1.Gatestone Institute（http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4921/germany-france-suicide）
Will Germany Abolish Itself and France Commit Suicide?
by Peter Martino
3 December 2014
Sarrazin wrote that Islamic immigrants threaten Germany's freedom and prosperity because they are unwilling to integrate and rely overwhelmingly on welfare benefits. The book hit a nerve with the German public. It sold over two million copies and became one of the most widely read books ever published in Germany.
Ziemmour's book argues that France is being destroyed by immigrants who refuse to assimilate; by political correctness that stifles all debate and by supranational organizations such as the EU, which are undermining the French nation state and the French economy. Its sales are breaking all records.
Four years ago, Thilo Sarrazin, a renowned German central banker, who was also a long-time member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), shocked the German establishment when he published a book in which he argued that Islamic immigration is undermining German society. In the book, Deutschland schafft sich ab [Germany Abolishes Itself],Sarrazin wrote that Islamic immigrants threaten Germany's freedom and prosperity because they are unwilling to integrate and rely overwhelmingly on welfare benefits.
Although Sarrazin's party, as well as the governing Christian-Democrats of Chancellor Angela Merkel, distanced themselves from the author -- and Islamic organizations tried to take him to court on charges of racial incitement -- the book hit a nerve with the German public. It sold over two million copies and became one of the most widely read books ever published in Germany.
Last October, Éric Zemmour, a French journalist, also published a book, which can be considered the French equivalent of Sarrazin's book. In Le Suicide français [The French Suicide], Zemmour argues that the policies of the French political elite are destroying the country. His arguments resemble Sarrazin's and the book has had the same impact. Its sales are breaking all the records. So far, in less than two months, over half a million copies have been sold, in spite of the fact that French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has declared that the book "does not deserve to be read."
Éric Zemmour, a 56-year old journalist at the conservative newspaper, Le Figaro, was born in France of Algerian Jewish parents who fled their native country in the 1950s during the Algerian War of Independence. Zemmour argues that France is being destroyed by immigrants who refuse to assimilate; by political correctness that stifles freedom of speech and by supranational organizations, such as the European Union (EU), which are undermining the French nation state and the French economy.
Despite its popular success, Zemmour's book is hardly leading to a serious intellectual debate. His critics have coined the term "zemmourisation of the mind" to describe the venting of ideas that are so preposterous that they do not deserve to be discussed. Others mock his ideas by calling his book "The Smurf Suicide" and referring to the author as "Gargazemmour" – a reference to Gargamel, the evil wizard in the fictional world of the Smurfs. Or they attack him as a racist. According to Senator Esther Benbassa, a Jewish politician for the Green Party, Zemmour is an anti-Semitic "Frankenstein of bad faith."
Zemmour has made it easy for his critics by devoting seven of the 540 pages of his book to the regime of the collaborator Philippe Pétain during the Second World War. In these pages, he claims the Pétain regime was able to save a number of Jews from the German gas chambers. Even though his view on Pétain is not the essence of the book, these seven pages have attracted the most attention from Zemmour's critics.
The book is also typically French in its criticism of both the United States, which is blamed for having imported politically correct thinking to France, and of free market liberalism. One of Zemmour's arguments against the EU is that it imposes "German economic thinking" on France. There is also a longing for the days of French imperial conquest, most notably the Napoleonic era. Bonaparte is apparently one of Zemmour's national heroes.
One of the few French journalists who openly defends Zemmour is Élisabeth Lévy, who, like Zemmour, is of Jewish Algerian descent. She criticizes Zemmour's "bonapartism," but has also called the behavior of Prime Minister Valls -- and others who attack the book without having read it -- "Stalinist and Orwellian." According to Élisabeth Lévy, ordinary French citizens long for the past – not, however, to the days of Napoleon, but rather the days when French suburbs had not become strongholds of radical Islam; when French society was still based on French values, and when people who felt insecure were taken seriously by politicians.
