respect of the truth.”[3] (Whose truth? Certainly not the truth about how ethnically motivated organizations like his own have become very powerful in France and how they have used their power against the interests of the great mass of native French.)
The CRIF has also demanded more censorship at European-level censorship, calling on the EU to create “a European CSA” (in France, the CSA is the High Council for the Audiovisual, the highly censorious radio and television regulator) and for similar organizations to be created in all EU countries.[4] The French regulator has banned various Arab TV stations for allegedly supporting “terrorism” (e.g. Hezbollah, whereas support for the Israeli armed forces’ killing of civilians is fine).
All this is of course deeply shocking, indeed completely alien, to anyone attached to the Greek, Anglo-Saxon or French civic and philosophical traditions. Prasquier’s ancestors have lived for a millennium in the West, but he and his organization still simply do not understand the Western concepts of free speech, rational debate, scientific inquiry and privacy, and indeed they are agitating to impose decidedly Levantine notions of ethnically-motivated obscurantism and censorship. So much for our “Judeo-Christian values.”
Despite the guarantees in Articles 10 and 11 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which forms part of the Fifth Republic’s Constitution, free speech is poorly protected in France. The 1972 Pleven Act criminalizes speech which “provokes discrimination, hatred or violence” on a racial, ethnic or religious basis. The LICRA had pushed for this law, called for its extension as a global norm, and invited “victims of racial discrimination” to report to the police (not unlike informants in totalitarian regimes).
The law is of course incredibly vague in practice, implementation made arbitrary by whether organizations file suit (naturally well-funded, skillfully-lawyered and obnoxiously “pushy” ethnic lobbies do so a great deal) and the subjective opinion of the judge. Thus the FN was found guilty for saying on one occasion that there were “too many North Africans” in a particular city, and the LICRA managed to have a judge condemn the terms “Jewish international” and “cosmopolitan party.” Thus Jewish organizations have pushed for global legislation criminalizing free speech and have a large network of international organizations working towards these ends, but any mention of such international efforts is itself criminal.
The LICRA is well aware that their role and that of the media is that of a thought police, analogous to the role of the religious police in Saudi Arabia or the often Jewish political officers that performed the same function in the early Soviet Union. As the LICRA said in 1992 on the twentieth anniversary of the Pleven Act:
There is no antagonism between the media and associations fighting against racism. … Together, they track down, denounce before public opinion and the authorities, not without risks, not without mistakes, not without courage.[5]
These laws were strongly reinforced in 1990 with the Fabius-Gayssot Act banning “Holocaust denial,” which was designed to harass Jean-Marie Le Pen and the revisionist historian Robert Faurrisson. The law is named after the ethnically-Jewish Laurent Fabius, the then-president of the National Assembly who strongly supported the law, and the official draftsman of the bill, the Communist Jean-Claude Gayssot. The latter is still active in politics and recently told a public gathering:
I hate the Front National. It carries all that leads to rejection, to hatred, and ultimately violence. … I would have been a regicide in 1789, a Bolshevik, a Leninist, a Stalinist at Stalingrad. But today I am Jauressian [referring to Jean Jaurès, a pre-Bolshevik socialist], because I am for revolutionary evolution.[6]
Gayssot’s liberticidal, censorious legislation, now in force over all France, is then well in line with his totalitarian left-wing political tradition.
The Fabius-Gayssot Act has been frequently criticized even by mainstream pundits and Jews for its manifestly arbitrary character (although, pointedly, FN politician Bruno Gollnisch was sued and widely defamed by the media as a “Holocaust denier” for similarly opposing this law). The law makes questioning the conclusions of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal a criminal offense — even though this was an extremely politicized body which included Soviet judges and which had an enormous conflict of interest insofar as demonizing the National Socialists as much as possible justified the terrible war the Allies had waged, including millions of Western dead, the burning alive of tens of thousands of Germans, and the pure and simple ethnic cleansing of 9 million ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland, Silesia and East Prussia. (Indeed, we know the Soviets lied at the trial regarding the horrifying Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish military and police officers, blaming the slaughter on the Germans.)
