Wham bam ...	On prend l'Imam ...
... thank you Imam.	... et on recommence.

Were Those American Flags on the Anniversary of D-Day, or Portraits of George W Bush?

A French antiquarian in Paris's outdoors antiquities market tells me that on June 6, she attached two American flags to her stall to honor the D-Day anniversary. As it happens, not many people seemed to notice, except… three or four people, who came up to… criticize her for her displayal of the Stars and Stripes.

But you know how it is with the French, don'tcha? "It ees only America's leaders zat oui have somes'ing against. It ees not America eetself. It ees not ze American people, who remain our frien's. Ze United States we like."

You don't say! What a relief! We're so glad to hear that! We're so glad to learn the extent to which you appreciate our friendship!

What Recent U.S. Film Describes "a Country Being Eaten Away by Corruption and Bigotry"?

Given the opportunity, Le Monde's main movie critic never fails to use his columns to castigate America, its leaders, and/or their policies. We shall see more of Samuel Blumenfeld in the coming weeks, but suffice it to say that in this week's Le Monde 2, he uses an article on Paul Verhoeven to lambast George W Bush.

That is hardly newsworthy, perhaps, given the reputation of the Starship Troopers director. But an interview with the Coen brothers in an earlier issue of Le Monde's weekly supplement says that their latest opus describes

a country being eaten away by corruption and bigotry, by finance and religion, a perfect metaphor for George W. Bush's America.

Now, I have no doubt that the chances are great that Joel and Ethan Coen are, like many in the movie business, pro-Democrat and anti-Republican. There are only two problems here: The first is that not once in the three-page article do the brothers ever speak of politics or American policies, domestic or foreign, nor do they ever mention a single politician's name. (Blumenfeld's description is even more jaw-dropping when one realizes that the movie star they chose for the main role is known neither to be particularly anti-Bush nor to have ever been, in any way, a knee-jerk opponent of the U.S. military.)

The second is that The Ladykillers is the remake of a British comedy from 1955, when the 43rd president was 9 years old. Of course, it might be interesting to find out if the intention of the earlier movie's director (Alexander Mackendrick) was to castigate that era's British government. But my hunch is that the Ealing Studios comedy (with Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers) was mainly what it purportedly set out to be: a comedy for the masses to enjoy.

The choice of words seems therefore to be entirely gratuitious and entirely Blumenfeld's, who probably — I know I'm extrapolating, here — felt empowered by the prevailing attitude in France (and at Le Monde) that the White House should be castigated at every possible opportunity.

Lire la version française

For the French: 'Terrorists on leashes' = 'war crimes' 'American beheaded' = 'permanent improvement'	Pour les franchouilles: 'terroristes tenus en laisse' = 'crimes de guerre' 'Un américain décapité' = 'une nette amélioriation'
More crap from the anti-Semite Willem in Libération PropagandaStaffel. The beheading of American prisoner Paul M. Johnson Jr. is covered by an article on page 10 of today's edition as compared to the twenty odd pages splashed with blown up photos of hazing of terrorists we had recently.	Encore de la camelote signée par l'antisémite Willem dans Libé PropagandaStaffel. Le meurtre par décapitation de l'américain Paul M. Johnson Jr. mérite un article à la page 10 de l'édition d'aujourd'hui par opposition à la vingtaine de pages, couvertes de photos agrandies de terroristes bizutés, que nous avons eues récemment.
'Ossama, I'll need your threats up until the November elections. Afterwards, you can go on vacation.'

Yeah, but once Kerry is elected the hangover will have a real kick to it	Ouais, mais une fois Kerry élu la gueule de bois sera carabinée
Slam it! It's possible to vote Democrat but you have to drink heavily beforehand. This being the Dhimmicraptic Party maybe they should offer free blowjobs ...	Cul sec! Il est possible de voter pour le parti Democrate mais il faut beaucoup boire avant. Comme il s'agit du Parti Dhimmicrotte, ils feraient mieux de proposer des pipes gratos ...

Somebody Put Something In My Drink	Quelqu'un a glissé un truc dans mon verre
The drunks over at AFP like a hit of anti-Semitism with their liquid lunch.	Les pochetrons chez l'AFP apprécient une bonne dose d'antisémitisme avec leurs déjeuners hyper bien arrosés.

Down the tubes	Aux chiottes
The future of Zeropa.	L'avenir de la Zéropa.

Wake up people	Réveillez-vous, les gars
The religion of pieces strikes. Kill faster. Total war. By all means necessary.	La religion des pets (car ça sent la merde) frappe de nouveau. Tuer plus vite. Guerre totale. Par tous les moyens requis.

