Jewish Militias: fifteen years, and more, of terrorism in France

[Slightly incomplete translation published in the Journal of Historical Review, March-April 1996 (Vol. 16, no. 2), pages 2-13]

In its issue of June 1991 the French monthly Le Choc du mois (“The Shock of the Month”) published a rather lengthy report entitled “Milices juives. Quinze ans de terrorisme,” (“Jewish Militias: Fifteen Years of Terrorism”, p. 7-13). Under the main headline, a subtitle summed up:

“Jewish Action Group,” “Jewish Combat Organization,” “Jewish Defense Organization”… Under these various names, Jewish activists for 15 years have unceasingly sown terror [in France] with total impunity. Provocations that have no other aim than to incite reprisals. As if certain people wanted the [French] Jewish community to feel threatened…

The report reviews 50 cases of physical aggression committed by organized Jewish groups during the period from June 19, 1976, to April 20, 1991. Not mentioned, therefore, are physical attacks committed by individual Jews (which are, in any case, rare).

The victims of the 50 cases listed by Le Choc du mois, who number in the hundreds, suffered: loss of life, an eye put out, acid throwing, numerous hospitalizations, injuries followed by deep coma, lifetime disabilities, and serious post-traumatic conditions, “the commission of barbaric acts,” severe beatings in the presence of policemen who refused to intervene, and numerous ambush attacks (in one case with the complicity of the daily newspaper Libération).

Most of these acts of aggression were passed over in silence by the media or only briefly reported. Some were applauded by Jewish publications or organizations which, in general, after a few pro forma words of censure, suggested that the victims deserved their fate, that such attacks are “only natural and normal,” and that no one need expect any leniency in future if he should ever again arouse Jewish “anger.”

It is worthy of note that not one Jew has been the victim of a single attack in revenge by any “revisionist” or so-called “extreme right” group. (Although the press routinely lumps “revisionism” and the “extreme right” together, in reality historical revisionism receives support from thinking persons of all possible political views, from the ultra-left to the extreme right, and of all parties, except the Communists. Paul Rassinier, regarded as the founder of Holocaust revisionism in France, was a Socialist.)

From among the many attacks committed by Jewish militias or organizations, we shall confine ourselves here to mentioning only those involving the following victims: François Duprat, a GRECE conference, Marc Fredriksen (twice), Charles Bousquet, Michel Caignet, Pierre Sidos, Olivier Mathieu, Pierre Guillaume, the “Friends of Saint-Loup,” and Robert Faurisson. Many other cases from the 1976-1991 period could be mentioned. (For example, on November 2, 1976, the building in which Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen was living had to be entirely demolished after being rocked from top to bottom of its five floors in a dynamiting for which a “Jewish Remembrance Group” claimed responsibility. On April 2, 1991, Fabrice Benichou, a newspaper vendor, died in his home after having been beaten up while selling a weekly paper in the Sentier, a Jewish district of Paris.)

François Duprat

François Duprat, a member of the leadership of the Front National and an author and distributor of revisionist writings, was killed in his car on March 18, 1978, when it was blown up with a sophisticated bomb. His wife was severely injured. A “Remembrance Commando” claimed responsibility for the crime. In keeping with the practice of “Nazi hunters” Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, Patrice Chairoff had published in Dossier néonazisme the name and address of Duprat, and of several other persons who were suspected of fascism, neo-Nazism, or revisionism (Le Monde, March 23, 1978, p. 7; April 26, 1978, p. 9).

In Le Droit de vivre (“The Right to Live”), the periodical of the “International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism” (Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme, or LICRA), Jean Pierre-Bloch, the publication’s director, commented on Duprat’s murder without saying a single word about his wife’s injuries. His comments reflect a cabalistic mentality: while affecting disapproval of this “vile” crime, he expresses the view that, in his opinion, the crime is due to the fact that in the years 1977-78 “anarchy and the reign of political score-settling” took hold in France, and that “criminal accusations were made against the immigrants, Jews or Gypsies.” Jean Pierre-Bloch thus equates indisputable criminal actions with “criminal accusations,” of which he in fact indicates neither the purport nor the consequences. Still more revealing is the following passage in his statement: “Yes, it is true. We are ready to fight and to die to permit our adversaries to say in complete freedom what they think as long as they don’t defend crime or harbor racial hatred” (Le Monde, May 7-8, 1978). In the context of this murder, these words constitute a warning to anyone who might displease the Jews by following Duprat’s example.

A few months later Jean Pierre-Bloch described Robert Faurisson, Europe’s foremost revisionist scholar, as an imitator of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Commissioner General of Jewish affairs in the wartime Vichy government, and then proclaimed: “Darquier will be extradited. Those who follow in his path can forget about living to a ripe old age. Sooner or later they will find the anti-racists on their trail” (Le Droit de vivre, December 1978, p. 23). The LICRA was founded in 1927 by Bernard Lecache under the name Ligue contre les pogroms (“League Against Pogroms”) to defend the Russian Jew Shalom Schwarzbart, who had assassinated Ukrainian General Simon Petlura in Paris the previous year. The public clamor organized on behalf of the assassin led to his acquittal. Similar public campaigns would much later lead to the acquittal of other assassins (such as the May 5, 1976 acquittal of the thug and murderer Pierre Goldmann).

