France leads the world in hypocrisy

Amazing, mind-boggling, brazenly hypocritical!

Check this out: the BBC reports that,

A top French judicial body has ruled a law backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy making it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide as unconstitutional as it infringes on freedom of expression.

Oh yeah?  Then what about the infamous Gayssot Act which is in the French law books since 1990!!

Some victims are clearly more equal than others...

Nothing new, but absolutely nauseating nevertheless.

Could the following have something to do with that? (in French only, sorry!)

The DOJ's escalating criminalization of speech

by Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com

Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening. The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, charged with "providing material support" to a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)).

What is the "material support" he allegedly gave? He produced and uploaded a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib, video of armored trucks exploding after being hit by IEDs, prayer messages about "jihad" from LeT's leader, and -- according to the FBI's Affidavit -- "a number of terrorist logos." That, in turn, led the FBI agent who signed the affidavit to assert that "based on [his] training and experience, it is evident that the video . . . is designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT and to recruit jihadists to LeT." The FBI also claims Ahmad spoke with the son of an LeT leader about the contents of the video and had attended an LeT camp when he was a teenager in Pakistan. For the act of uploading that single YouTube video (and for denying that he did so when asked by the FBI agents who came to his home to interrogate him), he faces 23 years in prison.

Let's be very clear about the key point: the Constitution -- specifically the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment -- prohibits the U.S. Government from punishing someone for the political views they express, even if those views include the advocacy of violence against the U.S. and its leaders. One can dislike this legal fact. One can wish it were different. But it is the clear and unambiguous law, and has been since the Supreme Court's unanimous 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had publicly threatened violence against political officials in a speech.

In doing so, the Brandenberg Court struck down as unconstitutional an Ohio statute (under which the KKK leader was prosecuted) that made it a crime to "advocate . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform." Such advocacy -- please read the part in bold -- cannot be a crime because it is protected by the First Amendment. The crux of the Court's holding: "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force" (emphasis added; for more on the First Amendment law protecting this right to advocate violence, see my discussion here).

To put this less abstractly, and as I've noted before, a person has -- and should and must have -- the absolute free speech right to advocate ideas such as this:

For decades, the U.S. Government has been engaging in violence and otherwise interfering in the Muslim world. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim men, women and children have died as a result. There is no end in sight to this American assault on the Muslim world and those of its client states. Therefore, it is not only the right, but the duty, of Muslims to engage in violence against Americans as a means of self-defense and to deter further violence against Muslims. That is the only available means for fighting back against the world's greatest military superpower. The only alternative is continuing passive submission to this onslaught of violence aimed at Muslims.

One may find that idea objectionable or even repellent, but does anyone believe that someone should be prosecuted for writing that paragraph? Anyone who would favor prosecution for that doesn't understand or believe in the Constitution, as those ideas are pure political speech protected by the First Amendment, every bit as much as: the climate crisis now justifies violent attacks on polluting corporations; or capitalism is so destructive that the use of force in service of a Communist Revolution is compelled; or "if our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it's possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken" (Brandenberg); or such is the tyranny of the Crown that taking up arms against it is not merely a right but the duty of all American patriots (The American Revolution). The Jerusalem Post just fired one of its columnists, a Jewish leftist who wrote that Palestinian violence against Israel is "justified" because they have the "right to resist" the occupation; is he guilty of a crime of materially supporting Terrorism? Should Ward Churchill, widely accused of having justified the 9/11 attack (or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who did the same) have been indicted?

Judging from the description of Ahmad's video in the FBI Affidavit (Ahmad's YouTube account has been removed), the video in question does not go nearly as far as the clearly protected views referenced in the prior paragraph, as it does not explicitly advocate violence at all; indeed, it appears not to advocate that anyone do anything. Rather, the FBI believes it is evocative of such advocacy ("designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT"), which makes this prosecution even more troubling. Apparently, if you string together video and photographs (or words) in a certain way as to make the DOJ think that you're implicitly trying to "develop support" for a Terrorist group -- based on the political ideas you're expressing -- you risk decades of imprisonment. Is it possible to render the ostensible right of "free speech" more illusory than this?

This case is not an aberration; as indicated, prosecuting Muslims for pure political speech is an increasing weapon of the DOJ. In July, former Obama OLC official Marty Lederman analyzed the indictment of a 22-year-old former Penn State student for -- in the FBI's words -- "repeatedly using the Internet to promote violent jihad against Americans" by posting comments on a "jihadist" Internet forum including "a comment online that praised the [October, 2010] shootings" at the Pentagon and Marine Corps Museum and "a number of postings encouraging attacks within the United States." He also posted links to a bomb-making manual.

Regarding the part of the indictment based on "encouraging violent attacks," Lederman -- who, remember, was an Obama DOJ lawyer until very recently -- wrote: it "does not at first glance appear to be different from the sort of advocacy of unlawful conduct that is entitled to substantial First Amendment protection under the Brandenburg line of cases." As for linking to bomb-making materials, Lederman wrote: "the First Amendment generally protects the publication of publicly available information, even where there is a chance or a likelihood that one or more readers may put such information to dangerous, unlawful use." Lederman's discussion of the law and its applicability to that prosecution contains some caveats (and also raises some other barriers to these kinds of prosecutions), but he is clear that the aspect of the indictment based on the alleged advocacy and encouragement of violence in the name of jihad "would appear to be very vulnerable to a First Amendment challenge." That's government-lawyer-ese for: this prosecution is attempting to criminalize free political speech.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this trend is the fact that a Pakistani man in New York was prosecuted and then sentenced to almost six years in prison for doing nothing more than including a Hezbollah news channel in the package of cable channels he offered for sale to consumers in Brooklyn. On some perverse level, though, all of these individuals are lucky that they are being merely prosecuted rather than targeted with due-process-free assassination. As I documented last month, that is what is being done to U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki due -- overwhelmingly if not exclusively -- to the U.S. Government's fear of his purely political views.

If the First Amendment was designed to do anything, it was designed to prevent the government from imprisoning people -- or killing them -- because of the political ideas they promote. Yet that is clearly what the Obama administration is doing with increasing frequency and aggression.