The enormous commercial success of Zemmour's book illustrates the deep dissatisfaction of many average French citizens with their political and cultural elite. Four years ago, Thilo Sarrazin's book showed that many ordinary Germans do not want the German political elite to abolish Germany. Today, Éric Zemmour's book illustrates that many ordinary French are not prepared to commit national suicide.
Has Germany abolished itself? Not yet. Has France committed suicide? Not yet. What the books do indicate, however, is that Europe seems ripe for political upheavals.
2.Algemeiner(http://www.algemeiner.com)
Body and Soul: The State of the Jewish Nation (REVIEW)
3 December 2014
At the present historical juncture, when millions of Arabs and hundreds of millions of Muslims awaken each morning thinking of ways to destroy Israel and murder its Jewish inhabitants; when John Kerry doggedly unfurls his best Chamberlain umbrella at the latest charade of nuclear negotiations with Iran’s mullahs; when a White House spokesman declares the president’s “eagerness to restore Iran to the family of nations;” when The New York Times finds ever more ingenious ways to “explain” the Islamist murder of Israelis in Jerusalem (or Jewish schoolchildren and their teacher in Toulouse), and columnists declare in that paper’s magazine that “The Palestinian cause has become the universal litmus of liberal credentials,” or call for “a third intifada,” a documentary film that reminds us of how and why the Jews’ first and second temples were destroyed may provide some assistance in throwing back the concerted attempt to expel Israel from the aforementioned “family of nations” and so destroy the third temple—and almost certainly the last.
Gloria Greenfield’s lavishly illustrated and lucidly narrated account of the relation between the Jewish people and the land of Israel both opens and concludes with the compelling voice and warm presence of Ruth Wisse, who is worth several battalions in the unending war of ideas over the Jewish state. She begins by pointing out that the Jews of the ancient Near East took the view that they were responsible for their fate, were “sent into exile,” ostensibly by the Babylonians but really because of their sins by the Almighty, and would eventually return—as indeed they did. They were unlike Jebusites, Hittites, Girgashites, and Hivites, conquered ancient nations who gave up on their ineffectual national gods.
In this documentary, Wisse sets the stage for what is to come by declaring that, as she wrote in Commentary in March 2009: “the Jewish people had a connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean that was greater and of longer duration than the nomadic peoples who came to be called Palestinians, and … the central place of Palestinians in world politics is due to an imbalance of power between the small Jewish state and the petroleum-drenched Arab states with which it must contend.” She also recognized and expressed, more powerfully than anyone since the late Emil Fackenheim, the Biblical resonance of the founding of Israel just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry as “the most hopeful sign for humanity since the dove came back to Noah with an olive leaf after the primeval flood.”
Among the other distinguished commentators whom we hear and see most frequently in this one-hour film (a sequel to Greenfield’s earlier production Unmasked, about Judeophobia) are historian Robert Wistrich and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who reflect on relevant documents of ancient and modern history tying Jews to Zion and to Zionism. One key ancient document that I missed seeing is the monument (now at the British Museum) on which Mer-Neptah, the 13th Century BCE ruler of Egypt, boasted of his great deeds and triumphs. He stated succinctly: “Israel is desolated; its seed is no more.” That boast was made over 3,200 years ago but it still demands our attention, partly with satisfaction that we are still here but partly with apprehension that we may not be forever.
