Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
There are scoops you must refrain from showingstates Arlette Chabot unequivocally, describing the ironclad principles of France 2 (as spoken to Le Monde's Daniel Psenny) with regards to such affairs as the Bagneux gang and the harm that irresponsible journalism can cause;
the words of [Youssouf] Fofona were provocative and could have harmed the family and the loved ones of Ilan Halami.
Blair makes one short reference to “examining ones’ conscience” in a television interview, and the British press (in their innnnn-finite “tolerance”) howls about religion, at the mere possibility of the use of the word.
Referring to the influence of a “muscular”, “born-again” style America, they miss the point. US affairs aren’t influenced inordinately by religious institutions or figures, it just doesn’t have a bias against and hatred for them.
Pat Robertson, and the “Reverend” Jesse Jackson each only have one vote, and so do I. The existence of either of them puts no-one at a disadvantage.
The BBC made much of material I didn’t happen to hear in the teaser they’ve been flogging:«So it must come as no surprise to Tony Blair that his remarks - made on ITV1's Parkinson programme - about being judged by God for his actions in Iraq have sparked a storm of protest.
Never mind the fact that it’s ITV’s scoop. Were the same zeal offered to the “freeing of Tibet”, which truly seeks theocracy, then thoughts of heresy, religiosity, and the like barely figure into the conversation at all.
It raises the prospect of inflaming Arab opinion which often links Christian western leaders with suggestions of a "crusade" - a charge already leveled at President Bush.
Others have asked how a Christian can defend war and “sending soldiers and civilians to their death.»
But if a critic is predisposed to try to make an argument that an elected leader is part of some religious illuminati, their mere mention of “consulting ones’ conscience” is a reason to display ones’ fear.
Perhaps they want a PM, or anyone else for that matter to NOT consult their conscience, and to do little more than stick their finger in the political wind. No?
I think they’d prefer a sort of false meritocracy of civil service experts who pass a governance test that is selected, not elected.
Meanwhile Radio 4 returns to it’s regularly scheduled programming of “All Gitmo, all the time”, and peppers it with round table discussions of why privatizing Royal Mail is bad for social justice™ as if it was the business of a state broadcaster to promote a nebulous, inaccessible cult intent on disempowering the people™ with delusions and failed class theory.
Meanwhile, back to exploiting the stupid and helpless, at the movies the love that dare not speak his name has both become “the love that just won’t shut up.”
While French readers pour scorn on Italy (and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) for not standing tall with its fellow Europeans and for not having the backbone to follow the quest for "long-term European stability" and for not standing up proudly to that terrible enemy represented by… Uncle Sam, the attitude of the French moralizers during the circus surrounding the Gaz de France affair with Suez comes across as a combination of chauvinism, protectionism, retrogradism, foul play, bullying, deliberate betrayal, and a return to the nation-state so often decried by Frenchmen (politicians, moonbats, or otherwise). And that, not only in Italy but also in Brussels and in Spain. (Incidentally, even France's champion in Italy, Romano Prodi, is ticked off.) The Trib: It is often the case in international commerce that when a foreign country blocks you from buying their company, it's "protectionism," but when a foreigner comes shopping in your country, it's a potential threat to your "strategic interests." That seems especially true in Europe, where attempts to create a level playing field across the European Union keep running up against chauvinism, unions or simply ignorance.In a Le Monde article that remained long unlinked, Jean-Michel Bezat, Jean-Jacques Bezonnet, and Jean-Pierre Stroobants report that Belgium's Le Soir is ironizing that "from now on, Belgium's energy ministry will be located in Paris" and that La Stampa's Barbara Spinelli has said that "France is a sick man who is contaminating all of Europe."
The latest tussle is over utilities: After an Italian company took aim at the French utility Suez, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin suddenly sensed a great threat to French security and started pushing Suez to merge with Gaz de France. Italy's Industry Minister, Claudio Scajola, rightly countered that the real threat was to the political and economic destiny of the European Union. …releasing free market forces across the entire continent is the whole point of the European Union, and neither France nor Spain has been shy about sending their salesmen on continental shopping sprees.
While Michel Bôle-Richard takes on the winds of change in Saudi Arabia and Françoise Hirot describes a visit to Petra, André Glucksmann takes on the double standards charge in the cartoon controversy.
Saddam Hussein had a habit of tape-recording meetings with top aideswrites the Wall Street Journal.