There is one last point that bears emphasis here. Numerous prominent politicians from both political parties -- Michael Mukasey, Howard Dean, Wes Clark, Tom Ridge, Ed Rendell, Fran Townsend, Rudy Giuliani, and many others -- have not only been enthusiasticaly promoting and advocating on behalf of a designated terrorist organization (MEK of Iran), but they have been receiving substantial amounts of cash from that Terrorist group as they do so. There is only one list of "designated Terrorist organizations" under the law, and MEK is every bit as much on that list as LeT or Al Qaeda are. Yet you will never, ever see those individuals being indicted by the Obama DOJ for their far more extensive -- and paid -- involvement with MEK than, for instance, Ahmad has with LeT. That's because: (1) the criminal law does not apply to politically powerful elites, only to ordinary citizens and residents (indeed, many of those MEK-shilling politicians cheer on broad and harsh application of the "material support" statute when applied to others), and (2) MEK is now devoted to fighting against a government disliked by the U.S. (Iran), so they've become (like Saddam Hussein when fighting Iran and bin Laden when fighting the Soviet Union) the Good Terrorists whom the U.S. likes and supports.

Nonetheless, MEK remains on the list of the designated Terrorist groups, and lending them material support -- which certainly includes paid shilling for them -- is every bit as criminal (at least) as the behavior in the above-discussed indictments. As usual, though, "Terrorism" means nothing other than what the U.S. Government wants it to mean at any given moment. The evisceration of the rule of law evidenced by this disparate treatment is as odious as the First Amendment assault itself.

UPDATE: A couple of commenters, such as abhisaha, argue that the government's prosecution of Ahmad has been made more plausible by last year's Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law (which I wrote about, among other places, here, when I interviewed the plaintiffs' counsel). It's certainly not an unreasonable point, except (1) that case did not overrule or purport to overrule Brandenberg, which remains good law; and (2) Holder itself emphasized that "pure speech" remains protected. It did, however, allow that one "may not coordinate the speech with the groups on the terrorist list," though whether Ahmad did that is far from clear, as opposed to the MEK advocates, who quite likely would be found to have done so virtue of those payments (nor would it have any bearing on the indictment discussed by Lederman). In any event, Holder is easily one of the worst free speech decisions in several decades, and the fact that prosecutions are now being brought that hinge on a broad reading of it only underscore how relentless is the free speech assault from the Obama DOJ (which, naturally, vigorously advocated for the broad "material support" interpretation upheld in Holder).

Holocaust, Hate Speech & Were the Germans so Stupid?

Testing the Limits of Freedom of Speech: Ernst Zundel Speaks Out

(thanks to L. for brining this article to my attention - VS)

An exclusive interview with one of Europe's most well-known political prisoners

by Kourosh Ziabari for Foreign Policy Journal

Ernst Zundel is a German author and historian who has spent seven years of his life behind bars as a result of expressing his controversial viewpoints and opinions. He is a revisionist who has denied the Holocaust as described by most historians. He has been one of the most prominent political prisoners in Europe and has been jailed in three countries on two continents.

After his arrest in the U.S. in 2003, he was deported to Canada, where he was kept in prison as “a threat to the national security” for two years. After deportation to Germany in March 2005, he was convicted and sentenced in 2007 to five additional years of imprisonment on charges of holocaust denial. He was finally released on March 1, 2010.

This is the first interview Ernst Zundel has given since his release.

Firstly, I would like to extend my congratulations on your recent release. Were you ever mistreated or subject to any type of mental or physical punishment in breach of international conventions?

My entire treatment these past seven years by those arresting me, trying and convicting me, and keeping me in prison has been in brutal breach of international conventions. I was arrested in broad daylight on American soil by officials of the U.S. government who acted as hit squads for a nefarious lobby. There was no arrest warrant. I was not read my rights. I was whisked away in handcuffs without being allowed to get my wallet, to call my attorney, to be allowed to make my case before an American Immigration Judge or even hug my wife goodbye.

I was incarcerated in six different prisons on two continents in three countries — the USA, Canada, and Germany — without relief of any kind. In effect, I have had 10 percent of my life stolen from me – and for what “crime”? For having “overstayed my U.S. visa”?

Throughout my imprisonment, basic human rights principles were trampled underfoot repeatedly and with impunity. The worst prisons were the Canadian detention centers at Thorold, Ontario and at Toronto West, where I was held for two long years in isolation cells, ice-cold in the winter, no shoes or socks allowed. The electric light in these cells, bright enough to be able to read, was kept on 24 hours a day. Through a glass slot in the door I was checked every 20 minutes, and my activities were meticulously noted by the guards: one sheet for every day. No dignity, no privacy. My toothbrush was kept in a plastic bin in a hall. I was not allowed to speak to other prisoners. Bed sheets were changed only after three months. No pillows. No chairs. When I wrote to my wife or to my attorneys, I had to sit on a makeshift pile of my court transcripts. No radio, no television, not even an electrical outlet to sharpen my pencils. No ball point pens, only pencil stubs, cut in half with a saw. No spoons, forks, or knives were permitted; only a white plastic spoon with a fork called a “spork” that had to be returned every time at the end of the meal. With very few exceptions when furtive guards showed me some kindness away from the surveillance cameras, I was treated as though I was the worst of criminals. That’s Canada for you, where I have lived and worked without a criminal record for more than 40 years.

It was somewhat better, but not much, in the United States. In Germany, it was quite a bit better in terms of the basic necessities, but personal mail was routinely withheld – 1,700 letters for up to five years – even after I forced a court to order that it be given to me. My so-called trial in Mannheim was a political show trial in the Stalinist mode in that my guilt was a foregone conclusion. I requested that exculpatory exhibits be allowed as validation for what I believed and had written and said. No meaningful defense was allowed. I could not put on record any forensic evidence, any historical documents, or even expert witnesses, That very request to be allowed to offer evidence was held to be a new offense of criminal behavior and could have resulted in new criminal charges – as were, in fact, lodged against my lawyers during that very trial who tried to overcome these restrictions.

Along with the rest of EU members, Germany regularly criticizes other countries for violations of free speech and human rights. However, your case demonstrated the emptiness of such claims within Europe. What’s your take on that? Is Europe really a utopia of liberty and freedom of speech?