In the 1990s, the LICRA expelled Abbé Pierre, the popular priest and philanthropist, from its honorary committee when he announced his continued friendship and support for the revisionist historian Roger Garaudy. Pierre declared: “The Church of France then intervened to silence me under the pressure of the press, inspired by an international Zionist lobby.”[7]
The LICRA’s support for this censorship was marked by intolerance and sophism. In suing Faurrisson under this censorship legislation, the LICRA claimed incoherently: “In making Mr. Faurisson appear before the courts, the LICRA is not violating freedom of speech. It is making it [such speech] responsible, which is altogether something else.”[8] Similarly the CRIF claimed in January 2010 during a visit it organized of 100 national and European parliamentarians to Auschwitz:
[The trip] was also an opportunity for them to learn about the new forms of racial and anti-Semitic hatred. More than ever, they pledged to fight these plagues by opposing them with the promotion of dialogue, of tolerance, the debate of ideas and the knowledge of history.[9]
Again, a bold lie given the CRIF’s preferred tactics of censorship and ostracism.
The Halimi affair: A case study of legal and cultural influence
In January 2006, the young French Jew Ilan Halimi was kidnapped and tortured to death over the course of three weeks by a gang of Blacks and Muslims. Jewish leaders claimed the murder was anti-Semitic, although it appears more the consequence of petty thuggery (the best of evidence they found were statements by perpetrators that they wanted to ransom Halimi because “a Jew is rich”).
The reaction was enormous. The killers’ ringleader, Youssouf Fofana, was prosecuted as a minor and received a life sentence in July 2009. His accomplices received lighter sentences of between six months and 18 years. This was not enough for the CRIF or Halimi’s lawyer, who demanded a public trial for reasons of “pedagogy.” Halimi’s mother cried: “The Shoah is starting again in 2009.”[10] Justice Minister Michèle Aliot-Marie followed suit and demanded the public prosecutor appeal the accomplices’ case. In February 2010, parliamentarians voted a quasi-retroactive law allowing public trials for adults (even if they were minors at the time of the crime). Aliot-Marie agreed with the CRIF, telling the organization that she wanted “trials to play a pedagogical role.”[11]
The trial was marked by rather inelegant crudeness. Halimi’s lawyer Francis Szpiner would call the advocate-general (representing the Justice Ministry) a “genetic traitor” and would call some of his fellow lawyers “bobo-leftist assholes.”[12] This misbehavior was reported to the head of the Paris bar, a certain Christian Charrière-Bournazel, who was none other than the vice-president of the LICRA and member of both the Berber and Jewish lawyers’ associations — a small networked world!
Some Jews feared the community’s leaders had been too aggressive. Maurice Szafran, owner of magazine Marianne, lamented: “In flexing its biceps, in using its strength, its influence, that fear it provokes, the political arm of Jews in France has put in place an unrelenting machine producing … anti-Semitism.”[13]
A film on the Halimi case, 24 jours, was released in 2014, directed by Alexandre Arcady (a Algerian-born Jew). The film was a box office bomb despite significant mainstream media promotion, having only 54,800 viewers in the first three days of its release. One journalist noted the film “has therefore not seemed to have found its audience, despite strong media coverage.”[14] In contrast, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 attracted 1 million people and the comedy Barbecue over 540,000 over the same period. A garden was named after Halimi in Paris’ twelfth arrondissement (with a plaque specifying he was killed “by anti-Semitism”).
Needless to say, while there are over 600 victims of murder every year in France, they typically do not lead to ministerial intervention, retroactive legislation or a feature film.
