Supporters at a pro-Israel rally in Paris, January 4
– By Scott Sayare –
PARIS — Last week, Paris’s court of appeals sentenced Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder and president of the Front National, the radical right-wing French political party, to three months prison time, with parole, and a 10,000 euro fine. Le Pen had appealed the sentence, first handed down last February, for remarks made to a political journal that constituted, the court decided, “the contesting of war crimes.”
“In France…the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, even if there were cases of misconduct, which are inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometers,” he said in a January 2005 interview.
In France, as in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Israel, and a handful of other nations, it is illegal to publicly question the historical veracity of the Holocaust. French law additionally prohibits the denial or defense of war crimes and crimes against humanity more generally.
Similar French laws govern the public expression of discrimination, as well as the appearance of such statements in the press. And earlier this month, a Lyon-based journalist, Muriel Florin, was threatened with sanctions by her employer, the regional newspaper Le Progrès, for a January 12 article that included statements by Franco-Jewish protesters denouncing Arabs. Quoting rally-goers, Florin had written:
“All they have to do is leave. If they stay, it’s because they want to die. Arabs are liars and thieves and the French press supports them.” “They’re violent, crude and hateful,” adds a neighboring woman. Who? “The Arabs,” she says. A young man protests. “Don’t say that. We all want peace…”
The so-called Loi Gayssot, enacted in France in 1990, prohibits discrimination on the basis of nationality, race or religion and includes a provision that curtails the press’s right to print or reproduce statements that might be deemed racist and accords any group the guaranteed right to a published response to such statements. The law reads:
The right of response…may be exercised by the associations…when a person or group of persons have been the object, in a newspaper or periodical, of accusations susceptible to harming their honor or their reputation for reason of their origin or their affiliation or non-affiliation with a given ethnicity, nation, race or religion.
And so, instead of responding to complaints about the article by the Representative Council of the Jewish Community of France (CRIF) by defending the newsworthiness of the story and the journalistic integrity of their reporter, the paper’s editors condemned her and the next day printed an interview with the regional director of the CRIF, who denounced the article and the paper.
The case has received little attention in the French media; among national outlets, only the online edition of Libération has covered the story. Given that French law favors places Florin’s article in questionable legal territory, it is perhaps unsurprising that there has been little public concern over her treatment.
But the case raises questions both about the liberty of the French press and the appropriateness of the country’s legal and cultural approach to issues of race.
The government of the République refuses to officially recognize the race of any of its citizens (which would, one might think, create some ambiguity as to what constitutes the “racism” that the state prohibits) and its citizens largely prefer to keep hush about the existence of racial tensions rather than confront them head-on. This approach carries over into the realm of the press, where racially-charged statements of any kind are all but outlawed. The ruling logic seems to hold that to deny that problems exist will ultimately make them go away.
Such reasoning no doubt influenced the regional director of CRIF, who, in the interview published in the pages of Le Progrès on January 13, criticized the editors’ decision to print the racist remarks of the CRIF supporters.
“The isolated statements, as they were reported, of one person amongst 1,000 present [at the rally] can in no way reflect the spirit of unity of that gathering,” said Marcel Amsellem. “To relate such statements flames hate and exacerbates inter-community tensions, which is not good for our democracy.
“The media,” he said, like community organizations and the government, “have a responsibility” to help “keep the peace.”
The apologetic editors of Le Progrès, along with the government, seem to agree with Amsellem that it might better serve the French public to remain ignorant of the virulent hate that some of its citizens evince than to see the reality of French racism. But to ignore the racism brewing within the community of French Jews is to overlook a fundamental and seldom-discussed aspect of how Gaza and the Arab-Israel conflict is lived in this country.
“We often keep quiet about things in an effort not to stoke the tensions between communities,” a journalist for Le Progrès told Libération yesterday. “But I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”
Surely, the French deserve to know what their fellow citizens really think. And the press ought to be free to inform them. But instead, the French media serves as yet another instrument in the propagation of a hopelessly unrealistic, ever-fruitless politics of racial denial.
