The unexpected French success of “Indignez vous!” (or “Cry Out”), the 30-page call to non-violent arms by 93-year-old Stephane Hessel — former member of the French Resistance, concentration camp survivor and diplomat — has been met with mild wonder.
After all, the initial run of 8,000 is now approaching 800,000 — outpacing famed French novelist Michel Houellebecq. In his essay Hessel calls for the citizenry to rise up, as he did against the Nazis, to confront the tyranny of the markets, big finance and the governments that are all too cozy and enabling of them.
But the thin tome, made up of a mere 13 pages of actual text, is not without its critics. On one of his pages, Hessel takes Israel to task for its actions in Gaza. “Jews themselves perpetrating war crimes is intolerable,” Hessel writes.
For this, the son of a Jewish father and a survivor of Buchenwald has been accused of anti-semitism. As both The Independent ( and The Jerusalem Post reported, French Jewish groups have condemned Hessel for his “fixation” on Israel.
Per JP: “We think the circumstances surrounding the publication of this book are very abnormal,” Marc Knobel, a researcher on anti-Semitism at CRIF, the French Jewry umbrella organization, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. “It’s a sort of a cult around Hessel, an image of pure humanity of a man at the end of life who wants to proclaim something.”
Hessel reportedly visited Gaza in 2009 and proclaimed the results of Operation Cast Lead to be “crimes against humanity.” The discussion of Hessel’s book falls on the two-year anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, which killed an estimated 1,400 residents in Gaza, including hundreds of children. It also coincides with a U.S. diplomatic cable newly released via Wikleaks that purports Israel purposely keeps living conditions in Gaza on the brink of collapse.
You wonder if there is any Jew on Earth so revered, so saintly that he would not immediately be branded antisemitic for standing up against Israeli crimes.
No Jew would fare any better than the Abbé Pierre, revered as a living saint in France, with impeccable credentials as a Resistance fighter and ‘righteous among the nations’ – until he took on the Palestinian cause and defended free speech on the founding myths of Israel. Target of a major smear campaign, shunned and cast into oblivion, much like Helen Thomas
link to en.wikipedia.org
From the ADL website:
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ADL COMMENDS CARDINAL LUSTIGER’S PUBLIC DENOUNCEMENT OF ABBE PIERRE’S ANTI-SEMITIC REMARKS
New York, NY, June 27, 1996…The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) commended His Eminence Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger of the Archdiocese of Paris for publicly denouncing French priest Abbe Pierre’s anti-Semitic remarks.
“We are pleased that Cardinal Lustiger has publicly recognized the severity and disturbing nature of Abbe Pierre’s prejudiced and historically inaccurate remarks,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “We applaud the Cardinal for his important statements affirming the enduring strength of Christian/Jewish relations,” he said.
As reported in Le Monde, Cardinal Lustiger spoke out against Abbe Pierre’s Holocaust denial. He called Abbe Pierre’s comparison of the acts of ancient Israelites to those of Nazis during the Holocaust “…naive and fundamentalist,” stating, “It can legitimate all kinds of fanaticism. It ignores exegesis, both spiritual and historical, of both Jewish and Christian traditions.”
Cardinal Lustiger described Abbe Pierre’s remarks against Zionism as “an attack on Israeli policy and … against Zionism and Jews in general.”
Reaffirming the solid and irreversible relations between Christians and Jews, Cardinal Lustiger said, “The Christian position has been clear since Vatican II. There is no going back on it. On the contrary, Judaism’s essence and reality is now recognized and acknowledged by Christians… this trend of mutual respect between Christians and Jews is irreversible.”
In a recent letter to Cardinal Lustiger, ADL raised the issue of Abbe Pierre’s questionable remarks.
The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.
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Well, I don’t agree that there’s anything particularly intolerable about Jews perpetrating crimes. Although there’s an almost racist belief in the West that Jews are more moral than other peoples, this is clearly not the case; they’re exactly like all other peoples, and the fact that they commit crimes, including against humanity, should surprise no one.
Interestingly, this belief in Jewish sanctity is nurtured by the Zionists’ frequent declarations that the Jewish state has the most moral army in the world, or instructs its soldiers to risk their lives to avoid harming civilians, or cares for the refugees from Darfur, or never seeks vengeance. All of these are lies.
The people in the West don’t believe the Jews are more moral than others; it’s just that they have been exposed to too many holocaust movies to make them feel guilty for something they had nothing to do with. They’ve also been made to believe that to criticize Israel is to condone what the Nazis did. In general, the West is not racist and it’s not stupid. Israel has been playing on the guilty conscience of the West to get away with stuff.
A fixation on Israel is anti-semitic? Hmmm, didn’t I read somewhere that Israel had become the (replacement for) RELIGION of USA’s Jews? If that’s not a fixation, then what is? And if it is not fixations per se which are anti-Semitism, but only fixation on Israel’s crimes, then does that mean the name-callers desire us to ignore Israel’s crimes whilst otherwise (if we like, of course) fixating on Israel (its non-crimes, that is)?
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil applies to us; but do as much evil as you like (all unexamined) seems to apply to Israel itself, for no one is supposed to notice. At least not in a fixated way. And “fixation” is in the eyes of the Israel-supporter, of course.
what might the settler-entity do that would end this fixation on itself?
end its siege of Gaza
agree to an immeade cease fire
agree to remove all barriers to the uniterrupted flow of people and goods between palestine and the rest of the world
sit down with representatives of the palestinian people for the purpose of figuring things out based on one equals one with liberty and justice for all (plus the right of return and trials in a criminal court of justice for those guilty of crimes against humanit)
stop claiming that Israel speaks for jews everywhere
stop using the jewish holocaust to divert attention from the holocaust that Israel has been perpetrating upon palestinians