"Merdre en France"

We had nothing to do with this. Especially not W. Le Monde reports:

A shocking scene in the capital toward noon of an early June day on the sidewalk by the square Saint-Médard, opposite a fancy caterer and a cable's length, for those unfamiliar with Parisian topography, from the main offices of Le Monde: a man crouched between two parked cars, a man who clearly qualifies as a bum, ass bared and turned toward the public thoroughfare, in the process of defecating shamelessly.

He was taking his time, tearing off a page of newsprint which he would make use of, sighing with ease, all with an attitude that conveyed a certain nobility. His friends, settled a bit further off, paid him no attention and the passersby, who were numerous at that time of day, pretended not to notice this all out assault on modesty which can't have failed to disturb them.

In his supreme indifference, this modern Diogenes erased with a single stroke centuries of civilization and education in personal comportment and projected his unwilling spectators into a distant era when such a scene would have been common and shocked no one. A time when, in brief, shit was an object of humor and defecation could occur in common, if not in public, without causing offense.

Aristophanes had a character shit on stage who claimed he'd eaten too many green pears and that this had rendered him a bit peaky, though this defecation added nothing to the intrigue; the audience delighted in it, no doubt. Rabelais wrote at length on the many ways of wiping oneself and the downy neck of a gosling seemed best to him for this operation. It is less well known that in the 17th and 18th centuries existed an entire branch of literature known by the equally ugly as erudite word "scatalogical" and which was hidden by historians of letters and which appears in no textbook: one of its greatest works was indisputably Caquire, a parody of the undigested play Zaïre, a tragedy by Voltaire, in which the characters' names Cucumane and Pupartout are themselves worthy of a dissertation and are due to the fecund imagination of one M. de Comble [clearly a pseudonym! — D].

But there can be no equal to the ode entitled The Royal Turd, written by Piron in 1744 to celebrate the convalescence of Louis XV; since the King had regained his health, it was fitting that the restoration of his natural functions be celebrated publicly and without malice. Here is a stanza, with a wit that is very much "Merde in France," and which allows us to measure how much our mores have changed:

O heavens, what do I see!
It is a turd...
How its substance is praiseworthy!
It is fat like a sausage;
It would well adorn a dinner table.
It is the work of the greatest of kings.
Its smell, its taste have the odor of the throne
And never could a bourgeois anus have delivered
One such as this without a stout matron.

Olivier Houdart

Running on empty	Panne de sens
Incredibly stupid cartoon by Plantu, even by Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine standards. This in a country where a wingnut like Thierry Meyssan sells 200,000 copies of his book and the number one political TV show stated that Israel was behind 9-11.	Voici un dessin incroyablement bête, même pour Le Monde Al-Jazira sur Seine, signée Plantu. Ceci dans un pays où un fou furieux comme Thierry Meyssan peut vendre 200.000 exemplaires de son livre et la première émission politique télévisée peut affirmer qu'Israël était responsable du 11-9-2001.
Bush to 9-11 commission: 'You want to hear the best part? John Kerry did it!'

Send him back COD	Renvoyez-le en livraison contre remboursement
Send this prick Moussaoui back to France in a pigskin shitsack.	Renvoyez ce fumier de Moussaoui en France dans un sac à merde en carcasse de porc.

Fighting (for) Words?

The French defense industry's hold on the news media is set to grow even tighter as Brussels has announced its approval of French defense and aeronautics contractor Dassault's buying back a significant portion of media conglomerate Socpresse, taking its shares in the company from 30% to 82%. Last March, I blogged Dassault's announcement that it intended to do this. See that post for more info.

Socpresse controls 70 publications in France including conservative daily Le Figaro and anti-Lance Armstrong publication L'Express. All in all, 70% of all French newspapers are in the hands of two weapons manufacturers. Defense and aeronautics contractor Lagardère owns the Hachette publishing empire, which is the world's largest magazine publisher and the tenth largest publisher and which owns, to name but a few examples, the magazines Paris Match (which recently scored a soft-ball interview with president Bush) and Elle and the radio station Europe 1. Hachette Filipacchi Médias claims to own 238 titles in 36 countries, which publish a billion copies and over 130,000 pages of paid advertising every year. The company also owns 40% of Editis, Vivendi Universal's publishing outfit.

Back in March, Le Monde, which is owned by a holding company shared between a number of companies and not-for-profit institutions, each having no more than a fraction of the ownership, published an editorial to express its outrage:

Do we have any idea what the reactions would be in the United States if the Washington Post were purchased by Lockheed Martin, maker of the F-16? In France, Dassault announced on Thursday, March 11, that it would buy up the remaining shares in Socpresse [a newspaper group that owns numerous French papers] owned by the heirs of Robert Hersant and take its ownership of Socpresse from 30% to 80%.

