upjf.org - David Reinharc / Israël magazine
dimanche 20 mai 2007
Cette défense des Juifs de la part de deux personnalités qui ne le sont pas - Christine Angot et Doc Gynéco - a quelque chose de très émouvant. Je crois que cette attitude - plus répandue qu'on ne le croit - a sa source dans le sens de la justice et de la vérité. Pour moi ce sont des Justes des nations. On ne mesure pas assez le courage qu'il faut à ces deux-là, et surtout à Doc Gynéco, pour ramer ainsi à contre-courant d'une opinion hostile à Israël et aux Juifs, ou trop lâche pour marquer leur différence en se distançant des propos antisémites et/ou anti-israéliens. (Menahem Macina).
"Le rap, c'est le bras armé du djihad" ; "Quand les jeunes de banlieue voient des fours et des charniers, ils adorent cela!" ….
Doc Gynéco ne tait rien de ce qu'il a envie de dire. Pour lui, né justement à la périphérie de Paris, les "jeunes de banlieue ont besoin de tuer en vrai. De voir le sang", tandis que pour Christine Angot [1], "nous sommes encore dans la France du Chagrin et de la Pitié" [2].
Après le meurtre d'Ilan Halimi, la vague d'antisémitisme, l'opprobre jeté au visage de la petite nation israélienne, il paraît clair que le monde, après lecture de cet entretien, a déclaré la guerre aux Juifs. Et chacun va devoir choisir son camp, le refus de choisir étant lui-même un engagement.
Sartre disait qu'"on n'avait jamais été aussi libre que sous l'Occupation".
On peut lire ces propos dérangeants avec détachement ou alors se dire : et si c'était vrai ? On n'a jamais été aussi libre.
David Reinharc [3] : Le rap est-il devenu un instrument de propagande ?
Doc Gynéco : En réalité, il ne milite plus ni pour le hip hop ni pour le public : le rap s’est aujourd’hui islamisé. Akhenaton est musulman, comme de plus en plus de rappeurs. Ils sont en guerre : le rap, c’est un peu le bras musical armé du djihad.
Christine Angot : Quand des gens prennent la parole, certains peuvent s’imaginer que le fait de dénoncer les met hors du processus violent…
Doc Gynéco : Ils gardent le sentiment d’être des artistes, même s’ils sont manipulés. Ils se sentent tous communistes, éducateurs du peuple, professeurs des jeunes de banlieue. Ils ne savent pas ce que parler veut dire. Ils portent un tee-shirt du GIA ou de Ben Laden comme on porte un tee-shirt du Che. Par contre les rappeurs qui s’en sont sortis ont conscience de cette manipulation.
David Reinharc : Diams, on a plutôt le sentiment que ce qu’elle pense est en adéquation avec ce qu’elle chante….
Doc Gynéco : Oui, elle y croit. Elle ne se rend pas compte de ce qu’elle dit. Mais I AM , il sait ce qu’il fait. Pourtant, ils font un art entièrement inspiré des Noirs Américains. Mais ça ne les intéresse plus depuis dix ans. Ils sont manipulés par la violence, par les films d’action, mais c’est une violence organisée et structurée de kamikazes, pas une violence de vrai révolutionnaire. Je baise la France : tous les rappeurs de Marseille à Paris chantent ça comme un seul homme.
David Reinharc : Se faire dynamiter s’apparente à de la résistance : le groupe de rap Sniper…
Doc Gynéco : Vous citez une phrase plutôt gentille. Ca me rend triste. Je suis contre l’islamisation du rap.
David Reinharc : Il existe malgré tout des groupes, doués et militants, qui savent très bien ce qu’ils font : Médine, l’album Jihad, Kamelancien, Keny Arkana, qui vient de l’extrême-gauche, instrumentalisent le rap à des fins de propagande politique…
Doc Gynéco : Moi, le terrorisme, j’ai fini d’y croire quand une bombe a explosé à Tati Barbès.
David Reinharc : Parce qu’avant, vous y croyiez ?
Doc Gynéco : Je pouvais croire, oui, à une forme de révolte par les armes.
David Reinharc : Contre qui ?
Doc Gynéco : Jean Moulin ! Vichy. « Pour plus de justice » etc. Mais l’attentat à Barbès m’a profondément heurté : des arabes tuaient des arabes. Ceux d’Algérie d’il y a pas longtemps. Je peux comprendre l’attentat de Port-Royal, même la prise d’otage des Juifs par les Palestiniens mais la bombe à Tati Barbès, là, je ne saisis plus.
David Reinharc : Des « victimes innocentes » ?
Doc Gynéco : On peut dire ça comme cela… On ne comprend plus leur combat.
Christine Angot : Dans un propos artistique, la question de la complaisance se pose toujours, mais je ne pense pas que les textes des artistes soient responsables des actes réels. Même la musique militaire n’est pas responsable des guerres.
David Reinharc : J’ai posé une allumette près d’une flaque d’essence, mais ce n’est pas moi qui ai mis le feu…?
Doc Gynéco : Médine, c’est pourtant le genre de personne qui poserait une bombe à Tati Barbès. L’Histoire, contrairement aux jeunes, il la connaît. Il sait, lui, ce que veut dire Jihad, pas les jeunes. Il utilise des moments essentiels pour les islamistes et il les met en musique. Cela a un impact latent, vicieux, sournois.
Christine Angot : Avoir un propos sur une réalité violente, c’est intéressant. En revanche, esthétiser cette réalité, ce n’est intéressant ni pour la société ni pour l’art.
Doc Gynéco : Sous couvert des idées communistes, le rap met en musique l’islamisme et les actions d’Al Qaïda.
David Reinharc : Dans le rap, on trouve le vocabulaire de l’islam contre l’Occident et aussi, paradoxalement, le culte de la société de consommation…
Doc Gynéco : C’est là qu’ils sont de droite. Ils ont oublié ce qu’est le rap américain. Mais c’est vrai que la tendance, dans le rap, est la conversion à l’islam. On se convertit à l’islam pour entrer dans le rap. Ce qu’ils aiment toujours, dans le rap des Noirs Américains, c’est la flambe et les femmes. Mais le message de paix s’est effacé. Le rap intello, ça n’existe pas.
David Reinharc : A l’exception d’Abd Al Malik – soufi, et qui n’est donc pas salafiste…
Doc Gynéco : Oui, lui je l’aime bien, mais il est arrivé en 2007.
David Reinharc : Vous-même, faites-vous un « rap de droite » ?
Doc Gynéco : Ce qui fait dire que tu es de droite quand tu es rappeur, c’est la façon dont tu vas gérer ton argent. Ne pas oublier qu’on n’en a jamais eu. On a donc un rapport avec l’argent, lié à la flambe.
Christine Angot : Oui, mais la flambe ce n’est pas une attitude bourgeoise…
Doc Gynéco : Les nouveaux rappeurs ont tous les codes des gens de droite : le cigare, le champagne, la bagnole…
David Reinharc : On trouve dans les textes de rap – Kamelancien, I AM, Sniper… - beaucoup de textes haineux contre Israël et les Juifs. Avec aussi un clip qui met en scène une liquidation d’Américains…
Doc Gynéco : On est en train de rendre les jeunes de banlieue complètement fous. Scorcese, les Affranchis, etc., ça pouvait se situer dans une esthétique qu’on n’aime pas, mais il y avait au moins des valeurs.
Christine Angot : Est-ce que c’est l’apanage du rap ? C’est l’ensemble de la société qui est concerné par l’antisémitisme.
David Reinharc : Mais pourquoi le rap est-il venu se cristalliser sur la question juive ?
Doc Gynéco : On utilise l’extrême gauche à de mauvaises fins. Ils critiquent l’argent, la bourgeoisie, les riches et donc, dans l’imaginaire collectif, les Juifs. On a réussi à opposer les Juifs à toutes les races : bientôt, même les Chinois seront de la partie. Avant, dans les quartiers, c’était Juifs versus Arabes. Maintenant, ça ne fait plus rire personne. Toutes les communautés sont en guerre contre les Juifs et je n’accepte pas ça.
