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The Occidental Observer
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
“At the Heart of Debates” on Censorship
The CRIF and the LICRA have taken on 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 the limits of
free expression are asked … . Internet is a multiplier of racism and
anti-Semitism. … We want penal policy to be extended to ordinary racism
on 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.”
[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 the European level,
calling on the European Union 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 push for global legislation criminalizing
free speech and have a large network of international organizations, but
any mention of such international efforts is itself criminal.
The LICRA is well aware that their role and that of the media is to
be police though, 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 Le Pen and
the revisionist historian Robert Faurrisson. The law is named after the
ethnically-Jewish Laurent Fabius, then-president of the National
Assembly, who strongly supported the law. The official draftsman of the
bill, the Communist Jean-Claude Gayssot, who is still active in
politics, 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 [a reformist as opposed to a revolutionary 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 committed 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 got light 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 recommencing 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 behavior. 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 the
Marianne
newspaper, 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 Jew born in Algeria). 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 in order to 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 around 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) and not 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
the 2002 Socialist candidate himself, Lionel Jospin, 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 coe 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]
Notes:
[1]Kling,
Le CRIF, 21.
[2]Ibid.
[3]Ibid.
[4]Ibid., 247.
[5]Kling,
La France LICRAtisée, 143.
[6]“Jauressian” refers to Jean-Jaurès, a pre-Bolshevik French socialist leader.
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.
http://www.metronews.fr/culture/24-jours-le-film-sur-l-affaire-halimi-fait-un-flop/mnee!C8ZhvgbnSCCeE/
[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.
http://www.fdesouche.com/295-jospin-sur-les-socialistes-%C2%AB-l%E2%80%99antifascime-n%E2%80%99etait-que-du-theatre-%C2%BB
[25]Kling,
La France LICRAtisée, 213.
[26] Ibid., 215.
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