The Marginalization of the Front National
“Anti-racism” has formed an integral part of the ruling ideology of the West since the National Socialist defeat of 1945 and the founding of the United Nations. This has been imposed from the top-down against European peoples, who naturally have ethnocentric reflexes even if these are less developed than other peoples, in a necessarily undemocratic manner, despite our elites’ lip service to democracy. Postwar Afro-Muslim immigration to France and Britain, like desegregation and forced busing in order to integrate schools in America, was and is deeply unpopular with large segments of public opinion, leading as it did to higher crime, White flight and irreversible cultural-demographic change. According to a 1985 poll, 78% of French people said immigrants were racist against the French, 68% said that if nothing were done France would lose its national identity, 66% said immigrants were not “a chance for France” (the immigrationist slogan), 65% said immigrants contributed to crime, and 56% said there would be difficulties in integrating Arabs.[15]
This ethnocentric energy and sentiment was just waiting to be tapped politically. Thus, like Enoch Powell in Great Britain or George Wallace in America, Jean-Marie Le Pen emerged and became enormously popular with a significant portion of the public. And, again as in Britain and America, elites had to massively organize to marginalize this popular politician and neutralize this ethnocentrism. Thus, a party consistently representing 10–25% of voters has for over three decades been systematically excluded from normal political alliances or any governmental positions, all in the name of “democracy.” Of course, as Kling notes, “a non-negligible part of the population finds itself deprived of national representation and of any participation in public life, which is the exact opposite of democracy.”[16] Kling perceptively notes on the limitations of Western democracy:
Because to be elected, one must belong to a system which does not hesitate to manipulate electoral laws to ensure its total hegemony and to fire its artillery cannons [orgues de Staline] if necessary: media, judiciary, public education, etc. And when one belongs to this system, it is impossible to get off the rails, except by risking excommunication, and therefore the end of one’s political career.[17]
Jewish groups have played an explicit leading role in the marginalization of the Front National since that party reached national prominence in the 1980s. At the time, center-right opposition leader Jacques Chirac promised to the B’nai B’rith, the organization of Jewish freemasonry, that he would never work with the FN, even though electoral alliances or a coalition government with the party would have made great political sense in beating the ruling Socialist Party. Le Monde reported in March 1986, just after the parliamentary elections which saw the FN win 35 seats, that the B’nai B’rith “reminds the representatives of these [center-right] parties of the pledges they undertook, during B’nai B’rith fora, before the community, declarations restated after the announcement of the vote results, to in no case ally themselves with the Front National.”[18]
In 1988, the LICRA’s leadership concluded that the organization should work to “restore the taboos surrounding the themes of the Front National,” meaning an explicit objective of shutting down public discussion on immigration, national identity, Islam, etc.[19] In 1995, the LICRA called for the pure and simple outlawing of the FN despite, or because of, its millions of supporters. The League argued in 1997: “‘No freedom for the enemies of freedom,’ as Saint-Just said,” referring to one of the leaders of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.[20]
Le Pen’s demonization has been instense. Marie Mendès-France, widow of the former Jewish prime minister Pierre Mendès-France, said in the 1980s: “We are currently reliving the period of 1938. Let us be careful, otherwise we will see the fascism again.”[21] Sometimes this demonization has been quasi-mystical. In November 1995, the LICRA’s published an analysis by Ashkenazi psychoanalyst and professor Gérard Miller in November 1995 arguing:
Psychoanalysis shows this: There is an un-nameable part in all of us. Le Pen embodies this. Hence the fascination which he attracts, and well beyond his own supporters. He personifies “The Thing” (“Das Ding,” as Freud said) which is in them. Even if it horrifies them.
Because that is the un-nameable, unsatiated monster in each belly, that they did not think was there, precisely where Le Pen found it.[22]
So it has rolled on for decades. By April 21, 2002 — the famous day on which Le Pen received enough votes to go the second round of the presidential elections, eliminating the Socialist candidate to face off against Chirac — there was a widespread media-political consensus that the FN and its leader were Satanic. Indeed, this was a traumatic experience for the Left — “how could this happen?” — and the media led an incredibly one-sided campaign against the Front National. Chirac was elected with the almost-Stalinist tally of 82.2% of the vote.
