Saturday, June 4, 2005
The story about LeMonde being found guilty in a French court for "racist defamation" is finally getting a little bit wider play. At the time I posted about it below, it was only a brief item at JTA, and a Google News search turned up no other matches. In fact, a search of "Le Monde racist defamation" still only turns up one hit...and that's to a blog.
Haaretz has an article with a little more deapth here (also noted by a commenter in the previous post): Le Monde editor found guilty of defamation against Jews, Israel
Further, Norm has posted a lengthy excerpt from the pay portion of the Wall Street Journal that covers this and more ground. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here's quick snip:
Yet it was no worse than thousands of other news reports, editorials, commentaries, letters, cartoons and headlines published throughout Europe in recent years, in the guise of legitimate and reasoned discussion of Israeli policies...
...[A]lthough 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....