Most European countries have only selected free speech for officially approved and sanctioned views on history. Almost all EU countries have laws in place that restrict freedom of speech under the guise of one fig leaf or other, such as the prevention of racist or neo-Nazi activities. The state decides selectively who is and what is racist. These laws are hypocritical, in Germany’s case superseding even their own Basic Law.

Dissidents are allowed very little opportunity to be read or heard in the mainstream corporate media channels of the West. The control mechanisms of the press are many, often subtle but widely understood and obeyed – fear of loss of jobs, diminished circulation, the withholding of government advertisements etc. There is no longer unrestricted freedom in any Western country, not even in the U.S. with its wonderful Constitution and Amendments such as the Bill of Rights.

Allow me here to point out to your readers the outline of a censorship practice known by its neutral term “rendition”, but more honestly defined as political kidnappings to force the silencing of dissident speech or alternate thoughts. Renditions in the West are ever more frequently practiced not only against alleged “terrorist suspects” but against ordinary political activists and writers whose viewpoints are frowned upon by such outfits as AIPAC and similar Zionist lobby and interest groups, B’nai Brith, the Canadian Jewish Congress etc.

In order to spell out what I can only describe to you in broad strokes, I’d like to briefly shed light on the period preceding my arrest in the U.S. and Canada, the conniving and the similarity in other cases like mine, where an innocuous or alleged infraction is used as a fig leaf to silence a political opponent.

Viet Dinh, a Georgetown University law professor and director of their Asian Law and Policy Studies Program who helped craft the Patriot Act, put it succinctly, as reported in an American publication called Wired that deals with freedom of speech on the net. That interview reads:

Wired News: An estimated 5,000 people have been subjected to detention since 9/11. Of those, only five — three noncitizens and two citizens — were charged with terrorism-related crimes and one was convicted. How do we justify such broad-sweeping legislation that has resulted in very few terrorist-related convictions?

Dinh: I’ve heard the 5,000 number. The official numbers released from the Department of Justice indicate approximately 500 persons have been charged with immigration violations and have been deported who have been of interest to the 9/11 investigation.

It may well be that a number of citizens were not charged with terrorism-related crimes, but they need not be. Where the department has suspected people of terrorism, it will prosecute those persons for other violations of law, rather than wait for a terrorist conspiracy to fully develop and risk the potential that that conspiracy will be missed and thereby sacrificing innocent American lives in the process.

This is exactly what happened to me. The initial reason given was an alleged immigration infraction – namely a “visa overstay”. I was no terrorist; I was a dissident writer. My political detractors knew perfectly well that I was in America legally, awaiting adjustment of status due to my marriage to an American citizen. I was in Immigration Adjustment of Status proceedings, meticulously following all the prerequisite steps. I was living openly in a rural area in Tennessee and was listed by address in the local telephone book. The U.S. government had given me a Social Security number, a work permit, a document that allowed me to leave the country and return unmolested. I had undergone and passed an FBI check and a health clearance. The only last step missing was a personal interview by an immigration official to ascertain a valid marriage to my American citizen wife.

We had been notified in writing that this interview could take as long as three years, and that no status report would be given. We were patiently waiting for that last step, a routine interview with an immigration official. Our immigration attorney had requested such an interview in writing – twice! Under oath, he testified that he had written those letters. These letters have mysteriously disappeared from our immigration file. When I was arrested, it was claimed that I had negligently “missed a hearing” which gave them grounds for an arrest due to a visa overstay. In other words, a simple bureaucratic loophole was found or fabricated that has cost me seven years of my life.

What happened to me in the context of a deliberate state policy of deception has also happened to others. Similar ruses via false accusations were used in cases like Germar Rudolf, likefwise married to an American citizen, El Masri of Germany, Maher Arar of Canada, Gerd Honsik of Spain, Siegfried Verbeke of Belgium, David Irving, and now Bishop Williamson of England, to name only a few individuals who were caught between the grind stones of a criminal policy possible only under the Patriot Act in the U.S. and similar legal instruments in other countries. Embedded in that background of a widespread covert policy and practice to force political conformity, my case makes eminent sense. We are no longer dealing with an aberration. These extrajudicial renditions give 9/11 and the Patriot Act a new light as a global policy instrument of brutal censorship of unpopular thinkers and writers.

The thrust of a prestigious publication such as yours would normally deal with the policies of foreign governments, renditions, kidnappings, and incarcerations not only of foreign enemies but, as in the case of Vanunu, an Israeli-born- and-raised atomic scientist. He was no neo-Nazi, no racist, no Holocaust Denier, yet he was relentlessly pursued by the Mossad and ultimately kidnapped and jailed for 18 years.

The patterns of the breaking of international law and conventions, the use of false identities, and the brazen practice of breaking and entering by spy and intelligence agencies, etc. – these criminal activities are daily in the news. This sets the stage and makes my case a logical progression of an old, established policy, with this one difference: we are no longer talking about hunting and kidnapping alleged “Nazi war criminals” like Eichmann or stone-throwing Palestinians or even “Arab terrorists”, but instead the targeting of writers and other political dissidents in Western countries calling themselves “democracies”.

My story does not even end there. In my case, my “Holocaust Denier” profile was convenient, but passé. It was not even, as is so commonly and falsely claimed, “Denial of the Holocaust” or even more bizarre, my “visa overstay”! I was told what actually happened by a friend of ours with high-level UN connections. In his own words: “It was the Blue Booklet that did it! That’s when it was decided at the very highest level to take you out for good!”

Here is what happened, briefly: In the early months post-9/11 my wife, an avid Internetter, discovered a compelling research document entitled Stranger than Fiction: An Independent Investigation of 9/11 and the War on Terrorism by Anonymous, 11-11-2. She gave it to me over breakfast. I read it, found it interesting, and ran a few copies off on my printer for people on my mailing list. I did not write that lavishly footnoted paper. I did not research it. I merely copied it. Somebody must have concluded that I, with my background of thorough forensic investigations in other areas, showed more than ordinary interest in 9/11 as a potential political false flag common in intelligence agency operations!

During my trial in Mannheim, ostensibly for “Holocaust Denial”, portions of my monthly newsletter, where I mentioned this booklet and the 9/11 topic, were referenced by the prosecution as criminal offenses. Only after it became clear that I welcomed the opportunity to have my attorneys present forensic evidence of a potential 9/11 cover-up were those portions of the accusation against me hastily dropped, and my trial became a “Holocaust Denial” show trial in the traditional Stalinist mode, “… accuse wildly but don’t allow a defense!”