Christine Angot : L’air du temps veut imposer l’idée que la violence faite aux Juifs n’est pas plus grave que la violence commise contre d’autres groupes. Sauf qu’il y a une spécificité particulière. Personne ne veut plus l’entendre. Cette volonté de nier la spécificité juive et la spécificité de la Shoah n’est pas propre au rap. Cette musique est juste un reflet de ce déni.
Doc Gynéco : Je veux en revenir à ce que représente la mort pour les jeunes de banlieue. Quand ils voient des fours et des charniers, ils adorent cela ! Dans leur portable, ils conservent les scènes d’égorgement, de tueries, de carnage. Il faut accompagner l’histoire de la Shoah du récit explicatif d’un professeur qui explique les images, sinon ça va finir sur les portables….
David Reinharc : Vous étiez le seul goy à la manifestation après la mort d’Ilan Halimi, premier meurtre antisémite après Auschwitz.
Doc Gynéco : Pas un rappeur n’a regretté cet acte de barbarie. Jamais Skyrock n’a fait passer un message. Ils utilisent tous ça : faites attention à eux. A cette époque, dans les banlieues, personne n’avait encore réussi à mobiliser les Noirs contre les Juifs. Mais dès le meurtre d’Ilan Halimi, j’ai su que ceux qui attisent la haine avaient gagné : ils ont montré le visage noir de Fofana, le «chef des Barbares».
David Reinharc : On connaît aussi votre attachement à Israël…
Doc Gynéco : On ne peut plus revendiquer dans un quartier l’attachement à la France, mais à Israël, c’est pire. C’est dur d’avoir un ami feuj en banlieue : tu vas te battre au moins dix fois pour lui….
Christine Angot : C’est dur dans un quartier mais aussi partout ailleurs. Dans toutes les situations difficiles, il y a un choix à faire : à chaque fois que des gens s’opposent, qu’il y a un conflit douloureux, il faut choisir son camp… Or, des tas de gens refusent de choisir. Mais on choisit quand même : les gens qui n’ont pas choisi Israël ont forcément choisi l’autre camp.
Doc Gynéco : Si dans un quartier, je marche avec un Juif qui répond à cette violence, s’il s’inscrit dans le rapport de force – je veux dire : il retire son tee-shirt et il se bat – c’est différent, ils le respectent. Dans les banlieues, ils ont besoin de te tuer en vrai quand ils ont un problème. De voir le sang. On n’est pas là-bas dans un salon littéraire…
David Reinharc : Vous préconisez la violence comme moyen légitime pour les Juifs de répondre à l’hostilité ?
Doc Gynéco : Pour avoir pratiqué ces gens-là, je peux vous dire qu’ils sont en guerre.
David Reinharc : C’est qui, « ces gens-là » ?
Doc Gynéco : Ceux qui ont besoin de tuer du Juif. Pour ceux-là, c’est la guerre à l’intérieur de nos frontières. Regardez Ilan : tout le monde savait. Des filles, des garçons : on va loin, là. Tous complices : des trentaines de personnes étaient là, personne n’a bronché. Les Juifs doivent savoir se défendre comme ils l’ont toujours fait : c’est la guerre, vous savez. A un moment donné, il faut se battre : il ne faut pas avoir peur de se montrer violent. J’ai connu des Juifs réputés parce qu’ils se sont défendus chaque fois. Tout le temps. Ils sont respectés.
Christine Angot : Si vous regardez "Le chagrin et la pitié", on est encore dans la même France.
David Reinharc : Il y aurait une violence plus légitime que la violence légale, celle de l’Etat ?
Doc Gynéco : Par exemple, au stade du Parc des Princes, lorsqu’ils ont trié les spectateurs et qu’ils se sont rangés en deux files pour les enserrer. Ils demandaient à chacun : « Êtes-vous Juif ? » ; et selon moi, il fallait dire : « oui ».
David Reinharc : « Oui », ça voulait dire se battre…
Doc Gynéco : Voilà. Mais je ne sais pas si c’est physiquement ou autrement. C’est les deux.
David Reinharc : C’est d’ailleurs un policier noir qui a sauvé un supporter Juif de la mort…
Doc Gynéco : Je suis fier de ça.
David Reinharc : Comment expliquer que les Juifs ont déserté la guerre qui leur est faite ?
Doc Gynéco : Il faut le savoir : les humains en face de vous n’ont pas nécessairement les mêmes données que vous dans le cerveau et sont peut-être plus portés sur la violence que vous…. Il faut revenir à l’époque du Roi David. Car, en face de vous, ils ont compris que vous parlementez, négociez, pinaillez. Il n’y a pas à se justifier. Il vaut mieux se battre, c’est certain. Ilan Halimi est mort, premier meurtre après Auschwitz, me disiez-vous. Mais si quelqu’un en banlieue avait été tué durant les émeutes, ils en auraient fait des chansons, des clips, des albums. Pour Ilan Halimi ? Pas une chanson, rien.
David Reinharc : En hébreu, face à la violence qui monte toujours d’un cran, on dit : on leur pisse dessus, ils disent qu’il pleut. C’est votre impression ?
Doc Gynéco : Après le meurtre d’Ilan Halimi, j’attendais au moins une chanson. Je pensais que les rappeurs allaient s’exprimer là-dessus. Rien. Omerta.
David Reinharc : Au lieu du « Jusqu’ici, tout va bien » des Juifs, concrètement, que feriez-vous ?
Doc Gynéco : C’est la guerre contre le silence.
David Reinharc : Sur Israël, vous pensez qu’il y a une paix possible avec le Hamas ? Ou bien qu’aujourd’hui comme hier et demain, la paix n’aura jamais lieu parce que le monde est en guerre contre les Juifs ?
Christine Angot : La vulgate, aujourd’hui, c’est d’être contre Israël. Dans une conversation ordinaire, le rejet d’Israël, c’est ce qu’on peut dire à haute voix, sans problème.
Doc Gynéco : Il fallait bien pour les Juifs un endroit pour se réfugier. Un terrain leur a été offert. C’est dommage que ce soit là, au niveau géographique, entouré de pays hostiles.
David Reinharc : Ailleurs que dans le berceau du peuple juif, ça aurait changé quelque chose...?
Doc Gynéco : C’est là qu’on voit qu’il faut se battre.
Christine Angot : Mais pourquoi les Juifs devraient se battre seuls, pour eux-mêmes? Les Juifs représentent tout le monde, toute spécificité, la spécificité de l’humain.
David Reinharc : Pourquoi les Juifs plus que les autres ?
Christine Angot : Parce que. C’est un peuple à part, que ça plaise ou non. Ils ne sont pas pareils, il y a une spécificité qui n’est pas comparable aux autres spécificités. Quelque chose d’unique qui nous représente tous.
David Reinharc : Et dès qu’ils ont voulu toucher à l’universel, ils ont accosté sur les rivages nauséeux du communisme…
Christine Angot : Nauséeux ! Quelle bizarre expression ! [4].
Doc Gynéco : Tous les peuples qui ont souffert ont commis cette erreur.
Christine Angot : Mais moi, je ne parle pas d’universel. Mais de spécificité. Il ne faut accepter ni le déni de la spécificité du peuple juif ni celui de la Shoah.
Doc Gynéco : Les Juifs sont un peu, par la force des choses, errants. Mais à un moment, ils se sont posés, parfois plus de trois cents ans. A un autre moment, ils ont trouvé Israël. Parfois, il fallait se battre, parfois ce n’était pas la peine. Aujourd’hui, c’est une époque où les Juifs doivent se battre. C’est clair. Sinon, vous reviendrez à l’époque de Salomon.
Christine Angot : Ce n’est quand même pas un hasard si le génocide intervient après l’invention de la psychanalyse par Freud. Tout s’est passé comme si c’était ça qu’on était venu punir. La découverte de l’inconscient. Ils n’ont pas supporté ça, pour le coup, ils ont voulu tous les tuer.
