Gaza on the Brink
When the fear is gone.
Evelyn Gordon 2017-06-02
If you ask Palestinians in either Gaza or the West Bank who’s responsible for their suffering, most would probably say Israel. But what would they say if they were safely overseas and no longer needed to fear their own governments? That’s not a question reporters, diplomats, or nongovernmental organizations usually bother asking. We now have an answer to it, at least with regard to Palestinians who fled Gaza. They left not because of anything Israel did, but because of persecution by Gaza’s Hamas-run government
Their testimony was brought by Haaretz reporter Zvi Bar’el, who went to Greece in search of Syrian refugees but accidentally stumbled instead on Palestinians from Gaza–thousands of them, by their own count. One Gazan refugee estimated there were about 6,000 Palestinians from Gaza in Athens alone. The Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights says the real figure is probably higher.
And that’s just those who have been able to leave. Many would like to but are stuck in Gaza because the border crossing to Egypt is open only a few days per month. Even when it’s open, only a few hundred people per day can leave. Osama, one of the Palestinians Bar’el interviewed, said that when he left Gaza (via a cross-border smuggling tunnel) over 25,000 people were on the waiting list to leave via the official border crossing.
And why have so many Gazans fled or tried to flee? The Palestinians Bar’el met had a uniform answer: Hamas. Not a single one of them even mentioned Israel in their responses.
“There’s a Palestinian doctor here who came with his wife and three children,” Osama told Bar’el. “Imagine, a doctor, a respectable person with a profession, has to flee Gaza only because he was suspected of disloyalty to Hamas.”
Ayman, who has been listening to the conversation in silence, joins in. “I’m a cartoonist, an artist, and I’ve had exhibitions in Gaza. Hamas didn’t like my cartoons and they forbade me to draw, and they also arrested me. After I spent time in a Hamas prison I decided to escape,” he says.
“They tied my hands and feet, they beat me, and after I was injured from the blows they transferred me to a hospital where I was for more than a month. In the meantime they also arrested my brother to get information out of him about me.”
Naji, another Gazan, showed Bar’el a deep scar on his leg that he said came from being tortured in a Hamas prison.
“One day I even tried to commit suicide. I slammed my head hard against a windowpane and put my neck up against the broken glass. But they pulled me back and I wasn’t successful,” he says, pointing to an ugly scar on his neck. “I’m telling you, Gaza is on the brink of civil war and no one knows what’s happening there. No one is interested.”
There are numerous UN agencies ostensibly devoted exclusively to helping the Palestinians, while human rights groups allocate disproportionate attention to this issue. In both cases, their only real interest in Palestinian suffering is finding some way to blame Israel for it. They couldn’t care less about protecting Palestinians from the abuses of their own government. That’s why they keep issuing reports accusing Israel of being the “key cause” of Palestinian suffering, as one UN agency put it this week, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Yet their blatant bias often obscures a larger problem that affects even well-meaning journalists, NGOs, diplomats and almost everyone else involved in telling the world about what’s happening in the West Bank and Gaza–a failure to understand the way fear affects what people say in nondemocratic societies. For Palestinians, blaming anyone other than Israel for their problems risks serious repercussions from either their own governments or vigilante groups affiliated with both governments. And that’s true not just in Hamas-run Gaza, as people like Ayman and Naji discovered to their sorrow, but also in the Fatah-run West Bank, where journalists, businessmen, and Palestinian security officers have all suffered arrest and financial sanctions for daring to criticize the Palestinian Authority or its president, Mahmoud Abbas. Blaming Israel is always the safest solution, even in cases where it’s patently untrue.
Responsible journalists, NGOs, and diplomats would take this fear factor into account and try to dig a little deeper to try to get at the truth. They would also recognize that the very fact that Israel is the one party no Palestinian fears to criticize is in itself a potent refutation of Palestinian claims that Israel is an oppressive regime. People who truly live under an oppressive regime are generally afraid to go on record criticizing it.
Instead, these opinion shapers take everything they hear from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza at face value and parrot it uncritically. That does nothing to better the Palestinians’ lot, but a great deal to bolster the Palestinians’ own repressive governments by absolving them of all scrutiny and pressure to reform.
The testimony of these Gazan refugees in Greece provides a rare opportunity to hear what Palestinians say when they’re out of reach of their own repressive governments and can speak freely. It thereby offers a glimpse at the true source of much Palestinian suffering – and a rebuke to all the journalists, diplomats, and NGOs who have collaborated with both Palestinian governments to hide this truth from the world.
