PA state-sponsored hate speech must stop, human rights expert says
Cotler later returned to Abbas and tried to convince him to end hate speech against Israel for domestic reasons, regardless of negotiations with Israel.Bernard-Henri Lévy: The French Were Right to Ban Dieudonné’s Offensive ‘Performance Art’
“Leaving aside the Israeli-Palestinian component, I told Abbas: ‘You should do away with hate speech because it is not only a threat to Israeli-Palestinian peace but it’s a threat to your own society. You want to bring up children not in a culture of hate but in a culture of respect for the other, for the inherent dignity of all people’.”
Non-democracies where free speech is prohibited, such as Iran or the Palestinian Authority, have an even greater obligation to prevent hate speech than free societies such as the US where all speech is protected, Cotler said.
“If it’s a non-democracy where there’s no opportunity for democratic free speech, then the state has a particular responsibility to ensure that hate speech does not fester. What’s happening in the Palestinian Authority is exactly the opposite; that hate speech is not only being permitted, it’s being encouraged.”
Anti-Semitism has a history. Over the ages it has taken different forms, but on every occasion that form corresponded to what the spirit of the times could or would permit. And I believe that, for reasons that it would be impossible to get into here, the only form of anti-Semitism with legs today, the only form capable of taking in and galvanizing large numbers of people, is one that accomplishes the trifecta of anti-Zionism (Jews as supporters of an allegedly murderous state), Holocaust denial (an unscrupulous people who, in pursuit of their purposes, are capable of inventing or staging the slaughter of their own), and competitive victimhood (memory of the Holocaust as a screen to hide other massacres on the planet). Well, Dieudonné was in the process of tying these strands together. With his accomplice, French right-wing extremist Alain Soral, he was a sapper assembling his explosive device and preparing to set it off. And for that reason, too, because he was weaving together three themes that individually are incendiary enough but that, joined together in mutual reinforcement, would provoke a new wave of anti-Semitism, it was urgent to stop him.Turkey reassured that NATO shield will not protect Israel
Turkey has accepted assurances a planned NATO missile defense system in which it is playing a part is not designed to protect Israel as well, the alliance's deputy secretary-general said on Wednesday.
Alexander Vershbow said objections by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's government had resulted in part from confusion about a Turkish-hosted NATO radar. Ankara had been further assuaged by alliance Patriot anti-missile batteries assigned to protect its territory from Syria.
A leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from 2010 described the Islamist-rooted Erdogan, under whom Turkey's once-solid ties with the Jewish state have deteriorated, as worrying that the NATO shield might provide cover for a threatened Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear sites.