The following item came from a Verso blog following on from a Shlomo Sand article in CounterPunch on 16 January 2015 after the recent events in France with Charlie Hebdo. At the end of the article was a link to this item from 3 December 2014, and the one article explains the other.
Shlomo Sand banned from speaking
The following is a statement from the UJFP, the French Jewish Union for
Peace:
Already banned (effectively) from the Maison des
Associations on Nice’s Place Garibaldi two years ago, Shlomo Sand is now
silenced in the place where we would least have expected it: the university!
The UNIA (Université de Nice Inter-Âge) had planned a public lecture for
Wednesday 19 November entitled ‘Actuality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’,
organised and presented by Yvan Gastaut (professor of contemporary history)
with Shlomo Sand, professor at the University
of Tel Aviv, invited to come and
speak. We learned on the 6ththat this meeting had been cancelled –
without any explanation.
What had happened, then? A technical problem at the venue? A participant
falling ill, or being otherwise occupied?
No!
With a simple email dated 2 November (and all our citations come from this
document), Mr. Roger Guedj, emeritus professor at the Université de Nice
Sophia-Antipolis, warned the ‘leadership’ of the UNIA against the invite
offered ‘to a questionable and widely-questioned historian on a particularly
sensitive subject linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ and who
‘questions the creation of the State of Israel’.
Is the university not the proper place for controversy and debate? Alas! Mr.
Guedj decided already: ‘lectures on current topics must be the object of
consensus…’ In conclusion, he ‘hope[d] that it [would be] postponed, awaiting
our leadership’s discussion of whether it is appropriate’. There was soon
consensus at the UNIA… and this was put into action, with the meeting
cancelled.
Two professors from the University
of Nice, alerted to this,
immediately expressed their indignation:
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond (extracts): ‘S. Sand’s theses are, certainly, the
object of doubt, but that does not at all make him a “dubious” historian, and
his academic position is testament enough to this…
No, Sand does not at all
challenge the existence of the State of Israel, indeed he is an Israeli
citizen… the UNIA has the vocation of developing (rather than doling out....)
culture, and in a convivial atmosphere, I shoud hope; but I do not much believe
in harmony, since culture is only alive through and in confrontations’.
André Tosel (extracts): ‘I know and have read this historian of great
intellectual talent and moral courage. This decision silences and sullies the
university world for which UNIA claims to stand. Intellectual life does not
consist of giving your blessing or dodging the issue. The contradictions of
history have to be taken head on, arguing loyally and with respect in the
discussion of analyses, rather than being neutralised by the reigning moral
order’s prejudices regarding what can be expressed.
These latter, alas, are a
speciality of Nice’s. The university body and the Université de Nice
Sophia-Antipolis must restore their intellectual prestige marred by this
decision, repudiating and overturning it without delay!
The Zionists will not dictate their rewriting of history, in Nice or
anywhere else!
Shlomo Sand is an Israeli academic who teaches at the University of Tel-Aviv
–and he isn’t censored there – and is the author of many works of history
including
The Invention of the Jewish People and
The Invention of
the Land of Israel. The Zionists cannot forgive him for having questioned
the founding myths of their ideology, namely the exile of the Jews and their
return.
We can have disagreements with Shlomo Sand, as with any researcher. The
Zionists have chosen to try to gag him. The meeting that was meant to take
place at the Université de Nice Inter-Âge on 19 November was banned without
explanation after the intervention of a professor from the Université de Nice
Sophia-Antipolis, arguing that a lecture on the subject ‘Actuality of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ would have to be the object of consensus, this
not being the case for ‘such a dubious historian’.
Too much – it’s too much! The Israeli government has just committed acts
against the Palestinian population that the Russell Tribunal on Palestine
called war crimes, crimes against humanity and incitement to genocide. Israel
society in its majority approves of these crimes, partly because it is worn
down by an incessant propaganda that denies Palestinians their dignity and
their rights.