As we later found out through various freedom of information requests in various countries, there was in place for years a deliberate, convoluted plan to arrest and detain me under false pretenses so as to take me out and put me behind bars.

I mention this only as an overarching, logical example as to how diabolically clever my political opponents are in using the accusation of “Holocaust Denial” and persecution of Holocaust Revisionists as arrows in their arsenal of weaponry to shore up, consolidate, and protect their deceptively acquired power and influence.

What’s the reality behind Holocaust? Didn’t it happen at all? What about people such as Elie Wiesel, Thomas Blatt, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and Leopold Engleitner who are Holocaust survivors and describe their own accounts of those painful days, when they personally witnessed the heart-rending demise of their parents in concentration camps and bone-crushing machines. How should we resolve these contradictions?

I will not answer this question. I would risk five more years in jail if I answered these questions honestly and truthfully. However, in the age of the Internet, others less known than I am find ways to simplify a painful, multifaceted problem, as this cartoon makes plain.

Many people of other countries have come to the categorical conclusion that the Western world is a beacon of liberty and unrestricted freedom of speech. But it sometimes seems that the reality is something else, and that people can be easily prosecuted merely for publishing views that are disliked. The booklet you published, Did Six Million Really Die?, is an example. What do you think?

Here is just one more example of what I already outlined above: We have faxes and other documents that prove on official embassy letterhead that the much vaunted and propagandized U.S. Judiciary has run interference for these kidnappers and renditioners via behind-the-scenes ex parte communication, thus engaging in a cover-up and whitewash worse than the ones practiced by those the U.S. government always blames for human rights violations in their hypocritical press campaigns, like against China in Tibet, Lukashenko in Belarus, Putin in Moscow and, of course, Iran during the recent so-called Green Revolution.

Many Zionist websites have introduced you as a white supremacist. Is that a fair characterization?

This claim is a convenient character assassination technique. I have never been a white supremacist and have stated so for decades, publicly, in countless interviews, newsletters, speeches, broadcasts, etc. It is my opponents’ modus operandi to broad-brush complex issues by politically expedient demonization.

You’re opposed to the regime of Israel because of its discriminatory and atrocious approach against the nation of Palestine. You consider yourself a pacifist who advocates stability and peace; aren’t these beliefs incompatible with your viewpoint regarding Hitler, who is internationally considered to be a notorious dictator and relentless killer? How can your peace-seeking stance come together with your approval of Hitler?

I cannot answer this question due to legal restraints. An honest and complete answer would land me in jail as a re-offender very quickly. Implicit in your question is the toxic image of me that my detractors would like you to have. To be called a Nazi is worse than being called a leper. For decades I have been on the receiving end of just such a targeted character assassination campaign. I have been jailed many times not for advocating an ideology but for expressing a dissident, alternative viewpoint on many topics, including Adolf Hitler’s role in history. Revisionism is not an ideology. It is merely a scientific method of re-examining historical events and of trying to understand the movers and shakers who made history a footnote to their personalities.

Let me answer your question this way: I have always abhorred any kind of violence in the pursuit of political goals. By anyone! Politically, I was and am a pacifist, much in the Gandhi style. I advocate a sober, neutral look at history, including the period known as the Third Reich. The peoples of the world, regardless of what system of government they live under, owe it to themselves to emancipate themselves of the simplistic images of propaganda and deceit posing as history.

On May 1995, your Toronto residence was the target of an arson attack which resulted in $400,000 worth of damage. A few days later, some of your extremist opponents were caught trying to break into your property. Again a few days later, you received a parcel bomb which the Toronto police detonated. Have you ever tried to lodge a complaint against them? Have they ever been lawfully sentenced?

This is the flip side of some of the questions above. While I have never advocated or engaged in violence, egregious acts of violence have been repeatedly practiced on me, of which the political kidnapping in 2003 was merely the latest. As to the fire and the bomb, no, nothing was ever resolved. The police apprehended the bomb builders and senders, but the charges laid were stayed. There seems to have been no political will at the highest levels of the Canadian government. There was no political coin to be garnered by prosecuting Jewish arsonists, who even confessed to the deed.

Do you differentiate between the Zionists and Jews as the followers of a divine, monotheistic religion?

Yes, the two are totally different. Some Orthodox Jews who are united against Zionism, such as the Neturei Karta, believe that also. They know the godfathers of Communism and Zionism followed identical policies. The guiding spirit behind the two systems is the same. Neturei Karta rabbis attended the 2006 Teheran Conference sponsored by your President in an attempt to distance themselves from what they consider to be a dangerous atheist clique in the pursuit of illegal politics of conquest of which they want no part.

The mainstream corporate media, while having already vilified you, remained silent about your release. What do you think about this? Are you going to continue your ideological path or would you prefer to keep a low profile and forget about the intellectual activities?

Ironically, that was exactly what I intended to do when I moved to Tennessee and married Ingrid; keeping a low profile and turning to private endeavors such as my love for art and music. I felt that my revisionist outreach was finished, concluded to my inner satisfaction. Let others read both sides and then judge for themselves. All the arguments, all the information needed on the Holocaust is out there, on the Internet, in tens of thousands of websites, all for the taking. How often do you have to dig up an archeological site to find yet one more bone, yet one more implicating shard? My wife likes to say that you don’t have to eat a camel to know what a cutlet tastes like. I was quite ready to retire and satisfy my creative needs and desires. I could leave the political mopping-up activities for others to complete. But could my political opponents bring themselves, as rational people might have, to likewise call it quits? No; that is simply not in their nature.

As you point out so cogently, a powerful vilification campaign is still going full blast. It keeps my name in the media for people to decide for themselves who I am. Upon my release, my wife has collected thousands and thousands of letters from readers, only three of which were negative! Not a bad record, of the millions of dollars spent and millions of words dispersed in an attempt to paint me as as a devil with horns.

Let me ask you – would your prestigious publication have cared to interview me if you thought that I deserved the label of Evil Incarnate?

