Agree... BTW, I've eventually dug out an interesting paper exposing those "dark features" Mr Kovalyov wanted me to elaborate on --here we go:
The French newspaper Liberation published a short article condemning my essay Midas Ears [*] for its 'antisemitism'. As you maybe remember, in this piece I quote French Jewish historian and a leading luminary of Institute of Antisemitism in Jerusalem who admits the French Jews bought and subverted the French media before World War Two. Liberation skips all the evidence, condemns me and threatens my translator with sanctions. A French thinker Jean-Francois Poirier wrote a response to the Liberation. His extremely rich language and deep thought makes it an interesting text by its own merits. Below, the letter of Poirier in English, the piece in Liberation in English and both documents in French.
-- Shamir
Is Israel Shamir antisemite?
by Jean-Francois Poirier
Once Goebbels had proposed to Fritz Lang to become the film director of the Third Reich. Leni Riefenstahl was not bad, Veit Harlan had skills, too, but Fritz Lang was incomparable, in Goebbels view. "But I am Jewish", - Fritz had objected. Doctor Joseph Goebbels, relentless, had answered: "It's up to us to decide who is Jewish and who is not". Today we live in a slightly different dictatorship, the Propaganda ministry has been privatised and the shares have been sold to the newspapers, radios and televisions and the mark of infamy has changed - it is no more to be Jewish. Nowadays, the unforgivable sin is to be antisemite, a charge of which Propaganda makes a discretionary use. It is them who decide who is antisemite and who is not.
If the administration of propaganda radically changed since the war, its techniques, on the other hand, remained quite the same. Bertolt Brecht has made a perfect analysis of them in The Copper. The Fuehrer says that whoever does not adhere to such or such idea is the worst of men, somebody who has to be eliminated before it is too late. Nay, he does not say it, he howls it, he vociferates it, he shows to everybody that his body is seized by the spasms of a furious indignation and by the tremors of a sacred anger: the body cannot lie, the good faith of the Fuehrer cannot be questioned. One expects that he will stop here, the evidence of his speech is such that one could hardly add anything, be it the beginning of a proof for example, without conceding to the adversary that his point of view could also have some reasons of its own. Well, one is mistaken, as after the fit here always comes a "because" (German denn), pronounced in rather a calm way, which opens the gate to a whole series of arguments or proofs. But what are these proofs? Brecht specifies that to us : whatever, all that passes through his mind, things which does not pertain to the subject in any way, and the less they pertain to it, the better it is, for the only important thing is to show that one has got one's good points too, that?s all, whatever these points may be.
Israel Shamir, an Israeli writer and translator (into Russian from Homer, Joyce, Agnon), born in Russia, is thus charged by a French newspaper. Shamir does not want to exterminate the Arabs as a whole and the Palestinians in particular, he expresses no predilection for the murder of little boys -surely intended as a way of eradicating evil from its very roots (they represent a quarter of all Palestinian victims killed last March); he thinks that Jews harbour a widely spread network of evildoers which took hostage other "Jews". If we understand him properly, whoever contests the criminal guidance of the Jewish leadership, whoever doubts the right of the leadership to speak in the name of all the Jews is branded an apostate, a renegade and is treated as such.
When reading the fatwa which was published against Shamir (in Liberation), one will notice that it is aimed against his translator (as translators are naughty guys - they spread thoughts beyond their sphere of natural reception, they span the barriers of languages without asking a permit, they behave as if all the thoughts had a right of citizenship in all the tongues. It is a very dangerous idea: we could very well end up applying it to people, which would not do at all).
Salman Rushdie escaped uninjured from the fatwa which was launched against him and which gave him a reputation that his mere artistic means would give no slightest hope to attain, but his translators, one remembers, did not escape as well as he did. Anyway they say: Shamir is anti-semite.
Perhaps you will say that Shamir is a Jew by birth and thus cannot be anti-semite. You will say that he is not against Arabs, while Arabs are Semites. Indeed, Arabic is by far more authentically Semitic a language than modern Hebrew, reshaped by a linguist of the XIXth century the way Viollet-le-Duc rebuilt Gothic cathedrals at the same time, and which is as Hebrew as Church Latin is Latin. You will say that to criticize a policy chosen by a group is not equivalent to call for extermination of this group. You may say that to distinguish between "Jews by intention" and "Jews by chance" is an extremely racist approach. But it will show that you are a simpleton or a malevolent man, or perhaps a malevolent simpleton.
Antisemitism is the cardinal sin, the focal point around which the contemporary definition of evil takes place and around this black sun the four other evils are in orbit: holocaust denial, Islam, terror and paedophilia. A literary policeman has even proven to us that the five evils always go together, as does the Good according to Socrates whose five elements cannot suffer the defection of one of them without the absolute loss of good, and reciprocally, presence of one of them necessarily implies presence of all the rest.
An antisemite dreams of denouncing Mrs. Lévy, the English teacher - second floor - to the Gestapo, in order to take advantage of her flat; he laughs sardonically when you say to him that you have lost all your beloved ones in the concentration camps; he does not find mental peace but within the narrow framework of a simplistic and barbarian religion like Islam (this religion forbids women to wear bikini, so it's said in the Quran). He is full of stinking hatred and rejoices at the bombs which explode everywhere in the world and he ends up touching little children. Why should he touch the little children? Well? why wouldn't he touch the little children?
As I was about to write a letter of support to Shamir, I wonder whether I am right supporting this man? Suffice it that I manage to convince myself he is a freak. Nasser ed-Dine Hodja is waiting for his turn in the interminable line of bakery customers, and all of a sudden, he is hit by a stroke of genius, and he starts shouting: "The sultan invites all the citizens to his table for lunch!? The customers run towards the palace. After a while, Nasser ed-Dine who was about to be attended, follows their suit: "Who knows ? Maybe it is true? One never knows", he says to himself.
One never knows, perhaps Shamir is a freak. Nobody has ever tried to exterminate all freaks. It is true that the Nazis had started to do it, but the Third Reich lasted only twelve years instead of the promised millennium and it is quite clear that a thousand year work cannot be done in twelve years. We could crucify Shamir, for starters, then we would poison all his supporters, which would already make some room in the line?
[Jean-François Poirier, translator of Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher and well-known antisemite, who had read with utmost interest the books of Carl Schmitt, author of Nazi Germany constitution, and it IS the proof that he is an antisemite, is that not ?]
[*] israelshamir.net |