We will not let those who support a criminal policy silence our voices. We
salute the two Nice academics, Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond and André Tosel, who have
protested against this attack on freedom of expression. Nice, whose mayor
treats Roma people as ‘delinquents’ and banned Rachid Bouchareb’s ‘outlaw’
film, is a city where this freedom is under threat. Already two years ago,
Shlomo Sand was forbidden from speaking in Nice. And in that same city in 2003,
a meeting with Leila Shahid, Michel Warschawski and Dominique Vidal was also
banned.
We can also recall the case of Stéphen Hessel, barred from speaking at the
École Normale Supérieur in 2011, or the ‘Israel,
Apartheid State’
conference banned at Paris VIII in 2012. The UJFP (French Jewish Union for
Peace) denounces these attacks on freedom of expression, which serve only to
cover up for the destruction of Palestine
that is currently underway. It demands that Shlomo Sand be able to speak freely
at the university.
UJFP-PACA
Translated from the French by David Broder.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
CounterPunch Weekend Edition
January 16-18 Suis
Charlie Chaplin
A Fetid Wind of Racism Hovers Over Europe
by SHLOMO SAND
Nothing justifies an assassination, all the
more a mass murder committed in cold blood. What has happened in Paris, the beginning of January, constitutes an absolutely
inexcusable crime.
To say that involves nothing original:
millions of people think and feel likewise on this account. However, in the
light of this appalling tragedy, one of the first questions that occurrs to me
is the following: in spite of the profound disgust experienced by the murders,
is it obligatory to identify oneself with the victims’ actions? Must I be Charlie
because the victims were the supreme incarnation of the ‘liberty of
expression’, as the President of the Republic has declared? Am I Charlie,
not only because I am a secular atheist, but also because of my fundamental
antipathy towards the oppressive roots of the three principal Western
monotheistic religions?
Certain caricatures published in Charlie
Hebdo, that I’ve seen ages ago, appeared to me to be in bad taste; only a
minority amongst them made me laugh. But isn’t the problem to be found there!
In the majority of the caricatures on Islam published by the weekly, in the
course of the last decade, I have discerned a manipulative aggro intended to
further seduce the readership, obviously non-Muslim.
The reproduction by Charlie of the
caricatures published in the Danish magazine seemed to me appalling. Already,
in 2006, I had perceived as pure provocation the drawing of Mohammed decked in
a turban in the form of a bomb. This is not so much a caricature against
Islamists as a stupid conflation of Islam with Terror; it’s on a par with
identifying Judaism with money!
It has been affirmed that Charlie,
impartially, lays into all religions, but this is a lie. Certainly, it mocks
Christians, and, sometimes, Jews. However, neither the Danish magazine, nor
Charlie would permit themselves (fortunately) to publish a caricature
presenting the prophet Moses, with kippah and ritual fringes, in the guise of a
wily money-lender, hovering on a street corner.
It is good that in the society these days called ‘Judeo-Christian’ (sic), it
should no longer be possible to publically disseminate anti-Jewish hatred, as
was the case in the not-too-distant past. I am for the liberty of expression
while being at the same time opposed to racist incitement.
I admit to, gladly, tolerating the
restrictions imposed on Dieudonné from expressing too far and wide his
‘criticism’ and his ‘jokes’ against Jews. On the other hand, I am positively
opposed to attempts to restrain him physically. And if, by chance, some idiot
attacks him, I will not be very shocked … albeit I will not go so far as to
brandish a placard with the inscription: ‘je suis Dieudonné’.
In 1886, there was published in Paris La France juive of
Edouard Drumont. And in 2014, the day of the assassinations committed by the
three idiot criminals, there appears, under the title: Soumission
[Submission], effectively Muslim France, of Michel Houellebecq. The pamphlet La
France juive was
a genuine bestseller by the end of the 19th Century. Even before its
appearance in the bookstores, Soumission was already a bestseller!