David Reinharc : C’est important de dire cela, car la vague d’antisémitisme actuel coïncide avec l’attaque en règle contre la psychanalyse. Le Livre noir de la psychanalyse se réfère au Livre noir, ce recueil de témoignages sur les atrocités nazies contre les Juifs d'URSS et de Pologne, rassemblés par Vassili Grossman. La boucle est bouclée.
Christine Angot : Je n’avais pas pensé au fait que le Livre noir de la psychanalyse se référait explicitement au Livre noir de Grossman. Donc, là, c’est la preuve.
David Reinharc
© Israël Magazine
Texte libre est de droits si sont cités la source et l’auteur.
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Notes de la Rédaction d’upjf.org
[1] Un blogue est consacré à cette écrivaine.
[2] Le Chagrin et la Pitié : Chronique d'une ville française sous l'Occupation, film documentaire épique de quatre heures et demie sur l'occupation allemande de la France pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, fut projeté récemment au festival du film de Sydney. Sorti il y a trente ans à Paris, ce film qui est maintenant distribué en DVD, est considéré à juste titre comme un des documentaires les plus importants du cinéma et parmi les rares films qui révèlent la collaboration de la classe dominante française avec l'Allemagne nazie de 1940 à 1944. (Extrait de "Collaboration et Résistance dans la France de Vichy : Le Chagrin et la Pitié, de Marcel 0phuls", sur le World Socialist Website). Voir aussi le bref article de Wikipedia sur ce film.
[3] David Reinharc est responsable, pour la France, d'Israël Magazine, correspondant du Jerusalem Post à Paris, directeur littéraire d'une maison d'édition parisienne, et journaliste.
[4] En effet, l'utilisation erronée de cet adjectif, au lieu de 'nauséabond', se répand de plus en plus, y compris chez des journalistes professionnels. En réalité, 'nauséeux' se dit de celui qui a la nausée ; 'nauséabond' se dit de quelqu'un ou d'une chose qui sent mauvais (étymologiquement, qui donne la nausée).
dimanche 29 juin 2008
samedi 28 juin 2008
What I've Learned: George Carlin
I was in my mother's belly as she sat in the waiting room of the abortionist's office. Dr. Sunshine was his code name. I was fifty feet from the drainpipe, and she saw a painting on the wall that reminded her of her mother, who had recently died. She took that as a sign to have the baby. That's what I call luck.
My father drank and was a bully. For the first five years of my brother's life, my father beat him with a leather-heeled slipper. Had I been subjected to that kind of treatment, all bets are off. His absence saved my life.
My mother had great executive-secretarial jobs in the advertising business and raised two boys during the Second World War. She used to say, "I make a man's salary." That's heroism.
I'm sure Hitler was great with his family.
I used to collect the most colorful curses I heard and write them down. I actually carried in my wallet things like "kraut cunt" and "burly loudmouth cocksucker" and "longhair fucking music prick," which was a thing Mikey Flynn yelled at a Juilliard student that he was kicking in the head.
I don't like authority and regulation, and I do my best to disrespect it, but I do that for myself. It's self-expression only.
Sex without love has its place, and it's pretty cool, but when you have it hand in hand with deep commitment and respect and caring, it's nine thousand times better.
If it's morally wrong to kill anyone, then it's morally wrong to kill anyone. Period.
It's amazing to me that literacy isn't considered a right.
I was arrested for possession and cultivation of marijuana in the early '70s, and it was thrown out. The judge asked me how I felt about it, and I said, "I understand the law, and I want you to know I'll pay the fine, but I cannot guarantee I will not break this law again." He really chewed me out for that.
Censorship that comes from the outside assumes about people an inability to make reasoned choices.
The first thing they teach kids is that there's a God -- an invisible man in the sky who is watching what they do and who is displeased with some of it. There's no mystery why they start that with kids, because if you can get someone to believe that, you can add on anything you want.
I would die for the safety of the people I love.
I wish that we could measure how much the potential of the mind to expand has been stunted by television.
Because of my abuse of drugs, I neglected my business affairs and had large arrears with the IRS, and that took me eighteen to twenty years to dig out of. I did it honorably, and I don't begrudge them. I don't hate paying taxes, and I'm not angry at anyone, because I was complicit in it. But I'll tell you what it did for me: It made me a way better comedian. Because I had to stay out on the road and I couldn't pursue that movie career, which would have gone nowhere, and I became a really good comic and a really good writer.
I stopped voting when I stopped taking drugs. I believe both of those acts are closely related to delusional behavior.
There's no morality in business. It doesn't have a conscience. It has only the cash register. They'll sell you crappy things that you don't need, that don't work, that they won't stand behind. It's a glorified legal form of criminal behavior.
If everybody knew the truth about everybody else's thoughts, there would be way more murders.
There's nothing wrong with high taxes on high income.
Lenny Bruce opened all the doors, and people like Richard Pryor and I were able to walk through them.
Given the right reasons and the right two people, marriage is a wonderful way of experiencing your life.
I think that the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King showed that all of the wishing and hoping and holding hands and humming and signing petitions and licking envelopes is a bit futile.
Blacks are deliberately kept down. Poor communities are deliberately underfunded.
I don't think people should get credit for being honest and brave. I think there's a lot of genetic shit going on there.
Someday they'll find a gene for putting on your overcoat.
There's a pulse in New York, even on the quietest street, on the quietest day. It's full of potential.
If there's ever a golden age of mankind, it will not include men over two hundred pounds beating children who are less than one hundred pounds, and it will not include the deliberate killing of people in a formal setting.
I did something in a previous life that must have been spectacularly good, because I'm getting paid in this life just magnificently, more than one would dare imagine or hope for.
vendredi 27 juin 2008
«Il faut normaliser le fait juif»
Anne-Marie Revcolevschi, Directrice générale de la Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah
Et si la cohésion nationale française était demain l'objet de telles agressions? Je ne pense pas qu'on puisse éradiquer toutes les causes de l'antisémitisme, qui sont culturelles, politiques, religieuses, familiales, et tiennent aussi à une crise de valeurs des élites intellectuelles françaises. Mais, puisque la plupart de ces actes sont commis par des jeunes, il faut donc s'attaquer à leur éducation. Or, selon une enquête de l'Association des professeurs d'histoire, 15% des enseignants, face à l'antisémitisme rencontré notamment en abordant l'histoire de la Shoah, se sont plaints de ne pas toujours savoir comment répondre et ont souhaité des outils appropriés. Notre fondation essaie donc de construire à leur intention, avec le ministère de l'Education nationale, une formation: d'abord sur la connaissance du «fait juif» et non pas directement sur l'antisémitisme, histoire de lever les fantasmes et les inexactitudes. Il faut normaliser le fait juif, insister sur ce que les différentes cultures et religions ont en commun plutôt que sur ce qui les sépare.propos recueillis par Ilana Cicurel, Jacqueline Remy, mis à jour le 17/09/2004 - publié le 20/09/2004
lundi 23 juin 2008
London summit focuses on plight of Jewish refugees from Arab states
By Haaretz Service
Jewish groups from around the world are meeting in London to highlight the plight of Jews who were forced to flee from Arab nations in 1948 when the state of Israel was founded, the British BBC website reported Monday. The conference is organized by the American-based group "Justice for Jews," which aims to "ensure that justice for Jews from Arab countries assumes its rightful place on the international political agenda and their rights be secured as a matter of law and equity." The group says some 850,000 Jews lived in Arab nations before Israel was founded and that most were forced to flee due to hostility. The group, which campaigns for compensation for Jewish refugees, says that the international community has placed a lot of emphasis on the plight of the Palestinian refugees, ignoring their Jewish counterparts. The Justice for Jews coalition numbers 77 organizations from 20 countries around the globe.
The BBC reported that the conference is highly controversial because the number of Jewish refugees and the conditions under which they left their home countries are disputed. The conference includes addresses by Holocaust historian Sir Martin Gilbert and former Canadian Justice Minister and Attorney General Irwin Cotler. The conference was to conclude on June 25.
