Lhe withdrawal of the Yadan bill on April 16, which sought to criminalize comments calling for the destruction of a state, briefly shed light on older legislation: that of the Pleven law. If the renunciation of the vote of parliamentarians was requested and obtained, it was by virtue of the obstacles to freedom of expression contained in this new text making it almost impossible to criticize the deadly actions of the State of Israel. But the aspect that made me most uncomfortable in this legislative project is the forgetting, which now seems confirmed, of this other law dating from 1972 and which bears the name of the Minister of Justice René Pleven (1901-1993). A law which offers a framework that is as universal as it is clear and offensive on questions of incitement to hatred.
Conceived in the 1970s, when post-colonial immigration and the deadly phobias that accompanied it were developing, the Pleven law clarified a health rule against an autoimmune danger contained in freedom of expression: the possibility of it ravaging the speech of certain categories of the population, to the point of affecting them in their flesh. The text of this law has the limpid beauty of legal texts whose technicality almost blends into the language of ordinary morality: it prohibits incitement to hatred because of origin or belonging to a specific ethnic group, nation, race or religion which, thus defined, enters the field of criminal justice.
The invention of a new law aimed at protecting Jewish people from a certain type of hate speech highlights the extent to which this text has fallen into oblivion. As if it became necessary to create specific legislation for each rhetorical renewal of hatred, while the Pleven law is this open legal space which allows, in theory, protection against television channels which treat black mayors as monkeys, against newspapers which recycle rhetoric from old anti-Semitic clichés, against political candidates who call for the banishment of immigrant children by claiming that they are all murderers, or against calls to kill illegal aliens on social networks…
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Originally published at Almouwatin.com