[Editor's note: The views and beliefs of Ernst Zundel are his own, and not those of Foreign Policy Journal. It is the policy of FPJ to uphold the principle of freedom of speech, which means freedom to say things that others may find despicable. It is otherwise a meaningless principle. It is also the position of FPJ that both sides to a story deserve to be heard. It's up to readers to draw their own conclusions and make their own judgments.]

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian media correspondent, freelance journalist and the author of Book 7+1. He is a contributing writer for websites and magazines in the Netherlands, Canada, Italy, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, South Korea, Belgium, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. He is a member of Stony Brook University Publications’ editorial team and Media Left magazine’s board of editors, as well as a contributing editor for Finland’s Award-winning Ovi Magazine. As a young Iranian journalist, he has been interviewed and quoted by several mainstream mediums, including BBC World Service, PBS Media Shift, the Media Line network, Deutsch Financial Times, L.A. Times and Sky News. He is a contributing writer of Tehran Times newspaper. His articles and interviews have been translated into numerous languages, including Spanish, Italian, German and Arabic. Contact him at kourosh@foreignpolicyjournal.com. Read more articles by Kourosh Ziabari.

Israel lobby commits major blunder in France: tries to silence a comedian

Amazing stuff is happening in France. It all began with a relatively well-known French-Cameroonian comedian, Dieudonné M'bala M'bala was invited to participate on a TV show on the channel France 3. The show also featured a Maghrebian artist and Dieudonne decided to impersonate an extremist Israeli settled infuriated by the presence of an Arab on a French show (for those of you who understand French, you can see an excerpt of his appearance that day here).

Dieudonne who, in the past, had always enjoyed ridiculing pretty much every segment of French society clearly had never expected the hysterical uproar that his humor would trigger that day: the huge constellation of French Zionists organizations lead by the notorious CRIF ("Representative Committee of Jewish organization in France" - the French version of AIPAC) immediately attacked Dieudonne, suing him for racists comments and suing him for "anti-Semitism" (a criminal offense in France). This was hardly the first time that the French Zionist mob had decided to crush an outspoken critic of its role in French politics or its unconditional support for the last racist state on the planet: Israel. But this time, the Ziomob miscalculated, badly.

Dieudonne began making the accusations of anti-Semitism made against him a central piece of his shows. Here is a sampling of the kind of the hilarious skits Dieudonne came up with:

Les racistes anonymes

L'antisemitisme

Peuple Elue

Mes excuses premiere partie

Mes excuses deuxieme partie

J'ai fait le con

Dieudonne et Faurisson au Zenith de Paris

Dieudonne et Faurisson 1

Dieudonne et Faurisson 2

This was not at all what the Ziomobsters in France had hoped to achieve when they attacked Dieudonne for his appearance on France 3. In response to his defiant stance, they then used their total control over the French political class to shut down his shows under the pretext that they would "threaten the public order". Dieudonne immediately replied that France is capable of providing the security needed for an event like the G8 summit, but not to let one comedian make his show.

Still, while in the past he had filled the biggest concert halls in France, Dieudonne was forced to perform his skits in a rented bus (you can see a report about this here). But Dieudo, has he is known, had one more thing up his sleeve.

His logic was simple: if I cannot use my freedom of speech as a comedian, why not use it as a politician?

Dieudo had already tried one to run for office a couple of times, but he never achieved any measure of success. This time, however, he came up with a stunning argument. Basically, Dieudo claims that the Left-Right chasm is an artificial and meaningless chasm in French politics and that the real issue which separates the parties in France is their attitude towards the Zionist ideology, the state of Israel, and the role of the Israel Lobby in France. Check out his press conference here:

Conference de presse de Dieudonne 1

Conference de presse de Dieudonne 2

Conference de presse de Dieudonne 3

Conference de presse de Dieudonne 4

Needless to say, the French political elites had a total hysterical breakdown at such inpudence. Doubleplusgoodthinking reporters and commentators declared that his political party had to be banned and that Dieudonne was probably mentally insane (the latter reminds me of the old trick invented by Yuri Andropov's KGB who used to declared that Soviet dissidents were "obviously" insane because how could any mentally sane person oppose the Soviet rule: QED).

Still, Dieudo did not back down and he has recently presented some of the members of his political movement "the Anti-Zionist Movement" running as candidates for the European Parliament. Here is the press conference of this event:

Conference de presse liste UE 1

Conference de presse liste UE 2

Conference de presse liste UE 3

Conference de presse liste UE 4

Candidats du Parti anti-sioniste: presentation

What is most interesting in this list is that its candidates come from every political movement imaginable. Unionists, nationalist conservatives, Roman-Catholics, Muslims, ex-Communists, Socialists, etc. Ethnically, everybody is also present. It appears that the Zionist threat is truly uniting many of those who until recently were virulently opposed to each other.

What is the potential of this political movement?

On one hand, the entire weight of the French political establishment is now coming crashing down on Dieudonne. Every politician, every newspaper, every commentator either completely ignores Dieudonne and his movement or, when they speak of him at all, it is with a vitriolic loathing which cannot be imagined. The French newspaper even calls him a "comedian" in quotation marks, showing that such a hideous figure as Dieudonne cannot be called a comedian or somebody who makes people laugh. The fury of the establishment is such that I find it very likely that Dieudonne's political movement will be simply banned and declared a criminal organization (in France, the membership in an organization declared illegal is considered a crime in itself). If not, Dieudonne might do very, very well.

The fact is that there are literally millions of French citizens from all parts of the society who are sick and tired of being ruled by a small group of mutually interchangeable elite (all of which is 100% loyal to anything Zionist or Israeli). The fact is that in the French "banlieue" (suburbs) there are hundred of thousands of Muslims who are outraged by the events in Gaza, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and the constant threats against Iran. The fact is that the economic crisis had hit France - and the rest of the Eurozone - very badly and that more and more people are making the link between the Israeli-American model of globalization and the economic collapse of the world markets. In fact, I would say tha the potential of Dieudonne's movement is huge and that it represents a very real threat to the French and, beyond that, USraelien elites in the West.

The fact that Dieudonne himself is (half) Black, and that he succeeded in federating very different currents of the French society under his stance will make it impossible to simply ignore him. Can the French political establishment engage Dieudonne and prevail over him in an open political debate? Not in a million years. Banning Dieudonne's political party will, at best, be a stop-gap solution as we can be certain that Dieudo will sue the French courts in Brussels and that, if needed, he will simply re-compose his movement under another name.

