La Boucle d'Occam

Points de vue

- Comment l’islam est perverti par des fidèles, Ali Malek (écrivain algérien) - "Tous les problèmes qui collent à la peau des musulmans proviennent de cette chose qu’on appelle le hadith" ; "Le contenu des prêches dans les mosquées est composé jusqu’à nos jours à 80 % de hadiths" ; "Si vous rappelez aux djihadistes les rudiments des lois coraniques, ils s’empressent de vous répondre par des hadiths et par des traditions qui remontent au Prophète et dans lesquelles on voit celui-ci tuer les prisonniers et massacrer les juifs".
http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2015/01/31/comment-l-islam-est-perverti-par-ses-fideles_4567342_3232.html

- The Return of Anti-Semitism, Jonathan Sacks (Wall Street Journal) - "Anti-Semitism entered Islam from the outside, in the form of two classic myths imported from Europe".
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-return-of-anti-semitism-1422638910?mod=fox_australian
   "[...] The murder of Jewish shoppers at a Parisian kosher supermarket three weeks ago, after the killing of 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sent shivers down the spines of many Jews, not because it was the first such event but because it has become part of a pattern. In 2014, four were killed at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. In 2012, a rabbi and three young children were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse. In 2008 in Mumbai, four terrorists separated themselves from a larger group killing people in the city’s cafes and hotels and made their way to a small Orthodox Jewish center, where they murdered its young rabbi and his pregnant wife after torturing and mutilating them. As the Sunday Times of London reported about the attack, “the terrorists would be told by their handlers in Pakistan that the lives of Jews were worth 50 times those of non-Jews.”
    An ancient hatred has been reborn. Some politicians around the world deny that what is happening in Europe is anti-Semitism. It is, they say, merely a reaction to the actions of the state of Israel, to the continuing conflict with the Palestinians. But the policies of the state of Israel are not made in kosher supermarkets in Paris or in Jewish cultural institutions in Brussels and Mumbai. The targets in these cities were not Israeli. They were Jewish.
    According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, an Egyptian cleric, Muhammad Hussein Yaqub, speaking in January 2009 on Al Rahma, a popular religious TV station in Egypt, made the contours of the new hate impeccably clear: “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them…They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing…You must believe that we will fight, defeat and annihilate them until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth…You will not survive as long as a single one of us remains.”
    Not everyone would put it so forcefully, but this is the hate in which much of the Middle East and the Muslim world has been awash for decades, and it is now seeping back into Europe. For Jews, “never again” has become “ever again.”
    The scope of the problem is, of course, difficult to gauge precisely. But recent polling is suggestive—and alarming. An Anti-Defamation League study released last May found “persistent and pervasive” anti-Jewish attitudes after surveying 53,100 adults in 102 countries and territories world-wide. The ADL found that 74% of those surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa held anti-Semitic attitudes; the number was 24% in Western Europe, 34% in Eastern Europe and 19% in the Americas. Or consider a 2011 Pew Research Center study, which found that favorable views of Jews were “uniformly low” in predominantly Muslim regions that it surveyed: 4% in Turkey and the Palestinian territories, 3% in Lebanon, and 2% in Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan. [...]
    Anti-Semitism has existed for a very long time. One critical moment came around the end of the 1st century C.E., when the Gospel of John attributed to Jesus these words about the Jews: “You belong to your father, the Devil.” From being the children of Abraham, Jews had been transformed into the children of Satan.
