New French Pamphleteer Sensation

He is 93 years old, and as such can be considered to have acquired the wisdom that comes with venerable old age.

He has had experiences that qualify him as one who can look back and assess the state of the world, then and now, making comparisons and announcing his qualified diagnosis. Which appears to be that his French countrymen are too placid, too busy going about their distracted lifestyles, and in his opinion, not sufficiently engaged in the social and political life of their country.

His message will have huge appeal to the 4.1 million Muslims now residing in France. Stephane Hessel's experience had little to do with the perceived shortcomings he now recognizes, of his country in addressing itself - or failing to, in reflection of the current climate of hopeful neglect and resulting resentment among immigrants - to the ills he perceives among the body politic of his country.

This is a man with a storied past. A former spy with the French Resistance. Who happens also to be a survivor of the Holocaust, since he is a Jew, besides being a decidedly angry personage. Who wouldn't be angry if life had served up a performance consisting of not one but two incarcerations in Nazi prisons, and death camps thrown in for good measure. He escaped to join the resistance.

And now, well seasoned by experience and by all the time that has elapsed since the end of the aspirations of the Third Reich, this man who was a former diplomat to offset his stint as a freedom fighter, and who just incidentally is one of the last surviving authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - who better than one with his experiences to delineate human rights? - has written his own brief tract, Indignes-vous!

He wants to mobilize public opinion, encourage people to think, to engage in some introspection; is this the society they want, where inequities, social and economic, dominate the social fabric of the country he so obviously loves?

"I would like everyone - every one of us - to find his or her own reason to cry out. That is a precious gift. When someone makes you want to cry out, as I cried out against Nazism, you become a militant, tough and committed. You become part of the great stream of history ... and this stream leads us toward more justice and more freedom, but not the uncontrolled freedom of the fox in the henhouse."

In other words, he wants, reasoned, rational reaction, a cry from the heart, a commitment, an impassioned but credibly reasonable move to right the wrongs of society where too many are poor and those that are not are too well endowed with the riches of the world. He cautions that those who heed his appeal not succumb to the "uncontrolled freedom of the fox in the henhouse", but he is aiding that very process.

Whereby a public conscience becomes aroused, and through that arousal looks about for a focus for their alienation and the privation they see around them - and that usually does translate as the fox having his way in the henhouse. The henhouse in this instance is the Jewish community within France.

For Stephane Hessel is also an outspoken and dedicated critic of the State of Israel. He denounces Israeli policies, accusing Israel of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity".

While this is fairly standard fare for the progressive, liberal-left which has, through unions and academics taken up the cause of the Palestinians, and in the process ascribing to Israel perniciously indefensible actions against a weak and fearful society dominated by another, what he is engaged in is stridently slanderous propaganda which serves the purposes of malign Islamist forces in the Middle East and within immigrant-Muslim Europe.

Those accusations which he has helpfully included in his pamphlet-publication identifying an enemy upon whom his followers can focus will do its part to help spread the already metastasizing cancer of anti-Semitism in Europe. And is that not the supreme irony? That a Jew who had experienced the Gestapo, torture, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, the Liberation and the General Secretariat of the United Nations, now dedicates himself to the greater good of humankind through skape-goating Jews for the world's ills.

"It's true that reasons to cry out can seem less obvious today" he has written. "The world appears too complex. But in this world, there are things we should not tolerate ... I say to the young, look around you a little and you will find them. The worst of all attitudes is indifference." He is certainly not indifferent. And there most certainly are things that should not be tolerated - in abundance.

Linking Israel and its 'policies' to the miseries of the world in general that creates slums like those which exist in French and British cities breeding material for violent jihadists does not represent social justice. To colour Israel in the vibrant mantel of the modern world's imperialist ambitions preying on a victimized population which in fact represents a dire threat to its existence through incessant violence posing as 'resistance' to the 'occupation' disfavours truth and reality.

Mr. Hessel, whose social-change tract has created a sensation in France is a most unlikely-seeming catalyst for the change his impassioned words are likely to aid. We are not the better for all of that.