Following the murder of François Duprat, an article appeared in the leading French daily Le Monde about an English revisionist pamphlet that had been distributed in France by Duprat. This article by journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponté, a smear job pure and simple, failed to make any mention of Duprat’s assassination (“Le mensonge (suite)”, Le Monde, 3-4 Sept. 1978, p. 9).

A conference of the GRECE

On December 9, 1979 about a hundred individuals wearing helmets attacked the 14th national conference of the GRECE (Groupe d’études et de recherches sur la civilisation européenne, “Group for the Study and Research of European Civilization”). Wrecking the book stands, they displayed banners bearing the name Organisation juive de défense (OJD, “Jewish Defense Organization”). Fifteen or so of the conference attendees were injured. One of them lost an eye. Several of the assailants were arrested by the police, and then released that same afternoon on the intervention of Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch, the son of Jean Pierre-Bloch and a friend of Jacques Chirac [currently President of France]. Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch had been involved, and would also later be involved, in other attacks and intercessions on behalf of these same attackers.

Marc Fredriksen

On September 19, 1980 a commando group of the “Jewish Defense Organization” (OJD) attacked sympathizers of Marc Fredriksen, an executive of FANE (Fédération d’action nationale et européenne, or “National and European Action Federation”), at the Paris Palace of Justice. Six persons were injured, two of them seriously. The Palace of Justice guards, although charged with maintaining order, permitted the Jewish militia group in this case, as in all other similar circumstances, to act without, or almost without, hindrance. As for Jean Pierre-Bloch, he was to state: “The law of retaliation might well appear again… If a single one of our own is harmed, we shall apply the formula: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth … If we have to organize militarily, we shall do so” (Le Monde, Oct. 1, 1980). The phrase “If a single one of our own is harmed …” indicates that not a single Jew had been harmed. And what was true in 1980 is still true in 1995. In the course of their fighting against nationalists or revisionists the Jews harm, wound or kill but are themselves never harmed, wounded or killed. If a French “right wing” group had harmed a Jew, the media of the entire world would have played up the attack, with shocking photographs of the victim, gruesome details about the injury, follow-up interviews, and outraged commentary.

Charles Bousquet, Marc Fredriksen

On October 3, 1980 an attack against the Paris synagogue in the rue Copernic, which resulted in four dead and 27 injured, received enormous international media coverage. The four dead were passersby, among them an Israeli woman whose presence has never been explained. That same day Interior Minister Christian Bonnet received information that allowed him to determine that this was a Palestinian attack, but under pressure from Jewish organizations and with the cooperation of the major newspapers, he let it be assumed that it was an action of the extreme right. It was later learned that the attack was actually committed by a Palestinian from Cyprus. On the very evening of the synagogue attack, the FANE headquarters were wrecked and the Librairie française bookshop in the rue de l’Abbé-Grégoire street in Paris was the target of a new arson attempt. This bookstore, owned by Jean-Gilles Malliarakis, would undergo more than ten attacks or attempts over a period of just a few years. The headquarters of a small political party, l’Oeuvre française, directed by Pierre Sidos was machine-gunned. Lynching scenes unfolded in Paris, as groups of Jewish demonstrators attacked lone young passersby who were singled out because they were tall, blond, and with short hair (Le Monde, Oct. 9, 1980, p. 12).

A few days later, on October 7, Charles Bousquet, 84 years old, was attacked in his home in Neuilly with sulfuric acid by a group of unknown men who had apparently mistaken him for the militant nationalist, Pierre Bousquet (no relation to René Bousquet). He was hospitalized for a month at Foch Hospital in the major burns ward, and suffered after-effects from his injuries. He refused to press charges because his son Pierre, a professor of history at the University of Paris IV, has asked him not to “on account of the Israelites.” He said: “They’ll be in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, the ones who did it. It would all be useless. I want to forget it” (during a conversation with R. Faurisson on May 2, 1984).

On October 12, 1980 Marc Fredriksen was beaten up and admitted to the Rambouillet hospital in serious condition. His apartment was torn apart in his absence. While under treatment at Berck-sur-Mer for multiple fractures, he came close to suffering another attack: three young men showed up and asked to see him; their description matched that of the Aziza team that subsequently attacked Michel Caignet with acid (see below).

On October 20, 1980 the writer André Figuéras was attacked at his residence.

Michel Caignet

On the morning of January 29, 1981 Michel Caignet, a 26-year-old Sorbonne student who was preparing for a doctorate in Anglo-German linguistics, had just left his residence in Courbevoie to go to the university when he was accosted by four individuals. They knocked him down and prevented him from moving. One of the four attackers sprayed his face and his right hand with sulfuric acid.