    But it took a millennium for this text to spark widespread violence against Jews. That came in 1095, when Pope Urban II delivered his call for the First Crusade. A year later, some Crusaders, on their way to “liberate” the holy city of Jerusalem, paused to massacre Jewish communities in Northern Europe, in Cologne, Worms and Mainz. Thousands died. Many Jews committed suicide rather than submit to the mob and forcible conversion to Christianity. It was a traumatizing moment for European Jewry—and the portent of worse to come.
    From the time of the Crusades onward, Jews in Christian Europe began to be seen not as human beings but as a malevolent force, a demonic and destructive power that mysteriously yet actively sought the harm of others. Jews were accused of desecrating the sacramental bread used in communion, poisoning wells and spreading the plague. They were held responsible for the Black Death, the epidemic that in the 14th century cost millions of lives. They lived in fear.
    This period added to the repressive vocabulary of the medieval West such terms as book burning, forced conversion, Inquisition, auto-da-fe, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom. In duration and intensity, it ranks among the most sustained chronicles of enmity in history. What had happened to activate a hate that had been incubating for 10 centuries, since Christianity emerged from Judaism? [...]
    Despite what some intemperate voices claim, anti-Semitism has no genuine provenance within Islam. The historian Bernard Lewis drew a wry distinction: Islam has traditionally had contempt for the Jews, he said, not hate—adding, “From contempt you don’t die. From hate you do.” Anti-Semitism entered Islam from the outside, in the form of two classic myths imported from Europe.
    The first was the blood libel, the mad idea that Jews kill Christian children to use their blood to make matzo, the unleavened bread eaten during Passover. The idea is absurd, not least because even the tiniest speck of blood in food renders it inedible in Jewish law. The libel was an English invention, born in Norwich around 1144, and was unsuccessfully condemned by several popes. It was introduced into the Middle East by Christians in the 19th century, leading to trials of innocent Jews in Lebanon and Egypt and, most famously, in Damascus in 1840.
    The blood libel is still in circulation. In 1983, Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass embraced it in his book, “The Matzo of Zion,” according to scholars like Stephen Eric Bonner and Anthony Julius. In 1991, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Syrian delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission praised this “valuable book,” saying it “unmasked the racist character of Zionism.”
   “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—a late 19th-century forgery about a supposed global Jewish conspiracy, produced by members of the czar’s secret police and exposed as a fiction by the Times of London as early as 1921—become one of Hitler’s favorite texts. In Nazi Germany, it became, as the historian Norman Cohn put it, a “warrant for genocide.” The “Protocols” were introduced into the Middle East in Arabic translation in the 1930s by, among others, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who spent World War II in Berlin, producing Arabic broadcasts for the Nazis.
   “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” continues to be reprinted and widely read. In 2002, a 41-part dramatic series called “Horseman Without a Horse,” which the Anti-Defamation League reported “portrays the ‘Protocols’ as historical fact,” was shown on Egyptian television during Ramadan. In 2003, a similar series called “Diaspora” was shown on a Lebanon-based satellite television network owned by the terrorist organization Hezbollah, also according to the Anti-Defamation League. The 1988 charter of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas warns that the Zionists’ “plan is embodied in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”
    Tragically, Europe, having largely cured itself of anti-Semitism, now finds it returning, carried by the very cultures that Europe itself infected with the virus. Fortunately, there are young Muslims, some of them ex-radicals, who are working for a more tolerant Islam, and in organizations such as the Coexist Foundation and New York University’s “Of Many” Institute for Multifaith Leadership, you find Jews and Muslims fighting anti-Semitism and Islamophobia together. [...]"