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Gaza on the Brink
Must-Reads from Magazine
Swelling the Enemy’s Ranks
How to make enemies and alienate others.
Noah Rothman 2017-07-07
On Thursday, the progressive left treated itself to an orgiastic display of self-destruction. In the name of opposing all that Donald Trump deigns to grace with his favor, American progressives found themselves attacking Bill Clinton’s brand of centrist politics, defending woefully misunderstood calls for “jihad,” and dismissing unqualified praise for the West as racially suspect.
Democrats lashed out at former Clinton Strategist Mark Penn on Thursday for recommending that the Democratic Party rediscover its respect for Christians and working-class Trump voters and embrace fiscal conservatism. The nearly unanimous response from the activist left was to dismiss this sage advice. “The administration that he served in locked up more black, African-American men than those enslaved in 1850,” said former Bernie Sanders campaign staffer Tezlyn Figar. Nostalgia for the 1990s may be politically potent, but it is also very un-woke.
When members of the left weren’t attacking one of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures, they were defending the word “jihad” and its champion, Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour. In a speech to the Islamic Society of North America over the weekend, the Muslim liberal activist said it is her hope “that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad….we stand up to those who oppress our communities.” Sarsour defined the term as “a word of truth in front of a tyrant ruler or leader,” though any sentient being knows that her interpretation is subject to much debate in the Muslim world. She added that it is her hope that the Muslim community would be “perpetually outraged” and that their first priority should not be to “assimilate” or “please any other people and authority.”
Naturally, the story of a Muslim activist who’s embraced by mainstream Democratic outfits while calling for a form of “jihad” against the president wasn’t treated as the real story. The Republican reaction to the story was the story. “Muslim activist Linda Sarsour’s reference to ‘jihad’ draws conservative wrath,” read the Washington Post’s headline. “Right-Wing Outlets Read Violence into Sarsour’s Anti-Trump ‘Jihad,’” declared the Daily Beast. “The people disagreeing with @lsarsour clearly don’t understand what Jihad means,” wrote Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, who was quoted favorably in Time magazine. Of course, Sarsour was not inciting violence, but her liberal allies now appear committed to explaining why this is not a pipe.
Among Thursday’s tiresome outrages, perhaps none was more destructive to the progressive left’s general allure than the liberal reaction to Donald Trump’s speech in Poland. It was, perhaps, the most classically liberal and historically erudite speech that Donald Trump has ever made. It praised Western values, heritage, and achievement without qualification. For the left, however, adoration for the West undiluted by apologetics for racism, bigotry, and colonial subjugation is not just a display of ignorance. It might as well be an endorsement of those evils.
It wasn’t just Trump’s praise for Western achievement that was deemed a display of subtle racism, although it did not escape that censure from the left’s cultural arbiters. It was also his warnings about the threats facing the West: “We must work together to confront forces,” Trump said, “that threaten over time to undermine these values and erase bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that make us who we are.” Trump added: “Do we have the desire and courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
Because this speech was drafted by anti-immigration activist Stephen Miller, among others, these lines certainly referred not just to threats from without, such as those presented by a revanchist Russia and Islamist radicalism, but also those within, such as the influx of refugees from the Muslim world into Europe. That paranoia can be toxic, and it merits skepticism. But praising the West, the Enlightenment to which it gave birth, and the standards of prosperity, tolerance, and civilization that typify it is not insidious in the slightest. To suggest otherwise is histrionic. Guess how the progressive left reacted to Trump’s speech?
“The West is not an ideological or economic term,” wrote the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “The West is a racial and religious term.” “The ‘south’ and ‘east’ only threaten the West’s ‘survival’ if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders,” Beinart insisted. “They only threaten the West’s ‘survival’ if by ‘West’ you mean white, Christian hegemony.” This is true only if we accept Beinart’s premise; that the West is only a racial and religious affiliation and not a set of political traditions. If we see the West as a champion of individual liberty, freedom of worship, reason and rationality, and republican governance—not to mention a bulwark against the forces of reaction, totalitarianism, and theocracy—Beinart’s definition is both narrow and incoherent.
