FRANCE CULTURE – ON DEMAND – PODCAST
It was 2019, and listeners remember it. Emmanuel Laurentin announced the end of “La Fabrique de l’histoire”, the show he had created twenty years earlier – leaving regulars and historians inconsolable. Fortunately, he did not disappear from the grids of France Culture and imagined “Le Temps du débat”, where, from Monday to Friday, he brings together professors, sociologists and researchers on a current subject. There was recently talk of agriculture, in resonance with the ongoing protest, or even cultural policies, when Rachida Dati arrived at Rue de Valois (headquarters of the Ministry of Culture).
Among the broadcasts devoted to Israel and Palestine since October 7, let us highlight two particularly interesting ones. One (dated Tuesday February 13) focuses on the divide in European opinions on the Palestinian question. Marie-Violaine Louvet (lecturer in British and Irish civilization at Toulouse II-Jean Jaurès University) recalls Ireland’s long-standing support for Palestine.
She also highlights the vehement statements against Israel by Mary Lou McDonald (the president of Sinn Fein, a nationalist party whose vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, was elected Prime Minister on Saturday February 3), urging the Irish government to join South Africa in its complaint of December 29, 2023, before the International Court of Justice, accusing the Jewish state of violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Strip Gaza.
Hubert Peres, researcher at the Center for Political Studies of Latin Europe and professor of political science at the University of Montpellier, recalls that the Spanish radical left also speaks of genocide and refuses to qualify Hamas as a terrorist organization. , while most Western countries recognize it as such and one of its stated goals is to eliminate Israel.
Anti-Semitism still present
“Is there a characteristic of anti-Semitism on the left? » was the title of the show on Wednesday February 7. For Brigitte Stora, author of What happened to my friends… The Jews, Charlie, then all of ours (Le Bord de l’eau, 2016), anti-Semitism has always been there: “I think it’s still time to listen to him, since he always says exactly the same thing. He says there are a guilty people conspiring for world domination. »
In the voice of Lola Yaïche, student, we hear fear, anger and pain. As a left-wing activist, she felt “isolated” with the unpleasant impression that “the left spends more time thinking about the exploitation of anti-Semitism than anti-Semitism itself”.
Really thinking and giving food for thought as well as dialogue, in short, raising the debate, this is what Emmanuel Laurentin does so well.
“Le Temps du débat”, program by Emmanuel Laurentin, produced by Laurence Malonda (Fr., 2023, 38 min). Available on demand on France Culture.