Letter to International Federation of Journalists

July 28, 2006

CENTRE SIMON WIESENTHAL - SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTRE - CENTRO SIMON WIESENTHAL
64, avenue Marceau - 75008 Paris - Tel. +33 (0) 1 47 23 76 37 - Fax: +33
(0) 1 47 20 84 01
E-mail: csweurope@compuserve.com 

Mr. Aidan White, General Secretary
International Federation of Journalists
IPC- Residence Palace, Bloc C
Rue de la Loi 155
B- 1040 Brussels
Belgium

FAX: + 322 235 22 19                                            
28 July 2006
e-mail: ifj@ifj.org

Mr. General Secretary,

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is an international Jewish human rights organization with worldwide membership of 440,000. Established in 1977, with headquarters in Los Angeles, it draws the lessons of the Holocaust to the analysis of contemporary issues of prejudice and discrimination. The Centre is an NGO in consultative status to the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the Council of Europe and the Organization of American States.

Last week, the Israeli chapter quit the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), in disgust at your denunciation of the Israeli Air Force destruction of the Al Manar Hizbollah television station in Lebanon.

Your definition of "Hizbollah terrorists" as "journalists", not only flies in the face of last year's closure by France of its EUTELSAT retransmissions of Al Manar Hizbollah TV broadcasts as "incitement to the murder of Jews and Christians".

Indeed, your camouflage for terror has already borne fruit: your Brussels neighbour, La Libre Belgique, in its op ed of 25 July entitled "C'est le sionisme qui mène à la guerre" (It is Zionism which leads to war), has blatantly endorsed Iranian President Ahmadinejad, Hizbollah's commander and bankroller, "to wipe the State of Israel off the map".

The newspaper goes beyond legitimate criticism of Israeli policy, maliciously crossing the red lines of civilized press discourse:

In distorting quotes from Jewish protagonists of Zionism as the only national liberation movement of the Middle East, La Libre Belgique states that "the founding doctrine of Zionism was racism and colonialism… the people of Israel, as a superior people and the modern continuation of the Chosen People… Israel in the Middle East is the apartheid South Africa of southern Africa - a Euro-American colony."

The article moves on from racism to the Holocaust to a new call for a definitive Final Solution: "By what right do Israeli leaders, most born after 1945, speak in the name of the victims of Nazism? By what right do they appropriate the exclusive memory of a crime against all humanity?"

Mr. General Secretary, it was not "all humanity", but, indeed, the leaders and people of Israel - every Jew alive today, whether in Israel or in the Diaspora - who were marked for extermination by Hitler. Yet, La Libre Belgique robs the victims of their own victimology.

Finally, the hop, skip and jump to a call for genocide, as a prominent Belgian daily, cognizant of Belgium's own complicity in the deportation of the Jews, unambiguously declares:
"We were shocked to hear the Iranian President say that Israel should be wiped off the map. However, it would surely be the only solution to see the State of Israel disappear, politically of course. … The policy of 'two peoples, two States', the policy of the partition of Palestine on a political and ethnic basis, is a policy of apartheid that will never bring peace. Let us return to what was always, until Oslo, the project of the
PLO…"

As a postscript, allow me to stress the clearly biased agenda of La Libre Belgique in claiming: "When a government judges that the life of one soldier is more important than that of dozens of children and civilians, on the sole pretext that this soldier is a Jew while the dozens of civilians and children are Muslim, Christians and non-believers, then the State that represents this government is a racist State".

Mr. General Secretary, if every state would value the life of each of its soldiers, as in the case of Israel for ALL its soldiers, whether Jewish, Druze, Muslim Beduin or Arab Christians - all Israeli citizens who serve in the Israel Defence Forces - then war would be a less likely policy option.

The IFJ legitimized Hizbollah terrorists as "Al Manar journalists" who, in fact, care not a wit for the number of their fighters lost as "martyrs" in their atrocities against civilians. La Libre Belgique has endorsed the antisemitic genocide of the same Iranian regime that sent one million of its children to detonate mines with their own bodies in the "Jihad" against Iraq.

Our Centre asks the IFJ and La Libre Belgique to acknowledge responsibility for their positions, just as the Stürmer editor, Julius Streicher at Nuremberg, or the three Rwandan journalists at the United Nations Arusha court. None had taken a single life, but all were condemned for media incitement to mass murder.

Mr. General-Secretary, be responsible for the possible consequences of your words: first, a wave of violent antisemitism across Europe; second, a Belgian debate on whether to open its gates to five million Israeli refugees.

But you know, Sir, that that will never happen, for it is the very language of La Libre Belgique that ensures the resistance and indomitability of the Jewish State.

Can we expect the IFJ to condemn La Libre Belgique for its antisemitism and undoubted violation of the IFJ's own code of journalistic conduct?

Dr. Shimon Samuels
Director for International Relations

cc:
Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean and Founder, Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Los Angeles
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean, Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Los Angeles