That incoherence didn’t stop the progressive left from joining him. “President Donald Trump issued a battle cry—for ‘family, for freedom, for country, and for God,’” wrote Vox.com’s Sarah Wildman, “in a speech that often resorted to rhetorical conceits typically used by the European and American alt-right.” “Imagine being a political writer in this moment and being utterly unable to identify clear white nationalist dog whistles,” wrote CBS News political analyst and Slate correspondent Jamelle Bouie. “[Y]ou don’t have to have a deep familiarity with the tropes of white supremacy to see this s*** for what it clearly is.”
Attacking centrist politics, criticizing those who react negatively to the liberal rejection of assimilation and endorsement of “jihad,” and declaring that praise for the West is a form of veiled racism; these are odd ways to go about making friends and allies. The progressive wing of the party appears determined to swell the ranks of their opposition, if only by defining their opposition in absurdly broad terms. If the progressive left was actively trying to alienate its potential supporters and marginalize itself, what would it do differently?
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The Democratic Party’s New Identity Crisis
Is the Trump era a blip or a realignment?
Noah Rothman 2017-07-06
Political media has a bias toward covering the powerful and, at the moment, Democrats are anything but powerful. The intramural debate over how Democrats should navigate the post-Obama environment is, however, far livelier than the press’s utter indifference would suggest.
The partisan liberals engaged in deliberations over how the Democratic Party will evolve in the age of Trump have settled into two camps: those who think the party has to change and those who don’t. This observation can only be made from the proper remove, it seems. Both the progressive wing and its triangulating centrists are dead certain that the other guy is in full control of the party they call home.
In the opinion pages of the New York Times, Democratic strategist Mark Penn and Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein offer up a rallying cry for those in the “change” camp. They argue that the party must adapt to a political environment in which their voters are being poached by a GOP that is no longer a monolithically conservative party. The authors claim that this mission will only succeed if Democrats abandon the hardline progressivism that typified the party in the Obama years.
Their argument takes aim at identity liberalism and the leftist activists who dominate the caucus process. They contend that Democrats need to combat campus speech policing, shun free trade, demonstrate renewed respect for Christians, and embrace fiscal responsibility over profligacy. Only by resurrecting the spirit of the Democratic Leadership Council can Democrats wash the stink off their party’s brand.
This salvo was aimed squarely at modern liberal orthodoxy, and progressivism’s patriarchs recognize heresy when they see it. “Papa needs a new contract!” mocked MSNBC host Joy Reid. “Rolling out Mark Penn to voice the last dying screeches of the Clintonite center-left is fitting,” said The Young Turks correspondent Mark Tracey. “Thank you, Mark Penn, for giving liberals [and] leftists something to unite over,” wrote liberal author Jill Filipovic. “That Dems should do none of this.”
It is hardly surprising that progressives would resist a total repudiation of the progressive program. They believe themselves to be the perpetual opposition within a party that already thinks like Penn and Stein suggest it should. “The current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure,” declared Bernie Sanders. The irony of this coming from the Democratic Party’s chief attraction—a septuagenarian who pointedly refuses to call himself a Democrat—is under-appreciated.
Sanders’s model appeals to what the New York Times dubbed the party’s “ascendant militant wing.” That is not an agenda for the middle of the country but for the coasts and urban enclaves, which can theoretically overwhelm the GOP’s suburban vote. That agenda can be summed up in one word: spending. Universal, state-funded health care; free college tuition; tax “speculation” on Wall Street; expand access to Social Security; cure diseases like HIV/AIDS; and “climate justice toward a sustainable economy,” whatever that means.
This tension between the party’s two halves has been out in the open for months. It led to real and sustained conflict in battles ranging from the fight over the next chair of the Democratic National Committee to special election primaries. It was evident in the party’s efforts to mimic the GOP, from former Governor Steve Beshear’s folksy response to Donald Trump’s address to Congress to Democrats unprecedented and reflexive hostility toward even innocuous Trump appointments.
Following a dispiriting loss in Georgia, Democratic elected officials briefly resolved to do something—anything—to demonstrate that their party was receptive to the electorates’ repeated votes of no confidence. That sentiment was short lived. The Democratic Party’s approach to the Trump environment was perhaps best summarized by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s latest attempt at a slogan: “I mean, have you seen the other guys?”
America’s two political parties have endured feast and famine before and emerged stronger for it. The Democrats present identity crisis isn’t exactly unknown territory, but that should be cold comfort.
In October of 1982, the Democratic Party appeared hollow and its program stale. “Of a sudden,” wrote Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1980, “the GOP has become the party of ideas.” That year, the GOP won the White House, 34 seats in the House, and 12 in the Senate. With a month to go before Reagan’s first midterm and despite a stalled economic recovery and mounting unemployment, Democrats were still anxious about their failure to meet the moment.