The former U.N. weapons inspector and experienced Arabic translator recently went public with 12 hours (out of a reported total of 3,000) of recordings in which we hear Saddam discuss with the likes of Tariq Aziz the process of deceiving U.N. weapons inspectors and his view that Iraq's conflict with the U.S. didn't end with the first Gulf War.
In one particularly chilling passage, the dictator discusses the threat of WMD terrorism to the United States and the difficulty anyone would have tracing it back to a state. With the 2001 anthrax attacks still unsolved, that strikes us as bigger news than the DNI or most editors apparently considered it.
In another disclosure, The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes was told by about a dozen officials that Harmony documents describe in detail how Saddam trained thousands of Islamic radicals in the waning years of his regime. So much for the judgments of many in the intelligence community--including Paul Pillar, the latest ex-spook to go public with his antiwar message--that the secular Saddam would never consort with such religious types.
«A group of Moslem males have tried to get at the daughter of one of the 12 cartoonists who drew the cartoons of Muhammed at her school. The political spokesman of the Liberals, Jens Rohde, revealed this during an interview with TV-Avisen while explaining his and the Prime Minister’s attack on the business community in Denmark, charging that they have put profits over Freedom of Speech.
Is that the love these thugs have for their faith? Trying to abuse and molest those that offend them, and failing that, their blameless children?
Not at school
Rohde says that the 12 cartoonists have had their lives overturned and are now living in hiding, after receiving several death threats.
"And a daughter of one of cartoonist was sought out by 12 Moslem males - they were looking to get to her. Fortunately she wasn’t at school," Jens Rohde said.»
This is how they honor the Waqf (awakening)? They are barbarians. Enough said.
Service notice: Agora has posted two updates incorporating translations of statements by the Police intelligence service and an interview with one of the parents.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, addressing a joint meeting of Congress here Wednesday, warned sharply against what he said was a "politically dangerous" tendency in Europe to stand apart from the United Stateswrites Brian Knowlton.
"A conception of European unity founded on a fanciful wish for self-sufficiency would be morally suspect and politically dangerous," he said, according to an English-language version of a speech delivered mostly in Italian.
His comments appeared to be a scarcely disguised slap at the ideas of President Jacques Chirac of France, who has supported the notion of a "bipolar world" in which the European Union and the United States serve as counterbalances.
Italy and France are locked in a bitter dispute over Paris's decision to block a possible Italian takeover of a French energy company.
"The West is, and shall remain, one," Berlusconi said. "We cannot have two Wests. Europe needs America and America needs Europe."
The line brought a standing ovation.…
He ringingly endorsed some themes closely associated with President George W. Bush, who had met with Berlusconi before leaving Tuesday for South Asia: the importance of expanding democracy, human rights and free markets through the world.…
Berlusconi said that only through the common efforts of every democracy "will we be able to free the world form the threat of international terrorism, from the fear of aggression by the forces of evil."
The reference to "forces of evil" echoed language often used by Bush.
The prime minister, whose support for the war in Iraq has strained Italian relations with some European countries, said that he had worked to ensure that "the European Union did not weaken its ties to the United States in reaction to events in Iraq."
"For the same reason," he added, "we cannot ignore the danger that a united Europe might seek to define its identity in contrast to America."
Berlusconi called for a fundamental reinvigoration of the Atlantic alliance, a strengthening of NATO, which, he said, "must remain the fundamental instrument to guarantee our security."
"It's so cowardly to attack the church when we won't offend Islam": «Burbling critics agreed. Gilbert and George still get a 'frisson of excitement' by including 'f-words, turds, semen, their own pallid bodies and other affronts to bourgeois sensibilities' in their work, wrote a journalist with the impeccably bourgeois name of Cassandra Jardine in the Daily Telegraph. 'Is it the perfect Christmas card to send George Bush at Easter? Yeah, yeah,' added groovy Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times.»
It’s the UK we’re talking about here – there’s never a shortage of artists talking in circles realizing uninventive results. Having sought a apparent cachets of decadence, sincerity, and default free-speech advocats, they've become interchangeable with any number of other artists with nothing to say about the world. Nick Cohen, again: «The fear of being murdered is a perfectly rational one, but it is eating away at the cultural elite's myths. In the name of breaking taboos, the Britart movement has giggled at paedophilia (Jake and Dinos Chapman) and rubbed salt in the wounds of the parents of the Moors murderers' victims (Marcus Harvey). It can't go on as if nothing has happened because the contradictions between breaking some taboos but not others are becoming too glaring.»