Caignet had belonged to the FANE, and he was a revisionist. He had been denounced by the weekly VSD. Following the attack with acid, his face looked so hideous that only two newspapers ventured to publish his photograph. The principal perpetrator of the attack, Yves Aziza, a medical student and the son of Charles Aziza (an assistant pharmacist at Montreuil), was identified by the police within an hour of the crime. But in this case, as in others, the French police and courts scandalously permitted Yves Aziza to flee to Germany and to Israel. At the Justice Ministry, an official named Main at the criminal affairs bureau (headed by Raoul Béteille) sarcastically evaded every question put to him with regard to the 14-day delay in opening a judicial inquiry. Among Yves Aziza’s correspondents was Daniel Ziskind, the son of Michèle Ziskind, sister of Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch, himself the son of Jean Pierre-Bloch.

Pierre Sidos

On September 18, 1981 200 members of the Organisation juive de combat (OJC) or “Jewish Combat Organization” laid down the law at the Palace of Justice in Paris, where the defamation trial brought by Pierre Sidos, president of l’Œuvre française, against Jean-Pierre Bloch was taking place. As usual, Jewish thugs beat up several of the spectators.

On November 25, 1981 the premises of the Études et documentation bookshop were set on fire by a commando group.

On May 8, 1988, at Saint-Augustin Square in Paris, OJC commandos used iron bars to attack l’Oeuvre française supporters who were taking part in the traditional parade in honor of Joan of Arc. Some 15 supporters were injured, two of them very seriously. Four of the victims were hospitalized. A septuagenarian remained in a coma for several weeks. Ten OJC members were questioned by the police. That same afternoon Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch interceded with the police (police judiciaire) on their behalf. Legal proceedings were instituted against some of the attackers. Some attackers were released with the following notation by the examining magistrate: “preliminary examination inopportune.” Other attackers were tried, though not without pressure “from the highest political level” being brought to bear on the public prosecutor’s office. In total, only three of the attackers were tried. Each received a two-year suspended prison sentence.

Olivier Mathieu

On February 6, 1990 millions of viewers witnessed the brutal attack against Olivier Mathieu during a television broadcast emceed by Christophe Dechavanne. Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch came on to the stage with a group of OJC militants. Mathieu had just time enough to exclaim: “Faurisson is right.” Then ten or so of the thugs severely beat him, his fiancee, and Marc Botrel. Among those present was an important figure among the Jewish militias: Moshe Cohen, a former second lieutenant of the Israeli army and an officer at the time of the Tagar organization, the student branch of the Betar (59 boulevard de Strasbourg, Paris X^e). The attacks continued off stage and out into the street. One attacker was questioned by the police, but released a few hours later on the intercession of Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch.

Pierre Guillaume

Pierre Guillaume, an “ultra-leftist”, is in charge of the small La Vieille Taupe publishing house, which has issued a number of revisionist works, including those of Professor Faurisson. He has been the victim of a number of serious attacks, both against his person – at the Sorbonne, in his Paris bookstore, and at the Palace of Justice in Paris (where the guards did not intervene) – as well as against his property (book warehouse, video equipment, bookstore). In 1991, groups of demonstrators, most of them Jews, laid siege to his bookstore in the rue d’Ulm on a regular basis. As a result of various acts of violence (breaking shop windows, spraying chemical products, physical intimidation, etc.), they finally succeeded in closing it.

The “Friends of Saint-Loup”

On April 20, 1991, at the Maison des Mines in Paris, about 50 individuals claiming to be members of the Groupe d’action juive (GAJ), or “Jewish Action Group,” and armed with iron bars and baseball bats, attacked the attendees of a meeting of Les Amis de Saint-Loup (“The Friends of Saint-Loup”), named after a deceased writer whose real name was Marc Augier. Thirteen persons, most of them elderly, were injured, two of them very seriously. Juliette Cavalié, 67 years of age, was taken to Beaujon hospital where she lapsed into a coma lasting three months. After regaining consciousness, she was condemned to spend the rest of her days unable to walk or even to feed herself. Alain Léauthier, a journalist for Libération and a relative of the socialist deputy and Jewish zealot Julien Dray, witnessed the attack from beginning to end, and provided a smug and ironical report of it (“Un commando sioniste s’invite au meeting néo-nazi”, Liberation, April 22, 1991, p. 28).

Robert Faurisson

Europe’s most prominent Holocaust revisionist scholar, Professor Robert Faurisson, was the victim of ten physical assaults between November 20, 1978, and May 31, 1993 (two in Lyon, two in Vichy, two in Stockholm and four in Paris). Seven of these attacks were at the hands of French Jewish organizations or militias – two in Lyon, one in Vichy, one in Stockholm (by Swedish Jews together with French Jews who had flown there from Paris), one at the Sorbonne, and one at the Palace of Justice in Paris.

