Yves Mamou. How “Le Monde” makes us take Palestinian Kouachi for Che Guevara – Tribune Juive

Through the itinerary of an 18-year-old young man, Ibrahim Al-Nabulsi, killed by Israeli soldiers during an exchange of fire, Louis Imbert, journalist at World, undertakes to paint the portrait of a generation. After all why not ? The problem is that the description operates from disguised information. This travesty proceeds from two inversions. The first is to victimize terrorists while the second undertakes to criminalize the victims of this terrorism.

For fifty years now, the media have presented us with Palestinian Islamist thugs as Rimbauds deprived of a future. ” The young man, killed at 18 by the Israeli army in August, has become the incarnation of a youth without prospects, which reconnects with the armed struggle writes Louis Imbert. These young Palestinians who have all the means to educate themselves, to acquire a trade, to marry, to travel (for more than fifty years, the European taxpayer has financed hundreds of millions of euros in the studies and maintenance refugees and descendants of refugees) are systematically presented by the media as cherubim who choose terrorism for lack of “perspective”.

Louis Imbert tells us that Ibrahim Al-Nabulsi “shot an officer and Israeli settlers”, but he does not specify how this “pale boy with a long face, slender and pious like his mother” got hold of a gun. M16 assault rifle. Would Palestinian babies come out of their mother’s womb with a Kalashnikov in their hands?

The young man was not an activist, but a universalist. He ” didn’t belong to any party, but to all the brigades “. Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Islamic Jihad, Daesh, Hamas? Louis Imbert does not specify which “brigade” had his preference.

Ibrahim al Nabulsi used an assault rifle but ” without killing “. Louis Imbert tells us that the boy is “innocent”. And it is at this stage that the second phase of the journalistic operation begins: the criminalization of the victims. Ibrahim was not a delinquent, nor a terrorist. He’s a child. “ There was something in his face, a child inside,” remembers a close friend. The Israelis who shot Ibrahim did not shoot a murderous thug, but a child. The al Durah case remains forever the prototype of these manipulations.

The criminalization of the victims then continues with the interview of Ibrahim Al-Nabulsi’s father. Louis Imbert quotes the father who affirms that the death of his son is attributable to “this peace that Israel never wanted to give us. My son’s generation is angry with us and their resistance is legitimate. »

And hop ! The Palestinian Rimbaud would have died from the lack of generosity of Israel. Louis Imbert of World endorses the father’s political narrative: it was the Jews who sabotaged the peace. The reality is of course different: it was the Arabs, then the Palestinians who, in 1946, in 1967, in 2000, in 2005, in 2008 and in 2020, turned their backs on all peace proposals, on all territorial arrangements that the Israelis and the Americans have offered them. Subsequent proposals by Obama-Kerry and then by Donald Trump were also angrily rejected. But when we have decided to criminalize the victims, the historical reality is of no importance.

Ibrahim was the Kouachi brothers

What Louis Imbert of World describes to us how the disarray of Palestinian youth actually resembles the itinerary of the Kouachi brothers, these Islamized thugs, assassins of Charlie Hebdo. Ibrahim seems to have been a scum similar to that which populates our suburbs. In college, it starts with “to stone soldiers as others in France rock cop cars. He ” stores explosives ” and ” shoot at Palestinian policemen “. He was thus arrested by the militiamen of the Palestinian Authority ” for a stolen car story “. Before shooting Jewish soldiers, Ibrahim practiced shooting unarmed Jewish clerics. ” Together they pursue the ultra-Orthodox Jews of the Bratslav sect, who sneak into the suburbs of Nablus “.

It will be noted that Louis Imbert is not surprised by this Islamic intolerance which forces religious Jews to hide in order to go and pray (“ a sect », « they sneak in “, he writes). Shooting Jewish pilgrims seems to have been a specialty of Ibrahim al Nabulsi. ” With a group of militants, he fires on Israeli settlers, escorted by the army on the tomb of Joseph”. Suddenly these Jews sectarian who are described as rats who sneak »to go and pray become settlers ». This term ” settlers has a function: it allows Louis Imbert to transform anti-Semitic Arab delinquents into anti-colonialist militants. And the sleight of hand is complete: the Jewish victims of the violence of the Arab gangs of Nablus are criminalized and the violence these victims suffer is justified.

Louis Imbert does not want to see the social decomposition of the Palestinian movement. This delinquent youth who steals cars and shoots indiscriminately at unarmed religious Jews and Palestinian policemen is romanticized. Ibrahim al Nabulsi, scum from Nablus, becomes a Che Guevara-type icon that all Nablus girls are in love with.

This romantic vision that structures the imagination of all journalists who deal with the Middle East is actually based on a falsified history. Matthias Küntzel, a (non-Jewish) historian specializing in Islam, explains that the anti-Zionists take up the mantra of the PLO according to which ” Zionism is… organically linked to world imperialism and opposes all movements of liberation or progress in the world “. ” It’s a falsification of history », explains Mathias Küntzel. ” In fact, the reverse is true, (…) before 1948 Zionism was not promoted, but fought “by world imperialism” – if by that we mean the British government and the Pentagon and the State Department in the United States – because at the beginning of the Cold War Zionism was seen as a tool of Moscow “. The western progressive left today also forgets that the western progressive left of 1948 supported the State of Israel against Arab imperialism which sought to annihilate the newly created State of Israel.

Matthias Küntzel asserts that the number one task of historians today is to break “the historiographical monopoly” of the PLO which has gradually imposed itself on the left since 1967. A titanic task when we see that in 2022, newspapers like The world promote jihad and NGOs like Amnesty compare Israel to apartheid South Africa.

© Yves Mamou

October 5, 2022.

Yves Mamou, journalist and essayist, worked for 23 years at the newspaper The world