FRANCE: France's newspaper of record, human rights groups and prominent Jewish personalities have expressed outrage at the content of a radical Zionist website created by French-speaking Jews.
The website, amisraelihai.org ("the people of Israel live", in Hebrew) was created in October 2000 by a Frenchman, Mr Alexandre Attali, who told Le Monde he was responsible only for the "technical aspects" of the extremist website. Mr Attali blamed his colleagues in Israel for the site's racist content, which calls Palestinians "teeming rubbish" and the refugee camps in the Israeli-occupied territories "garbage dumps" and "tips".
Le Monde's editorial said the website was "tantamount to incitement to hatred and racial violence", a criminal offence in France. The anti-racist group MRAP has filed a lawsuit against it, and the Paris prosecutor's office has opened an investigation. But the website's authors moved from a French server to one based in Panama, and registered additional .net; .info and .biz suffixes to make it difficult to shut the site down.
Paradoxically, the site's ideology is close to that of the extreme right. It casts doubt on the reality of the attempted assassination of President Jacques Chirac by a neo-nazi on July 14th, and derides the role of Mr Mohamed Chelali, a Canadian of Algerian origin, who helped to overpower the would-be assassin.
But the site's identification of Jews deemed hostile to Israel - and its call for violence against them - has created the greatest shock here. The names of politicians, scientists, intellectuals and entertainers are singled out with a Star of David in a list of well known people who support the Co-ordination of Appeals for a Just Peace in the Middle East. Last month, the group was one of 30 which called for a boycott of Israeli products to protest against the Israeli Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon's actions.
"Not only do they deserve to be boycotted, but if you come across them we encourage you to tell them . . . what you think of them: spitting at them or even hitting them with a baseball bat in the jaw might sort out their twisted minds," says the website.
French Jewish groups were embarrassed by the website's links with their own internet addresses. amisraelhai.com is recommended by desinfos.com, which is in turn recommended by the website of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), the mouthpiece for France's 700,000 strong Jewish community. Mr Haim Musicant, the secretary of the CRIF, told Le Monde that "referring to another site doesn't mean you approve of its content on a day to day basis."