Bernard-Henri Lévy rose to the occasion with his trademark hyper-ethnocentric flourish:
We went … to the towns run by the FN [i.e. with FN mayors], we went to Vitrolles, Marignane, Orange, it’s the reign of private police, of parallel militias, the reign of suspicious deaths, of protestors who commit suicide with a bullet in the back as on May 1, 1995 in Paris, the FN, we have to repeat it, is more violence, more insecurity, more civil war and not less.[23]
Le Pen, whatever his very real qualities and flaws, is quite obviously not a devil. If one surveys his career, one can say he is a French nationalist, an adventurer willing to risk his life repeatedly for his country and political ideals (as military volunteer, victim of terrorist attacks, street brawler …), and a politician who wanted to occupy the “right-of-the-center-right” electoral market share. He was not particularly racist (his second-in-command, Bruno Gollnisch, has a Japanese wife and Eurasian children), nor particularly anti-Semitic. But he refused to submit to the leftist dogmas which have become mandatory since the 1960s, and, as a free man, he enjoyed the occasional politically incorrect joke. These facts alone made him a demon as far as the LICRA/CRIF and French media-political class were concerned. As Lionel Jospin himself, the 2002 Socialist candidate, later admitted:
During all the years under Mitterrand we had never faced a fascist threat and so any ‘anti-fascism’ was merely theater. We faced a party, the Front National, which was a far-right party, a populist party as well in its way. But we were never in a situation of facing a fascist threat and not even of a fascist party.[24]
As in the rest of Kling’s narrative, it is difficult to identify the exact impact of Jewish groups on this or that specific policy or measure, there being numerous factors at work. But there is little doubt this impact was considerable. In September 1995, the head of the center-left Nouvel Observateur magazine Jean Daniel (né Bensaid, himself Jewish) argued these groups were decisive in preventing the FN from entering a coalition government:
Must we not put among the accomplishments of the antiracist movements and even of their demonization of the Front National, the fact that a guilt-ridden [center-]right, having become moral and republican in this respect, has broken with the far-right? Without the rupture thus obtained, would we not today have Lepenist ministers in a government which would have come to power thanks to their votes?[25]
Given that similar right-wing nationalist parties succeeded in participating in governments in Italy and Austria, and in tacitly supporting center-right governments in the Netherlands and Denmark (where Jewish groups are much weaker), this seems highly plausible.
This role in persecuting the FN has also worried some Jews, who fear stoking anti-Semitism. Bernard Cahen, head of a Jewish lawyers’ group (Rassemblement des avocats juifs de France) complained to a Jewish publication in 1989: “The LICRA is wrong in wanting to have Le Pen sentenced every day. In the long run, people will end up thinking that the courts are run by the Jews, even though this is far from the case.”[26]
[1]Kling, Le CRIF, 21.
[2]Ibid.
[3]Ibid.
[4]Ibid., 247.
[5]Kling, La France LICRAtisée, 143.
[6]L’Indépendant, “Jean-Claude Gayssot à Carcassonne : ‘Je hais le Front national !’,” March 15, 2015. http://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr/Jean-Claude-Gayssot-a-de-la-haine-envers-la-haine-31702.html
[7]Kling, La France LICRAtisée, 121.
[8]Ibid., 116.
[9]Kling, Le CRIF, 174.
[10]Ibid., 235.
[11]Ibid., 238.
[12]Ibid., 236.
[13]Ibid., 238.
[14]“‘24 jours’: le film sur l’affaire Halimi fait un flop,” Metronews, May 5, 2014.
[15]Kling, La France LICRAtisée, 206.
[16]Ibid., 14.
[17]Ibid., 248
[18]Ibid., 216.
[19]Ibid., 212.
[20]Ibid., 218.
[21]Ibid., 203.
[22]Ibid., 217.
[23]Lévy is referring, confusedly, to individual cases where left-wing or minority activists were killed by far-rightists, even though these cases had no link to the FN. Ibid., 222.
[24] Statements made on radio France-Culture on September 29, 2007.
[25]Kling, La France LICRAtisée, 213.
[26] Ibid., 215.
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