[...]

[...W]e must hope that the arrival of Dassault won't mean a return to the days when the press danced for billionaires. We must also hope that it doesn't see the media come under political influence. Suspicion may be heightened by the friendship that exists between Jacques Chirac, president of the Republic, and Serge Dassault, the CEO of the family business, who was also a regional advisor to the Rally for the Republic [France's governing party] and mayor of Corbeil-Essones. A suspicion that can grow still further, given the direct dependence of the very same groupe Dassault on State contracts for its fighter planes.

One would want to think that a reversion to the customs that once existed between the power and the press is impossible, Today they are forgotten. The journalists of every editorial board, including those in the Socpresse group, know the price of independence: the credibility of their newspapers depends on it. Yet Italy shows us that there is still a vivid temptation for the power to take the media in hand.

According to to-day's article in Le Monde, Dassault president Serge Dassault, now 79, said in 1997, "I want to own a newspaper or a weekly to express my opinion." Le Monde cites Forbes magazine as having estimated that Dassault is France's third richest citizen with a personal fortune of €5.2 billion.

In March, I also referred to a passage on page 70 of the now famous 1991 exposé Notre Allié Saddam ("Our ally Saddam"). We get a glimpse of Dassault's attitude to expressing one's views:

In February of 1991, Olivier Dassault, RPR member of the Assemblée Nationale and son of Serge, president of the group, revealed one aspect of these ambiguous relations: "I chose to sanction Michel Rocard (this was a censure motion at the Assemblée Nationale). So my father, who thinks that one does not vote against a government to which one is selling planes, pulled me from my position as head of planning for his factories, a position I'd been in for six months [Paris Match, 14 mars 1991].

Big Fish

The AFP reports:

PARIS (AFP - 21:38) — Syrian authorities have extradited Saïd Arif, a "hardened Jihadi," to France where anti-terrorism specialists have called him a "big fish" with connexions to al-Qaeda.

According to French intelligence agencies, Arif maintained ties to so called "Chechen" networks, suspected of having planned one or more attacks in France.

He is "one of the most important (suspected terrorists) that we have caught for years," sources familiar with the case said on Thursday. "He's a big fish. He is very close to al-Qaeda circles among which he has some importance."

One judicial source said Arif is "close" to the Jordanian Abu Mussab al-Zarkawi. He is also "in close contact" with one one of the latter's closest lieutenants, says the Interior minister. al-Zarkawi is believed to be al-Qaeda's specialist in toxins and chemical poisons.

Arif, who was to be delivered to anti-terrorism magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière for interrogation, was extradited with in hours of his detention by Syrian authorities as part of the investigation into the "Chechen networks."

This investigation, that began with the networks recruiting combatants for Chechnya, led to the dismantling of a suspected terrorist cell in the Paris region in La Corneuve and in Romainville (Seine-Saint-Denis).

See here for the Interior ministry's press release. See here, here and here for more on Judge Bruguière.

Nazi Graffiti Sprayed on French Mosque

The AFP also reports:

LILLE, France, June 17 (AFP) — A swastika and racist slogans extolling the Nazi genocide have been sprayed on the wall of a mosque in the northern French town of Lens, police said Thursday.

The graffiti in black paint read, "Death to Islamists," and "Hitler would have gassed you, long live the pure race SS881488." It was discovered at the weekend and has since been cleaned.

The regional Union for the Algerian Community said in a statement that it was "very perturbed at the resurgence of acts of intolerance, racism and xenophobia. Today it is the mosque at Lens that is paying the consequences."

There has been a wave of similar acts of vandalism at Muslim and Jewish sites in recent weeks in northern France.

Awesome!!

Yet again from the AFP: Striking electrical workers blacked out Chirac's office!

Yep. They did. Staging wildcat actions, they blacked out the Eiffel tower, the Champs Elysées, the US and British embassies and several French ministries as well. This was to protest the proposed partial privatization of Electricité de France (EDF). On Tuesday there was a demonstration while others cut power to several cities and towns, including prime minister Raffarin's home.

Finance minister Sarkozy has stated his determination to press forward with the liberalization despite (er... rather, because of) the fact that it further damages Raffarin's position. The plan calls for allowing private ownership of 30% of EDF. EDF has 167,000 employees, revenues of €45 billion and either controls or has important stakes in several foreign energy companies.

