J. Bove says it's Mossad that bombs synagogues in France

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/
http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/001/187bvgea.asp
>...France has laws against Holocaust denial. The current climate shows them to
be bad laws, not just because they make free-speech heroes of those who are
basically mentally ill, but because they can be violated in spirit with
impunity. Such a violation was committed by Jose Bove in the first days of
April, when he was expelled from Israel following a visit to Yasser Arafat's
compound in Ramallah. Bove, who rose to fame for vandalizing a McDonald's in
southern France as a protest against American influence, is not merely the
informal leader of the younger French left, the "hero" of the Seattle riots,
and the guiding spirit of many of the anti-Le Pen protests that are now raging
in Paris; he is also the most charismatic leader of the anti-globalization
movement in the world.

It was thus alarming to see Bove, after a pro forma denunciation of anti-Jewish
violence, informing viewers of the TV channel Canal Plus that the attacks on
French synagogues were being either arranged or fabricated by Mossad. "Who
profits from the crime?" Bove asked. "The Israeli government and its secret
services have an interest in creating a certain psychosis, in making believe
that there is a climate of anti-Semitism in France, in order to distract
attention from what they are doing."

Since Bove didn't actually say Jews weren't killed in the Holocaust, it may
seem excessive to some readers that B'nai B'rith accused him of negationnisme,
or Holocaust denial. But B'nai B'rith is right. They have simply thought about
the roots of Holocaust denial a bit more thoroughly than others. For anyone who
inhabits Western culture, the Holocaust made that culture a much more painful
place to inhabit--and for any reasonably moral person, greatly narrowed the
range of acceptable political behavior. To be human is to wish it had never
happened. (Those who deny that it did may be those who can't bear to admit that
it happened.) But it did. If there's a will-to- anti-Semitism in Western
culture--as there probably is--then the Arab style of Judeophobia, which is an
anti- Semitism without the West's complexes, offers a real redemptive project
to those Westerners who are willing to embrace it. It can liberate guilty,
decadent Europeans from a horrible moral albatross. What an antidepressant!
Saying there was no such thing as the gas chambers is, of course, not
respectable. But the same purpose can be served using what Leo Strauss called
the reductio ad Hitlerum to cast the Jews as having committed crimes identical
to the Nazis'. They must be identical, of course, so the work of self-delusion
can be accomplished. We did one, the Jews did one. Now we're even-steven.

You can see the attractive force in such an ideology. Author Alexandre Del
Valle fears that anti-Semitism could also be a binding force, leading to a
"convergence of totalitarianisms," of Islamism and the Western anti-globalist
left. Elisabeth Schemla, a longtime editor at France's center-left opinion
weekly Le Nouvel Observateur who now edits the online newsletter www.Proche-
Orient.info, says, "The anti-Semitism of the left is more dangerous than that
of the right. They have power in the media, the universities, the associations,
the political class." Schemla worries that a third of the candidates in the
first round of the presidential election were strongly motivated by the
conflict in the Middle East. As such, it is not the strong showing of LePen
that is the most alarming development in the first round of the election, but
the record-high score of the three Trotskyite parties on the hard left.




Part 2