In the French court decision, two passages were cited for their racist character.

The first reads, "One has trouble imagining that a nation of fugitives, descendants of the people who have suffered the longest period of persecution in the history of humanity, who have suffered the worst possible scorn and humiliation, would be capable of transforming themselves, in two generations, into a dominating people, sure of themselves, and, with the exception of an admirable minority, into a scornful people finding satisfaction in humiliating others."

The second incriminating passage reads, "The Jews, once subject to an unmerciful rule, now impose their unmerciful rule on the Palestinians."

I think that the Le Monde folks were really trying to say that they don't like Jews and feel sorry for the Palestinian terrorists that are trying to bomb Israel into the stone age. They just wanted to lump all Jews and the State of Israel into the same basket.

So why isn't the French court decision clearly a free speech violation issue? According to the Representative Council of French Jews(admitingly not the most impartial source for insight on this issue), "The Court of Versailles has thus clearly set out limits to a deviance that involves incriminating 'the Jews' in the name of criticism of Israel." In other words, you can't incriminate Jews in general via criticizing the State of Israel. As seen by the French court, Jews in general cannot be lumped together as a class of people into the same basket, as representing the State of Israel.

Then what about the Oriana Fallaci case? Italian Judge Armando Grasso has ordered Oriana to stand trial for alleged defamation of Islam. Judge Grasso refused a request by prosecutors to throw out the case, brought by the president of the Muslim Union of Italy, Adel Smith, and ordered magistrates to proceed in the matter.

And just what did Oriana Fallaci write? How did she defame the Muslim 'people'?

Dagger In Hand has a summary of the offending passages. For sake of continuity, I reproduce them here:

1) during the occupation of Montecassino in the 9th century "the Muslims amused themselves by sacrificing each night the virginity of a nun. Do you know where? On the altar of the cathedral."

2) while occupying Constantinople in 1453, the Turks led by Mohammed II "decapitated even newborns. And extinguished candles with their little heads."

3) "In a woman the Koran sees above all a womb to give birth."

4) "In the dream that the sons of Allah have been nurturing for years, the dream of blowing up Giotto's Tower or the Tower of Pisa or the cupola of St. Peter's or the Eiffel Tower or Westminster Abbey or the cathedral of Cologne and so on . . ."

5) ""halal butchery is barbarous" just as "shechita butchery is barbarous. That is, the Jewish version which is carried out in the same way and consists of slitting the animals" throats without dazing them."

6) France is a country "where Islamic racism, that is the hatred of the infidel-dogs, reigns supreme and is never put on trial, never punished. Where the Muslims declare openly: "We must take advantage of the democratic space that France offers us, we must exploit democracy, that is, make use of it to occupy territory." Where not a few of them add: "In Europe the Nazi position was not understood. Or not by all. It was judged a vehicle of homicidal folly, when actually Hitler was a great man."

7) for Muslims "biology is a shameless science because it is occupied with the human body and sex."

8) " . . . we will have to resign ourselves to the yoke of a creed that . . . instead of love spreads hatred and instead of liberty slavery."

9) "a Right and a Left . . . that (in Italy) are both on the side of the enemy (Islam)."

10) the demands of the Islamics with regard to school curricula mean that in literature classes "we will not be allowed to include for example The Divine Comedy . . .nor the Canticle of Creatures nor the Sacred Hymns of Alessandra Manzoni . . ." etc. etc.

11) " . . . the uncouth wailing of the muezzin . . ."

12) the terrorist attacks of the last twenty years have caused six thousand deaths "to the glory of the Koran. In obedience to its verses."

13) "Our Jesus of Nazareth . . . they put him in their Danna where he eats like Trimalchio, drinks like a drunkard, screws like a sexual maniac."

14) ". . . the revolting, reactionary, obtuse, feudal Right is found today only in Islam. It is Islam."

15) infibulation is "the mutilation that the Muslims force on little girls to prevent them, once they are grown . . . from enjoying the sexual act. It is a female castration that the Muslims practice in twenty-eight countries of Islamic Africa and because of which two million persons die each year from sepsis or loss of blood . . ."

16) the Italians afflicted by atavistic loss of pride "are not offended when Islamic immigrants urinate on their monuments or soil the sacristies of their churches or toss their crucifixes out the window of a hospital."

17) ". . . Islam is a pond. And a pond is a trough of stagnant water. . . it is never purified . . . it is easily polluted, like a watering hole for livestock of little value. The pond does not love life: It loves death . . ."

