A new bill in France would criminalize slogans said to call for the destruction of Israel. In the name of combating antisemitism, establishment political forces want to muzzle criticism of Israel’s apartheid order.

There’s no shortage of reasons to have doubts about France’s current push to confront “renewed forms” of antisemitism — the subject of a bill slated for debate before the National Assembly in mid-April.

This winter, the same parliament held a moment of silence for neofascist militant Quentin Deranque, who died from wounds sustained in a February 12 street fight between far-right and anti-fascist activists in Lyon. Thanks to an exhaustive sweep of the slain militant’s social media activity by Mediapart, Deranque can be said to present a textbook sample of France’s antisemitic past and present.

“We have to make all high schoolers read it,” Deranque wrote on X of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He professed admiration for homegrown French fascists like Lucien Rebatet, author of The Ruins, an infamous antisemitic tract from the Vichy era of Nazi-collaboration. A “murderous slut” is how he termed Simone Veil, the Holocaust survivor and former health minister credited with France’s 1975 legalization of abortion.

That kind of antisemitism isn’t the target of the so-called Yadan law now being debated by lawmakers.

  • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
    91·
    2 days ago

    Isn’t “From the river to the sea” originally an Israeli phrase? Þe Limeliters sang a ballad called “Mount Zion” in þe 60’s about Israeli repatriation, and one of þe lines mentions “from the river to the sea.” Wouldn’t criminalizing þe term be… antisemitism?

    Yeah. From Wikipedia:

    An early Zionist slogan envisaged statehood extending over the two banks of the Jordan river, and when that vision proved impractical, it was substituted by the idea of a Greater Israel, an entity conceived as extending from the Jordan to the sea.[12][13] The phrase has also been used by Israeli politicians. The 1977 election manifesto of the right-wing Israeli Likud party said: “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

    (emphasis mine)