- Confronting European Anti-Semitism, Alan M. Dershowitz (Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School) - "This common form of the new anti-Semitism—we love the Jews, it's only their nation state that we hate—is pervasive among many European political, media, cultural and academic leaders".
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5167/confronting-european-anti-semitism
   "I just completed a three day visit to Prague and the former Terezin concentration camp.  I was there to speak at a conference commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps.  Many European speakers talked about the efforts they are making to confront the rising tide of anti-Semitism throughout Europe.  But before one can decide how to confront a sickness like anti-Semitism, one must first describe and diagnose the pathology.
    There are several distinct, but sometimes overlapping, types of anti-Semitism. The first is traditional, right wing, fascist Jew hatred that has historically included theological, racial, economic, social, personal and cultural aspects. We are seeing a resurgence of this today in Greece, Hungary and other European countries with rising right wing parties that are anti-Muslim as well as anti-Jewish.
    The second is Muslim anti-Semitism.  Just as not all Greeks and Hungarians are anti-Semitic, so too not all Muslims suffer from this malady. But far too many do.  It is wrong to assume that only Muslims who manifest Jew hatred through violence, harbor anti-Semitic views. Recent polls show an extraordinarily high incidence of anti-Semitism—hatred of Jews as individuals, as a group and as a religion,—throughout North Africa, the Middle East and Muslim areas in Europe. This hatred manifests itself not only in words, but in deeds, such as taunting Jews who wear yarmulkes, vandalizing Jewish institutions, and occasional violence directed at individual Jews. Among a small number of extremists it also results in the kind of deadly violence we have seen in Telouse, Paris, Brussels and other parts of Europe.  Several decades ago it manifested itself in attacks on synagogues by Palestinian terrorists, including some operating on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
    Third, there is hard left anti-Zionism that sometimes melds into subtle and occasionally overt anti-Semitism.  This pathology is seen in the double standard imposed on everything Jewish, including the nation state of the Jewish people.  It is also reflected in blaming "Jewish power", and the "pushiness" of Jews in demanding support for Israel.  I'm not referring to criticism of Israeli policies or actions. I'm referring to the singling out of Israel for extreme demonization.  The ultimate form of this pathology is the absurd comparison made by some extreme leftist between the extermination of policies of the Nazis and of Israel's efforts to defend itself against terrorist rockets, tunnels, suicide bombers and other threats to its civilians. Comparing Israel's actions to those of the Nazis is a not-so-subtle version of Holocaust denial. Because if all the Nazis really did was what Israel is now doing, there could not have been a Holocaust or an attempt at genocide against the Jewish people.  A variation on this perverse theme is apartheid denial: by accusing Israel—which accords equal rights to all its citizens—of apartheid, these haters deny the horrors of actual apartheid, which was so much more horrible than anything Israel has ever done.
    Fourth, and most dangerous, is eliminationist anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism of the kind advocated by the leaders of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and ISIS. Listen to Hassan Nasrallah: "If [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide" or "If we search the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew.  Notice I didn't say the Israeli."
    These variations on the theme of anti-Semitism have several elements in common.  First, they tend to engage in some form of Holocaust denial, minimization, glorification or comparative victimization. Second, they exaggerate Jewish power, money and influence. Third, they seek the delegitimation and demonization of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.  Fourth, they impose a double standard on all things Jewish. Finally, they nearly all deny that they are anti-Semites who hate all Jews. They claim that their hatred is directed against Israel and Jews who support the nation state of the Jewish people.
    This common form of the new anti-Semitism—we love the Jews, it's only their nation state that we hate—is pervasive among many European political, media, cultural and academic leaders. It was evident even among some who came to commemorate the liberation of the death camps.  A recent poll among Germans showed a significant number of the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of Nazi supporters didn't want to hear about Nazi atrocities, but believed what Israel was doing to the Palestinians was comparable to what the Nazis had done to the Jews.
    This then is the European problem of anti-Semitism that many European leaders are unwilling to confront because they have a built in excuse!  It's Israel's fault—if only Israel would do the right thing with regard to the Palestinians, the problem would be solved. Tragically, it won't be solved, because the reality is that hatred of Israel is not the cause of anti-Semitism. Rather, it is the reverse: anti-Semitism is a primary cause of hatred for the nation state of the Jewish people."

