Commentary: Bearing false witness

WASHINGTON, July 25 (UPI) -- One of the most distressing electronic chain letters that arrived in this writer's mailbox in recent months was a ruse. It was hate mail directed against an entire nation of 60 million people -- France.

The letter's last sender was an ardent Christian, who fervently supports Israel. He doubtless received it from an equally ardent Christian, who presumably had it from yet another ardent Christian.

But the actual author was purported to have been Sen. Joseph P. Lieberman, an orthodox Jew. The text expressed "contempt for present day France." It accused the French of "tolerance of and indifference to the wave of attacks upon French Jews."

This, it continued, "speaks clearly of the decline of the French national character."

These crude generalizations resembling Nazi jargon -- "THE Jews," "THE Gypsies" -- were so out of line with Lieberman's diction that United Press International brought these slurs to the senator's attention. His press secretary, Casey Aden-Wansbury, responded thus:

"This letter is a hoax. Senator Lieberman was not involved in any way with the writing or distributing of it. At this point the specific origins of the letter are unknown. But Senator Lieberman's office has referred the letter to legal authorities, who are looking into the matter."

That is the good news. The bad news is that the letter fits neatly into the superfluous trend of cross-Atlantic recriminations generated primarily by media pundits trying to fill airtime -- or provoke their readers.

As if the French or Italians or Germans had flown hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, we read from the plume of an eminent Washington columnist perhaps smarting from the snooty comportment of a Parisian waiter:

"The best of the Europeans are here, and the ones whose grandparents missed the boat are over there." In other words, 376 million citizens of the European Union -- never mind all the others -- are of inferior breed. One has to go back half a century or more to find this kind of language in print.

We are even told in stilted jest that soccer, Europe's favorite sport, is "socialist" and thus inferior.

Stirring things up is of course the devil's forte. It seems he is currently very busy mongering hate between the world's two bastions of freedom. On the one hand, still pubescent veterans of the 1968 student uprising, who dominating some of Europe's media, grab every opportunity to malign the United States.

On the other hand, some of their colleagues on this side of the Atlantic react with a display of redneck traits most of us had thought for dead after Birmingham and Selma. Meanwhile, both sides are overlooking the reality that they are locked in a lethal battle against a common foe.

Those wallowing in anti-European sentiment are pointedly ignoring the fact that the French, the Italians, the Germans, the British, the Spaniards, the Dutch and a host of others are fighting side by side with the Americans in their war against terror.

If you suppress this information, it's easy to utter Chris Matthews' favorite moan: "Once again, we are all alone."

But in a way, this is still the lighter part of this media war. It gets serious when six decades after the holocaust chain letters and commentators charge entire nations with being anti-Jewish or complacent in the face of anti-Semitic outrages.

Not that these outrages are not taking place. In France alone, 405 attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions were recorded between Sept. 1, 2000, and early this year. But notice the date when they began -- it coincided with start of the second Intifada in the Holy Land.

"Comprendre c'est distinguer," the 17th-centure French philosopher René Descartes used to say -- to understand is to distinguish. Surely, the French, are entitled to that much consideration in their current predicament.

For who are the perpetrators here? "It is highly probably that the overwhelming majority of them are of North African origin. They are expressing their solidarity with the Palestinians," said Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld.

Referring to the burning synagogues in his country, Klarsfeld went on, "But the Jews don't burn down their mosques." Charles Pasqua, the former French minister of the interior, estimated that among the four million Muslims living in ghastly suburban housing estates, some 1,000 are terrorist sympathizers -- still enough to create any amount of havoc.

It is sadly true that ordinary burghers often look the other way when 20-year old French Arabs attack Jews. Civil courage, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed just before being hanged by the Nazis, is a rare commodity indeed.

People are scared of these often violent youths, whom Tariq Ramadan, an Egyptian scholar living in Geneva, desperately tries to integrate into mainstream French society -- but with limited success.

There are of course signs that some Muslims are as horrified and ashamed by the anti-Jewish violence as most other Frenchmen. In the Paris suburb of St. Denis, where the French kings are buried, an Imam of a small mosque gave a beleaguered Jewish school his congregation's bus, as a sign of solidarity.

That kind of news is not reported in America. Neither is the urgent advice of Theo Klein, the former president of the Council of Jewish Institutions of France: "Think twice before you use the word, anti-Semitism."

The bogus "Lieberman letter" is intended to reach 10 million Internet addresses, according to its distributors. In other words, it intends to pollute the minds of millions against an entire nation that is still a friend of the United States.

As if America did not have unresolved social problems as a legacy from its own past, the author of this text tries to take advantage of unresolved social problems that are the legacy from France's colonial past -- and all this, one assumes, in the name of Christianity. One wonders, to what end?

The most troubling aspect of this pathetic turn of events is this, however: It shows up the Internet's extraordinary capacity for evil -- parallel to its equally impressive capacity for good. And this is a progressive malady.

When two years ago, an Air France Concorde crashed on takeoff killing all passengers onboard -- chiefly Germans -- America Online members rejoiced in Internet chat rooms over the "German barbecue."

Some disgusted AOL members told them off, and no newspaper columnist or television pundit echoed these feelings. But that was then. Now reputable journalists are participating cheerfully in an absurd cyber-campaign presumably of self-righteous "Christians, have forgotten the Eighth Commandment: "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor."