Strategic Lawyering Hatred kills
In the wake of the Hamas massacre of civilians on the Israeli territory on October 7, I had planned to write an article on the concepts of terrorist crimes, crimes against humanity and war crimes. A way of putting on my wig and gown against the abominations committed by Hamas.
But words cannot express the horrors that the world inflicts upon us month after month. There is no longer any question of a hierarchy of crimes against mankind, which ideologues and false prophets justify by invoking, according to the tropisms of their formatted thinking, nostalgia for a fantasized empire, misguided religious rigorism or antagonistic visions of history. For them, not all lives have the same value, even the life of a child.
After WWII, the world has made every effort to establish international institutions designed to guarantee peace, trade and the movement of individuals and ideas. Poverty and barbarism receded everywhere, before the return of hatred of others and self-hatred.
We must not merely condemn the massacres perpetrated in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, we must defend the values on which our model of civilization is based: democracy, freedom of the press, freedom to believe or not to believe, respect for others, confrontation of ideas and taste for travels and encounters, in a word, universalism.
Jean-Luc Soulier
Member of the Paris Bar