JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Karsenty pushing al-Dura probe

By Uriel Heilman · October 23, 2008

The decision by a Paris court last spring to overturn a libel ruling against Philippe Karsenty, a French media watchdog who claimed the iconic shooting of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura was manipulated by video editing, lent new credence to claims that the September 2000 shooting was staged.

The ruling has fueled Karsenty’s increasingly public campaign for a probe of the shooting, which during the violent early days of the second intifada became a symbol for Palestinians of Israeli brutality.

Karsenty talks about the shooting in an interview in the latest issue of the Middle East Quarterly.

Here’s JTA’s latest story on the subject.

0 Comments | Share This | France, International, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Palestinians

Rap artist reps for French-Israelis

By Daniel Sieradski · October 7, 2008

Meet Shmoolik, A.K.A. Shmouel Halimi, the French-Israeli Chasidic hip-hop artist and graphic designer.  As a rhyme spouting ba’al teshuva Chabadnik, the comparisons to Matisyahu are inevitable, but Shmoolik is very much in a class of his own.

Now that you’ve met the man, hear the music. Here’s the video for his track, “Les Enfants d’Israël.” Written and recorded in the midst of the Gaza disengagement, the track samples Serge Gainsbourg’s 1967 coming-out-as-a-Jew song, “Les Soldats Et Le Sable.”

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Sarkozy charms the world

By Lisa Hostein · September 24, 2008

Rabbi Arthur Schneier (right), presents the Appeal of Conscience World Statesman Award to French President Nicolas Sarkozy. French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and GE chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt look on along with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In his brief visit to New York this week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed continued pressure on Iran, reiterated his condemnation of anti-Semitism and extolled France’s close relationship with America. No wonder he is being feted by the Jews and Jewish-sponsored human rights groups.

He was honored by both the Elie Wiesel Foundation and the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, and gave passionate speeches at both events extolling human rights and slamming anti-Semitism and racism.

Lauded by Rabbi Arthur Schneier, president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, as a “man of courage,” Sarkozy quipped Tuesday night that it was a dubious honor to receive the group’s “World Statesman” award at a time “when everything is going wrong” in the world.

Earlier in the day, the French leader made a forceful speech at the United Nations, vowing to pursue further sanctions against Iran and urging that those responsible for the world financial crisis be held accountable.

Sarkozy, elected president of France just last year, has catapulted onto the world stage rapidly, playing a key role in resolving political tensions in Lebanon, working out a cease-fire agreement between Russia and Georgia and hosting an international gathering of Mediterranean country leaders, including Israel, Syria and other Arab nations.

Not all pro-Israel advocates – or Jews in France – support his outreach to Syria and they wonder whether as the current president of the European Union, he will do much to ease tensions with Israel. The E.U. Parliament, for example, earlier this month passed a resolution conditioning improved relations with Israel on Israel improving its treatment of Palestinian prisoners.

As incidents of anti-Semitism in France continue to dominate headlines, it’s not clear how much Sarkozy will be able to do to quell it, despite his forceful condemnation.

Still, Sarkozy and his current stature is garnering a great deal of attention, even though he appears more popular abroad than at home. Sadly, much of the media are more enamored by his wife, Carla Bruni Sarkozy, than by him. At the press opportunity with Sarkozy at the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, there were as many paparazzi crowding around the couple as political reporters and photographers. You can bet “Inside Edition” wasn’t there to hear his views on the political and financial crises of the day.

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The latest ‘Dreyfus affair?’

By Lisa Hostein · August 4, 2008

First the al-Dura affair, now a to-do about the firing of a French columnist for his purported anti-Semitic rantings. The French media has been filled with self-examination this summer, much of it related to Jewish affairs.

In the al-Dura affair, the French press questioned its role after a court ruled in favor of a media watchdog who had challenged the authenticity of a French TV broadcast of an alleged Israeli shooting of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy.

Now, a French columnist has become the new cause celebre after he was fired for a series of writings that started with an offensive piece about Nicolas Sarkozy’s son’s engagement to a Jewish heiress.

NYTimes columnist Roger Cohen says the issue could be shaping up to be another Dreyfus Affair, which has become the code word to describe a Jew being unjustly accused of something.

Here’s how Cohen describes it:

It’s not quite the Dreyfus Affair, at least not yet. But France is divided again over power and the Jews.

While the United States has been debating The New Yorker’s caricature of Barack Obama as a Muslim, France has gone off the deep end over a brief item in the country’s leading satirical magazine portraying the relationship between President Nicolas Sarkozy’s fast-rising son, Jean, and his Jewish fiancée.

The offending piece in Charlie Hebdo, a pillar of the left-libertarian media establishment, was penned last month by a 79-year-old columnist-cartoonist who goes by the name of Bob Siné. He described the plans — since denied — of Jean Sarkozy, 21, to convert to Judaism before marrying Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, an heiress to the fortune of the Darty electrical goods retailing chain.

“He’ll go far in life, this little fellow!” Siné wrote of Sarkozy Jr.

He added, in a separate item on whether Muslims should abandon their traditions, that: “Honestly, between a Muslim in a chador and a shaved Jewess, my choice is made!”