Jewish groups from around the world are meeting in London to highlight the plight of Jews who were forced to flee from Arab nations in 1948 when the state of Israel was founded, the British BBC website reported Monday. The conference is organized by the American-based group "Justice for Jews," which aims to "ensure that justice for Jews from Arab countries assumes its rightful place on the international political agenda and their rights be secured as a matter of law and equity." The group says some 850,000 Jews lived in Arab nations before Israel was founded and that most were forced to flee due to hostility. The group, which campaigns for compensation for Jewish refugees, says that the international community has placed a lot of emphasis on the plight of the Palestinian refugees, ignoring their Jewish counterparts. The Justice for Jews coalition numbers 77 organizations from 20 countries around the globe.
The BBC reported that the conference is highly controversial because the number of Jewish refugees and the conditions under which they left their home countries are disputed. The conference includes addresses by Holocaust historian Sir Martin Gilbert and former Canadian Justice Minister and Attorney General Irwin Cotler. The conference was to conclude on June 25.
Sarkozy to Knesset: A nuclear Iran is intolerable
By Ariel Zilber and Sara Miller
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking at a special session of the Knesset in his honor, vowed Monday that France would always defend Israel in the face of any existential threat - a direct reference to Iran and its nuclear program, which he called unacceptable. "A nuclear Iran is intolerable," Sarkozy said. "Anyone trying to destroy Israel will find France blocking the way." And, to applause from the assembled politicians, judicial leaders and assorted dignitaries, Sarkozy declared: "Israel must know it is not alone in the battle against Iran's nuclear ambitions."
Turning to the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the French prseident said that the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and a Palestinian state was a condition for peace. The Palestinians, he said, "have the right to a viable state of their own." He added that such a state would "ensure Israel's security." He also called on Israel to end its settlement activity in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and said that there would be "no peace without a solution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees," a key sticking point in negotiations between the two sides. The French leader also urged Israel to "encourage legislation that would entice settlers to leave the West Bank." "There will be no peace if the Palestinians do not fight terrorism," Sarkozy said. "Each side has to make an effort. Peace is not possible if the Palestinians cannot move about freely." Sarkozy and wife Carla Bruni received a red carpet reception as they arrived at the Knesset, and as he stood to speak, the French leader received a standing ovation from lawmakers. In his address to the plenum of lawmakers in Jerusalem, the first by a French president since Francois Mitterrand in 1982, Sarkozy said that his nation's connection to the Jewish people had enriched French culture. Ahead of his speech, Sarkozy received plaudits from Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik, who praised his "determination" and "courageous reforms," and Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who called him a "true friend of Israel." Netanyahu's remarks in which he labeled "radical Islam as the greatest threat to the free world" prompted angry catcalls from the Arab MKs, who heckled the former premier. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert applauded Sarkozy for his "determination to root out anti-Semitism in France," and said that ties between France and Israel had seen a "revival under your leadership." "Your words of support for Israel touch our hearts," he said. Sarkozy, who arrived Sunday for a three-day trip accompanied by an entourage of some one hundred businessman, cabinet ministers and Jewish leaders, spent the first part of Monday morning at the Yad Vashem Holocaust musuem, where he was accompanied by Bruni and President Shimon Peres. Prior to Sarkozy's arrival, France promised Israel that it would put the brakes on its rapprochement with Syria until Damascus shows willing to distance itself from the axis of extremists, in particular Iran. During a meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday, Sarkozy and Peres discussed Syria. Peres applauded his French counterpart for inviting Syrian President Bashar Assad to a meeting of the Mediterranean nations in Paris on July 13. The visit, which will conclude Tuesday afternoon, will also include meetings for Sarkozy with the parents of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was abducted to Gaza in 2006. Shalit's father, Noam is of French extract, and Gilad holds French citizenship. In his address to the Knesset, Sarkozy offered to assist in efforts to Shalit, and the two Israeli reservists held by Hezbollah since July 2006. Sarkozy will also hold talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem, and with Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking at a special session of the Knesset in his honor, vowed Monday that France would always defend Israel in the face of any existential threat - a direct reference to Iran and its nuclear program, which he called unacceptable. "A nuclear Iran is intolerable," Sarkozy said. "Anyone trying to destroy Israel will find France blocking the way." And, to applause from the assembled politicians, judicial leaders and assorted dignitaries, Sarkozy declared: "Israel must know it is not alone in the battle against Iran's nuclear ambitions."
Turning to the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the French prseident said that the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and a Palestinian state was a condition for peace. The Palestinians, he said, "have the right to a viable state of their own." He added that such a state would "ensure Israel's security." He also called on Israel to end its settlement activity in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and said that there would be "no peace without a solution to the problem of the Palestinian refugees," a key sticking point in negotiations between the two sides. The French leader also urged Israel to "encourage legislation that would entice settlers to leave the West Bank." "There will be no peace if the Palestinians do not fight terrorism," Sarkozy said. "Each side has to make an effort. Peace is not possible if the Palestinians cannot move about freely." Sarkozy and wife Carla Bruni received a red carpet reception as they arrived at the Knesset, and as he stood to speak, the French leader received a standing ovation from lawmakers. In his address to the plenum of lawmakers in Jerusalem, the first by a French president since Francois Mitterrand in 1982, Sarkozy said that his nation's connection to the Jewish people had enriched French culture. Ahead of his speech, Sarkozy received plaudits from Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik, who praised his "determination" and "courageous reforms," and Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who called him a "true friend of Israel." Netanyahu's remarks in which he labeled "radical Islam as the greatest threat to the free world" prompted angry catcalls from the Arab MKs, who heckled the former premier. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert applauded Sarkozy for his "determination to root out anti-Semitism in France," and said that ties between France and Israel had seen a "revival under your leadership." "Your words of support for Israel touch our hearts," he said. Sarkozy, who arrived Sunday for a three-day trip accompanied by an entourage of some one hundred businessman, cabinet ministers and Jewish leaders, spent the first part of Monday morning at the Yad Vashem Holocaust musuem, where he was accompanied by Bruni and President Shimon Peres. Prior to Sarkozy's arrival, France promised Israel that it would put the brakes on its rapprochement with Syria until Damascus shows willing to distance itself from the axis of extremists, in particular Iran. During a meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday, Sarkozy and Peres discussed Syria. Peres applauded his French counterpart for inviting Syrian President Bashar Assad to a meeting of the Mediterranean nations in Paris on July 13. The visit, which will conclude Tuesday afternoon, will also include meetings for Sarkozy with the parents of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was abducted to Gaza in 2006. Shalit's father, Noam is of French extract, and Gilad holds French citizenship. In his address to the Knesset, Sarkozy offered to assist in efforts to Shalit, and the two Israeli reservists held by Hezbollah since July 2006. Sarkozy will also hold talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem, and with Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
dimanche 22 juin 2008
When it Comes to Al-Dura, Journalists Are Against Free Speech, John Rosenthal
Earlier this month, the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur launched a surreal [1] “Appeal for Charles Enderlin” in response to a French court judgment clearing media critic
A full professional translation of the higher court’s judgment is available [2] here on Richard Landes’s Augean Stables blog. (The complete judgment in French is [3] here.) Richard Landes’s translation of the Nouvel Observateur’s “Appeal for Charles” is [4] here. The “Appeal” has in the meanwhile been signed by hundreds of Enderlin’s colleagues in French journalism, plus several “personalities,” and even some simple “web surfers” [internautes].
I say that it is surreal, since it is by no means clear what the point of the appeal is supposed to be or what exactly the signatories want done “for Charles Enderlin.” It was not, after all, Enderlin who was on trial: he and France 2 were the plaintiffs. The “Appeal for Charles” identifies Karsenty as the “person mainly responsible” for an “obstinate and hateful campaign” against Enderlin. But, as PJM readers will know (and Nouvel Observateur readers might not), Karsenty is in fact just one of numerous critics who have challenged the authenticity of Enderlin’s September 2000 report allegedly showing the killing of the Palestinian boy Mohammed Al-Dura by Israeli troops.