Europe

- Comment Yehya Kaddouri, islamiste radical repenti, a vaincu sa colère, Jean-Pierre Stroobants (Le Monde) - "Celui affecté aux entretiens avec Yehya l’a, explique ce dernier, convaincu que des attentats visant des civils étaient illégitimes et n’aboutiraient qu’à stigmatiser davantage les musulmans. Et que les juifs étaient « des hommes comme les autres »."
http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2015/01/27/comment-yehya-kaddouri-islamiste-radical-repenti-a-vaincu-sa-colere_4564548_3214.html

- Bravo les Grecs ! Comment Syriza a déjoué le "complot juif de Hannoucah", Benoit Rayski (historien, écrivain et journaliste) - "Et ce grâce à Théodoros Karypidis un des pontes du parti qui fera passer la Grèce des ténèbres à la lumière" ; "la presse grecque qui a relayé les propos de M. Karypidis a parlé du "complot de Hannoucah"."
http://www.atlantico.fr/decryptage/bravo-grecs-comment-syriza-dejoue-complot-juif-hannoucah-benoit-rayski-1979716.html

- Au moins six morts dans des bombardements à Donetsk (Reuters) - "Six personnes au moins ont été tuées vendredi à Donetsk, ville de l'est de l'Ukraine tenue par les séparatistes pro-russes, lorsque des obus sont tombés sur un centre culturel et un trolleybus".
https://fr.news.yahoo.com/au-moins-six-morts-dans-des-bombardements-%C3%A0-125220276.html

Point de vue

- Outstanding speech by Matti Friedman (Elder of Ziyon) - "Matti Friedman, former AP journalist, spoke at a BICOM dinner in London on January 26. His speech is an absolute must-read". Je confirme, c'est long mais c'est un excellente et passionnante plongée dans les coulisses de la couverture médiatique du conflit israélo-palestinien. L'ensemble est intéressant, et il serait trop difficile de sélectionner un extrait. Il faut bien sûr noter que la réalité qu'il décrit de l'intérieur des médias américains, malheureusement, est encore plus grave dans le cas des médias français.
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.fr/2015/01/outstanding-speech-by-matti-friedman.html

