The law can’t stop hate

Since the intensification of the Palestinian jihad five years ago, Britain and Europe have been convulsed by an eruption of virulent anti-Jewish hatred based on the systematic lies, libels and demonisation directed at Israel by the media and intelligentsia.

Still reading? Well done. Others will no doubt already have thrown this article across the room in disgust. For conventional wisdom has it that there has been no upsurge of anti-Jewish hatred, only legitimate attacks on Israel which are being labelled anti-Jewish prejudice by those who are either suffering from advanced paranoia or are Zionist zealots attempting to sanitise the crimes of Ariel Sharon.

Now, however, agreement that hatred of Jews is indeed umbilically linked to the current attack upon Israel has emerged from a most unlikely quarter. In France, everyday violence and intimidation has left French Jews in a state of siege.

Yet two weeks ago the French appeal court in Versailles ruled that in a comment piece published by Le Monde in 2002 entitled ‘Israel-Palestine: the Cancer’, the paper was guilty of ‘racial defamation’ against the Jewish people. In other words, under cover of an attack upon Israel in language which is replicated every week in Britain and Europe, the most prestigious newspaper in France had been whipping up hatred of the Jews.

The appeal court ruled that the article, written by a well-known sociologist, a university lecturer and a member of the European Parliament, contained comments that ‘targeted a whole nation, or a religious group in its quasi-globality’.

The article was the usual farrago of untruths, libels and distortions about Israel. It described it as ‘oppressing and asphyxiating the Palestinian population’, repeated the lie about the massacre of Jenin that never was, and claimed that Israel was imposing apartheid beneath the shroud of the Holocaust. In particular, the court singled out two paragraphs which explicitly defamed the Jewish people as a whole:

‘It is hard to imagine that a nation of fugitives born of a people who have been subjected to the longest persecution in the history of humanity ...should be capable, in the space of two generations, of transforming themselves into a people sure of themselves and dominating (of others) and, with the exception of an admirable minority, a scornful people that takes satisfaction in humiliating others....

‘The Jews of Israel, descended of an apartheid [sic] named the ghetto, are ghettoising the Palestinians. The Jews, who were the victims of a pitiless order, are imposing their pitiless order on the Palestinians. The Jewish victims of inhumanity are displaying a terrible inhumanity. The Jews, scapegoats for every evil, are “scapegoating” Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, made responsible for attacks that they prevent them from preventing.’

Le Monde, which is now appealing to the highest court in France, merely sniffs in lofty disdain. The ruling took these remarks out of context, said one of the paper’s lawyers; of course these authors were not anti-Jewish. Some of their meilleurs amis, no doubt, are Jews.

In fact, these two paragraphs provided the rhetorical climax to the article’s group libel against Israel and thus explicitly associated what it so delightfully called ‘the chosen people’ with ‘plunder, gratuitous destruction, homicides, executions’.

One might have expected such a momentous ruling pronouncing Le Monde guilty of racial prejudice against the Jews to have made waves. Not a bit of it. The French have ignored it. The case was only brought to light by the Middle East commentator Tom Gross in the Wall Street Journal Europe, who asked why nothing had been written about it anywhere a week after the ruling. Following his article, the Guardian belatedly ran a story.

The media has been silent because the same kind of calumnies are routinely published and broadcast in Britain and throughout Europe: obsessively disproportionate and libellous coverage which equates Israel with the Nazis, misrepresents its defence against terror as brutal aggression, and singles out the Jewish people in their ancient and restored nation state as uniquely unworthy of self-determination.

So should those who are deeply concerned by the rise in prejudice and violence towards Jews provoked by this perversity be able to take similar action? In Britain, only individuals, not peoples or nations, can seek the civil redress provided by the libel laws. So should we too have a crime of racial defamation?

Well, no. For heartening as it is to see a public body at last calling this prejudice by its proper name, the case against Le Monde also provokes unease. Racial prejudice is hateful and should be exposed as such. But this should be done at the bar of public opinion, not in a court of law.

It was only through a procedural quirk of this particular case that Le Monde was required merely to pay notional damages; since racial defamation is a crime, its editor and writers could have gone to prison. It is surely oppressive to jail anyone for their opinion. The courts are a blunt instrument, and using them to suppress free speech is deeply troubling. Our draconian libel laws already stifle much necessary expression, and anti-discrimination laws are in danger of demonising half the population for being either racists or every kind of phobe.

Incitement to violence is a crime that should be prosecuted. But hatred and prejudice are subjective concepts and so can easily be used to suppress legitimate expression.

We already have a law against incitement to racial hatred, and the government proposes to introduce a new crime of incitement to religious hatred. The latter will criminalise legitimate and necessary criticism of religion, while the former is so problematic that it is scarcely used. If political views that promote anti-Jewish or other racist hatred were banned, so too must all literary anti-Jewish and racist stereotypes be banned, which would mean censoring much of English literature, not to mention the New Testament and the Koran. What is hateful and prejudiced to one person may be legitimate comment to another. The way to deal with prejudice is surely through the public pillory, naming and shaming and countering it with the truth. In other words, far from suppressing expression the remedy is to open up debate.

The problem, though, is that the media refuse to do this over Israel because the prejudice is omnipresent. This is why ‘blogs’ — website comment spots — are becoming increasingly important to bust the monopoly of the mainstream media and subject its bias and prejudice on any subject to systematic exposure, deconstruction and opprobrium.

Racist expression poses an acute dilemma for a liberal society. Its effects are noxious; its antidotes may be muted. But suppressing it just drives it underground. If hearts and minds are to be won, prejudice has to be fought in the open on the battlefield of ideas.