The first of these seven attacks took place on November 20, 1978. It was lauded in Libération-Lyon by the Jewish journalist Bernard Schalscha, who reported the day, the place, and the hour of the professor’s courses. Members of the Jewish Students’ Union who had come by first-class train from Paris attacked the professor at the University, while Dr. Marc Aron, a cardiologist and president of the liaison committee of the Jewish institutions and organizations of Lyon, was present.

The second attack occurred a few weeks later when Faurisson attempted to resume his courses. On that day as well, Marc Aron was again at the university.

At the Sorbonne, on September 12, 1987 members of a Jewish militia attacked Henry Chauveau, Michel Sergent, Pierre Guillaume, Freddy Storer (a Belgian), and Professor Faurisson, all of whom were injured, Chauveau seriously. The Sorbonne guards apprehended one of the attackers. A plainclothes policeman ordered the attacker released and used the violence as an excuse to expel the professor from the university. Let us recall that Prof. Faurisson had once taught at the Sorbonne.

On September 16, 1989 three men set a trap for Faurisson in a park near his residence in Vichy as he was out walking his poodle. After spraying a stinging gas into his face, temporarily blinding him, the assailants punched him to the ground and then repeatedly kicked him in the face and chest. If a passerby had not intervened, the attackers’ kicks to the head would have been finished off the 60-year-old scholar. Badly injured, Faurisson had to undergo a lengthy surgical operation. The crime investigation unit inquiry confirmed that the attack could be attributed to “young Jewish activists from Paris.” On the eve of the attack, Faurisson had noted with surprise the presence near the park of a certain Nicolas Ullmann (born in 1963). On July 12, 1987, Ullmann had violently struck the professor at the Vichy Sporting-Club. When he was questioned at the criminal investigation department about his presence in that area, he denied having been there. Moreover, Ullmann claimed that on the very day of the attack he had taken part in a masked ball in Paris, so that it would be impossible for anyone other than his host and friend to vouch for his presence in Paris that day. It should be noted that the examining magistrate of Cusset, near Vichy, never summoned Faurisson to hear his testimony. Instead, judge Jocelyne Rubantel merely received him in her office in Cusset to inform him that she would ask for a dismissal of the charges – which she obtained. No search was made of the Paris headquarters of Betar/Tagar. Such a search would have incited too much “anger” in the Jewish community. On October 16, 1989, precisely one month after the attack in Vichy, a bomb exploded at the door of the offices in Paris of Le Choc du mois, which were then ransacked. Credit for the attack was claimed by the “Jewish Combat Organization” (OJC) and some far left groups. Éric Letty, who had devoted an article in Le Choc du mois to Professor Faurisson, would have been killed had he not, by a miracle, detected the imminence of the explosion.

Space is lacking here to cite the other attacks against Professor Faurisson.

Other cases

Many other cases could be cited of attacks by Jewish groups: in addition to the incidents during the years 1976-1991 listed in the Choc du mois article, there are other, unlisted, cases, as well as attacks that have occurred since 1992.

To repeat: the total number of victims of Jewish terror amounts to several hundreds, even though, in contrast, not a single Jew has been the victim of a concerted or organized attack in France.

On January 14, 1988, in Lyon, Professor Jean-Paul Allard was hospitalized following a group attack against him for which the OJC claimed responsibility. The attackers ambushed him in the parking lot of the University of Lyon III. In June 1985, he had presided over the examining board of the thesis of revisionist scholar Henri Roques on “The ‘Confessions’ of Kurt Gerstein,” which have been widely regarded as key evidence for Holocaust gassings. (In an action without precedent in French academic history, the thesis’s defense was annulled under pressure from “angry” Jews.)

Armed Jewish militia members carried out new acts of violence on April 13, 1994, during a break in the trial of the “hooligans of the Parc des Princes,” a Paris soccer stadium. (At least one of the hooligans was a Jew.) In this case the victims were policemen. The militia group entered the Palace of Justice with weapons and iron bars, and one of the court house guards was attacked. “An interesting detail,” one Paris paper noted. “No investigation was made to clear up the affair, and the only arrest made was that of one of the ‘nationalist militants’ who had been attacked and dared to defend himself.” (“Les milices juives font la loi,” Le Libre Journal, April 27, 1994, p. 9. See also: “Le Betar fait la loi au palais de justice,” Rivarol, April 22, 1994, p. 5). On April 28, 1994, the German citizen Ludwig Watzal, an official guest of the University of Nanterre (near Paris), was struck by members of Jewish or leftist organizations.

Several bookshops have been wrecked. In addition to the Bleu-Blanc-Rouge, Ogmios, Librairie Française, and Librairie de la Vieille Taupe stores, we may mention the Librairie de la Joyeuse Garde. (In the last-named case, shop windows were broken, steel safety shutters were glued shut, and excrement was strewn around.) Further targets of attacks, for which Jewish organizations claimed responsibility, have been offices, buildings, exhibitions, a book warehouse and a church (Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet in Paris, on December 21, 1978).