18) " . . .despite the massacres through which the sons of Allah have bloodied us and bloodied themselves for over thirty years, the war that Islam has declared against the West . . . is a cultural war. . .they kill us in order to bend us. To intimidate us . . . Their goal is not to fill cemeteries. Not to destroy our skyscrapers . . . It is to destroy our soul, our ideas. Our feelings and our dreams. It is to subjugate the West once again."

"Dagger" writes that ""Oriana doesn't really live up to her claim that this time around she is appealing solely to the power of reason and putting aside her rage and pride." However, "She does cite a lot of facts in support of her attacks on Islam, and as you can see several of the 18 sentences are simply historical assertions. She doesn't provide any footnotes or sources for any of her facts though (no doubt Muslim historians paint things differently), and it is undeniable that the overall tone of her book is one of visceral revulsion for Muslims, not just rationally alarmed criticism of certain political and cultural developments in Europe.""

Although I find myself in agreement with "Dagger In Hand," that its "easy to understand why a Muslim who does not wish to blow up the Eiffel Tower or conquer the West would rightly feel that he was being stereotyped and hatred being fomented against him," Oriana is clearly stating her opinion of the Muslim faith. She has not taken a race of people and lumped it in the "Muslim" basket. She obviously has great contempt for Muslims and feels that the radical Muslims have hijacked the Muslim faith and are intent on forcing their version of Islam upon Muslims and non-Muslims alike(my words not hers), but she has said nothing racial or slanderous. For the most part, she offers historical facts, although not sourced and to some degree disputable, but she is expressing her opinion. And certainly, a lot of people like the ones Fallaci describes "assuredly exist," and the gap will not be bridged by pretending it isn't there. But in a free society this sort of expression ought to be beyond the reach of legal sanctions, and in almost all free societies it does, Italy now on the verge of being an exception that, in a way, more or less makes Oriana Fallaci a prophet(of the ongoing Islamization of Europe).

So, if in my opinion Le Monde should not be given a pass for whipping up anti-Semitic opinion, but Oriana should not be made to stand trial for "defaming" Muslims, what's the difference? The Le Monde case is a racial issue, and the Fallaci case is free speech issue, period. Am I cutting it close? Yes, admittingly so, but nonetheless, there's a difference. So, where's the story here? It's in the yawn!

From the Wall Street Journal via American Future:

"A French court last week found three writers for Le Monde, as well as the newspaper's publisher, guilty of "racist defamation" against Israel and the Jewish people. In a groundbreaking decision, the Versailles court of appeal ruled that a comment piece published in Le Monde in 2002, "Israel-Palestine: The Cancer," had whipped up anti-Semitic opinion.

The writers of the article, Edgar Morin (a well-known sociologist), Danièle Sallenave (a senior lecturer at Nanterre University) and Sami Nair (a member of the European parliament), as well as Le Monde's publisher, Jean-Marie Colombani, were ordered to pay symbolic damages of one euro to a human-rights group and to the Franco-Israeli association. Le Monde was also ordered to publish a condemnation of the article, which it has yet to do."

(...) although the French court ruling -- the first of its kind in Europe -- is a major landmark, no one in France seems to care. The country's most distinguished newspaper, the paper of record, has been found guilty of anti-Semitism. One would have thought that such a verdict would prompt wide-ranging coverage and lead to extensive soul-searching and public debate. Instead, there has been almost complete silence, and virtually no coverage in the French press.

(...) ... and few elsewhere will have heard about it. Reuters and Agence France Presse (agencies that have demonstrated particularly marked bias against Israel) ran short stories about the judgment in their French-language wires last week, but chose not to run them on their English news services. The Associated Press didn't run it at all. Instead of triggering the long overdue reassessment of Europe's attitude toward Israel, the media have chosen to ignore it.

Marc asks in his piece, "Eurabia?"

Notice that Oriana's comments about Islam got lots of press, but, all the Le Monde case got was the big yawn!

Discriminate or defame the Jews, and no one cares, no media covers it. Say something about Islam or the Koran, and the media are all over it. The real story here is nothing more than anti-semitism on one hand, the Le Monde case, and dhimmitude on the other, the Fallaci case. God help us all if we don't reverse both!
By the way, I've already donned a hard hat, and am willing to accept the abusive comments on this that are sure to come - probably, deservedly so.

Hat tip - American Future and Dagger In Hand

Cross posted by Hyscience