Israel on Their Minds

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203517304574304020241098840.html

Never mind Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors, China’s killings of ethnic Uighurs or the epidemic murders of Kremlin critics. When it comes to Europe’s bien pensants, the only country that really seems to engage their moral indignation is Israel. Calling for Israel to be sanctioned may be the one cause that unites British university lecturers and Scandinavian union activists with radical Islamists and neo-Nazis. Now, however, the European Court of Human Rights has called this fixation with the Jewish state what it is: discrimination.



Last week, the Strasbourg-based court upheld a 2003 French court conviction against Jean-Claude Fernand Willem for advocating a boycott of Israel. French prosecutors had charged Mr. Willem—at the time the Communist mayor of the northern French town of Seclin—with provoking discrimination on national, racial and religious grounds. Mr. Willem was first acquitted but an appeal court fined him €1,000, a decision confirmed by France’s highest appeal court in 2004 and now also by Europe’s human rights court.



In a 6-1 decision, judges from seven European countries said Mr. Willem’s punishment did not violate his freedom of expression. He was not found guilty for his political views or for anti-Semitism. Instead, the judges agreed with their French colleagues that he was “inciting the commission of a discriminatory, and therefore punishable, act.” The former mayor wanted to infringe on “the normal exercise of economic activity of the manufacturers based solely on the fact that they belong to a certain nation.”



Laws against discrimination have their uses and abuses, and we would rather have seen Mr. Willem voted out of office than sanctioned by a court. But to the extent that the judges’ ruling exposes the atavistic fixations of some Europeans with the Jewish state, it does the Continent a service.