It was indeed
The authors of the “Appeal” - like Enderlin himself in [5] a blog post published shortly after the rendering of the court’s decision - take heart in the fact that the higher court “recognized” that Karsenty’s litigious remarks regarding the Al-Dura report “unquestionably do damage to the honor and reputation of news professionals”: i.e. Enderlin and France 2 as a whole. But the court’s observation in this connection is in fact a mere tautology. In [6] his November 2004 text - in which, incidentally, Karsenty called for the “immediate dismissal” of Enderlin and France 2 news director Arlette Chabot - Karsenty himself describes Enderlin’s Al-Dura report and, above all, France 2’s defense of it as “a masquerade that does dishonor [déshonore] to France and its public television.”
The real question, of course, is whether Karsenty’s criticisms of
As I discussed in [7] my analysis of the original judgment against Karsenty two years ago, what has always been at stake in the Karsenty case is not the authenticity or otherwise of the Al-Dura report but the very right to freedom of opinion. As a public figure discharging a highly public function affecting a matter of obvious public interest - and for a public television channel no less - Charles Enderlin can hardly claim to be immune from public criticism of his work. Nor, of course, can
It is this insight - an insight that one would expect to be entirely banal in a democratic society - that underlies the higher court’s ruling. The court did not find that the fraudulence of the Al-Dura report had been “proven,” but it found that Karsenty offered sufficient and sufficiently serious grounds for the claim of fraudulence to make it a legitimate matter of public debate.
To have ruled otherwise - as the lower court did in its original ruling - would be, in effect, to institute a sort of crime of lèse majesté protecting journalists and news organizations from criticism: placing them above society and the mere “lay persons” who are then supposed to accept the claims of the “news professionals” without question. Le Nouvel Observateur’s “Appeal for Charles Enderlin” positively exudes such a sense of corporate privilege, as [8] Richard Landes and his commentators on Augean Stables were quick to point out.
The judgment “surprises us,” the authors of the “Appeal” complain, “since it gives the same credibility to a journalist known for the seriousness and rigor of his work…and to his detractors…who have no knowledge of the reality on the ground and no experience of reporting from a war zone.” (As so happens, many of Enderlin’s principal critics have as much if not more experience “on the ground” as Enderlin and some, like retired Le Monde correspondent Luc Rosenzweig, are also well-known “professional” journalists.
In a sort of mini-revolution, commentators on Le Nouvel Observateur’s own website were equally quick to point out the disdain involved in such words and to reject the pretensions of the “news professionals” to being the guardians of truth. One commentator, for instance, wondered why Le Nouvel Observateur did not reproduce the court decision, as Augean Stables had, so that readers could judge for themselves. “The French are intelligent enough to understand,” the commentator added pointedly. With the reactions in the comments sections running overwhelmingly against Le Nouvel Observateur’s initiative, however, the editors quite simply suppressed the comments link. (Though the link is gone, as of this writing the comments pages can still be consulted [9] here.)
Regarding the signatories of Le Nouvel Observateur’s “Appeal” [10] Richard Landes has written that “in the future, [they] will be part of a list of ignominy.” It is interesting to note some of the names on this list.
Among the sixty or so original signatories, one finds at least two journalists who have themselves gained notoriety as the authors of extravagant, unverified reports concerning alleged Israeli misdeeds. Thus, in March 2002, Sylvain Cypel of the daily Le Monde published an article announcing the “dismantling” of “a vast Israeli spy network operating on American territory.” The “network” was supposed to have comprised some 120 persons who had already been “arrested or expelled.”
Citing details from a Fox News report and the supposedly independent research of French “intelligence expert” Guillaume Dasquié, Cypel declared the alleged operation to be “undoubtedly the most important Israeli espionage affair in the United States” since the Jonathan Pollard case and he mused darkly about circumstantial evidence apparently connecting the Israeli “spies” and several of the hijackers responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
The second name that stands out in this regard among the journalists is that of Sara Daniel: one of the large cohort of original signatories from Le Nouvel Observateur and, as so happens, the daughter of the founder of the publication, Jean Daniel. In November 2001, Ms. Daniel would provoke controversy by publishing an article in Le Nouvel Observateur in which she accused Israeli soldiers of raping Palestinian women “while perfectly cognizant of the fact” that the women would later be killed by their families as a matter of honor. Ms. Daniel described the alleged Israeli practice as a “war crime.” She and her father would later claim that the passage was the result of a “technical” error.
The most prominent of the “personalities” featured in the list of signatories is none other than former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine. Védrine was French Foreign Minister in September 2000, at the time the French public television broadcast its Al-Dura report and offered the controversial footage free of charge to other news organizations around the world. Barely a year and a half later, in January 2002, he would respond to the first manifestations of what would become [11] a massive upsurge of anti-Semitic incidents in France by archly observing: “One shouldn’t necessarily be surprised that young French people from immigrant families feel compassion for the Palestinians and get agitated when they see what is happening” (Radio Classique, 12 January 2002).
But what if what the young French people “see happening” - notably, on the nightly news - is not in fact happening? As one of the most dogged partisans of
Perhaps the most notable member of this “list of ignominy” is Robert Ménard, the founder and Secretary General of the Paris-based NGO Reporters Without Borders: or “RSF” as per its French acronym. Ostensibly dedicated to the defense of press freedoms and freedom of speech around the world, RSF’s reports are frequently cited in the American press and blogosphere: including by “pro-American” and “pro-Israeli” bloggers. In recent years, RSF has specially cultivated the goodwill of the blogosphere by launching initiatives like the [13] “First Online Free Expression Day” and compiling a list of countries it designates as [14] “Internet Enemies.”
As I noted in [15] a recent exposé of the organization, however, RSF has maintained a conspicuous silence on the Al-Dura affair and
It is on account of this massive funding by France and the European institutions that I have suggested that RSF be referred to not as a “non-governmental organization” (NGO), but rather as a “para-governmental organization”: a “PGO” whose supposedly objective assessments of the situation of press freedoms around the world are in fact largely and obviously influenced by the political agendas of its principal state sponsors. (See part II of my exposé [17] here.)
Robert Ménard’s attitude to the Al-Dura affair is just further confirmation of the “PGO” status of Reporters Without Borders. By breaking his silence and signing the Nouvel Observateur “Appeal,” Ménard has now explicitly come out in favor of suppressing
[1] “Appeal for Charles Enderlin”.
[2] Here.
[3] Here.
[4] Here.
[5] A blog post published shortly after the rendering of the court’s decision.
[6] His November 2004 text.
[7] My analysis of the original judgment against Karsenty two years ago.
[8] Richard Landes and his commentators.
[9] Here.
[10] Richard Landes has written.
[11] A massive upsurge of anti-Semitic incidents.
[12] Here.
[13] “First Online Free Expression Day”.
[14] “Internet Enemies”.
[15] A recent exposé of the organization.
[16] Here.
[17] Here.
L’honneur du journalisme
Elie Barnavi [A propos de l’affaire Al-Dura]
Un texte admirable d’équilibre et d’équité. Extraits : « A qui la faute de cette omerta ? A l’esprit de corps, pardi. Charles Enderlin est un journaliste chevronné et respectable ; or, un tel journaliste ne saurait manquer aux règles élémentaires de la profession ; donc, Charles Enderlin n'a pas fauté. Allons, messieurs les Journalistes, vous savez bien que ce syllogisme est vicié, et que nul n'a le monopole de la vérité… Alors, plutôt que de confondre dans un même opprobre ceux qui doutent parce qu'ils veulent comprendre, et ceux qui condamnent parce que la haine partisane leur tient lieu de jugeote, mieux vaudrait vous rallier à l'idée d'une commission d'enquête indépendante. ».
Un texte admirable d’équilibre et d’équité. Extraits : « A qui la faute de cette omerta ? A l’esprit de corps, pardi. Charles Enderlin est un journaliste chevronné et respectable ; or, un tel journaliste ne saurait manquer aux règles élémentaires de la profession ; donc, Charles Enderlin n'a pas fauté. Allons, messieurs les Journalistes, vous savez bien que ce syllogisme est vicié, et que nul n'a le monopole de la vérité… Alors, plutôt que de confondre dans un même opprobre ceux qui doutent parce qu'ils veulent comprendre, et ceux qui condamnent parce que la haine partisane leur tient lieu de jugeote, mieux vaudrait vous rallier à l'idée d'une commission d'enquête indépendante. ».