Back in April, I blogged a police investigation into the EDF worker's council that had widened to include the Communist Party and an enormous labor union.

France Denies Negotiating Weapons Contract with Israel

Xinuanet reports that the Defense ministry has denied negotiating a weapons contract with Israel. Xinhuanet says Ha'aretz reported that France was preparing to sign contract worth $150 - $200 million during Eurostatory 2004 (14-18 June). Details of the deal released to the public indicate that Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) was to participate in the manufacture of the Eagle 1 drone by EADS (for a recent post relating to EADS, see here) and to be based on the Israel Defense Force version. That would have been the largest Franco-Israeli arms contract since France imposed an arms embargo on the Middle-East following the 1967 Six Day War.

"The contract doesn't exist," said a Defense ministry spokesman who did not rule out that IAI's services might still be retained for the project in the future.

Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française now online.

Web surfers can now search the first two volumes of the dictionary for free for words ranging alphabetically from A to moudre.

Joëlle Aubron

Joëlle Aubron, the day she entered prison and yesterday, the day she left.

A member of the banned French terrorist organization Action Directe, Joëlle Aubron, 44, was released from prison on health grounds yesterday. She is suffering from cancer. "The liberation of my comrades is a battle still being waged," she said. (According to the law, those suffering terminal illnesses can be released to die at home. The law that allows this is named for Dr. Bernard Kouchner, one of the most popular politicians in France who angered more than a few with his support of the US intervention in Iraq.)

Aubron's group, Action Directe, was France's version of the Red Army Faction. Formed in 1979 by Jean-Marc Rouillan, it sought to overthrow the French government, which it viewed as undemocratic, in favor of a Marxist/Leninist regime. A year later, 22 of its members including Rouillan and his girlfriend Nathalie Ménigon, were collared by police. In 1981, president Mitterrand included them on a list of presidential pardons. The group then became highly active but was officially banned in 1982, when it began to collaborate with ETA, the Spanish group GRAPO, the Italian group Prima Linea, Germany's RAF and the Italian COLP.

From 1982 to 1985, AD carried out numerous bombings and attacks in Paris. On February 21, 1987, the groups leaders were arrested, Aubron among them. Aubron was convicted in 1989 and in 1994 and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for 18 years. Her crimes included the murder of Georges Besse, president of Renault, and of armed forces Inspector General, gen. René Audran.

An asside: In 1982, gen Audran was France's envoy to Baghdad. Back in december, I blogged general Audran's role in France's loan of 5 Super-Etendard fighter planes to Saddam (an entirely unprecedented maneuver) to help the latter in his war with Iran. France's Defense minister at the time, Charles Hernu, one of François Mitterrand's closest advisors, helped arrange the deal but was exposed in 1996 as a KGB agent.

Aubron will spend her days under strict police surveillance. On exiting prison, Aubron fell into the arms of German, Belgian and French supporters who sang "l'Internationale" (a hymn of far left militancy), their fists raised in the air under eight red flags, some from the Confédération nationale du travail (CNT, an anarchist union), which formed an honor guard.

Others who have benefited from the Kouchner law include Maurice Papon and former Elf president Loïk Le Floch-Prigent, convicted of embezzlement.

What do the French have in common with Hezbollah?	Qu'est-ce que les franchouilles partagent avec le Hezbollah?
Uh, besides the fan club in Sarcelles, they share this. Thanks to Tanker.	Ben, à part les supporteurs à Sarcelles, ils partagent ceci. Merci à Tanker.

If Vlady and Tony Were Willing to Play the Game, Why Not Sly Old Jacques?

Kenneth Dreyfack, a freelance writer in Paris, has an interesting article in the International Herald Tribune on how (and why) Jacques Chirac stood out from the G-8 meeting in Georgia.

Big City Nights

C'est beau une ville la nuit

Pont de Tolbiac, Grands Moulins de Paris on one side, the Seine on the other, everything blurred by the speed, the smoke, and the booze, go for it, fuck, make a B-line to the ringroad, burning the red lights as they passed underneath, here it is, the border, the Rio Grande in slumbering concrete, the suburbs on the other side, the barrio, home, covered in darkness. Quai d'Ivry, through to the Place Gambetta, go man, step on it, Marco the turbo R 5 or the Golf GTI lifted earlier just outside a movie theatre on the Boulevard Saint Michel with all its cylinders screaming, Ah! fuck yeah, and on those lucky nights, two died blonde bitches in the back seat, some trainee hairdressers from the Belle-Epine shopping center, or some screwed up chicks from a different suburb, Montfermeil, Bobigny, Créteil or someplace else, half drunk, picked up in some joint at Pigalle, or in a nightclub on the huge avenues of Paris, and who would be gangbanged in a basement back at the projects. Excerpt from the short story: 'When electric death blinks', Maurice G. Dantec, 1996

