Journalists of France, Mesdames, Messieurs,

A friend has written to me, saying "as long as citizens (young people and especially women) are standing up in opposition to the madness, there is still a little hope. Thanks for your message. The media speak only about killings, and bombings (of increasing intensity.. which will end up with no house standing... as Israel’s president wishes) .. they don’t speak about peace initiatives."

So let me ask you journalists, you who are supposed to inform your fellow-citizens: Why do you not speak (with rare exceptions) of the facts and actions that point towards peace, and life, and a better world, and fraternal human relationships? Why do you let those open-target massacres in Gaza continue?
You couldn’t predict or prevent those of October 7 by denouncing them in advance, since nobody could imagine them - not even Mossad and the IDF, apparently. But the massacres now occurring for you and the world to see, why are you silent about them?

By your silence, your dumbness, your disinformation (yes it is that), you are allowing the massacre to continue in Gaza, allowing the "circumcised nazi" (according to the humorist Guillaume Meurice) who leads Israel continue to perpetrate crimes against humanity, as horrible as those done by Hamas - if not worse because they are done on an industrial scale with all the resources of modern technology, and (the height of hypocrisy) done in the name of defending democratic values.

Your passivity, your inertia, is what serves the interests of dictators and war-mongers, such as Putin or Netanyahu, who believe they have permission for anything because they have the Bomb. For decades, you have been maintaining a code of silence about this crazy fiction: the claim that atomic bombs, weapons of mass murder, guarantee peace and world security. They do exactly the opposite, as is proved by the Ukraine war and by Israel’s perpetual war in the Near East.

As Mordechaï Vanunu said in 2006, after ending his 18-year prison term for proving to a British journal that Israel had the Bomb: "It is because Israel has the Bomb that it can practise apartheid without fear." For the same reason Netanyahu continues to defy the international community and massacre Gazans with impunity. And for the same reason Putin invaded Ukraine and keeps on fighting there with impunity.

The atom bomb serves war not peace. It serves to protect the exercise of ordinary and extraordinary violence, by threatening to commit violence that is far worse, extravagantly worse. The bomb serves the men who are thirsty for domination. It serves to deter the honest deterrers - if there are any, if those who think or claim that they support deterrence really do - deterring them from invading effectively to stop a crime being committed.

So, by your collective and individual silence, you permit not only the continuing massacres of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and murders on the Occupied West Bank, you are also contributing to the expansion of anti-semitism. You are letting Netanyahu and his far-right accomplices fuel the world’s belief that the Jews are not worth any more than the perpetrators of the Holocaust. And when, in Jerusalem, young Jews rise up bravely to condemn their government’s odious policies, or when Israeli and Palestinian women - let’s call them Israelo-Palestinian - march together to show that "there is another way", you say nothing, you keep silence. You let people think that all Israel’s Jews are like Netanyahu and support him.

Mesdames, Messieurs, les journalistes français, speak of them, and let them have their say!

Show that you are worthy of living in the "home of human rights" (yes!), that you deserve it. Recognise and let it be known far and wide, as the Pope does, that another world is possible - a world with people who have hearts not just wallets, and who have hands for shaking not hurling grenades.

If not, your silence makes you accomplices of assassins of all stripes, today and tomorrow. Be aware that tomorrow you will perhaps be victims, with your children or grandchildren - victims of men crazy about God or bombs or triggers. Who then will stand up holding your portraits to protest against your execution, to call for justice, and to demand a ceasefire? There will be nobody left, it will be too late.

Another French journalist, in the columns of Combat, wrote this the day after Hiroshima: "Mechanical civilisation has attained its last degree of savagery... Given the terrifying perspectives now opening to humankind, we see even better that peace is the only struggle worth waging. This is now not a plea but an order that needs to rise from the peoples to the governments, the order to choose definitively between hell and reason."

He was alas the only one saying this, in the French and world press, while others rejoiced in the Americans’ scientific and technical exploit. But if Albert Camus returned today among us, it would be no better. Would you hear him? Would you echo him?

Journalists, men and women of the press and other media, echo the words of the war-resisters, the partisans of peace and disarmament, the lovers of life. Be yourselves peace activists!

Wake up, for God’s sake! And you politicians, elected officials, wake up too!

Jean-Marie Matagne, Ph. D
President of ACDN (Action des citoyens pour le désarmement nucléaire)

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