The most dangerous place in France: the Palace of Justice of Paris
and environs

For those who have been targeted for attack by the Jewish militias, the most dangerous city in France is Paris. Within Paris, one of the most dangerous districts is the first arrondissement, and within that the most dangerous zone is the Palace of Justice – the central courthouse – and the immediately surrounding area. Paradoxically, this area is under particularly good police surveillance because the Palace has its own “military command” consisting of hundreds of armed guards, and because next to the Palace is the building on the Quai des Orfèvres housing police headquarters. As it happens, though, in recent years the guards and policemen have allowed many acts of violence to be carried out, especially against revisionists who have been summoned to court or who come to attend the trials.

When a Jewish militia group decides to burst into the court building, the scenario is invariably as follows: the thugs, whose demeanor betrays their bellicose intentions, are in no way restrained by the guards from approaching their intended victims. No officer attempts to inform these shock troopers that violence will not be tolerated. The assailants are permitted to insult, to provoke, and then to strike their victims. Sometimes guards will make an effort to protect victims. If a militia member calls special attention to himself by extreme violence, three guards quickly take him away, but then let him go. Once the militia group has completed its brutal work and disappeared, the guards hasten to the bloody or swollen victims, fussing over them like weeping nannies. The victims are never able to get the police to arrest the attackers, or even to learn their identities.

On May 9, 1995 a trial in which Professor Faurisson was the defendant was held in the criminal court (17th chamber of the tribunal correctionnel) without the interference of such militants. This was not surprising, though, because attorney Jean-Serge Lorach, who represented the plaintiffs in this case, announced in his oral pleadings that he had asked “survivors” and reporters not to attend the trial. All the same, Betar/Tagar chief Moshe Cohen was present in the court with some colleagues. When the trial finished, Cohen was at the court building exit with four men (one of whom had a cellular phone) to keep an eye on Faurisson, his attorney, and others who were accompanying them. Cohen’s team had an unmarked police car (Renault 19, plate number 356 JEK 75) parked near the court building gate, positioned to leave quickly. Cohen, the Betar/Tagar group’s “dirty jobs” specialist, was apparently there with the authorization of Robert Baujard, police commissioner of Paris’ first arrondissement, and with the consent of Colonel Roger Renault, commander of the court guards, whose orders were to tell the curious that the vehicle belonged “to the police.”

Collusion of the Interior Ministry (police) with Jewish militias

In 1986, when Laurent Fabius was Prime Minister of France, his wife, Mme. Françoise Castro, revealed that the Jewish militias and the Interior Ministry were working hand in hand. She stated: “[there is] an extraordinary novelty in political behavior: the Left has allowed Jewish militias to establish themselves in some quarters of Paris and also in Toulouse, Marseille, and Strasbourg [and to have] regular contacts with the Ministry of the Interior” (Le Monde, March 7, 1986, p. 8). Castro and Fabius are both Jewish.

By a sort of general assent it seems to be agreed that the Jews must be treated in France as a privileged minority whose “anger” (colère) must be excused. (This word crops up in the press with nagging persistence.) By law, private militia groups are not legal in France. But the authorities allow one exception to this law. Jewish militias are the only ones permitted to bear arms in France. (See the photograph of a Jew armed with an automatic pistol on the roof of a building in the rue de Nazareth. Libération, Oct. 14, 1986, p. 56.) France’s police investigators are thus paralyzed in their investigations of crimes committed by these militia groups (“young Jewish activists from Paris”, as they are sometimes euphemistically called).

These militias enjoy at least a partial guarantee of impunity in France. The worst thing their members have to fear is having to go into exile in Germany or Israel for a spell.

Apologists for Jewish violence

Simone Veil, former secretary general of the Magistrates Council and a former government minister, provides a prime example of persons in France’s Jewish community who incite actual murder.

In 1985, in connection with Klaus Barbie, she declared: “Listen, I believe very sincerely that I would not have been shocked by a summary execution [of Barbie]” (Le Monde, Dec. 24, 1985, p. 14).

She repeated the statement on April 22, 1992, during a broadcast shown on the country’s Second television network entitled “Vichy: Remembering and Forgetting.” During a discussion of the Touvier trial (which had disappointed her, in spite of the life imprisonment sentence handed down against the octogenarian with cancer), she said:

If we wanted a trial in which things are spoken of in their true light and that doesn’t turn out like the Touvier trial, well then, in the last analysis it would have been necessary for someone, like me for example, at some moment or other to coldly murder someone.

The murderer would then be in a position, Simone Veil continued, to explain publicly the reasons for his act.

She spoke in the same spirit in 1994, on the occasion of the murder of René Bousquet, which was committed by a visionary who had been incited by the frequent calls for vengeance appearing at the time in French newspapers and in Jewish circles. On that occasion, Veil declared: “Besides, if I’d had the courage, I’d have gone and killed him myself.” (Globe Hebdo, May 11-17, 1994, p. 21).

On December 14, 1992, in a report broadcast nationwide on the American PBS radio network, Professor Pierre Vidal-Naquet could be heard saying in English: “I hate Faurisson. If I could, I’d kill him personally.”

