Pro-Israel forces in France, in large measure non-Jewish, are mobilizing further to counteract anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda emerging from the extreme left and from traditional Gaullist sources. This propaganda, more than the ineffectual efforts of Arab students and emissaries of the El Fatah guerrillas, was believed to have made an impression on the vast majority of French university teachers and students.
The France-Israel Alliance movement, which has been promoting a restoration of friendship between the two countries, has established a “university section” for the purpose of fighting “the recrudescence of anti-Israel propaganda in the universities and the odious allegations which try to besmirch Israel’s name.”
Some 40 professors, mostly department heads and the great majority of them non-Jews, have formed a sponsoring committee. Typical of the propaganda they were fighting was an article in the newspaper Le Monde Saturday by Vincent Monteil, a militant Gaullist who defended the hangings of Jews and others in Baghdad last January for allegedly spying for Israel. “For us former resistance fighters, a spy is not even worth the rope with which he is hanged,” M. Monteil wrote. His remark was published in the framework of Le Monde’s daily “Free Expression Tribune” and not as the view of a member of the paper’s staff. The writer also said that Gen. de Gaulle’s famous remark about Jews being an “elite people, self-assured and domineering,” was “a gross understatement.”
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