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“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). Read more