Calls for physical violence have appeared many times in French papers. An example: “As far as he is concerned, Jacques Kupfer, president of [the militantly Zionist] Herout de France, has a precise idea of the Jewish response to the FN [Front National]: ‘I have never been of the opinion that anti-Semitism is settled by means of communiqués or philosophical discussions,’ he said. ‘But I know how you settle the problem of the anti-Semites: in a very physical manner. Jewish young people must be ready for that: there’s no need to cry, or to be afraid, or to complain’ …” (Arié Ben Abraham, “Le Pacte communautaire” [The Community Pact], Tribune juive, week of May 25 to June 1, 1995, p. 15.)

A list of incendiary statements by French Jews in positions of responsibility calling for physical violence would be a long one. Jews do not shrink from political assassination. On this subject, one may read the recent work of Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Political Assassination by Jews: A Rhetorical Device for Justice (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993). We know the considerable role played by Jews in the Bolshevik revolution: Lenin and Trotsky were merely the two most bloodthirsty Jews of the Bolsheviks’ political police. In France, the song of the partisans was written by two Jews, Joseph Kessel (1898-1979) and Maurice Druon, both of whom were later members of the French Academy. The song’s refrain is well known: “Hey there! Killers by gun or blade. Kill swiftly!” (Ohé! Les tueurs à la balle et au couteau. Tuez vite!).

The case of the Klarsfeld couple

For more than three decades, Serge Klarsfeld and his German-born wife, Beate, have dedicated themselves to tracking down “Nazi war criminals” and fighting “neo-Nazism” and Holocaust revisionism. In his Lettre à un képi blanc (1975, p. 93), Bernard Clavel wrote: “War poisons peace. Look at that German woman, Beate Klarsfeld, who spends her life in hatred, who lives only for vengeance.”

On July 24, 1978, at a news conference in Paris following the indictment in Cologne of Kurt Lischka, Serge Klarsfeld stated: “We are not seeking vengeance. If that were our aim, it would have been easy for us to kill all the Nazi criminals we have tracked down.” “And if the court in Cologne refuses to try Lischka?,” someone asked. Klarsfeld replied: “That in a way would be signing his death sentence” (Le Monde, July 26, 1978, p. 4).

In 1982 the Klarsfelds engaged the services of a hired assassin, a Bolivian socialist of Indian origin named Juan Carlos, to assassinate Klaus Barbie (Life, Feb. 1985, p. 65), but the operation failed.

During a 1986 interview with the Chicago Tribune (June 29, 1986), Beate Klarsfeld told “how she haunted at least three former Nazis until they committed suicide or died; how she organized attempts to kidnap others; how she used headline-making gimmicks to bring to trial or to ruin the careers of many who were convinced the world had forgotten them.” She related how she slapped the face of German Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger in public in 1968. “Once, she and several friends tried to kidnap Kurt Lischka” but the operation failed because the car they were using had only two doors. As for Ernst Ehlers, “harassed by Klarsfeld-organized demonstrations outside his home, he first resigned his position [as judge] and then committed suicide.” After picking up the trail of Walter Rauff in Chile, the Klarsfelds organized demonstrations in front of his house and broke his windows. “He died a couple of months later,” Beate Klarsfeld told the American daily. “I was glad, because as long as these people are alive, they are an offense to their victims.” “My husband and I are not fanatics … Once my husband held a pistol to the temple of Rauff, just to show that we could kill him, but he didn’t pull the trigger.”

In 1988 Serge Klarsfeld stated: “No one has really gone after Le Pen in dead earnest. We ought to have provoked confrontations with him so that … he’d take the most extreme position possible.” (Le Soir [Brussels], quoted in Rivarol, July 1, 1988, p. 5).

In 1990, during the convention of the Union des étudiants juifs de France held in Lyon, where Professor Faurisson had taught and where Bernard Notin was still teaching, S. Klarsfeld told the students: “In your lives as Jews, move into action to defend the remembrance, to defend the Jewish State” (reported in Le Progrès de Lyon, November 2, 1990, p. 6).

In 1991 Beate Klarsfeld entered Syria with fraudulent papers to go after Alois Brunner (who was already disfigured and missing most of his fingers as the result of letter bombs). In front of his presumed residence, she wanted to repeat the kind of demonstration that had been staged in front of the home of Paul Touvier in 1972 (which was broken into, looted, and laid waste).

In 1992 the Klarsfelds organized what Le Monde (Oct. 21, 1992, p. 4) called “the savage escapade of the Betar at Rostock … spreading terror in the central square of the Rostock town hall, with French and Israeli flags displayed, calling passersby ‘dirty Germans, dirty Nazis!’”

A short time later Beate Klarsfeld expressed approval of the Betar attack against the Goethe Institute in Paris, calling it an act of “legitimate violence” because the Rostock police had briefly held and questioned a few of the Jewish attackers. (Der Standard [Vienna], Oct. 23, 1992). Nine of the policemen had been injured, among them several who required hospitalization after being beaten with baseball bats and iron bars, and sprayed with “defensive” gas.