Pont de Tolbiac, Grands Moulins de Paris d'un côté, la Seine de l'autre, le tout brouillé par la vitesse, la beu et l'alcool, allez, putain, d'une traite jusqu'au périf, sous lequel ils passaient en grillant tous les feux, ça y est, la frontière, le Rio Grande de béton endormi, de l'autre côté la banlieue, le territoire, chez eux, plongé dans le noir. Quai d'Ivry, jusqu'à la place Gambetta, vas-y, mets le boulet, Marco la R 5 turbo ou la Golf GTI chouravée un peu plus tôt près d'un cinoche du Boul'Mich hurlant de toutes ses soupapes, ah! ouais putain, et les soirs de chance, avec deux pétasses fausses blondes décolorées à l'arrière, des stagiaires coiffeuses de Belle-Epine, ou alors des gamines paumées d'une autre lieuban, Montfermeil, Bobigny, Créteil ou ailleurs, à moitié bourrées, levées dans un rade de Pigalle, ou une teboi des Grands Boulevards, et qu'on allait pouvoir se tirer à; plusieurs dans les caves de la cité. Extrait de la nouvelle: 'Quand clignote la mort électrique', Maurice G. Dantec, 1996

The Common Thread Among All Recent American Presidents…

John Vinocur again hits the nail on the head in his weekly International Herald Tribune column.

Ronald Reagan, who Europe now thinks may not have been such a terrible leader after all, and George W. Bush, who it persists in regarding as fairly awful, shared a problem. They asked the Europeans to do what they could not easily offer.

So did Jimmy Carter, like other presidents. And in some respects, Reagan's Democratic predecessor hit on Europe earlier and for more than the Great Communicator ever attempted. The fact is that Reagan personified what Carter had started — walloping defense budgets, cruise and Pershing missiles to be deployed in Europe, and continuous dunning of the NATO allies for more military spending and sanctions against the Soviets, who had invaded Afghanistan. …

Very much unreassuringly for Europe, Reagan took credit for concepts like the Evil Empire to characterize the Soviet Union, and the space-based missile defense called Star Wars. Sounding well over the top, he even shouted seemingly loony stuff at Mikhail Gorbachev from a rostrum at the edge of the Iron Curtain in Berlin, like: Mr. G, tear down this wall.

Reagan was frontally, irredeemably American entering the White House in 1981, a time when Western Europe's economy and social fabric looked the sounder of the two continents' and when many Germans were convinced they had invented a magical massage of cash and euphemism that would soothe the Soviets into letting democracy tiptoe to their door.

Projected against this European mind-set (which, modified to fit current circumstances, applies again to Bush), Reagan was a dummy, a cowboy, and a voodoo economist creating McDo jobs. The clod actually used words that fit what he meant. The man said that if NATO's European members didn't militarily face down the Soviets' SS-20 missiles targeted on them by agreeing to deploy the cruises and Pershings, the Russians would win.

That was confrontation. And since much of the American press had amplified a vision of Reagan as a Master of Simplism, the Europeans jacked up those decibels in his first years and made Reagan out to be a dangerous fool. Demonstrations against the American missiles — Reagan-as-cowboy posters were their mark of ultimate disdain — rolled across Europe in numbers that made the anti-Iraq marching of 2003 seem weedy.

The common thread among all recent American presidents, whatever the party, and Reagan and George W. Bush, continues here.

Just as Carter initiated many specifics in a tough American line on Europe that Reagan would accentuate, Bill Clinton, in a sense, set in place a part of Bush-America's continuing tone.

It was Clinton's United States that was first accused by France of being a hyperpower and the world's great unilateralist menace. And that didn't like the Kyoto environmental treaty, the International Criminal Court, or having to run U.S. bombing targets past NATO committees in a Kosovo war whose multilateral confusion left the U.S. administration saying never again.

Read also about the differences between the two Republican presidents' experiences

Update: Clinton Offers Little
Sympathy to Europe's Bush-Bashers

Junky	De la came
After junk food, junk journalism.	Après la malbouffe, le maljournalisme.

Leftist vermin	La vermine gôchiste
While Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine spews rubbish about 'hate sites', the French extreme-Left gets a free pass.	Tandis que Le Monde Al-Jazira sur Seine éructe au sujet de 'la haine sur la toile', la gôche franchouille sanguinaire bénéficie d'une immunité totale.