L'Express genuflects to Former Non-Resident Israeli Ambassador to Mauritius
22.12.2024
Imagine when you open your L’Express newspaper on 20 December and there on page 8, with a little heading even on Page 1, you find yet another page of this once-proud pro-Independence newspaper spreading Israel’s colonialist propaganda.
The L’Express interview by journalist Lindsay Prosper might just as well have been a paid-for advertisement, so complicit, so fawning is it. The journalist has hereby shredded his own reputation. The newspaper’s reputation was already well-nigh shredded.
We note that the interview had been promised in writing, in exchange, it seemed at the time, for the VIP “treating” by the Israeli Defense Force of the now-suspended L’Express journalist Anju Ramgulam to Israel.
The Ambassador of Israel, or rather the former Ambassador of Israel, better still the former non-resident ambassador of Israel to Mauritius, is leaving. So, he gets a page.
The departing Ambassador uses his page to lay out bait for any corrupt people in Mauritius to bite on. So, this article can serve as a warning: beware of the bait!
Lindsay Prosper – now in the long line of L’Express “justifiers” of Israeli crimes, starting with Marie Annick Savripenne, then Anju Ramgulam, then Aline Groeme, then Jacques Maunick – just simply masks all the crimes against humanity that Israel so brashly commits. He, like those he follows at L’Express, turns a blind eye to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians, slaughter that now clearly qualifies as “genocide”.
Does he not see even the cold-blooded killing of his own fellow-workers, his own fellow-professionals? Israel has killed about 150 Palestinian journalists in a year. Israel assassinated many of them on purpose as a policy designed to destroy the proof of the genocide Israel is committing. And L’Express journalists fail to so much as notice? Let alone stand in solidarity with their colleagues working in Palestine? Have they no professional ethics? Let alone moral compasses?
The Lindsay Prosper interview might well have been conducted, instead of by an informed Mauritian journalist, by some kind of ignorant individual from outer space. Lindsay Prosper pretends there is no Israeli genocide. To him, there are not even “allegations” against Israel for crimes against humanity that he can put to the Ambassador as he departs. To the journalist, there are no Court judgments, no UN findings or any other independent reports proving all these crimes, even alleging them. He must live in a parallel universe.
He fails even to ask what the departing, ex, non-resident Ambassador thinks of Mauritius, the country he was Ambassador to, sending lawyers to The Hague to support the case at the ICJ against Israel for illegal occupation of Palestine? Is it a taboo even to put the question to the man? What kind of journalism is this? The Court has, this very year, found Israel to be an illegal occupier, having unlawfully displaced Palestinians, and has condemned Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and to allow all Palestinian refugees to come home to Palestine, and to pay damages. Mauritius helped win this case. And Lindsay Prosper asks no question on this. Silans radyo. Lordy!
And what about the ICC international arrest warrant? What if the ex-non-resident departing Ambassador was to have organized a visit by his Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu? Does the journalist not think it worth a little question about whether the Ambassador believes Mauritius would arrest Netanyahu, as international law obliges Mauritius to do, since a warrant has been issued against him for crimes against humanity? This would be an ordinary, normal question from an ordinary journalist. To not ask this question, is what is incredible. What conclusion can readers be expected to draw about this journalist, and equally relevant, about his employer bosses and manager bosses that promised such an interview in the first place, and then published it, even without any relevant questions? Plumb in the middle of Israel perpetrating a genocide?
The ICJ has already issued Provisional Measures, announcing “plausible” genocide by Israel and calling for the isolation of Israel. This case was brought by South Africa, where the non-resident Ambassador was in fact resident. No question on this either from the journalist?
Instead, the journalist goes begging for a bit of money from Israel in the form of getting Israeli tourists for the Mauritian tourist industry bosses’ pockets, and pleading for aid for Mauritian agribusiness bosses? How is he putting out a begging bowl to this pariah state this way? And how come he cowers down on behalf of Mauritian para-statal bodies that provide electricity and water services all over the Republic of Mauritius, again openly fawning for hand-outs? And he asks not a single straight question about the effects on Israel of the world-wide sanctions, boycott, disinvestment movement and the calls for an arms embargo against Israel? Not even a word, a single word, is put to the Ambassador about the effect of the dis-invitation of the two Israeli cultural groups due to perform in Mauritius, protested against because the Israeli musicians concerned publicly support for the Israeli regime’s genocide?
So, the interview was not really an interview. What it was is unclear.
LALIT