On June 8, 1993 René Bousquet, former secretary general of the police in the wartime Vichy government (and who was later deported by the Germans), was struck down in his Paris residence by a fanatic. The attacker, who spewed out verbiage à la Klarsfeld, explained his action as that of a lover of justice who had already tried to kill Paul Touvier. Writing in Le Monde (June 10, 1993, p. 28), Annick Cojean referred to Serge Klarsfeld:

“Wasn’t he the one who destroyed Bousquet? The one who tracked him down, sued him, attacked him, forced him to resign from all his positions between 1978 and 1989? And wasn’t he [by this killing] robbed of a long awaited trial?” The lawyer [Klarsfeld] quietly smiles: “Why deny it? What I feel today is relief above all. And if that runs counter to the interests of the cause, then too bad! I can’t wish that those people go on living. I can’t help it.”

Already on September 16, 1989, upon learning of the attack against Professor Faurisson, Serge Klarsfeld had stated in a broadcast on “Radio J” (“J” for “Jewish”):

It’s not so surprising, because anyone who provokes the Jewish community for years on end has to expect an occurrence of this kind. You can’t insult the memory of the victims without there being consequences. That may be regrettable, perhaps, but it’s normal and only natural.

His wife, Beate, similarly said:

What could be more normal than some young people getting angry and trying to teach Faurisson a lesson? (Le Monde, Sept. 19, 1989, p. 14).

Although Serge Klarsfeld is an attorney and an officer of the National Order of Merit, he has never concealed his taste for violent action as long as the victims are persons he regards as “criminals.” In the same spirit, he has also admitted resorting to lies and blackmail. (See: Arno Klarsfeld, “Pourquoi je suis juif” [“Why I am a Jew”], Information juive, June 1994, p. 9, and, S. Klarsfeld, “Lettre à François Mitterrand,” Libération, Sept. 12, 1994, p. 6.)

In 1989, following the nearly fatal attack against him in Vichy, Faurisson shared some thoughts with Le Choc du mois (Dec. 1989, p. 42 f.) – remarks that have become all the more relevant with the passage of time and, in particular, the assassination of Bousquet. For the Klarsfelds or other such friends of the Israeli Embassy in Paris, said the Professor, “it is easy to arouse strong feelings and to stir into action those who mean to take justice into their own hands.” Faurisson concluded:

I think… that a Jewish terrorism exists. It is lamentable, and the lament covers the sounds of the blows and the screams of the victims… In order to silence me, it will be necessary to kill me. And a host of revisionists in France and abroad will then take my place.

Instances of non-physical aggression

This essay deals with acts of physical violence committed by Jewish militias. It confirms that in this country the Jewish community, “happy as God in France” (a Yiddish proverb), enjoys exorbitant privileges.

Other, non-physical actions further highlight these privileges. Consider two cases involving Robert Faurisson, at the University of Lyon II, and Bernard Notin, at the University of Lyon III. By law, each of these professors was incontestably entitled to practice his profession and resume his lectures. Dr. Marc Aron decided otherwise. Along with such organizations as the Union of Jewish Students of France, he cynically declared that as far as they were concerned, these two teachers would never again be able to work. Without so much as a murmur, all the presidents of the Republic in succession, all the prime ministers, all the education ministers, all the university presidents, and all the labor unions promptly submitted to that edict. Several months after the decision, Prof. Faurisson learned in a letter delivered by ordinary mail, and with no form of explanation, that his professorship had been eliminated. In June 1994 Bernard Notin thought he had found a way out of this problem, and Le Monde announced (June 9, 1994, p. 14) that “Bernard Notin is leaving to teach in Morocco.” But a few days later Le Monde reported (June 11, 1994, p. 6) that the announcement of his departure for the University of Oujda “had provoked a reaction of ‘shock’ [scandalisée] on the part of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF), which demands the cancellation of the contract signed by the two institutions (French and Moroccan) and ‘the definitive dismissal of Mr. Notin from the teaching profession’.” Not a single major newspaper raised its voice to point out that Marc Aron and his institutions or organizations were gravely infringing on the rights of civil servants, hindering the freedom to work, and inflicting considerable injury not only to individuals but to the normal functioning of the country’s institutions. Marc Aron and his militias are thus obeyed in fear and trembling. After seeing to it that two professors who had aroused their “anger” were no longer allowed to practice their profession, Aron and his friends were able to count on Le Canard enchaîné, a satirical weekly that specializes in denouncing scandals, to proclaim the “scandal” of two professors who were getting paid (on short allowance) without working!

Organized Jewry and its influential cohorts excel in repression through the legal system and the media. “The unjust force of the law” operates on behalf of the Jewish community, and to the detriment of those who are labelled “anti-Jewish” or “anti-Semitic.” Those who are so labelled find themselves severely punished for the least word or thought judged to be heretical. Fines, damages and imprisonment ruin their lives and destroy their families. The media, whose venom glands never run dry, contribute their part to this hysteria of vengeance.

