Voltaire Network - Internal Dissensions

Internal Dissensions

Several senior members of the Réseau have complained about a lack of control of the administration council over actions of the president and general secretary. One example was "Entretien avec le Hezbollah" ("Meeting with the Hezbollah") which presented the group as a "social group of Muslim inspiration, comparable to the Liberation theology in South America".

Three members of the administration council (Michel Sitbon, Gilles Alfonsi and Jean-Luc Guilhem) resigned in February 2005, over what they consider is an adhesion to the theory of the so-called "Clash of civilizations," although the Network's publications clearly oppose the theory as a neo-conservative strategy to control the world's last remaining oil reserves, and the instrumentalisation of the network. They object that "With the pretext of resisting American Imperialism, lenience toward Chinese and Russian imperialisms and closeness with Islamists is symptomatic of a latent anti-Semitic drift among the direction." They also claim the existence of links with intelligence agencies, arguing that the Voltaire network had been constructed against such organizations. However, they also underline that the new stance of the direction shouldn't cause the previous work of the network to be forgotten. Since 2002, these members had been in conflict with Bruno Drweski, director the Communist review La Pensée. These accusations were denied by the Réseau Voltaire, which evokes mere "changes in dimension." Founding member Michel Sitbon cited the arrival of controversial personalities like Claude Karnoouh (who was never actually an administrator) and Bruno Drweski, while the Réseau, in a 2005 declaration, said that "administrators favourable to a franco-French petty political conception of the association have been put in minority. They resigned either before or during the general assembly"