Flat-Earthers are people who believe the Earth is flat. Yes, there are many of them (10% of Americans and perhaps a little fewer in Europe). On a show hosted by Mathieu Vidart (“La Terre au Carré,” October 13), the journalist discussed the topic with astrophysicist Sylvain Chatille, who has written a book on the subject. We learn that in July 2020, a fanatic on the subject (Mad Mike) cobbled together a rocket that he launched with the goal of reaching the Kármán line (600 km) to prove that the Earth is indeed flat. The outcome was predictable: his rocket exploded, and he died. To make matters worse, this wasn’t his first attempt; in his previous attempt, he had merely suffered a vertebral compression fracture.
Yet we’ve known since the 4th century BCE that the Earth is round, and medieval peasants knew it too, as did the Church—which means this fact was widely accepted. How, in the 21st century, after trips to the moon, stunning images of Earth seen from space, not to mention the scientific evidence regarding gravity and relativity, can anyone believe such nonsense? It turns out that while there are certainly conspiracy theorists (anti-vaxxers, 9/11 deniers—those who claim the Twin Towers weren’t destroyed, etc.), there are also level-headed people who are neither anti-vaxxers nor conspiracy theorists. Such is the magic of modern times, with networks that challenge science, evidence, and proven facts. Everyone’s opinion is worth as much as that of a specialist, and you can deny the obvious and still feel good about yourself.
Denying the massacres in Gaza—slaughter, ethnic cleansing, genocide—choose whichever term suits you, as semantics are truly secondary—is pure flat-earthism! Dan Rather, the famous American news anchor, once said that if television had existed in the 1940s, the Holocaust would never have happened. Here is the proof through experience. Despite the systematic massacre of journalists—more killed than in both World Wars combined—whether local or the few foreigners who managed to get in and out alive (CNN), we see it all via social media: the systematic destruction, the desperate searches by parents for the bodies of their children buried under the rubble—and for the most skeptical, there’s Google Earth; with before-and-after shots and indisputable, unaltered images!
The film NAZA—an acronym for “collateral damage” in Hebrew—reveals an even more disturbing fact: that the Israeli people condone these massacres taking place 60 km from Tel Aviv, the cheerful and largely secular city. In it, we see the elite of what Israel does best—namely, fanatics of algorithms and computer programs—stating without any remorse or hesitation, “I caused the deaths of hundreds of children by designating that section of a building as the target for the next bomb.” The worst part is that, having installed Gaza’s telephone exchanges in the 1970s, they monitor all phone calls, and through this surveillance, they know if a mother said that her husband had come home—and thus they could kill everyone. One expert states without hesitation that killing a Hamas leader—identified by an algorithm with its flaws—simply because he may have been in contact with a Hamas member or lives nearby—justifies massacring 500 people at the same time, including women and children, in the block of buildings where he is located. The most incredible thing is that he uses the same rhetoric as the Nuremberg defendants—and, for that matter, Adolf Eichmann during his trial—namely, “the program decides”—before, it was Hitler. No hesitation, no remorse; yes, I heard the voices of the children who were about to die and the cries that followed—a young girl searching for her sister, and so on. Perhaps even worse is this sniper, proud of having killed more than the daily quota of children, women, and adults who ran to find food, stepping out of line in order to get there in time. One is left speechless by such a complete lack of self-reflection: I’m part of the elite, and you can’t imagine how prestigious it is to be part of it—or how many competitive exams I had to pass to get there. This film—which is topping the box office and will be available for free in the pages of The Guardian, which produced it—will cast a dark shadow over the image of this country, now a pariah nation that has committed the worst massacre of this century.
Let’s be clear: this is not about downplaying the massacres of October 7th; despite the fabrications circulating here and there about hundreds of babies having their throats slit or being put in a microwave, etc., the horror of the killings speaks for itself.
Nor is it a matter of disputing the need for vengeance or retribution; a fanatical Israeli (or French person) has the right to say—as Israeli political leaders, in fact, say at great length—“even the babies must be killed because the Gazans are animals,” in the words of the President of Israel, as does the prime minister—not to mention the neo-fascists Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and the fanatics of Jewish purity, particularly the religious ones (though not the most Orthodox, who dispute the very existence of the country, since according to the texts, it is only when the Messiah comes that Jerusalem will regain its temple and its glory—yet since he apparently hasn’t come! No, the problem here is how to explain the transformation of this people who see nothing because they refuse to see anything. Their TV bans any coverage of Gaza; their army—that is, all adults aged 18 to nearly 60—is proud of its battles and continues to claim to be a moral army defending Israel, which, as always, is the victim of anti-Semitism from the rest of the world (with the exception of Trump, Merz, and a few others; particularly the dictators whom Netanyahu frequents assiduously).
The point here is simply this: whatever your convictions may be, do not deny the obvious. The IDF—the so-called most moral army in the world, hailing from one of the “finest democracies”—has carried out the complete destruction of a territory where 2 million people lived, the majority of whom were children. This complete destruction has made life there impossible, leaving no choice but to leave and ultimately handing over the entire territory to the Jews (since churches and Christians are among the destroyed structures and the unwanted population). One cannot understand all of this without placing the history of the last century at the heart of the discussion. This project has a long and equally indisputable history, dating back 80 years to the 1940s, when Ben-Gurion recognized that the Arabs had to be expelled in order to have a “Eretz Israel” that was pure—free of Arabs—because otherwise they would quickly become the majority, which is incompatible with the Zionist dream. The residents of Gaza are the expelled inhabitants and their descendants from the surrounding Palestinian villages destroyed in 1947–48, all of whose residents were forced to walk to Gaza. More than 800,000 Palestinians were expelled, with thousands of villages destroyed and several massacres on the scale of Oradour-sur-Glane—never brought to justice.
To each his own conscience, but the Western democracies that failed to react (with the noble exception of a few countries such as Spain or Ireland) will bear the consequences of this hypocrisy for a long time to come. We proclaim ourselves a champion of human rights yet allow these massacres to go unpunished, when all it would take is a little economic pressure; Europe has not even been able to block imports from the territories occupied since 1967, in defiance of all UN resolutions and the positions of all global nongovernmental organizations.
How can we justify that Israel—which, to my knowledge, is not in Europe—is the only country to benefit from so many economic advantages in its trade with the Old Continent? How can we let Trump’s decision to starve the International Court of Justice—a court to which European countries are signatories—pass without reacting with anything more than empty words? It’s easier to understand why the far right is knocking on the doors of power in so many countries; it’s hard to believe the politicians’ empty rhetoric about morality—nothing gets through anymore.