Do the denizens of that echo-chamber really think the public care to see them chasing the mice in their heads and see artists talking about themselves anyway? Sorry, guys – Van Halen weren’t thinking of you when they wrote “Hot for Teacher.” Now that they have little to say to the public, one has to wonder just who is it they’re talking to?
«If you wish to test the thesis that the Left blames those blown up for being blown up by Muslim terrorists, have your son or daughter at college ask some liberal arts professors who is to blame for 9-11 or Muslim suicide bombers in Israel, etc.
In fact, one way to describe the moral divide between conservatives and liberals is whom they blame for acts of evil committed against innocent people, especially when committed by non-whites and non-Westerners. Conservatives blame the perpetrators, and liberals blame either the victims' group or the circumstances.
We Americans are used to this. For decades, liberals have blamed violent crime in America on racism and poverty, i.e., on American society far more than on the murderers, rapists, arsonists and muggers themselves. Conservatives blame the criminals. »
Melanie Phillips speaks to the too-often seen intersection between Islamist, the far left, and fascists. The thing is that it’s often not just a case of sympathy and misguided concern for non-whiteness as a determinant in one’s position in the class of victim superiority, but a case of common cause. Quoting Michel Gurfinkiel on the sorry state of the common French understanding on the human condition: «The attraction of the French far left, which accounts for another 20% of the national vote, toward Islam, rabid anti-Americanism, and even anti-Semitism, a phenomenon underscored by the emergence of Dieudonne,Still haven't reached for that bottle of gin under the seat of the forklift? There's this, perhaps.a former liberal music-hall humorist who has turned into an enormously popular French equivalent of Louis Farrakhan. Dieudonne, the son of a black Camerounese father and a white French mother, claims that Jews were the main European slave traders in the 17th and 18th centuries. He refers to civic and educational programs about the Holocaust as ‘memory pornography.’ He has welcomed the electoral victory of Hamas in Palestine. According to the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, he is in moral terms ‘Le Pen's son.’»
In other words, they've drunk the left's Kool-aid, and love it, love it, love it becuase it's just as undemanding of reason as the supremasist drivel. Oddly enough, all roads point to Heeb-killing becoming the European public’s spectator sport again, except for those willing to fracture the faction that they normally vote with. It's a sort of "regime change", if you will.«Recently, Le Pen’s strategic adviser Jean-Claude Martinez has said that the National Front...
[Gurfinkiel] must adjust to globalization, forget about some of its founding myths, like ‘Joan of Arc fighting an alien invasion,’ and welcome immigrant blacks and Arabs into the national fold.
This is because, Gurfinkiel suggests, the far right in France is not monolithic but is in the process of fracturing into neo-fascists like le Pen and more traditional Christian right-wingers:
[Gurfinkiel] Neofascists think Jews and Americans are the chief enemy, rather than Arabs and Muslims. In a way, they even tend to celebrate Arabs and Muslims as fellow fascists. As for Christian right-wingers, they see Arabs and Muslims as the chief enemy. For years, Mr. Le Pen has been pretending he is a Christian right-winger rather than a neofascist and that resistance to Muslim immigration is his major concern. Now he has emerged on the side of the neofascist branch and is ready to drop the anti-Muslim issue.»
With thanks to Agora
Jyllands-Posten reports the release of a grand manifesto by a group of writers and a call to print it in the free presses of the world.
Excerpts:«We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.
[...]
To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.
[...]
We reject «cultural relativism», which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions.
[...]
We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of "Islamophobia", an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.»
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Chahla Chafiq
Caroline Fourest
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Irshad Manji
Mehdi Mozaffari
Maryam Namazie
Taslima Nasreen
Salman Rushdie
Antoine Sfeir
Philippe Val
Ibn WarraqCharlie Hebdo has urged other papers to print it in solidarity.
"Oppression is our past. This is about democracy, I must continue."Muayed Naima, 1951 - 2005 - Iraqi Cartoonist.
Despite the strong historical and cultural links the countries share - and their centuries of close cooperation, known here as "Nordism" - Sweden and Norway have carefully chosen to distance themselves from the conflict engulfing Denmark.In my book, I write that Sweden has been prompt to wag its finger at the American democracy; during World War II, it was less eager to lecture to Nazi Germany.
This, some politicians now say, means that even the pretense of a special relationship between the Nordic countries should be given up.