Texte repris de Marianne du 7 au 13 juin 2008.
Le 30 septembre 2000, une scène insoutenable faisait le tour du monde. Au carrefour de Netzarim, à la lisière de la bande de Gaza, un petit garçon était tué par balle dans les bras de son père, qui tentait pathétiquement de le protéger. Commentée en "prime time" par Charles Enderlin, le correspondant de France 2 à Jérusalem, l’image atroce offrait à la deuxième Intifada, qui venait à peine de commencer, son premier martyr, un cri de ralliement et un inépuisable thème de propagande. Depuis que juifs et Arabes s'affrontent sur ce bout de terre, rien n’a eu un effet aussi dévastateur sur l'image d'Israël et de ses armes que la mort du petit Mohammed al-Doura, Seule la tuerie de Deir Yassin, le 9 avril 1948, a eu des conséquences plus graves. Telle est la puissance de la télévision.
En arrivant à Paris, trois mois plus tard, j'ai dû m'intéresser, malgré moi, à une affaire al-Doura qui refusait de se faire oublier. Des esprits bien intentionnés voulaient enrôler l'ambassade d'Israël dans une croisade contre France 2 ; des journalistes moins bien intentionnés souhaitaient savoir ce que l'humaniste et homme de gauche, que j'étais censé être, pensait de l'assassinat en direct d'un enfant .J’expliquais aux uns qu'il valait mieux ne pas remuer cette boue, que le mal était fait et qu'il n'y avait, à s'acharner contre l’évidence des images, que des coups à prendre, Aux autres, que moi aussi j'avais été bouleversé par l'indicible horreur de la mort d'un enfant, mais que ce n’était certes pas un « assassinat », l’armée d'Israël, que j'avais quelque raison de connaître de l'intérieur, n'ayant pas l'habitude de massacrer des enfants, et que le seul moyen d'éviter d'autres affaires al-Doura était de mettre fin à la violence et de retourner à la table des négociations. J'avais raison avec ceux-ci, mais peut-être tort avec ceux-là.
En effet, l’acharnement de quelques francs-tireurs - pas tous des sionistes excités - mit au jour des faits troublants qui jetaient un doute sérieux sur la version des faits offerte par France 2. Ainsi, il s'avéra bientôt que Talal Abou Rahma, le cameraman d'Enderlin - lequel n'était pas présent sur les lieux lors des faits - n'était point ce professionnel au-dessus de la mêlée que vantait son patron, mais, de son propre aveu - et il s'en faisait gloire -, un propagandiste au service de la cause palestinienne. Bien plus tard, on devait apprendre aussi que les cicatrices exhibées par le père de Mohammed étaient dues à des coups de couteau [et de hache - NDLR d’upjf.org] subis au cours d'une rixe à Gaza et soignés dans un hôpital israélien. Et bien d'autres choses encore.
Petit à petit, au fil des mois et des années, des enquêtes, des polémiques et des procès, le tableau se brouilla encore davantage. II existe déjà une épaisse littérature à ce sujet, qui charrie le meilleur et le pire. La querelle se noua autour des rushes, dont on n'avait monté qu'une petite partie. Que cachaient les autres ? L'agonie de l'enfant, qu'Enderlin disait avoir voulu épargner à ses téléspectateurs ? Ou des images moins douloureuses, mais aussi plus préjudiciables à sa version des événements ? Sous la pression, France 2 finit par permettre à des happy few triés sur le volet, de les visionner. On découvrit que la plupart des « affrontements » filmés avant la scène finale étaient du théâtre au bénéfice des caméras. Et l'on a vu le petit Mohammed lever la tête après les tirs censés l’avoir tué et jeter un regard furtif à la caméra. France 2 perdit de sa superbe ; ce qui nous était présenté comme vérité dure comme roc, en octobre 2000, dans la bouche du médiateur de la chaîne, ne fut plus, dans celle de sa directrice, qu’aveu désolé d'ignorance, quatre ans plus tard.
Alors, que s’est-il vraiment passé, ce tragique 30 septembre, au carrefour de Netzarim ? Je ne sais pas. Ce que je sais, c'est que l’on est en droit de se poser des questions déplaisantes, et que celles-ci méritent une réponse honnête. Or, la presse française a été, là-dessus, d'une totale discrétion. N'est-il pas étonnant que le Monde fut le seul organe de presse national à rendre compte du procès gagné devant la 11e chambre de la cour d’appel, par Philippe Karsenty, cet animateur d'un site de « notation des médias », accusé de diffamation par Enderlin et France 2 ? Ce n'était pourtant pas une mince affaire que ce procès intenté par la principale chaîne publique française, et qui touche à la déontologie du métier de journaliste, la presse internationale ne s'y est pas trompée, qui s'en est fait largement l’écho.
A qui la faute de cette omerta ? A l’esprit de corps, pardi. Charles Enderlin est un journaliste chevronné et respectable ; or, un tel journaliste ne saurait manquer aux règles élémentaires de la profession ; donc, Charles Enderlin n'a pas fauté. Allons, messieurs les Journalistes, vous savez bien que ce syllogisme est vicié, et que nul n'a le monopole de la vérité, dont les voies sont parfois tortueuses et inattendues. J'imagine qu'une pétition va bientôt circuler, où il sera question de l'honneur bafoué d'un confrère injustement décrié par une meute de sionistes d'extrême droite. Nous n’en serons pas plus avancés pour autant, ni Charles, ni vous, ni les citoyens de ce pays, encore moins la vérité.
Alors, plutôt que de confondre dans un même opprobre ceux qui doutent parce qu'ils veulent comprendre, et ceux qui condamnent parce que la haine partisane leur tient lieu de jugeote, mieux vaudrait vous rallier à l'idée d'une commission d'enquête indépendante. Car il y va de l'honneur de votre profession, le chien, de garde de la démocratie, dit-on.
Elie Barnavi *
© Marianne
dimanche 15 juin 2008
Holocaust Education, Swedish-Style
Holocaust education is no small matter in places like, Israel, Britain and the United States. As a Swedish teacher and educational scientist, you cannot help being surprised and impressed by the huge collection of guidelines and curricula on Holocaust education assembled by the US Holocaust Memorial Museums (USHMM). The collection in the museum basement is open to all teachers and educationalists. A number of librarians are on hand to help you track down a particular guideline, even if you cannot specify exactly what you are looking for and can only describe your mission in vague terms.
This approach is probably indicative of an educational system dictated by the curricula for each individual subject. In Sweden, as you know, we are more accustomed to management by objectives than management by rule. Several of my teaching and research colleagues in Britain, at the Spirou Institute in London, for instance, and in Beth Shalom outside Nottingham, have observed that the number of teachers seeking further training about the Holocaust has increased drastically following the introduction of a compulsory curriculum for Holocaust education in the early 1990s. The question then arises: what is this dramatic increase in teacher training going to lead to, and why do teachers suddenly feel the need for extra training in this field? These questions are highly relevant in Sweden, too, not because a new compulsory subject has been introduced but because for the past three years we have been actively spotlighting the historic event known as the Holocaust in almost every conceivable kind of learning situation – schools, the home, study circles, and so forth. My purpose in presenting this article is to describe and discuss various educational perspectives in relation to the Holocaust.
The Holocaust is an historical fact that ought to make us reflect on the educational opportunities involved
A famous article by the German philosopher T W Adorno, Erziung nach Auschwitz, begins thus: ‘The first demand that should be made on all education is that it should never allow another Auschwitz. This demand overshadows all else, so I consider it self-evident that I do not have to go into the reasons why. (1)
After this opening, he presents his arguments for why schools must deal with the mechanisms that led to Auschwitz. He does not argue specifically in favour of teaching schoolchildren about Auschwitz, which is not to say he is against it. Adorno’s point is that the mechanisms that were of decisive importance for the Holocaust are a part of society and therefore a contemporary problem.