Under the infulence of the recent immigrants to France, the French society is changing and it appears that while the "native" French did not have the wits and guts to take on the Ziomob in power, those who immigrated to France do have what it takes.

It is amazing to listen to these recent immigrants defending the secular and multi-ethnics nature of the French Republic and denoucing the ethnic and tribal nature of Jewish ortanizations in France. For example, Dieudo was once asked what he thought of the attemps made by such French Blacks to create an organization which woud speak for them. Dieudo rejected this approach, saying that the organization which should speak for them should be the French Parliament. Amazing idea, no?

Thanks to Dieudonne, Zionism is now finally being denounced as a tribal and racist, ideology and suport for Israel is now becoming as morally repugnant as support for Apartheid. The entire intellectual edifice which was carefully built by the Zionists in France for many decades is not coming crashing down because once these issues are out in the open, the Ziomob has already lost the key battle. In fact, Dieudo has said that he has already won the next election.

What will happen next? Dieudonne does not take his participation in the upcoming elections too seriously. As a typical comedian, he can sit there and say "I will bring you all to the light" with a serious face. When asked if he is really serious, her replies that nobody in French politics is serious and that the difference between him the the rest of the French politicians is that they are lousy comedians whereas he is a professional.

Humor as a weapon of liberation can be very powerful. The ridicule which Dieudonne is now heaping on the previously sacred cows of French Ziopropagnda, such as the "The Eternal Memory of the Shoah" (all in caps), and all the rest of the Zionist brainwashing toolkit might well prove to be a formidable weapon for which the Ziomob does not have a standard answer.

It will be very interesting to see what happens between now and June 7th - the next election.

In the meantime, here are some links to Dieudonne's non-political skits. Enjoy!

L"equipe du 11

Avant le mariage

Apres le mariage

Le garagiste

La prison

Le journaliste premiere partie

Le journaliste deuxieme partie

L'institutrice

L'avocat

NYT article with mode details about Javed Iqbal and the Zio-snitch who ratted him out to the Feds

The New-York Times reported in 2006: For several years, Javed Iqbal has operated a small company from a Brooklyn storefront and out of the garage at his Staten Island home that provides satellite programming for households, including sermons from Christian evangelists seeking worldwide exposure.

Mr. Iqbal’s home, a modest two-story stone and brick house on Van Name Avenue in Mariners Harbor, stands out because among the children’s toys in the backyard were eight satellite dishes.

But this week, the budding entrepreneur’s house and storefront were raided by federal agents, and Mr. Iqbal was charged with providing customers services that included satellite broadcasts of a television station controlled by Hezbollah — a violation of federal law.

Yesterday, Mr. Iqbal was arraigned in Federal District Court in Manhattan and was ordered held in $250,000 bail. The Hezbollah station, Al Manar — or “the beacon” in Arabic — was designated a global terrorist entity by the United States Treasury Department in March of this year.

Hezbollah was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997.

“The charge lurking in the background is material support for terrorism,” Stephen A. Miller, an assistant United States attorney, told United States Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein. He said Mr. Iqbal, 42, was a flight risk because he has family in England and Pakistan. “We think there is a strong incentive for him to run,” Mr. Miller said.

Mr. Iqbal’s lawyer, Mustapha Ndanusa, said his client, who came to the United States from Pakistan, is a compassionate man, and at one point offered shelter in his house to a homeless woman.

"He has been very generous in the community," Mr. Ndanusa said outside court. "He’s a fun-loving guy."

Another spokesman for Mr. Iqbal called the government’s charges ridiculous. "It’s like the government of Iran saying we’re going to ban The New York Times because we think of it as a terrorist outfit," the spokesman, Farhan Memon, said before the hearing. “Or China trying to ban CNN.”

Civil libertarians also expressed alarm.

“It appears that the statute under which Mr. Iqbal is being prosecuted includes a First Amendment exemption that prevents the government from punishing people for importing news communications,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “Such an exemption is constitutionally necessary, and the fact that the government is proceeding with the prosecution in spite of it raises serious questions about how free our marketplace of idea is.”

Court papers filed by the government to obtain a warrant to search Mr. Iqbal’s business and home suggested that the authorities learned that certain high-definition global transmission systems were providing access to Al Manar broadcasts in the United States. They got their information from Mark Dubowitz, who heads a Washington-based policy group that has monitored Al Manar — through a project called the Coalition Against Terrorist Media — and campaigned for its removal from worldwide broadcasting.

Mr. Dubowitz said in a telephone interview that Al Manar’s programming includes “very explicit calls for violence,” including ones that promote suicide bombing against American troops in Iraq and “death to America.”

He said that some broadcasts, which he characterized as racist and anti-Semitic, glorify suicide bombings and suicide bombers themselves as martyrs and that children’s programming encourages youngsters to “join the jihad and give their lives for the cause.”

The programming, he said, is sophisticated and diverse, ranging from soap operas and dramas, produced in Syria and Iran, to what he called “MTV-like” music videos. A 28-part series that was broadcast over Ramadan and based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion included a dramatization that depicted what he said looked like an Orthodox Jew slitting the throat of a Christian child and draining the child’s blood to make food for Passover.

According to the government documents, agents flew a helicopter over Mr. Iqbal’s home, then sent a confidential informant to the shop to buy a satellite package from Mr. Iqbal. The informant said that Mr. Iqbal had told him that the station was legal. Mr. Iqbal, according to the government, pressed the informant to buy a package with Al Manar instead of another service.

Mr. Iqbal’s family members declined comment yesterday. Neighbors said that the family had lived there for about five years. A sign attached to a chain-link fence along the driveway announces the business, “HDTV-LTD,” and advertises “TX/RX Earthstation and video, audio data, IP security.”

Melinda Edwards, who lives across the street, said Mr. Iqbal would use his snow blower to clear her driveway after winter storms.

“He seemed nice,’’ she said. “He seemed like everyone else.” Like many others in the neighborhood, Ms. Edwards said she noticed the large number of satellite dishes — some of which can be seen from across the street — and asked him about them a while back.

