By JANICE ARNOLD, Staff Reporter MONTREAL — The Canada-Israel Committee (CIC) thinks Parti Québécois (PQ) officials should not be contributing financially to a website that posts content the CIC deems to be antisemitic.
Vigile.net, which has been in existence for 15 years, provides news and commentary on mainly Quebec politics and serves as a forum for exchange between sovereigntists. Maintained by Bernard Frappier and supported by private donors, it has no official link with the PQ.
Richard Marceau, the CIC’s senior adviser on government relations and a former Bloc Québécois member of Parliament, said he has observed an increasingly hateful tone in what Vigile.net carries about certain minorities, especially Jews, over the past five or six years, that cannot be dismissed as isolated.
He also believes it has crossed the line of acceptability in the content and tone of its criticism of Israel, to which he also feels it pays disproportionate attention.
“I would call it really disgusting,” he said, “clearly antisemitic, and that is not a word I use lightly.”
During Vigile.net’s current fundraising campaign, the names of recent contributors and the amounts they gave and when are posted on the site.
PQ members of the National Assembly Bernard Drainville, Bertrand St. Arnaud, Louise Beaudoin and Agnès Maltais are among those listed as contributing in the past six months.
Others include Jean-François Lisée, columnist and former adviser to Lucien Bouchard, and former cabinet minister Richard Le Hir, who is cited as one of the biggest donors of the year at $750, as well as some PQ riding associations.
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Since Marceau went public with his criticism March 17 in the newspaper La Presse, Drainville, a former Radio-Canada journalist until he entered politics in 2007, has distanced himself from the site.
He communicated that the PQ “dissociates itself from antisemitic remarks found in the certain texts posted on Vigile.net” and that the party has “fought against discrimination against any community.”
Maltais followed suit with a similar statement.
But Vigile.net has responded by running a defiant editorial, under Frappier’s name, headed “From intimidation to defamation,” stating that “we are in Quebec where we can still exchange opinions even on the backs of oligarchies.” The statement is accompanied by a photo of Parliament’s Peace Tower, with a Canadian flag behind it in which the maple leaf has been replaced by a Star of David.
The site’s preoccupations are clear from its front page. There are sections under the headings “Propagande sioniste” and “antisémitisme intimidation,” for example. (??!!?? - Vigile)
Vigile.net has published content accusing Jews of duplicity, of controlling political and financial institutions, and of war-mongering, as well as conflating the Quebec nationalist cause with Israel’s alleged repression of the Palestinians. Quebec is referred to as a “Zionist colony,” and Montreal Jews are accused of treating French Quebecers as Palestinians.
The CIC cited some particularly egregious recent content. On Jan. 6, regular contributor Ivan Parent wrote, “We know that the Jewish lobbies are very powerful and, in fact, control, through international banks, nearly all states.” He blamed them for the turmoil in financial institutions and for causing wars, hinting at, but not explicitly saying for fear of censure, that this was foretold in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a czarist forgery.
On Feb. 17, Parent followed up that Jews “suck the lifeblood out of the countries in which they live, so it’s not surprising that they were hated wherever they lived.” This history of the Jews is “one of massacres, killings, genocides under the divine inspiration of [God],” he went on.
Jews get away with all this by “hiding behind the cloak of antisemitism.”
On Dec. 13, Robert Barberis-Gervais blamed the “Jewish lobby” for the “Michaud affair” saying “rich Jews” treat “French Quebecers like the Palestinians.”
He added: “It’s high time the truth was told: it’s the Jewish lobby that relies on the money it gives to the Liberal party and the money it controls in the banks and elsewhere in society that is responsible for the Michaud affair.”
Frappier himself has written that the National Assembly’s 2000 censure of PQ militant Yves Michaud for antisemitism illustrates “the repugnant side of the ‘democracy of money,’” and the “sterilization of the PQ by B’nai Brith, an extreme branch of world Zionism.” Another correspondent, Yves Claudé, worries about the “breakthrough of the Judeo-Nazi Kahanist movement in Canada.”
Celebrated novelist Victor Lévy-Beaulieu vented, under the “Israël, l’Occident et le cochon,” that the Jews are war-mongerers and Israel is “Hitlerian.”
“Beyond the classical antisemitism that it serves as a vehicle for, Vigile.net is also distinguished by an obsessive transposition of the Israeli-Arab conflict onto the Quebec national question,” said David Ouellette, communications and research director for the Quebec-Israel Committee.
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Marceau is prepared to give the benefit of the doubt that the Péquistes who support Vigile.net may not have been aware of all of its content.
“I know some people were shocked. But they cannot plead ignorance anymore,” said Marceau.
Marceau does not absolve Frappier. “He chooses what goes on the site. It’s not as if anybody can have anything published.”
As disturbing as he finds much of the content, Marceau doesn’t think it’s a matter that should be investigated by the police. “My preference is that mainstream sovereigntists repudiate Vigile.net and build another website for exchange,” said Marceau, who’s not aware of any such site now.
Ouellette agrees. “That the sovereignty movement needs a forum on the Internet to debate ideas and advance its cause is plain. But the trivialization of antisemitism that Vigile.net has been devoted to for years is absolutely contrary to the values promoted by sovereignist movement. It’s hard to understand how Vigile.net could continue to serve as a credible window onto that movement.”