It is precisely this connection with our own day and age that makes history such a complex subject, and we must constantly ask ourselves whether we should approach it on the basis of problems deriving from our own contemporary view of the world or whether we should use it as a point of departure in describing why we are where we are today.
A meeting of minds, a collision or an exchange of views?
The explicit endeavour of the Living History project is to raise consciousness among pupils and other groups about the historiography of the Holocaust as a means of combating racism, Nazism and xenophobia. Consequently, the declared aim is to use history to influence the modern age, which is always both a complex and a controversial course to take. The Holocaust thus becomes more than an academic subject – it takes on additional perspectives and, as I have noted, my aim here is to describe the various educational approaches. It is abundantly clear that there is a difference between the Holocaust as a subject of academic research and the Holocaust as an educational subject. Whereas academic freedom is considerable as regards how the Holocaust may be researched in historical terms, Holocaust education always takes place in an explicit framework. In our objective-oriented Swedish schools there are of course no plans describing in detail how Holocaust education is to proceed, but such teaching must meet the requirements of the national curriculum, or rather it is supposed to represent a stage in the fulfilment of one or more of the curriculum objectives.
While academic research on the Holocaust can freely discuss things like whether the Holocaust was unique or not, the Holocaust as an educational subject must be curriculum-related. This does not imply a contradiction between academic research and classroom tuition – on the contrary, classroom work is based on genuine historical facts that have been assembled through research. But I reject the idea of the teacher simply functioning as a sort of transformer, who reduces the degree of difficulty so that academic knowledge becomes easier to manage for the various age levels and groups. Teachers should not only dictate the forms, they must also be educational leaders who invest their tuition with meaning. It is part of a teacher’s task to deal with all the points of view concerning a given subject and to turn them into useful school work. In the case of the Holocaust, opinions differ as to how the train of events ought to be interpreted in part or as a whole, and we have long abandoned the idea that this is simply a case of intentionalists versus functionalists. You then have the question of how education is to be viewed in general – is the point of it to provide factual knowledge or should it also have a fostering role? But as though this were not enough, there is the further question of what teaching is and how it should be provided – should it be thematised, interdisciplinary or problemoriented? Somewhere in the middle of all this stands the individual teacher, wondering which perspective to choose.
Didactical matters
In order to give all these perspectives a structure, teachers can proceed from the three universal didactical questions:
• Why should I teach? – the Legitimacy Question
• What should I teach? – the Selection Question
• How should I teach it? – the Communication Question.
These three questions separate the perspectives described earlier. They do not necessarily need to be addressed in that order. You can if you like start with the Communication Question. But in the case of a subject area such as the present one, where it is not absolutely clear what can be achieved and what ought to be achieved, it is a good idea to contextualise the teaching situation. As a teacher, I must have some idea about the context in which the education is provided before I choose the form.
For what purpose should the Holocaust historiography be used?
One extreme is to view the Holocaust as a unique occurrence that can and should be studied disinterestedly and in a true positivist. The other extreme is to seek the relevance of the Holocaust for contemporary life. By placing it in a contextual relationship to something modern, you link factual knowledge to human interests. It happens to be my conviction that knowledge and human interests always interlock even when people claim disinterested study. The question is simply what sort of knowledge you link to what kind of interest. This can be discussed on two levels: on the one hand on a metalevel that questions the political relevance of the subject matter for modern life, as for instance Klas-Göran Karlsson has done with the Swedish Government project Living History. (2) But the question can also be discussed from a didactic viewpoint. Even if both levels are worth discussing, I will confine myself to the latter. Using Habermas’s definition of ‘knowledge interests’ (3) as a starting point, it is possible to describe different approaches to the didactic choice of material.
• Technical knowledge interest – A controlling knowledge interest where the pupil is expected to master a certain field in order to produce results (e g more effective medicines).
• Hermeneutic or practical knowledge interest – Concerned with interpreting phenomena in various connections. Understanding is the primary goal.
• Emancipatory knowledge interest – A liberating knowledge interest that is verified by changing the factors constraining liberation.
Habermas never argued that one form of knowledge interest was more important than another. On the contrary, all were necessary. The problem according to Habermas is that we have been operating from the wrong interest in some sectors. It is apparent, for instance, that the system sphere tends to try and colonise the life sphere.
Applied in this context, the technical knowledge interest may be viewed as a desire to establish pupils’ levels of attainment by means of various tests for the purpose of arriving at an assessment or grade. The hermeneutic interest can be viewed as an endeavour to develop the pupil’s ability to interpret and understand the historical event in question. The emancipatory interest, finally, proceeds from the notion that knowledge of the past can be used to question the present.
To return to Adorno, the task then is to identify the mechanisms that were crucial to the development of the Holocaust and place them in relation to modern society. Are they still with us? In that case, how do they operate? What is my role as a pupil, a teacher or a citizen in relation to these mechanisms?
Once again, there is no conflict between these interests. If the third and last is to work, the requisite knowledge, i e the hard facts, in the first must have been properly established. If you choose to take Adorno’s approach to the Holocaust as an educational issue, the subject will be made up of a framework where the structure is firmly rooted in historical fact while the content is more controversial. In the present case, the content is society’s common ‘code’ of fundamental democratic values.
This code, of course, is neither self-evident nor unambivalent. You might easily think that it comprises a basic set of established values – ‘the equal worth of all’, ‘equality’ and so forth – but it would be more accurate to view it as a basis for values that can develop and become comprehensible through dialogue. To reduce democratic values to the policy documents that variously seek to define some kind of code of ethics would be to alienate pupils from the real world they occupy. The form and substance of these values and their meaning can only be explained in relation to the reality in which we live our lives, where history is a very important part. Historical fact (the framework) provides efforts on behalf of fundamental democratic values with an authenticity within which we can tackle the concepts of ‘autonomy’ and ‘responsibility’. An assertion that needs further clarification.
What do I as a teacher want to say by holding up the Holocaust as an example?
The history of the Holocaust does not describe a clear-cut, linear course. Sometimes the paths it takes seem both winding and labyrinthine.
When the chief prosecutor in Munich, Carl Wintersberg, was confronted with the situation in KZ Dachau in 1933, he was shocked. Probably at what was actually taking place there, but principally because it was unlawful. On paper, Germany in March 1933 was still to a great extent a law-based state, even if emergency clauses were being invoked to allow the government to enact laws without parliamentary approval. But as yet, not many laws had been amended and Wintersberg described KZ Dachau as unlawful. Consequently, he took legal action against the camp command, citing deprivation of liberty, assault and murder. The classic question is: what happened to the prosecutor? The answer you usually hear is that he got to see Dachau from the inside. Almost 70 years on, people are still astounded to learn that nothing happened to him personally, even if the case he brought was constantly delayed until such time as it could be dropped and 18 months later he was moved to a less prominent position in northern Bayern.
It seems as though the ‘Goldhagen Debate’ (4) is having a hard time making itself heard in Sweden – just why, one can only surmise. To speculate, however, this may possibly be due to a conviction that the Holocaust was carried out within the framework of a strict issuing of orders that could only be disobeyed on pain of death. The very idea that people exercised free, individual choice in participating in, say, the mass killings committed by the Einsatzkommando seems as terrifying as it is improbable. Yet both Goldhagen and Browning show that there was plenty of scope for free choice in Reserve Police Battalion 101, and proceed to project this onto the Holocaust machinery as a whole. The debate concerns not whether free choice existed but what that this choice looked like and how the soldiers made use of it. In this respect, if their positions may be defined so briefly, Goldhagen contended that the soldiers used their free choice to shoot Jews as they were anti-Semites, while Browning argued that they dared not exercise their freedom of choice. This was not from fear of formal punishment but because it was easier to go with the others into the woods to the place of execution – which involved a passive decision – than to stay behind in the town or village, which involved an active decision.
A passive decision does not have to be explained or legitimised to your colleagues, while an active decision does. Back to the question of what one wants to say by referring to the Holocaust. There may be other things you want to explain, such as what the ultimate consequence of racism may be, or what blind obedience can lead to, etc. Whatever it is you want to say, you have to establish a clear link between it and the historical reality in point, otherwise you risk simplifying and diluting the matter. There are a number of infamous examples, in Britain and other places, of the Holocaust being cited to counteract bullying in school.
