Thursday, January 22, 2009
Hamas, a party of religious fascists, editorial from Riposte Laïque
Several years ago, I was interested in a public meeting in Paris suburbs, by the League of Human Rights. The theme was peace in the Middle East, what works? Hoping to learn things, I was in the audience, surrounded by 500 people. At the forum, among others, sat the host of this debate, Daniel Mermet, the then President of the LDH, Michel Tubiana, Leila Shahid, Palestinian Authority representative in France, Bernard Ravenel representing the Committee on Palestine and a representative of the French Jewish Union for Peace (UJFP), speaking with a strong English accent.
The forum took the floor for two and a half hours. I was amazed at the oneness of all speeches. Israel was the evil aggressor, and Palestinians innocent victims. Daniel Mermet adding to each transition in this Manichean vision. He apologized after the last speech from the hall and explained that very little time for debate, therefore asked the potential stakeholders to be very brief. I pounce on the microphone, and asked for five minutes.
Irritated, Mermet gave me three. A little upset, I begin by saying that the conflict was fueled by two extremes, the far-right Jewish religious and right-wing religious Islamist. I explained that people wanted a greater Israel, freed of the Palestinians, and that others wanted to remove the State of Israel from the map. So I did express my surprise at the fact we have not yet decided once the name of Hamas. I say what really quickly Hamas and the political line he defended. At the forum, it started to jiggle nervously, and tried to interrupt me Mermet. I him a minute to conclude.
I added that I appreciated in France, Jews and Arabs have been able to work together against the National Front, in SOS Racism, and that the solution to the Middle East, could see the day when each side isolate religious extremists and his defending a secular society. I conclude by saying that I wanted more balanced meetings, from the LDH, for greater credibility of the goal: peace. A great silence accompanied my intervention and was succeeded by a few long seconds where we could hear a fly fly.
Apparently angered by my words, Mermet passed the floor to Tubiana. It began to say that the rise of Islamophobia and racism in France was serious. I interrupted the room telling him that I had not uttered the word Islamophobia, and I prayed to respond to what I said. While Mermet had announced that the meeting was to end in the minutes that followed, various speakers took the floor again an hour to meet me, often painstakingly, and justify their silence on Hamas.
Why start this first editorial of the year by that old story? Because it illustrates the drift of a section of the Left, political, associative and association, on the Palestinian question. To be published in Issue 69, the charter of Hamas, and have described as racist, sexist and of totalitarian and for not having married compassionate politically correct speech, our newspaper (see abundant letters ) has been extremely strong reactions, and sometimes abuse, from some opponents.
According to some, we would monsters indifferent to the suffering of the people of Gaza, and would be tolerant of the massacres of the State of Israel, colonialist, racist, fascist, who wants to exterminate the Palestinians as Hitler wanted to do away with Jews (for short).
As would be comfortable if the world were so simple. We would like to say that the fascists who killed the communists. Unfortunately, the facts are stubborn, Stalin killed more communists and Hitler, for example, there is evidence that 8000 Polish officers were executed in Katyn forest, with a bullet in the head, not by the Nazis as has long claimed the official version, but by the Red Army, which does not detract from the horror of the Nazi regime.
Since it would be comfortable today, in the same spirit, for many activists, to explain the woes of the Arab peoples by the sole fault of the Hebrew state. Of course, Palestinians killed in Israeli assaults which, remember, the politico-military targets Hamas. Any civilian casualties, even a child, is still a victim too. But can we hide the fact that the Hamas claim of using women and children as human shields? Has it existed historically, war clean, even for just causes and progressive?
Need I remind the other hand, thousands of Palestinians killed during Operation "Black September" in the 1970s by the Jordanians, the dead by the thousands, Shiites or Sunnis in Iraq and elsewhere, response to suicide bombings, also espoused by Hamas, killing several hundred activists of the Palestinian Authority, lynched without trial at the putch Hamas in Gaza, are not the result of the Zionist state? The tragedy of Darfur is not the fact of U.S. imperialism and its ally Israel, but the Islamist militias. Write it in no way detracts from the criminal attitude of the United States against Iraq, but requires a vision of the history a little less biased and compassionate.