Although Body and Soul does not dwell on the Holocaust, Israeli historian Anita Shapira makes a large contribution to historical clarity by rebutting the foolish notion, endlessly repeated by Israel’s detractors, that the state of Israel came into existence because of Western bad conscience over the Holocaust. In its most egregious form it was expressed by the late Edward Said who wrote (in The Question of Palestine) that the Holocaust served to “protect” Palestinian Jews “with the world’s compassion.” In fact, as Shapira tersely remarks, Israel came into existence not because but in spite of the Holocaust, which destroyed in Eastern Europe millions of the most Zionist Jews in the world. They would have done far more to establish the state as live immigrants to Palestine than as dead martyrs pricking the feeble conscience of the West. At the present moment, any remaining European qualms of conscience about the Holocaust—as several of the film’s commentators (Yossi Halevi, Manfred Gerstenfeld, and Emanuele Ottolenghi) observe—seem to consist mainly of the feeling that it gave antisemitism a bad name. Today the Dark Continent that is Europe cannot cope with the Israelophobia and generalized Jew-hatred of its rapidly multiplying and increasingly violent Muslim minority except by blaming its woes on its (peaceful) Jewish minority, especially those Jews who assert Israel’s “right to exist” and do so in countries that not so long ago questioned Jews’ “right to live.”
Not all of the film’s testimonials to the “state” (in both senses of that term) of the Jewish nation are made by the historians, archaeologists and journalists. One of the most moving and also most politically potent of them all comes from a black Methodist minister, Reverend D. D. Coleman. She expressed her joy at seeing Israel’s Ethiopian Jews (Beta-Yisrael) become part of Israeli society since they were brought there in the mid-eighties in Operation Moses. Although she says not a word about politics, her recognition of the fact that tens of thousands of black Africans were brought to Israel, not as slaves but as full citizens of a democratic state, confutes with a single stroke all the BDS babble about Israel as an “apartheid” state. The claim is all the more egregious when it is virtually the only state in the Middle East that does not institutionalize and rigorously enforce religious, sexual and racial discrimination, as scholars like Efraim Karsh have pointed out. There have, of course, never been apartheid laws in Israel. Jews and Arabs use the same buses, clinics, government offices, universities, theatres, restaurants, soccer fields and beaches. All citizens of Israel, regardless of religion or ethnic origin, are equal before the law.
The particular significance of other great aliyahs is also explored in the film. The Jews of Arab countries and Iran, who were usually forced out by pogroms and expropriation, moved from one part of the Middle East to another, an expedient never made available by Arab countries to Palestinian refugees. The Soviet Jewry movement transformed both the country which the “refuseniks” defied and the land to which they came.
Greenfield showed good judgment in giving more attention to the importance of ideas than to settlements in the part of Body and Soul that presents Zionism and the history of modern Israel. Rabbi Sacks speaks of Zionism’s rabbinic roots in Yehuda Alkalai and Zvi Kalischer, Yoram Hazony discusses Theodor Herzl and Hillel Halkin reflects on Vladimir Jabotinsky. Few Israelis have shown better understanding than these three men of J. S. Mill’s precept that “speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them.”
We come away from this film feeling that Israel, despite its many miraculous successes, still lives with a constant burden of peril as did the Jews of Eastern Europe. The Jews of Poland and Russia, about whom I.L. Peretz and Sholom Aleichem and I. B. Singer wrote, constituted prior to their destruction by the Germans and their allies the biological and cultural center of world Jewry. About half of world Jewry today resides in Israel. That fact, regardless of any other considerations, renders laughable the claim that the unceasing worldwide campaign to portray Israel as uniquely and absolutely evil, alone among all the nations on the globe in deserving abolition, has nothing antisemitic about it. It is a campaign to turn the pariah people into the pariah state.
In the penultimate segment of Body and Soul, Bret Stephens asserts that the depictions of Israel as the devil’s laboratory pose at least as great a danger of a second Holocaust as does an Iranian nuclear bomb. He cited the propagation — in universities, in progressive circles (including, if not especially, Jewish ones), in the BDS brigades, in the UN, in European parliaments, and in countless mosques and churches — of the view, to which millions are daily exposed, that “for the sake of world peace Israel must be destroyed.” Those who participate in this defamation run the risk of being found guilty not merely of stupidity or cowardice, but of becoming accessories before the fact to mass murder. We should not be meek and gentle with them.
・Edward Alexander’s book Jews Against Themselves will be published by Transaction Publishers in spring of 2015.
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