Terrorist chic in France, from the Jeu de Paume exhibit to Al Durah to Mohamed Merah

Contexte: Jeu de paume, jeu de vilain - où va la liberté d'expression?

Tablet est une revue américaine de gauche.  Richard Landes, professeur d'histoire à l'Université de Boston, s'intéresse à l'exposition du Jeu de Paume laquelle n'a provoqué que quelques rares protestations en France.  Au fond, ça ne choque plus personne en Europe - tout se passe dans l'approbation, générale.  L'exposition est passée par des lieux de haute culture en Italie, en Espagne, en France et ira bientôt au Portugal - avec la collaboration d'une maison d'édition allemande (détails ICI).  Partout en Europe on constate la même approbation.

"This Summer the French National Museum, the Jeu de Paume, once famous for its display of Impressionist paintings, is hosting an astonishing photography exhibit, Phantom House. The work of an Israeli Bedouin woman, Ahlam Shibli, it assembles an eclectic series of photographs that depict a number of different groups whose homes are really not theirs, or who do not have homes—people who “live under oppression.” These include Bedouin “Trackers” who enlist in the IDF, “Palestinians” living in the Galilee and Jordan, Polish children in orphanages, Middle Eastern LGBTs who live in Western countries, the French of Corrèze during the Nazi occupation, and, in by far the most elaborate of the exhibits, the Palestinian families of “martyrs” who “resisted” the “occupation,” standing with the pictures, posters, and graves of their “disappeared” relatives.  [...]

The unalloyed admiration for the “resistance to occupation” of the Palestinians, juxtaposed with that of the French resistance to the Nazis, plays on a common, if grotesque, theme of Palestinian propaganda—that the Israelis are the new Nazis and the Palestinians the new Jews.

How can the French, who know what Nazi occupation was like, compare their experience to that of Palestinians in the West Bank? How they could not notice that while the Nazis killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in occupied Europe as part of their deliberate policy of collective punishment, the Palestinians kill thousands of civilians as part of their “resistance”? How could they miss the difference between an “occupation” that kills 6 million Jews and one that produces a Palestinian population with the highest standard of living in the non-oil-rich Arab world? How can they glorify a movement that embraces and intensifies Nazi Jew-hatred? And why do they view Jews who attempt to protect themselves from that aggression through the eyes of those who foment hatred? How did such a profound moral disorientation occur, and why has it been elevated to the level of high art? [...]"

Communiqué: Europe Israël demande à la direction du Jeu de Paume de mettre un panneau en droit de réponse à l’exposition « Phantom home »