These two books, each in its own time, have
benefited from sizeable and heated media coverage. There are, certainly,
differences between them. Amongst other things, Houellebecq knows that, at the
beginning of the 21st Century, it is no longer acceptable to
generate fear-mongering of a Jewish threat, but that it remains readily
acceptable to sell books implying a Muslim threat. Alain Soral, less adept, has
not understood the ‘rules’ and, for this fact, he is marginalized in the media
– and so much the better! Houellebecq, on the other hand, has been invited,
with much fanfare, to appear on the coveted 8 o’clock program (journal de 20 heures) of French public television,
while his book is simultaneously responsible for the dissemination of the fear
of Islam.
A bad wind, a fetid wind of dangerous racism,
hovers over Europe: there exists a fundamental difference between challenging
a religion or a dominant belief in a society, and that of attacking or inciting
against the religion of a dominated minority. If, in the breast of
‘Judeo-Muslim’ [no less ridiculous than the Judeo-Christian label] society – in
Saudi Arabia, in the Gulf Emirates – there is a groundswell of protests and
warnings against the dominant religion that oppresses workers in their
thousands, and millions of women, we have the responsibility to support the
persecuted protestors. Now, as one well knows, Western leaders, far from
encouraging the would-be disciples of Voltaire and Rousseau in the Middle East, maintain their total support to the religious regimes the most
repressive.
On the other hand, in France or in Denmark, in Germany or in Spain populated by millions of Muslim workers, more often
forced into the worst jobs, at the bottom of the social scale, it is necessary
to show the greatest prudence before criticizing Islam, and above all to not
crudely ridicule it.
At the moment, and particularly after this
terrible massacre, my sympathy goes to the Muslims who reside in ghettos
adjacent to the metropolises, who are at considerable risk of becoming the
second victims of the murders perpetrated at Charlie Hebdo and at the Hyper
Casher supermarket. I continue to take as a reference point the ‘original
Charlie’: the great Charlie Chaplin who never mocked the poor and the
little-educated.
Moreover, and knowing that one’s writings
always occur in context, how to not raise the fact that, for more than a year,
so many French troops are present in Africa to ‘combat the jihadists’, when no
serious debate has taken place in France on the usefulness or the damage of
these military interventions? The colonial gendarme of yesteryear, who carries
an incontestable responsibility in the chaotic heritage of [arbitrary] borders
and regimes, is today ‘recalled’ to reinstall ‘law and order’ by means of its
latterday neo-colonial gendarmerie.
France joins the military coalition in Iraq, beside the US military, firefighting pyromaniac, responsible for
the chaos created in the region, and notably in the rise to power of the
frightful ‘Daesh’. Allied with the ‘enlightened’ Saudi leadership, and other
ardent partisans of the ‘liberty of expression’ in the Middle East, [France]
shores up the illogical border carve-up that it had imposed a century ago
according to its imperialist interests. It is summoned to bombard those who
threaten the precious oil reserves whose product it consumes, without
understanding that, in doing so, it invites the risk of terror attacks in the
heart of the metropolis.
But, in fact, it is possible that this
process is well understood. The enlightened West can’t possibly be the naive
and innocent victim as it loves to present itself. Of course, for an assassin to
kill in cold blood innocent and unarmed people it is necessary to be cruel and
perverse. But it is necessary to be hypocritical or stupid to close one’s eyes
on the particulars that have provided the foundations of this tragedy.
This is also proof of a blindness that we had
better understand: this conflict will further escalate if we don’t all
work together, atheists and believers, to open true ways of living together
without hating each other.
Shlomo Sand is the author of How I
Stopped Being a Jew, Verso, 2014.
In November 2014 Sand was denied the
opportunity to talk at a University in France (seat of the liberty of expression). The UJFP
summarises the affair here.
An earlier version of this article was
published on the site of the Union
Juive Française pour la Paix, and reproduced on Mediapart.
Translated from the Hebrew by Michel Bilis; translated from Bilis’ French by
Evan Jones.
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