Thursday, 28 August 2008
Lucas Catherine conference at Brussels Catholic school: Israel is an apartheid State
http://philosemitism.blogspot.com/2008/08/lucas-catherine-conference-at-brussels.htmlAnti-Israeli propaganda has reached a peak in some Belgian French-speaking quarters. Hardly does a week go by without the holding of some sort of public event demonizing Israel.
One recent such event was the summer university course organised by ... Belgian Marxists on the subject of "A world in crisis(crises)". The event was hosted, of all places, at the very posh Catholic Berlaymont boarding school in Waterloo, near Brussels.
Venue details here, for the programme click on programme détaillé des cours (in French).
Lucas Catherine reveals the real nature of Israel:
intolerant nationalism, colonialism, apartheid
Lucas Catherine, a well-known Israel-basher, was scheduled to give a talk on the history of Israel at 60 along the following lines :
"The anniversary of a State based on intolerant nationalism, colonialism and apartheid. Apartheid began in South Africa, in 1950, when the majority of land was given to the white minority. In Palestine, for the last two years, Israel has confiscated and turned the major part of the land into an exclusively Jewish territory. Lucas Catherine will apprise us of the real nature of the Jewish State."
The message is deliberately simple and explicit. No need to attend the "course" to understand that Israel is a criminal and evil state.
Lucas Catherine seems to ignore that the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights working definition of anti-Semitism states that it is anti-Semitic to deny : "the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour."
The Flemish magazine, Joods Actueel, revealed a while ago that Lucas Catherine drew some of the facts in his book "Palestina" (EPO, 2002) from the work of a pro-Nazi writer, Gert Winsch, who wrote: "England's regime in Palestine: England unmasked", see Nazi propaganda literature).
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Logically another pet subject was George Bush's "Middle-East domination plans".
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Other than equating Israel with apartheid South Africa, Africa is nowhere to be seen on the agenda of these self-styled progressives. Neither Darfur, nor any of the former Belgian colonies in Africa (Congo, Rwanda and Burundi) feature on the "course" programme.