In other countries as well, Jewish terrorism manifests the same characteristics. Apart from the extraordinary circumstances of the Judeo-Arab conflict, Jews act as aggressors without themselves ever being subject to physical attack by any group or organization, either anti-Jewish or reputed to be.

Conclusion

During the period under consideration here (1976-1995), no groups, commandos or militias have committed any acts of physical violence against a Jew in France (the Palestinian Arab attacks are another matter.) But this remarkable fact seems to have escaped political observers of every stripe. The score thus far is as follows: on one side, some 50 acts of Jewish violence organized and carried out over a 20-year period by armed militias, resulting in hundreds of victims, and, on the other, a total of physical assaults and victims thereof adding up to… zero!

With the Betar/Tagar organization, France’s well-organized Jewish community possesses – with Interior Ministry approval – a paramilitary force the like of which does not exist for any other ethnic, religious or minority group in France.

As Le Choc du mois noted in its report on these militias (June 1991, p. 11), the French television network “La Cinq”, on April 4, 1990, broadcast a program on the Betar/Tagar militants. It showed a student receiving a beating at the hands of the “Tagarim” as he was leaving the grounds of the University of Paris II-Assas. On May 18, 1990, this same television network broadcast a second report devoted to the training of Betar/Tagar militants, “copied after that of the Israeli soldier,” which they receive twice a week at a chateau in the vicinity of Sarcelles (a suburb of Paris): paramilitary exercises and close action combat training under the Israeli flag. In themselves, such exercises might constitute a kind of enactment or “show” to impress people, but with the Betar/Tagar they find expression in criminal attacks and commando actions that enjoy Interior Ministry protection, support (in deed if not in word) from so-called “anti-racist” organizations and sympathetic treatment on the part of the media.

Annie Kriegel, who is Jewish, in 1990 denounced “an intolerable Jewish thought police” (Le Figaro, April 3, 1990, p. 2, and, L’Arche, April 1990, p. 25). In fact, this “thought police” acts with the authority of law, thanks to Rabbi Sirat, who launched the idea of an anti-revisionist law (Bulletin de l’Agence télégraphique juive, June 2, 1986, p. 1), and thanks to Laurent Fabius, who can justly claim credit for taking the parliamentary initiative in passing the law. As a result of the disgustingly hyperbolic and obsequious media coverage of the desecration of Jewish graves in the Carpentras cemetery – a crime in which, it turns out, the son of a synagogue officiant was apparently involved – all opposition to the final vote on the Sirat-Fabius-Gayssot law was paralyzed.

Alongside this intolerable thought police, there exists in France an intolerable Israeli-style armed police that operates with unconcealed force.

A useful source of information about this entire subject is the detailed 416-page book by Emmanuel Ratier, Les Guerriers d’Israël: Enquête sur les milices sionistes (“The Warriors of Israel: Investigation into the Zionist militias,” Facta, 37 rue d’Amsterdam, 75008 Paris, 1995).

On May 7, 1995, in Toronto, Canada, the house of revisionist Ernst Zündel was devastated in a criminal arson attack. A few days later, Zündel received a parcel bomb (which he turned over to the police, who detonated it). Many other examples of this kind of violence – usually preceded by a hateful press campaign – could be cited. Further information on this subject is given in The Zionist Terror Network: Background and Operation of the Jewish Defense League and other Criminal Zionist Groups, a booklet by Mark Weber published by the Institute for Historical Review (revised and updated edition, 1993). In France, there is a danger that such acts of violence will grow in number if the Jewish minority continues to have armed militias at its disposal.

We demand an end to the privilege that this community enjoys.

Pending such a change, at least the Palace of Justice in Paris and its immediate environs should be prohibited to any group or leader of a group (such as Moshe Cohen) whose terrorist intentions are manifest. It is inadmissible that a certain category of persons who have been summoned to court, and those accompanying them, should have had to fear physical attack while entering or leaving the 17th chamber of the criminal court (presided over by Martine Ract-Madoux or Jean-Yves Monfort), or the 11th section of the Court of Appeal (presided over by Françoise Simon or Violette Hannoun). Speaking of attacks against revisionists carried out within and in front of the court building, Jean-Pierre Bloch exclaimed in 1980: “The pip-squeak little Nazis got the thrashing they deserved in front of the Palace of Justice.” (Libération, Sept. 24, 1980). It is shocking that Jewish militants are permitted to hang out at the court house with all the privileges accorded to officers of the national police. No one can pretend to be ignorant of these acts of physical violence, which the LICRA president was publicly sanctioning 15 years ago and which, for the past 15 years, have been occurring with the complicity of the forces of law and order. For 15 years neither the judges nor the lawyers nor their respective unions have demanded that an end be put to this – a state of affairs that dishonors French justice. As for Moshe Cohen, he should be reminded of his statement of a few years ago to L’Événement du jeudi (Sept. 26, 1991) that every Jew in France is “a displaced person” who has his real roots and future in Israel. He should heed his own advice and settle permanently there.

June 1, 1995