The starting point for the present article is the interaction between the individual and the system. What often appears to be both an explicit and a tacit a priori is that it was the National Socialist state that created the spectators through violence, the threat of violence and indoctrination. This is indeed a part of the truth, but hardly the whole truth – the spectators helped create the system by an unparalleled display of personal adjustment and integration. The individual’s interaction vis-à-vis the system can be described in terms of people’s desire and capacity to adjust. Such adjustment can then be placed in relation to our own society. In order to investigate this kind of adjustment, you have to separate the system from the life sphere in your historical presentation and put the following questions:
• What was the system’s intent? (i e the National Socialist state)
• What was the function of the system?
• What was the individual’s (life sphere’s) intent?
• What was the individual’s function?
These questions bring to mind the classic debate between intentionalists and functionalists, but it is clear that neither of them can explain the genesis of the Holocaust or its implementation on their own. In general, you could say that intentionalists have no difficulty explaining how the Holocaust developed but then find it hard to explain the actions of the individual participants at various stages along the way and to explain how Germany (i e West Germany) could return to being a humanistic society. If, as Goldhagen claimed, there was an explicit desire among the Germans to exterminate all Jews, it is difficult to understand what happened to this desire after 1945.
The functionalists find it difficult to apply, say, Milgram’s theory, which describes our inclination to obey authority, in seeking to explain the origins of the Holocaust (i e why the Jews in particular), but have no difficulty making clear the unbroken chain of German administration before, during and after the Holocaust, when very few individuals were substituted from one stage to the next. This is why in a teaching situation it is important to problematise the complex relationship between system and individual and to split up the Holocaust into its different phases and different levels. A progression can be seen from, say, the housewives who earned money on the side by helping to amend the civic registry following the introduction of the Nuremberg laws, to the train drivers who drove the trains, to the administrators who ran the various camps and made sure they were properly paid for the slave labour they hired out to companies, to those on the Eastern front who actively shot people or who were responsible for the industrial extermination process, to those who planned the various phases, to those who legitimised these actions (whether beforehand or afterwards).
Individual responsibility in the National Socialist state
In charting the origins of the Holocaust, we must focus on the moral responsibility of the individual. This is to be found in the interaction between the life sphere and the system. Was Frau Müller the housewife forced to help revise the civic registry, where her task was to record which members of the population were Jews? No, she was not. It was a job you applied for. Why did he apply for it? Because she was an anti-Semite or because she needed the money? There is no answer to this question – here is where independent reflection and analysis begin on the basis of the historical facts at our disposal.
On the one hand we can argue that she would not have performed this task were it not for the presence of anti- Semitism, but we are then referring to the anti-Semitism of the system, for it was the system that sought to distinguish between Jews and Aryans. So without this anti-Semitism there would have been no work on the side for Frau Müller. Was the nature of the work important to her personally? Yes, if she was an anti- Semite it probably was. But if she was not, would it then have been impossible for her to do this work? Probably not – the extra money may well have been enough to persuade her to take on this fairly simple task. Regardless of whether or not she was an anti-Semite, could Frau Müller in 1935 have known about the fate of the Jews? Of course she could not have been aware of the ‘final solution’, but she could have known that the Jews did not stand to benefit from being deprived of their citizenship or from being forbidden to take part in a number of both private and public areas of community life, and that her role was to make it easier to distinguish Jews from the rest of the population.
We can see that Frau Müller’s adjustment occurs in several different ways and that it is definitely not a question of adjustment by coercion. She is adjusting to an anti-Semitic system that in practice does not insist on her being an anti- Semite herself, even if we are unable to determine whether she in fact was one or not. Her adjustment may be of a financial nature. Is it possible to adjust to work you do not believe in for financial gain? A banal question, of course, with a simple answer – it goes on all the time. But getting a pupil to ask himself or herself that question is not banal. This is because it embodies a part (far from the whole) of the Holocaust’s origin, implementation and conclusion while at the same time describing problems in our own day and age.
Separating morality and action
The question of whether Frau Müller was aware of the consequences of her actions or not causes us to examine the relationship between morality and action. In his book ‘Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason in the Search for Truth in the Sciences’ (5) René Descartes described the three rules in his own personal code of morals. The first was to “…obey the laws and customs of my country…”, but noting that it was not always easy to be sure of people’s true intentions, he added: “…in order to ascertain that these were their real opinions, I should observe what they did rather than what they said, not only because in the corrupt state of our manners there are few people who desire to say all that they believe, but also because many are themselves ignorant of their beliefs.” This first rule and its explanatory note incorporate one of the most important mechanisms behind the Holocaust. It might be described as the separation of avowed morality (moral consciousness and intent) from consummated morality (i e the action performed as a function of stimuli-response rather than an action performed individually and based on autonomous principles) in the public sphere.
When the mass extermination of Jews began in 1941, this was in accordance with the “…laws and customs of my country…” and it took place in the public sphere, which means that public customs bore responsibility for such actions. Unlike in the case of pogroms, the participants did not require personal hatred to motivate them nor did they need to take responsibility for the work content to any great degree. This is because the predominant values in the public sphere differ from those in the private. In the public sphere, the predominant values are instrumental ones such as duty, while the private sphere is dominated by terminal values, i e values you aspire to that give meaning to your life. As everyone knows, we have to use instrumental values as a way of realising terminal values – in modern society, we find it very hard to imagine life without both a public sphere and a private. This in itself is clearly not peculiar to German society in 1933-45 but is a feature of all modern societies. Thus two different patterns of action emerge, one in the public sphere and one in the private. Public action might be termed strategic as it primarily seeks to bring benefit to the private sphere – perhaps something as banal as working for an ourly wage – in order to realise terminal values there.
Thus taking responsibility for the form of your work is more important than taking responsibility for the content as it is the system that decides the content, and in the present case we are talking about the anti-Semitism of the system. If you object to the content, you may well find it harder to exploit the instrumental values. In the private sphere, however, we have what Habermas terms communicative action (6), i e we take personal responsibility for both the form and the content of our actions. Or put more simply, we are obliged to do what we say and say what we do if people in our immediate circle are to understand and respect us.
Thus we can see that the assumption of moral responsibility differs strikingly between the public sphere and the private. In the private sphere you assume full responsibility for both motive and deed while in the public sphere your only responsibility is to perform the tasks you have been entrusted with, i e to take technical responsibility rather than moral responsibility. Thus your personal motives are totally irrelevant as long as you do what is expected of you. The question we teachers have to ask ourselves is how we are dealing with this mechanism today. Is there not a danger that the school system is reproducing this separation of morality and action? Isn’t this precisely what is meant when young teachers and trainees are warned that the pupils are good at decoding their tuition, i e working out how to go about things in order to please the teacher?
Isn’t it our duty as teachers to get the pupils to work out how they are to go about things in order to please themselves rather than us?
This is nothing new, perhaps, nor is it controversial. But by basing our actions on this insight, and using the Holocaust as an historical framework, we may be able to deepen people’s understanding through Holocaust education and help them realise that we all have something to learn from the Holocaust.
(1) Originally a radio talk on Hessischer Rundfunk frpm 18 April 1966.
(2) Karlsson K-G. Varför sekelslutets Förintelseintresse? (Why this turn-of-the-century interest in the Holocaust?)
Paper published at the 7th Nordic Conference on History and Didactics in Trondheim, Noway, 9 September 1999.
(3) Originally published as an appendix to his book, Erkenntnis und Interesse, published in 1968.
(4) The Goldhagen Debate derived from two books by historians Browning and Goldhagen on Reserve Police Battalion 101 which served at one time in Poland. The books are based on the same source material, consisting of police interrogation of members of the battalion some 20 yeas after the war, when a preliminary investigation was launched into its wartime activities.
(5) Descartes, R. Om metoden (Discourse on Method) pp 36-37 Björck & Börjesson, Stockholm 1918
(6) Habermas J. Kommunikativt handlande (Communicative Action) Daidalos, Göteborg 1995
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