“We’re still the party of Tip O’Neill and Jimmy Carter,” said the depressed Democratic consultant Joe Rothstein. Washington Post editor Robert Kaiser observed that the Democratic Party, once the party of the little guy, had become captured by lawyers, corporatists, and “activist minorities.” Democrats rebounded some in November of that year, but they did not fully recover in Congress until Reagan’s second midterm election.
The early 1980s represented a period of political realignment, but that was only obvious in retrospect. And Democrats did eventually meet that moment, but it took a decade and the emergence of a Southern, centrist governor to do it.
Were the GOP’s victories in the Obama years merely a reaction to his presidency, or has the earth shifted under Democratic feet? Democrats haven’t even asked the question. Perhaps they don’t want to know the answer.
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On Russia: Trump vs. Trump
Only one Trump is the real Trump.
Noah Rothman 2017-07-06
What is more revealing of a president? His extemporaneous and unguarded thoughts or his vetted, polished statements? Donald Trump, the man and his administration, must be taken whole. When it comes to America’s relationship with Russia, this is an administration devoted to sending dangerously mixed signals.
On Thursday, in a speech in Poland delivered ahead of the G20 summit, Trump cast himself as the latest in a line of American presidents who dedicated themselves to the defense of liberty. The president touted the West’s virtuous intellectual and political traditions, and he did so without any of the self-conscious apologetics that Western elites seem to think marks a man of intellect. “We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives,” the president declared. He quoted Pope John Paul II’s 1979 address to the Polish people who, when laboring under the stifling Marxist secularism, observed that the people of America and Europe “still cry out, ‘We want God.’”
Not only did Trump defend the Western world’s intellectual heritage, he championed its right to defend itself against the chief threat to its interests in Europe: Russia. Trump demanded that Moscow put a halt to “destabilizing activities” in Ukraine and end its support for “hostile regimes,” including those in Iran and Syria. He explicitly stated his intention to honor the Atlantic Alliance’s mutual defense provisions—something he has so far been reluctant to do. Moreover, Trump drew a parallel to the threats Russia poses to Europe today—and Poland specifically—and those they presented in the past under the former Soviet Union. The Soviets, he noted, “tried to destroy this nation forever by shattering its will to survive.”
The Trump administration has backed this rhetoric up with action. Earlier this week, Trump agreed to provide Warsaw with sophisticated anti-missile batteries—reaffirming a commitment made to Poland and the Czech Republic by George W. Bush. Contrary to the protestations of the Obama administration that put a halt to that agreement, the reversal of that commitment was seen both in Central Europe and Moscow as deference to the Russian claim that ABM technology was destabilizing. The Trump administration has also begun shipments of liquid natural gas to Poland, the first of which arrived last month. This reduces Europe’s compromising dependence on Russian energy imports.
These policies dovetail with the Trump administration’s refusal to reduce the burden of Obama-era sanctions on Russia until Moscow withdraws its forces from the territory it occupies in Ukraine. If the Trump administration was expected to go soft on Russia, it has not lived up to its expectations.
This Donald Trump is, however, at war with another Donald Trump—the Donald Trump who speaks from the heart and without a script. That Donald Trump is conspicuously deferential toward Moscow and well-versed on Russian interests. If President Trump is poised to defend the West against the threats it faces from traditional adversaries like those in the Kremlin, he will only say so when those words are the words on the teleprompter.
Before his speech on Thursday, Donald Trump was asked why he is so reluctant to call out Moscow for its efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election even though he believes those hacks of private American political institutions were Russian in origin. “I think it was Russia, and it could have been other people in other countries,” Trump said. He conceded that several of America’s intelligence agencies—the FBI, CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—concluded that the Russian government orchestrated an influence campaign, including cyber espionage operations, designed to influence the course of American political events. And while he said the history of the run-up to the Iraq War ensured that everyone should be cautious about intelligence estimates, Trump proceeded to scold his predecessor for failing to respond forcefully to Russian meddling.
In Trump’s view, Russia is responsible for an attack on American sovereignty, his predecessor “choked” when confronted with this assault, and he is prepared to ratify that choke as official American policy by declining to rectify what he regards as Obama’s mistake. Good luck squaring that circular logic.
