I'm Indignant!

Reported:

Stéphane Hesse..at 93...is the author of a best seller that has become a publishing phenomenon in France...a thin, impressionistic pamphlet called “Indignez-Vous!,” held together by two staples and released by a two-person publishing house run out of the attic of their home. It urges young people to revive the ideal of resistance to the Nazis by peacefully resisting the “international dictatorship of the financial markets” and defending the “values of modern democracy.”

"Democracy"?  "Values"?  How?

In particular Mr. Hessel protests France’s treatment of illegal immigrants, the influence on the media by the rich, cuts to the social welfare system, French educational reforms and, most strongly, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

“When something outrages you, as Nazism did me, that is when you become a militant, strong and engaged,” he writes. “You join the movement of history, and the great current of history continues to flow only thanks to each and every one of us.”

Don't you just marvel at someone, a Resistance veteran who "was...imprisoned in concentration camps, waterboarded in Nazi torture sessions and saved from hanging by swapping identities with an inmate who had died of typhus", who is a complete idiot - or is he just a fool when Israel enters his sphere of attention?

And consider this indicator of attention-time:

The book’s short length [29 pages in French] and low price (it sells for about $4) made it a popular Christmas gift among left-leaning intellectuals, parents struggling to inject political activism into their children and just about anyone else who needed an extra stocking stuffer.

But there's more:

...the book has been branded anti-Semitic by some French intellectuals for its attack on Israel, in particular that country’s 2008 incursion into Gaza. The book describes Gaza, which Mr. Hessel visited with his wife in 2009, as “an open-sky prison for a million and a half Palestinians,” and says that “for Jews themselves to perpetuate war crimes is intolerable.”

On his Facebook page Pierre-André Taguieff, an expert in the history of French anti-Semitism, wrote: “Certainly he could have ended his life in a more dignified way, instead of inciting hatred against Israel, thus adding his voice to the worst of anti-Jews. Even old age doesn’t make someone impermeable to vanity, or kill the appetite for applause.”

Mr. Hessel denies that he is anti-Semitic or anti-Israel. “I feel that I am completely in solidarity with Jews in the world, because I know what it is to be a Jew,” he said. “I’ve seen what it is, I am myself of Jewish origin, and therefore I can only be fully in support of the idea that the Jews, after all they’ve suffered, need a country where they are at home. I shouted my joy when Israel was founded. I said, ‘At last!’ ”

When a handful of protesters branded him a racist during a speech he gave in the Paris suburb of Montreuil last week, he said that he told them: “My love for Israel is stronger than yours. But I want it to be an honest country.”

Other critics have pointed out the book’s outrage does not mention human rights offenses in places like North Korea, Myanmar, China and Iran.

Jewish?

He was born in Berlin to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother and was baptized so that he could attend school. The family immigrated to Paris when he was 7.   With her husband’s consent his mother had a longstanding affair with Henri-Pierre Roché, the writer and art dealer. The relationship became the inspiration for Mr. Roché’s first novel and later for François Truffaut’s classic French New Wave film “Jules and Jim.” The young Stéphane character was the little girl in the film.

Self-hating?

No; or maybe; but whatever, ignorance, spite and above all, left-wing thinking or what passes as intellectual thought, are at fault. Democracy he's concerned about?  In the Palestinian Authority?

He's indignant and angry?  I am moreso.


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