Point de vue

- L’antisémitisme qu’on ne veut pas voir, Marcela Iacub (Libération)
http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2015/01/23/l-antisemitisme-qu-on-ne-veut-pas-voir_1187287
   "Il y a eu dans les commémorations des victimes du terrorisme quelque chose de très gênant : la place presque inexistante octroyée aux morts juifs. On dira qu’on en a parlé partout, un peu moins que des morts de Charlie, certes, mais on ne les a pas complètement oubliés. Voilà le problème. C’est précisément cela qui laisse un goût amer dans nos mémoires. Car le sentiment que l’on éprouve, c’est que le fait de tuer des gens pour avoir dessiné des caricatures du Prophète est plus grave que de tuer des juifs au seul motif qu’ils sont juifs.
    Comme si, d’une certaine manière, c’était normal de tuer des clients d’une épicerie casher. Non que ce soit bien. C’était mal, bien évidemment que c’était moche : ce sont des êtres humains innocents, comme on dit. Et des Français, de surcroît. Mais pas de quoi faire une journée de deuil national ou une manifestation dans laquelle il y aurait presque 4 millions de personnes. C’est pourquoi le mot d’ordre des commémorations était la liberté d’expression et non pas la lutte contre le terrorisme islamiste.
    Ceci explique certains des problèmes qui sont apparus par la suite. Ces mots d’ordre ont pu suggérer que la pire objection que l’on pouvait adresser à ces assassins était leur hostilité envers la liberté d’expression. Comme si en massacrant des gens ils ne faisaient qu’exprimer une opinion à propos de cette précieuse liberté démocratique. Sans compter qu’en France il y a tant de gens qui sont contre cette liberté ! Les élites politiques et médiatiques ne cessent de vanter les mérites des sanctions pour ces «abus» dont se rendent coupables les mauvais parleurs. Ils se félicitent de nos lois restrictives et veulent à chaque fois que l’occasion se présente les durcir encore.
    C’est pourquoi, dans un tel contexte, il devient très difficile de différencier les personnes qui ont des opinions liberticides des terroristes. Si les actes de ces derniers sont si monstrueux, c’est parce qu’ils piétinent un droit beaucoup plus important et élémentaire que celui de s’exprimer librement, un droit qui rend possible tous les autres : celui de vivre.
    Si une telle confusion a vu le jour, c’est en grande partie parce qu’il fallait justifier que l’on s’horrifie davantage que les terroristes aient tué des dessinateurs français que des juifs. Que ces terroristes, au lieu de s’en prendre aux juifs comme c’est leur habitude, attaquent aussi des vrais et bons Français.
   «Je suis Charlie» et la défense de la liberté d’expression, ce sont les noms que l’on a donnés à cette tergiversation. Alors qu’en réalité on voulait signifier autre chose, notamment que, dorénavant, il fallait prendre la menace islamiste au sérieux. Tant qu’il n’y avait que des juifs comme cibles, on pouvait laisser les jihadistes se réunir, s’armer, comploter, rentrer de Syrie, acheter des armes comme si de rien n’était. Alors que, maintenant, on prendra des mesures fermes pour désamorcer ces foyers de folie et de violence qui poussent à la vue de tous.
    Mais le fera-t-on vraiment ? La réponse à cette question est loin d’être évidente. Ils sont si peu nombreux les humoristes qui font des caricatures du Prophète (et on les a presque tous tués) qu’on n’aura pas longtemps à trop se prendre la tête pour protéger la population la plus vulnérable aux attaques terroristes, c’est-à-dire les juifs.
    Car protéger, ce n’est pas juste mettre des policiers en faction devant les écoles ou les synagogues : c’est ainsi qu’on a voulu préserver les journalistes de Charlie d’une vengeance sanglante. Protéger les juifs contre la menace terroriste implique de faire des efforts beaucoup plus importants que cela. On a laissé pendant si longtemps se développer ce monstre que la seule solution qui reste aujourd’hui est celle d’une répression sans merci.
    Certes, il y en a une autre : conseiller aux juifs de quitter la France pour trouver refuge en Israël. Si cela peut éviter aux bons et vrais Français des ennuis, au nom de quoi va-t-on s’empêcher de prendre cette dernière solution au sérieux ?"

- I, the son of Holocaust survivors, thought I'd live to see anti-Semitism vanish, Samuel Heilman (Haaretz) - "Seventy years after Auschwitz was liberated, European anti-Semitism has reemerged – like diseases that return because parents were lax in immunizing their children".
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.639371

Histoire

- Regardez en avant-première le 1er volet du documentaire "Jusqu’au dernier, la destruction des Juifs d’Europe" (Vidéo 55mn)
http://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/regardez-en-avant-premiere-le-1er-volet-du-documentaire-jusquau-dernier-la-destruction-des-juifs-deurope_803863.html
   ""Jusqu’au dernier, la destruction des Juifs d’Europe" revient, 70 ans après la libération du camp d’Auschwitz par l’Armée rouge, sur les étapes de la Shoah entre 1933 et 1945. Francetv info diffuse, samedi 24 et dimanche 25 janvier, en avant-première, les deux premiers volets de ce documentaire, La fin des illusions et Le piège, qui seront diffusés, lundi 26 janvier, à partir de 22h20 sur France 2.
    Au cours des huit volets de cette série, les réalisateurs William Karel et Blanche Finger s’interrogent sur le processus qui a amené les nazis à penser puis mettre en œuvre l’anéantissement des communautés juives d'Allemagne, mais aussi de tous les pays occupés par le Reich.
    L’objectif de ces huit films est de comprendre, à travers des témoignages d’une cinquantaine d’historiens internationaux de renom (dont certains sont des survivants de la Shoah), comment est né ce funeste projet, mais également d’analyser de quelle manière a été mise en œuvre et exécutée, à l’échelle de tout un continent, l’extermination des Juifs d’Europe."