"Nordism is bankrupt," Carl Hamilton, a member of Parliament for the Swedish Liberal Party, said in a telephone interview. Hamilton said he was "ashamed" of how the Swedish government had handled the crisis, adding: "As soon as it faces a real conflict, poof! - the solidarity is gone."
…Aftonbladet, the biggest Swedish newspaper, recently published an editorial describing Denmark as "the most prejudiced, bigoted and narrow- minded country in Western Europe." [France's largest national daily has been just as courageous.]
In Denmark, none of this has gone unnoticed, and commentators say that it has fueled resentment.
"This has made an already tense relationship, especially with Sweden, even sharper," said Erik Meier Carlsen, an editorial writer with the Danish newspaper BT. Carlsen said that many Danes felt Swedish criticism over Danish immigration policy had become unreasonable and aggressive, and that Persson's statements were generally viewed as "very arrogant."
"There have always been differences of opinion between Sweden and Denmark," he said in an interview, "but before it was generally good-humored. Now it is getting much more nasty, and that's something new."
Danish and Swedish critics of the Swedish government approach are drawing parallels to another perceived betrayal - when Sweden failed to support Denmark during a war with Prussia and Austria in 1864. Even convinced "Nordists" are beginning to show despair.
"I think we could see a renaissance for Palme," said Gustav Fridolin, a 22- year-old political wunderkind who represents the Green Party in the Swedish Parliament. "I think young people today have a great engagement in international politics, in global justice, and in that Sweden again should have a active role in this struggle."
«Il n´y a jamais eu d´exécutions en masse en Irak sous Saddam.»
Said one anonymous commenter on this post.
He drools further:«Saddam était un dictateur qui de temps à autre éliminait un, deux ou une dizaine d´adversaires (plus quelques kurdes) certes, MAIS Bush en 32 mois d´invasion irakienne a tué proportionnellement bien plus d´irakiens que Saddam en 24 ans de pouvoir.
Okay, sparky, PROVE IT.
Mais peu importent les raisons de cette guerre : l´essentiel est que les GIs s´amusent en Irak. Comptons les points.»
Les 'GI' are just being entertained. Do you think that throughout the past 20 years, all 'zee GIs' have been ze same soldiers? And as long as you’re trying to engage in comparative non-Euro-ness, and looking things up in unfamiliar things, like, books ‘n stuff, who are THESE PEOPLE, punk?
There’s really nothing new about the same old scare tactics being recycled for the past 40 years,
First it was “about oil”, then it was about “avenging an old enemy for daddy”, then it was about WMDs, then it was about imposing faith, then it was about...
If you listen to the sort of people who try to explain away everything they disagree with, you’re likely to hear amusing but unreliable tales of woe, notions that everything supporting their view of the world being linked together, and evidence of mass-murder, unilateral warfare against Kuwait and Iran, funding Hizballah, Hamas, and Jihadist miscreants having no linkage.
You will hear the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament having advocated for Saddaam who wanted nukes, and for Iran that wants nukes.
You’ll never hear this, though: «There's more. Indeed, as late as 2000, Saddam can be heard in his office talking with Iraqi scientists about his ongoing plans to build a nuclear device. At one point, he discusses Iraq's plasma uranium program — something that was missed entirely by U.N. weapons inspectors combing Iraq for WMD.
You see, the war was about anything but a mass-murderer who opaque to the world sought to dominate his people, neighboring states, and use terrorist to do the dirtiest of his dirty work.
This is particularly troubling, since it indicates an active, ongoing attempt by Saddam to build an Iraqi nuclear bomb.
"What was most disturbing," said John Tierney, the ex- FBI agent who translated the tapes, "was the fact that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N. Special Commission (or UNSCOM, the group set up to look into Iraq's WMD programs)."
Perhaps most chillingly, the tapes record Iraq Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz talking about how easy it would be to set off a WMD in Washington. The comments come shortly after Saddam muses about using "proxies" in a terror attack.
9-11, anyone?
In short, let us repeat: President Bush was right. We had to invade to disarm Saddam — otherwise, he would have completely reconstituted his chemical, nuclear and bio-weapons programs when inspectors left.
Saddam probably knew better than to use them himself against the U.S. But it's likely he wouldn't have hesitated giving one or more to terror groups with which he had routine contact.»
It could only be about the theories western academic leftist could imagine, because suddenly if it weren’t, they would be wrong for once – and they aren’t capable of dealing with that. So it HAD to be about something else. It just HAD to.
