Media Watch 24 July 2025
Jean Quatremer, genocide denier. (OECD Forum)
Journalists everywhere should be furious with Israel. Its soldiers have killed approximately 230 media workers in Gaza during the current war; those still alive are starving.
We should be furious, too, when our supposed colleagues in the West act as apologists for Israel. They include Bret Stephens at The New York Times and veteran French reporter Jean Quatremer.
In a recent social media post, Quatremer attacked Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. “Adolf Hitler approves this message,” Quatremer wrote, responding to a comment made by Albanese about how Israel has committed one of the most cruel genocides in modern history.
Quatremer’s views regularly appear on the pages of Libération – his employer for almost four decades.In a May piece for that paper, he denied that Israel’s actions could constitute a genocide, placing scare quotes around that word.
“The accusation of ‘genocide’ made against Israel almost since the beginning of the offensive in Gaza does not hold up,” the wrote. Quatremer added that the “intention to biologically destroy a human group in whole or in part” was missing.
Quatremer made no reference to an article published two weeks earlier by the Dutch daily NRC.
That publication asked seven genocide scholars about Gaza. The seven were unanimous in categorizing Israel’s actions as genocidal and stated that nearly all teachers of the subject agree.
Nor did Quatremer mention that the International Court of Justice had deemed South Africa’s case against Israel under the Genocide Convention plausible in January 2024. The preliminary ICJ ruling quoted declarations from leading Israeli politicians which displayed an intent to inflict harm on Gaza’s population.
Among them were an October 2023 warning by Israel Katz, then energy minister, that Gaza’s civilians “will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.” Given that survival without water is impossible, such a measure is surely intended to “biologically destroy a human group in whole or in part,” as Quatremer phrased it.
Grotesque irony
There is a grotesue irony in Quatremer being a genocide denier.
In December 2024, he complained about the role Le Monde – a rival to Libération – had played in what he called “the expansion of denial of the Jewish genocide.” He was seeking to amplify a historian’s observation about how Le Monde had in 1978 published an article by Robert Faurisson claiming there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz.
His abhorrence of Faurisson notwithstanding, Quatremer is actually emulating his nemesis.
Faurisson achieved notoriety as a Holocaust denier. By concealing the truth about the holocaust that Israel is committing in Gaza, Quatremer is engaging in comparable deception.
Quatremer has spent most of his career in Brussels. For shedding light on backroom deals, he has been hailed as a “thorn in the European Commission’s side.”His reputation for muckraking is at odds with the stenography he has undertaken on behalf of CRIF, France’s dominant pro-Israel group. In January 2024, he cited CRIF data to contend there had been “an explosion of anti-Semitic speech and actions under the pretext of solidarity with the Palestinians” since 7 October 2023.
Quatremer has been known to lob the insult “islamo-gauchiste” – “Islamo-leftist” – at those with whom he disagrees.
Like other pro-Israel advocates, he has been particularly venomous toward Rima Hassan, the first French Palestinian elected to the European Parliament. When Hassan listed Israel’s crimes – terrorism, apartheid, colonialism and genocide – earlier this month, Quatremer alleged that a “hatred so pathological” was a matter for a “psychiatric hospital.”
Quatremer’s analysis of Palestine has become worse.In the early stages of the genocide – the genocide he denies – Quatremer criticized the full support which Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, offered Israel while paying a visit to Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister. Von der Leyen, he wrote, “did not demonstrate any compassion for Palestinian victims caught in the storm of this endless war.”
If that was an acknowledgment that the current situation follows decades of injustice, then Quatremer has backtracked, judging by a comment he made this week. His comment gave the impression that the sole cause of the violence in Gaza was the Hamas-led operation on 7 October 2023.
Not for the first time, Quatremer spread the lie that Palestinians committed mass rapes that day.
Neither Quatremer nor the editorial board at Libération responded to requests for comment when I contacted them this week. Despite how he has frequently hurled abuse at the Palestine solidarity movement, Quatremer appears to be thin-skinned when challenged over the positions that he takes.
Last month he was embroiled in a row with Aymeric Caron, a member of the French National Assembly.
The row was sparked when Quatremer tried to justify the war Israel declared against Iran by labeling that country “misogynistic, totalitarian, oppressive.”
Caron responded on X by drawing attention to how flimsy Quatremer’s “justification” was. Using Quatremer’s own logic, Caron asked if the journalist could be “a bombing target” given how he supported Israel at a time it was massacring children.
Although Caron’s question was clearly rhetorical, Quatremer alleged that he was being threatened with death.
Predictably, his allegation elicited great sympathy from his chums in the Israel lobby. Why waste an opportunity to play the victim?
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