There is a charitable line of argument that suggests Trump is averse to attacking Russia for meddling in the 2016 election because it undermines his legitimacy as president. That line does not, however, explain why the president was so observant of Russian interests and disinclined to criticize Vladimir Putin over the course of the 2016 campaign.
In the summer of last year, Trump told the New York Times that he may not respond to an attack by Russia on a NATO ally in the Baltics, such as Estonia, because those countries “aren’t paying their bills.” Never mind that Estonia was one of only five NATO allies that did meet the alliance’s defense-spending requirements. Trump endorsed Russia’s military intervention in Syria as an operation aimed at terrorist elements like ISIS, even though Russia spent most of its energies attacking U.S. supported anti-Assad rebels and neutralizing British and American covert facilities.
When confronted by the fact that Putin presides over a regime in which journalists and opposition figures have a habit of dying violent deaths, Trump replied as a candidate: “I think our country does plenty of killing.” He reprised the line as the president. “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers,” he told Fox News in February. “What, you think our country is so innocent?” As a candidate, Trump surrounded himself with figures with ties to pro-Putin elements in Moscow. That indiscretion has led to a series of congressional and Justice Department investigations into that campaign, which saps this administration of authority.
These two Donald Trumps are reconcilable, but only with the understanding that the real Donald Trump is the guy without a Teleprompter in front of him. It’s only modestly reassuring that the administration he runs does not appear to share his persuasion. Trump’s speechwriters and political appointees aren’t the president. When the crisis comes, it will be the true Donald Trump who determines the course of history.
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Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz: The Threat to Free Speech
From the July/August COMMENTARY symposium.
Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz 2017-07-06
The following is an excerpt from COMMENTARY’s symposium on the threat to free speech:
Speech is under threat on American campuses as never before. Censorship in various forms is on the rise. And this year, the threat to free speech on campus took an even darker turn, toward actual violence. The prospect of Milo Yiannopoulos speaking at Berkeley provoked riots that caused more than $100,000 worth of property damage on the campus. The prospect of Charles Murray speaking at Middlebury led to a riot that put a liberal professor in the hospital with a concussion. Ann Coulter’s speech at Berkeley was cancelled after the university determined that none of the appropriate venues could be protected from “known security threats” on the date in question.
The free-speech crisis on campus is caused, at least in part, by a more insidious campus pathology: the almost complete lack of intellectual diversity on elite university faculties. At Yale, for example, the number of registered Republicans in the economics department is zero; in the psychology department, there is one. Overall, there are 4,410 faculty members at Yale, and the total number of those who donated to a Republican candidate during the 2016 primaries was three.
So when today’s students purport to feel “unsafe” at the mere prospect of a conservative speaker on campus, it may be easy to mock them as “delicate snowflakes,” but in one sense, their reaction is understandable: If students are shocked at the prospect of a Republican behind a university podium, perhaps it is because many of them have never before laid eyes on one.
To see the connection between free speech and intellectual diversity, consider the recent commencement speech of Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust:
Universities must be places open to the kind of debate that can change ideas….Silencing ideas or basking in intellectual orthodoxy independent of facts and evidence impedes our access to new and better ideas, and it inhibits a full and considered rejection of bad ones. . . . We must work to ensure that universities do not become bubbles isolated from the concerns and discourse of the society that surrounds them. Universities must model a commitment to the notion that truth cannot simply be claimed, but must be established—established through reasoned argument, assessment, and even sometimes uncomfortable challenges that provide the foundation for truth.
Faust is exactly right. But, alas, her commencement audience might be forgiven a certain skepticism. After all, the number of registered Republicans in several departments at Harvard—e.g., history and psychology—is exactly zero. In those departments, the professors themselves may be “basking in intellectual orthodoxy” without ever facing “uncomfortable challenges.” This may help explain why some students will do everything in their power to keep conservative speakers off campus: They notice that faculty hiring committees seem to do exactly the same thing.
In short, it is a promising sign that true liberal academics like Faust have started speaking eloquently about the crucial importance of civil, reasoned disagreement. But they will be more convincing on this point when they hire a few colleagues with whom they actually disagree.
Read the entire symposium on the threat to free speech in the July/August issue of COMMENTARY here.
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A Victim of the Hate That Won’t Be Named
Fear of what the truth may yield.
Ben Cohen and Benjamin Weinthal 2017-07-05
Back in 2002, the serving president of France, Jacques Chirac, huffily told an interviewer from the New York Times, “To imagine that France, the very first country to recognize the rights of Jews, could be anti-Semitic is propaganda, not reality.”