Furthermore, a reading of the geo-political world, as written in 2005 by General Gallois is also useful for understanding the global context in which this conflict takes place.
Of course, the secular can not be found in certain positions in the State of Israel, and the pressure exercised what some religious circles. How can a democratic country can accept the need to marry abroad to see a civil marriage recognized? But if secularism is the freedom of conscience, there is no comparison between the democratic system in place in Israel, and the totalitarian logic of Hamas. Remember that for him the only solution in Palestine is the submission to Allah, the destruction of Israel, the extermination of the Jews and the imposition of sharia law, women in particular. For a woman, a homosexual, to a layman, for a progressive, is it better to live according to the principles applied in Israel, or the rules in force today in Gaza?
The fascination of a part of the left to totalitarian models yesterday Stalinism today Islamism, rebellion still those of us who believe that the social struggle can not hide a vision of society where, in addition to freedom of conscience and democratic rights, equality between men and women is a value with which we can not compromise.
However, in the name of a Marxist who is among the colonized peoples and colonizers, who yesterday showed complacency with criminal bureaucrats Stalinists, Trotskyites or many orphans who seem wall, repeated today, Today this appalling mistake, some even in light of Hamas, Hezbollah in the past, representatives of the poor and oppressed, as the novelist Thierry Jonquet in a magnificent published two years ago.
It is also curious that this blindness that led to the left fringe to have fought, sometimes with virulence, the campaign for a law against religious symbols in schools. They are also the ones who close their eyes, every day, before the offensive of Islam in France and Europe, against secularism, the Republic and the rights of women. What can they respond to Sarkozy when he defends secularism positive, they defend this thesis with Islam for 20 years! Have you noticed that we hear very little about the provocations Dieudonné giving the floor to Faurisson?
Some believe that the essential divide in a democratic society, would be the social and wealth distribution. They believe that the claim of religion of the poor and oppressed the right to take any liberties with our Republican principles. Well, no!
We can not have a society with people who accompany the offensive Islamist fascists, even if the activists say things just on the distribution of wealth and scandalous social inequality.
We do not want to live in a country where Muslim enclaves are becoming more and develop on our territory propaganda of Hamas, and its draft fascist society.
We do not want to see mosques invade more and more public space, much less when they are paid with our sub!
We do not want to hear religious Jews claim arrangements for the Saturday school, or other churches claim reasonable accommodations with secular principles and the law of 1905.
We note that those who now accuse Israel of war crimes and demonstrate against this (without worrying about the windfall that it is crazy for Allah), are not in the street when suicide bombings cause thousands of deaths, the United States, Britain, France, Spain, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Indonesia, and throughout the world where the culture of rampant death, on behalf of the prophet. Too bad for Muslims and Arab peoples, first victims of religious fascism, we should not distract the masses of the one true battle: the one against U.S. imperialism and its Zionist ally. Hence the events where the flags of Hamas alongside those of the PCF (ie: French Communist Party) or the LCR! (Ed.: Revolutionary Communist League)
Yesterday, he had shut the realities of Stalinist regimes, not to despair Billancourt, and not divert the masses of the struggle against the bourgeois state. At another time, on behalf of revolutionary defeatism, it should not fight against Nazi Germany, when it was France, because it was promoting its own imperialism!
When a little common sense and the recognition that the defense of secular values, feminist, humanistic, democratic have more importance than ideological visions of the world where we end up defending religious fascists because they represent the oppressed (they also have nothing to do, their only prospect is to impose the jihad in the world).
As recently wrote Henri Guaino decidedly sometimes prevent labels of thinking.
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Labels: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Terrorism
# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 6:59 PM 
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