Ezra Ben-Shalom
jewish state. com

18 March 2008

RFI's show calls itself Geopolitics, The Debate, but the debate centers around just how much murder Israel deserves. This week's guests, René Naba and Denis Sieffert, agree perfectly on Palestinean victoomhood and Israeli guilt. Finishing each other's sentences and outdoing each other with the virulence of their criticism for Israel, keeping track of which guest is speaking proves as difficult as it is pointless.

The united Islamist front on RFI offers a peculiar perspective on the violence between Arab extremists and the Middle East's only democracy. The host of the show, Richard Labévière, calls Israel's anti-terror operations "reprisals", while both guests suggest that mass murder of Israeli civilians merely reflects a natural consequence of Israel's sub-human policies.

Sieffert's suggestions that Israel has itself to blame for these murders fits with what he has written for the French publication Politis. For example, Sieffert wrote on 6 March that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's "problem is not the injustice of a territory [Gaza] economically and socially asphyxiated, it is the act of rebellion [Hamas's firing of missiles on civilian areas] that this injustice provokes."

Thus, Sieffert skillfully erases any mention of Hamas's openly proclaimed objective of killing all Jews: those in the Jewish State as well as those in the diaspora. That truth, sitting in the public square for all to see, does not merit observation on the antennas of RFI. Instead, he offers the substitute explanation that Jewish crimes perforce trigger mass murder of Jews.

Of course, Sieffert does not bother to ask, "Why would this Arab organization want to eliminate the Jews, and especially why would it try to commit genocide considering the Arab inferiority in matériel and military effectiveness?" Instead, he and the other guest make an enumeration Israel's military assets without following up with a point, as though Israel's superior forces imply guilt, or a heartless, militaristic state.

Of course, since RFI does not desire to hear a Zionist voice at The Debate, no one had a chance to ask this key question: "Why does Hamas, which the E.U. recognizes as a terrorist organization, take shelter in civilian areas after launching missiles on civilian areas and then win international sympathy when civilians are killed in anti-terror operations?"

René Naba, the other Islamist voice on The Debate, lends a hand in stifling the Israeli viewpoint. His lack of insight shines brightly through the following excerpt from his blog, which pretends to explain the War of 1956:

Ten years later, in 1956, together with Israel and the UK, France embarked on a « punitive raid » against President Nasser, guilty of having attempted to get back Egypt’s sovereignty over its sole important national asset, the Suez Canal. What a curious team such an alliance was, gathering the survivors of the Nazi genocide (who were many among the Israelis) and France, one of their former butchers, which had been an anteroom of the extermination camps under Vichy !

If Naba correctly identifies a history of anti-Semitism and genocide in France (not to mention French misdeeds in pre-1995 Rwanda), unfortunately he fails to convince that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was merely "guilty of having attempted to get back Egypt's sovereignty." As John Adams wrote, "Facts are stubborn things," and unfortunately for Naba's analysis, the Arab states made plain the genocidal ambitions of their "war of destruction against Israel". On 31 August 1955, General Nasser declared, "Egypt has decided to dispatch her heroes, the disciples of Pharaoh and the sons of Islam and they will cleanse the land of Palestine....There will be no peace on Israel’s border because we demand vengeance, and vengeance is Israel’s death." [Middle Eastern Affairs, (December 1956), p. 461.]

With the benefit of 50 years of hindsight, if Naba cannot understand the génocidaires of the 1950's, how can he avoid getting caught up in modern calls to genocide?

Shame on RFI for its Islamist garbage show. The majority of the French people do not share this extremist interpretation and deserve more for their tax euros.