“I said, ‘You got more satellite dishes than anyone I’ve ever seen,’” Ms. Edwards said.

She said that Mr. Iqbal told her that the satellites were for his business.

New Yorker jailed for rebroadcasting Al-Manar TV

The Jerusalem Post reports: The Pakistan-born owner of a satellite TV company has pleaded guilty to providing material aid to a terrorist organization by letting customers receive broadcasts from Hizbullah's television station.

Javed Iqbal entered the plea in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday. He declined comment afterward. As part of the plea, Iqbal agreed to serve a prison term of up to six and a half years. Sentencing was set for March 24.

Prosecutors said Iqbal used satellite dishes on his Staten Island home to distribute broadcasts of Al Manar, the television station of the Lebanon-based organization that has been fighting Israel since the early 1980s.

Israel and the US consider Hizbullah a terrorist organization and accuse it of being behind deadly attacks in Lebanon and abroad.

Iqbal, 45, was born in Pakistan but has lived in the United States for more than 20 years. He is a permanent resident with five children. A former New York Police Department officer was among those who signed his $250,000 bail package.

Although Americans are granted freedom of speech under the First Amendment to the Constitution, the government contended in this case that Iqbal was not entitled to arrange the satellite broadcast of an organization designated as a terrorist group, regardless of the message.

Lebanon's information minister, Ghazi Aridi, had criticized Iqbal's arrest, calling it an "attack against freedoms (that) robs a large section of people from watching a specific channel."
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Commentary: needless to say, the Justice Department under President Obama could drop the charges, but the sad, and frightening, reality is that it will not. So much for Obama's "yes we can" and promises of change crap. Equally frightening is the silence surrounding this case. With the possible exception of people with severe brain damage, it is plainly clear to anyone that the US list of "terrorist organizations" is purely a political tool to brand some groups and not others, depending on their stance towards the USA and Israel. This is how the Albanian KLA has turned into a liberation army, while Ronald Reagan's Afghan "freedom fighters" were turned into terrorists (presumably, they were not terrorists during the Soviet occupation). This is also how Hezbollah is considered as "terrorist". Bottom line?

Phase one: any organization worldwide the US government does not like, it can brand as "terrorist". Phase two: spreading any information about this organization becomes a federal crime. Phase three: Anyone challenging this risks being jailed.

Is this really the freedoms the Founding Fathers of the United States envisioned for the American people? Is this really the kind of society the Obama administration wants to foster?

Where is Amnesty International? Where is Human Rights Watch? Where are all the "doubleplusgoodthinking" human rights activists?

As Saint Gregory the Theologian once wrote: By Silence is God Betrayed

Israel Arrests Iranian TV Correspondent

Fars News Agency reports: Israeli forces have arrested Iran's Al-Alam News Network's correspondent reporting from the occupied Palestinian territory.

The man's lawyer said the Palestinian was also suspected of passing confidential information to unauthorized persons - "a very harsh security offense" - but gave no further details.

Khadr Shahine, who reported for Iran's state-owned Arabic language Al-Alam television station, violated the censorship rules when he reported the beginning of Israel's ground offensive against the Gaza Strip before it was permitted by military censors, Israeli authorities claimed.

Shahine turned himself in Tuesday after hearing police wanted to question him, his lawyer said.

Shahine's lawyer, Mohammed Dakhleh, said his client was being held on suspicion of passing confidential information to unauthorized persons.

"This is a very harsh security offense," he said, adding that it was the first time it had been used against a journalist.

Dakhleh said Shahine has long worked as a journalist, including during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

"It's basically persecution because the guy has been giving TV items for years now," Dakhleh said.

Israel's military censor has broad powers to shut down media outlets or imprison journalists to prevent the release of information deemed threatening to the Zionist regime's security.

"A guy who supplies information for Iranian television is being questioned by police for suspected censorship violation," said Daniel Seaman, the head of Israel's Government Press Office.

Israel waged war on the Gaza Strip on December 27 and began a "long-term" ground offensive on the Palestinian territory last Saturday.

Thus far, the Israeli aggression has killed 763 Palestinians and injured thousands of others - a large number of the casualties are civilians

Freedom of Speech, Free Speech and Their Enemies: The Silencing of Gilad Atzmon

By Oren Ben-Dor

I have recently signed a petition that condemns the constant attempts to silence Gilad Atzmon (photo). The same petition also objects to the constant attempts to discredit and hinder the website that hosts, among others, Gilad's views--Peacepalestine--one of the more enlightening internet platforms on Palestine.

It would be an understatement to say that debating Gilad's voice is supremely important. No thinking person could fail to be stimulated by the deep connections Gilad makes.

Dwelling together in the unsaid is what makes intellectuals' innermost togetherness but it does not mean that all those who respond to the unsaid can be assimilated into one another so as to form some kind of a "group".

All those who try to smother Gilad's endeavours, to distort his voice through vulgar associations and conventional clichés, and to utilise uncritically accepted conventional havens for thoughtlessness, do not really do justice to the intellectual game as far as Palestine is concerned. I believe this message to be the essence of this petition.

In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel García Márquez narrates the story of a village in which everybody understands that a murder is about to be committed in the near future. Yet, nobody is doing anything about this forthcoming event that is chronicled to happen. Some deep causes combine to make everybody complicit in diverting, repressing, hindering, "forgetting", being "delayed", in short avoiding any possibility of stopping the chronicle from happening. This concealment thus becomes a part of that fate that eventually leads to the death of Santiago Nasar.

García Márquez may have given us a metaphor of how fate can unfold as possibilities that are always already grounded in denial of deep self-concealing past events. He also shows how the unfolding of this fate lurks amidst intensive highly-involved chatter.

Zionism may not merely be a cause of colonial injustice in Palestine in the sense of being a misguided response to anti-Jewish racism understood as "anti-semitism". Zionism can be conceived as a symptom the non-empathetic manifestations of which are historically and existentially continuing certain facets of Jewish being and thinking. It is very important to ask whether the originary aggression of victim mentality as well as the choseness-begotten separateness existentially links the Zionist and the Jewish question. This link may well pervade the mentality of Israelis whether orthodox or not.