Fifteen years later and after dozens of attacks on Jews ranging from street violence to kidnapping to a terrorist massacre at an elementary school, much of France, on the right and left, still clings to Chirac’s brazen denial that the country has a problem with anti-Semitism. That’s particularly true when it comes to the approximately 7 million Muslims living there.
That disdainful attitude—that refusal to recognize and name the violent anti-Semitism that is being actively cultivated in French Muslim communities—isn’t just confined to politics and media. It’s impacting law enforcement as well.
Case in point: the murder of Sarah Halimi, a 66-year-old orthodox Jewish widow who lived alone in an apartment in the gloomy Paris neighborhood of Belleville.
By all accounts, Halimi, a doctor and kindergarten teacher, was a much-loved figure in the Parisian Jewish community. Her children had left the modest family home, but Halimi chose to stay in Belleville. One day, Halimi’s daughter, on a visit to her mother, passed a neighbor who hissed at her, “Dirty Jewess!” Her mother confirmed that she knew the neighbor and was frightened of him.
That neighbor was Kobili Traore, a Malian immigrant in his late 20s. He was reputedly a drug dealer and drug user seeking some form of salvation in Islam.
In the early hours of April 4, Traore broke into Dr. Halimi’s apartment. Once inside, he proceeded to beat the elderly lady with sadistic ferocity. Hearing Dr. Halimi’s screams, neighbors alerted the police, who arrived to hear Traore bellowing “Allah!” and “Shaitan!” (Satan) on the other side of the door. Fearing an Islamist terror attack was in the works, the cops radioed for back-up.
By the time anti-terror units arrived, more than two hours after Dr. Halimi’s unspeakable ordeal began, she was dead. Her bloodied and fractured body was thrown from the window of her third-floor apartment.
Traore has no record of mental illness. He is known to have harassed Halimi and her relatives. His killing of Halimi bore all the fervor of a jihadi attack. And yet this monstrous attack is not being treated as a hate crime. As of now, if Traore goes on trial, it will be on a charge of voluntary manslaughter, mitigated by the mental health problems from which his lawyers claim he suffers.
There was no public outcry for many reasons, but perhaps the most important one is that Dr. Halimi was tortured and murdered at a rather inconvenient time: The climax of the French presidential elections and the widespread fear in much of the French media that Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front would emerge victorious.
With these political circumstances as cover, this shameful story was discreetly buried by French editors. They fretted that doing otherwise would boost Le Pen’s electoral prospects. The police carried on investigating an act of lunacy and not a savage crime motivated by the eternal Islamist hatred of the Jewish people.
Only after Le Pen’s defeat at the hands of Emmanuel Macron did Halimi’s murder—and the motive behind it—start receiving wider attention. Said William Attal, Halimi’s brother, “I have waited seven weeks before I said anything. The absolute silence about my sister’s murder has become intolerable.”
If Sarah Halimi is to receive justice, then her murder must be tried as a hate crime. Anything else would be a mockery.
But if France is to finally overcome its unsettling silence around anti-Semitism—broken occasionally by Chirac-esque denials that there is a meaningful problem in the first place—it has to first accept that many of its leaders and opinion-formers are responsible for maintaining it.
Last month, the publicly-funded Franco-German broadcaster Arte/WDR canned the screening of a major documentary on anti-Semitism, which carried endorsements from many of Germany’s leading experts on the same Islamist ideology that continues to explode in European cities. Bosses at Arte/WDR blamed the film’s producers for not conforming to an agreed mandate, but that was code for their evident discomfort at the film’s focus: the fusion of crude anti-Semitism with Islamist ideology that is creeping through Muslim neighborhoods across Europe. The scale of the problem was laid bare in a recent study showing that 40 percent of Germans hold anti-Semitic views about Israel’s right to exist
Following widespread protests in Germany against the cancellation, the documentary was eventually shown, but only in Germany. The French continue to refuse to screen the film.
Can one speak of censorship in a democracy? Perhaps it’s more comforting to describe Arte/WDR’s decision as reflecting a type of group-think about anti-Semitism in Europe which holds, in essence, that what you see right before you isn’t really there.
As a result, millions of Europeans remain genuinely flummoxed as to how their Muslim fellow-citizens can tolerate such deadly anti-Semitism in their midst even when they are often victims of racism and intolerance.
Meanwhile, the kindly Dr. Halimi lies dead. Most cruelly of all, no one will dare explain why.
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