A Report on
Shamir’s Publisher Trial in France
by Maria Poumier
The Hearing of the Lawsuit against the Publisher, Al Qalam,
prosecuted on behalf of the LICRA, the 6 Sep 2005-09-11 re
Israel Shamir's book L'Autre Visage d'Israel (‘The Other Face of
Israel’, called Galilee Flowers in English) “a book teeming with
incitement to racial hatred”, according to the prosecuting
counsel, Marc Levy.
The magistrate of the 14th chamber of the Nanterre TGI (Tribunal
de grande instance), Mr Regrolèbe, dwelt at length on the
contents of the back cover of the book, on the ‘provocative
nature of the mock-up’, and on the content, assessing them to be
quite violent, ‘letting loose an emotional load’ capable of
leading eventual purchasers of the book to hatred, a book which
is available at FNAC (one of France’s largest booksellers),
where ‘they are not researchers from the CNRS’ coming to fill up
their cart. To mention the USA’s hegemonic power at the world
level seemed to him ‘very hard’, just like the comparison of
Israeli society with apartheid. And to read that ‘No, not all
Jews are wonderful’, or that they possess ‘terrifying power’; he
found that to be a ‘ somewhat warlike discourse’, though he
recognised that it was all presented as a counterweight to what
had been ‘a mainstream line, for all intents and purposes’. Then
he questioned the publisher to find out to what extent he
accepted responsibility for each and every sentence of the book,
what had motivated him to publish something so incongruous, and
if he considered that he had in front of him a ‘ dramatisation
intended to appeal to the reader’, a ‘ relatively spirited
discourse’, a ‘ rather black pessimism’, as we were used to say
in the past, when some people mentionned ‘the forces of evil’.
The publisher has bravely accepted responsibility. When the
author beckons a reader to combat the ideas of Mr Finkelraut,
this book ‘re-establishes the equilibrium’ amongst the analyses
of the conflict in the Middle East in a French business climate
where this type of book is rare. He doesn’t think there is
either incitement to hatred nor to violence, while recognising
that the book had been the subject of a previous publication in
France, and had been withdrawn from the market by the publisher.
The judge took the trouble to read several paragraphs from the
conclusion of the book ‘For a Separate Peace’, in order to
demonstrate that he took into account the author’s project, that
of working towards peace between the Israelis and the
Palestinians.
Mr Delcroix, counsel for the defence, claimed the partial
non-validity of the accusation, because for a number of the
incriminating expressions and extracts, the page references were
incorrect. Then he read passages where Shamir clearly
differentiates between an ‘ideology’, a ‘paradigm’, and the Jews
as individuals, where Judaism explicitly represents for Shamir a
personal ‘choice’. He reminded us that in the above, Shamir
admitted repeating the thesis of the Trotskyite Jew, Isaac
Deutscher.
Mr Levy, the prosecuting counsel, made it known that proceedings
have been started against Shamir himself. He described the book
as ‘outrageous’, and one which reveals an ignorance of French
laws. Then he read some passages which he interpreted as a
revival of the ‘Protocols of Zion’, a ‘sham produced by Tsar
Alexander III. Contrary to what often happens nowadays, it’s not
a question of anti-Semitism hiding behind anti-Zionism, but
exactly the opposite. Because the Jews want to dominate the
world, they command ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to mean that Jews have
the right to kill everybody, except fellow Jews, and that they
are predatory and covetous, it would be necessary to fight them,
according to Shamir. The anecdote about the Inuit ‘who broke the
kettle lest it should grow up into a locomotive capable of
crushing people’, seems to him a real call to hatred, hatred
towards a religion, a race, and an ethnic group. The judicial
precedent set by the Dieudonne case concluded that the latter
committed insult, not incitement to hatred; with Shamir it’s
different, as we have both direct and indirect incitement, by
means of certain tales, such as the story of Joseph being sold
into slavery by his own brothers, while everybody knows that it
was the Egyptians who enslaved the Hebrews, then the story of
one of the gospels being solemnly burned in Israel, or certain
other stories of extra-judicial assassinations. Then there is
the history of the Jews compared to that of the Brahmans, of
which Mr. Levy understands nothing, because he knows nothing
about the Brahmans (important, since it was Isaac Deutscher, the
Trotskyite Jew, who formulated the comparison, which Shamir
simply repeated). Whether Shamir and/or Delcroix invoke Marx or
other authorities, it’s completely ‘odious’, because what they
are defending goes back to Hitler. The damages and interest and
the withdrawal of the book are simply a beginning of
Reparations.
Mr Delcroix took up all these points reminding us that the
Protocols could not be imputed to Nicholas III, but might well
have been the work of the French novelist, Maurice Joly, a
fiction writer, amongst whose works there is something very much
alike, ‘A Dialogue in Hell’, and can thus be interpreted as a
type of science fiction novel, (like Orwell’s 1984), of which
Shamir clearly states that it does not specifically impute the
conspiracy to the Jews. He pointed out that Shamir simply
repeats Solzhenitsyn in his interpretation of the Protocols. He
then referred to three Jewish authors, other than Marx (The
Jewish Question), who develop the three central ideas for which
Shamir is criticised: ambition to dominate the world; the
connection between Jews and money; the religious injunction to
practise vengeance. However, none of these three is subject to
prosecution. This is followed by a passage from Deuteronomy (28,
1, 10, 12, and 13), another from Edouard Valdman, president of
the Association of Jewish Francophone Writers, and author of
‘The Jew and Money: For a Metaphysics of Money’, ed. Galilée,
Paris, 1994, and finally Sergio Quinzio, under official rabbinic
control, who explains why one must not forgive, according to
Judaism, in ‘Hebrew Roots of the Modern World’, ed. Balland,
coll. Metaphora, directed by Rabbi Marc-Alain Ouakuin, Paris
1992, pp 150-151. These ideas are so widespread as to be
commonplace. And ‘ the only country which admits to killing
people who haven’t been tried is Israel. Conclusion: when one
mentions these three characteristics in a positive way, one is
encouraged by the LICRA; in the opposite case must one be
condemned?
The judicial precedent set by the Houellebecq case confirms that
in secular France one has the right to criticise religions [Houellebecq
is a novelist who says Islam is the more stupid of all
religions]. Whether one thinks of Shamir’s analyses as
criticisms of an ideology or of a religion changes nothing,
insofar as one has the right to criticise Nazism, Marxism, etc.
The ‘divine exception’ doesn’t come into play here. The European
Convention on the Safeguarding of Human Rights confirms that it
sees itself as secular, and the freedom to criticise has no
connection with incitement of hatred of people on account of the
country they come from, the nationality or other characteristics
which they do not choose, but which are an accident of birth.
Delcroix did not hesitate to describe Shamir as a ‘saint’, who
has written heart-rending pages on thousand-year-old olive trees
uprooted , peasants whose houses are razed to the ground, and
finally, and springs from the times of Abraham dried up by
Caterpillar tanks; he thinks we are dealing with a ‘very great’
book, and that it would be lamentable if France were to treat
the publisher as the ex-USSR treated Solzhenitsyn. He pointed
out that the LICRA, by asking for € 50 000 in damages and
interest, and the withdrawal of the book (which would be a
supplementary penalty), would like to see a system of private
fines introduced in France.
The trial will continue in November 2, 2005
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