The anti-Zionist struggle must not encage itself in too simplistic a link between the Jewish Question with the Zionist Question--a simplistic link that in fact craves to sever the deeper ontological connection that might persist between the two questions. Such a dominant, and far too quick, paradigm that by and large dominates the anti-Zionist struggle has been that Zionism's misuse of the Holocaust is somehow an aberration of Jewish thinking. Thus portrayed, Zionism can be successfully isolated and fought against by Jews as Jews.

It is this very denial of the existential link between the Jewish Question and the Zionist Question--a link that is suppressed by formulations such as "Jews Against Zionism" or, more broadly, by many attempts of "Jews" to become anti-Zionist - that needs to be questioned and destabilised.To be an anti-Zionist without due regard to that being and thinking that Zionism may so tragically continues, may well be to confuse symptom and cause, thus perpetuating that history that leaves the symptom--Zionism--intact. There is need to fathom the extent to which the slogan "Jews against Zionism" may be an oxymoron. Such an oxymoron may be at the heart of the denial, and protection bestowed upon the denial, of the oxymoronic nature of another notion, namely that of a "Jewish and democratic state".

It is the task of an intellectual to touch the untouchable and liberate thinking from its blackmailed, somewhere idle, comfort zones.

I am firmly convinced that these vulgar attempts at silencing of Gilad and other courageous voices offends against supremely thoughtful, compassionate and egalitarian intellectual endeavours. This propaganda of silencing which is characterised by breeding conflict and heresy stalls a debate which is crucial for Palestine and for humanity. Intellectual reflections on actuality, historicity, causes of events--those primordial events that manifestations of violence, the Holocaust amongst them, respond to - are not to be decided by picketing, balloting and smearing.

What is an intellectual? What is an intellectual pursuit? Intellectual pursuit is to make a connection that brings the unsaid and the unsayable into language. As such, an intellectual pursuit is not only about sharpening and clarifying but about being able to hear the unsaid, thus making a connection and near actuality in a way that may shock and surprise in its strangeness. Being an intellectual is first and foremost to hold the mirror, or rather losing oneself in the mirror.

The essence of an intellectual is free speech and therefore some reflections on free speech are in order here.For an intellectual, free speech is not a matter of choice, but a way of being, or responding, of being response-able and therefore responsible. To authentically speak rather than to be spoken by, to be active rather than passive, is to respond in speech to self-concealing actuality.

That which needs to be brought into language by free speech is quite often that which is most difficult to say and to hear.In fact so difficult it might be that we might even venture to suggest that it is essentially impossible to respond in speech to what is. So, rather, it would be better to say that to speak is to respond to an always antecedent and mysterious call, thus essentially belatedly and distortingly--to respond to what needs to be attended to in speech. If speech is the captive of discourse, the captive of represented group identification, the captive of methodologies, the captive of a representative narrative of captive of amputating version of collective memory, the captive even in the notion of a thinking-subject, it is not yet active speech.The Saying of speech is irreducible to anything merely said and is always a response to a call by a yet always-antecedent Saying that has already called upon the speaker to respond.

Freedom of speech is an absence of constraint on free speech. Freedom of speech is not merely associated with freedom of information but with a freedom that ensures conditions for free speech, speech that responds to what is unsaid- to something which is nameless and inexpressible.

Sometimes freedom of speech can be understood as that condition in which nobody has dominance over the means of representation. But even this is not quite, not yet, to capture the essence of free speech. Even conditions of absence of dominance of the means of representation are still not conditions that allow for freedom of speech. This is because equality of the means of representation does not by itself entail free speech. Speech happens as the dark side of representations and their means. Freedom of speech ensures the conditions for some people to ethically bring the inexpressible into language without giving up the secrets that language holds--secrets that call upon the ear and the mind.

We need free speech in order to understand what might be the deep origin of Zionism and in order to contemplate Zionism's so-successful use of the Holocaust "memory". By simplistically condemning any free speech about the mystery of the Holocaust as "anti-Semitic" or "holocaust denial" the silencers suck all energy from our thinking, thus playing into the hand of denials and vulnerabilities, thus helping to tranquilise the mind from connectedness to primordial events.

Moreover, it is the idle speech of those silencers which may in effect deny the significance of the Holocaust. The significance of the Holocaust, like the significance of terror and violence, is not attended to by making it dependent upon, or subservient to, this or that person or groups. The significance of the Holocaust is both nebulous and ubiquitous to humanity.

We must not legalise the thinking about the Holocaust. We must not turn thinking about it into a moral, legal or indeed factual reflection. The horrors and murderous violence against Jews may have been a response to events that had corrupted the relationship between humans and Being long ago. Grasped thus, the Holocaust may have been severely distorted by National Socialism; by those who are said to "deny" the Holocaust by some arguments about facts; by self-righteous Jews-against-Zionism; by Zionists. All these forms of forgetfulness of the Holocaust may well be on a common matrix of denial. Indeed this denial may constitute a chronicle of another Holocaust foretold.

My point is that the Holocaust's significance lies beyond the actions by the Nazis who actually perpetrated the violence and who justified these actions by turning this significance into a militarist object of an idea. The same claim can be made in relation Zionists and their Jewish opponents.

Thus, a simplistic anti-Zionist struggle - including such struggle's memorialisation of the Holocaust by fighting against the abuse of Holocaust memory by Zionists - may itself tragically become the most sophisticated form of Holocaust denial. It is not simply that Zionism denies the Holocaust. Those who fight Zionism may have already fallen into that very fateful chronicle that Zionism participates in.

Voltaire's words concerning the freedom of speech loom large. I urge all people with free speech as their guide to sign this petition and to help by that to respond to the actuality of the actual in Palestine, an actuality, again, which embraces all humanity and the denial of which might well have catastrophic implications for humanity.

I believe that only through holding of the mirror might there be a faint chance to find a connective tissue to that being and thinking of Israelis. Without holding this mirror the egalitarian struggle against Zionism may well remain in distance and deafness to the self-preserving violence in the Middle East and the World.

Oren Ben-Dor grew up in the State of Israel. He teaches political philosophy and the philosophy of law at the School of Law, University of Southampton, UK.His books Constitutional Limits and the Public Sphere (2000) and Thinking about Law: In Silence with Heidegger (2007) are published with Hart Publishing, Oxford. He can be reached at: okbendor@yahoo.com