Elie Wiesel and Bernard-Henri Lévy have weighed in on the case, which appears to be reverberating across Europe.

Cohen comes out staunchly against Sine’s firing, opting for free speech over martyrdom. Read his whole column.

5 Comments | Share This | Anti-Semitism, France, Media

The beating of Rudy Haddad

By Uriel Heilman · July 31, 2008

An Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal picks up on a story JTA has been following in France on the brutal beating attack against a young Parisian Jew, Rudy Haddad, in June:

Confused accounts of the June 21 fights that ended with the attack against Rudy – portrayed as a tough guy with a police record – curiously recall the “cycle of violence” treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict, where Palestinian terror attacks and Israeli efforts to prevent them are judged as morally equivalent.

0 Comments | Share This | Anti-Semitism, France

Peace of Paris

By Uriel Heilman · July 21, 2008

Newsweek has a piece about how French President Nicolas Sarkozy has “very publicly embraced the Jewish state,” enabling him to do some things Israeli leaders haven’t loved without appearing to be hostile to Israel. Among them: telling Israeli leaders that Jerusalem should also be the capital of a Palestinian state, giving Libyan dictator Muamar Gadhafi the red carpet treatment and welcoming Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, to Paris. Reporter Eic Pape writes:

It may be a canny approach, but it’s also a risky one. “Sarkozy in Israel acted as an intermediary who could be heard by both sides, and he is more listened to in Israel than his predecessors,” says Gilles Kepel, a Middle East scholar at Sciences Po in Paris and the author of “The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West.” “But the great difficulty is to not lose his capital in Arab countries. It is a balancing act that is very complex. It is a gamble.”

Meanwhile, David Singer of the Canada Free Press points out that making solid progress on the Israeli-Palestinian peace front is a lot harder than bringing together the two countries’ leaders for a photo op, as Sarkozy did at his Union for the Mediterranean conference last week:

The images of President Sarkozy, PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Mr Olmert smiling and enjoying a three way bear hug would have encouraged President Sarkozy into believing that he would be able to achieve the diplomatic breakthrough that had eluded the Quartet for the last 5 years…

Little did [French Foreign Minister Bernard] Kouchner - or President Sarkozy - imagine that the fundamental disagreements between Israel and the PA would be used by the PA to undermine the grand design of President Sarkozy to bring the nations of the Mediterranean and the European Union together in a new spirit of co-operation and joint venture.

The unfriendly wind Mr Kouchner had felt was shortly to blow away any hopes of an agreed summit position when the PA objected to the wording of the summit declaration.

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Al-Dura conspiracy theories

By Uriel Heilman · June 20, 2008

After ridiculing claims by Jewish right-wingers that the iconic shooting of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura was a hoax, the Jerusalem Post’s Larry Derfner responds to a rebuttal by Richard Landes and Philippe Karsenty with a detailed analysis of what is, and isn’t, known about the shooting.

Karsenty is the French Jewish media watchdog who was sued in a French court for claiming the al-Dura incident, which helped fuel the flames of the second intifada, was staged. Karsenty initially was found guilty of defaming the journalist who filed the report, France 2 TV’s Charles Enderlin, but last month a French appeals court overturned the verdict, supporting Karsenty’s right to charge that the incident was a hoax.

The upshot? Derfner agrees with Karsenty, the IDF and Jewish observers who say that al-Dura likely was killed by Palestinian fire, not by Israeli troops, but Derfner says there’s no evidence to show the boy’s shooting was staged:

In short, the French appeals court upheld Karsenty’s legal right to cry hoax. It by no means upheld the substance of his claim. There are light years of difference between the two.

Yet while it’s pure Jewish paranoia to claim that Enderlin and his co-conspirators knew all along that the Palestinians killed al-Dura, and it’s way beyond paranoia to think the Palestinians killed the boy deliberately or that he never died at all.

3 Comments | Share This | Anti-Zionism, Arab-Israeli Conflict, France, International, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Uncategorized

We’ll always have Paris

By Ami Eden · June 11, 2008

The Associated Press reports that the Jewish Quarter in Paris is losing its je(wish) ne sais quoi:

The kosher pizzeria on the rue des Rosiers smelled like hot cheese, and Jewish teens leaned skullcap-covered heads into the doorway, hoping to order one of Moshe Benjamin Engelberg’s thin-crusted pizzas.

But Engelberg shook his head. After 27 years, he has lost faith in his neighborhood, home to French Jews since the Middle Ages, and is shutting down, depriving the rue des Rosiers district of one of its remaining Old World-style kosher restaurants.

The disappearance of a dingy pizzeria, its faded portraits of rabbis hanging crooked on brown-stained walls, where men recently swayed back and forth under prayer shawls between pizza courses, was a blow to those fearing the area has become a lifeless, polished museum.

The district has been losing a vital chunk of its Jewish character to high-end designer labels in a slow transformation that residents say is reaching a turning point. Local officials estimate that as many as 20 Jewish shops in the compact quarter have given way to clothing stores in the past four years.

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