Vergès Update

Sulfurous French lawyer Jacques Vergès has been looking ready to defend Saddam for some time. (See here for more info.) The BBC says it's now official.

French lawyer 'to defend Saddam'

A French lawyer who made his reputation defending some of the world's most notorious figures says he will take on Saddam Hussein as his latest client.

In his long career, Jacques Verges defended Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal and former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Mr Verges says the request came in a letter from Saddam Hussein's nephew, Ali Barzan al-Takriti.

He says he will also defend former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.

He will be supported by a dozen other French lawyers to mount a defence case.

Mr Tikriti sent the following message to Mr Verges: "In my capacity as nephew of President Saddam Hussein, I commission you officially via this letter to assure the defence of my uncle".

sundry

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I've been flat out. To make up for it, here's a few briefs on things I've been meaning to mention.

A:	Our friend Rémy Ourdan participated in an on-line chat with lemonde.fr readers on Wednesday. Sarah: Since you're on the scene, can you clearly tell us what the feelings of the population are about the military operations and other attacks organized against the occupation forces? How does the Iraqi in the street see these operations: acts of resistance or terrorism? Remy Ourdan: For the Iraqis, these are both at once. Many publicly applaud the attacks on the American army because this army is seen as brutal and arrogant. But the same people describe all attacks that target Iraqis as terrorism. Moreover, let's reiterate that the occupation army is very unpopular but that many Iraqis privately admit that they don't want its immediate departure, out of fear, even now, of civil war. Later, he had this exchange: Richard 75: It seems that Iraqis (even when they are anti-American) have a virulent anti-French feeling because they think that France tried to save Saddam. Can you confirm or deny this? Remy Ourdan: This feeling is very strong in Iraq. Almost all the Shia, almost all the Kurds and many Sunnis think that France defended Saddam Hussein to protect an old friendship and so-called economic and petrol interests. Also, many Iraqis are angry with France because of its attitude after the war. Pragmatic, they feel that once the conflict was over and Saddam gone, France and the other countries of Europe should have come to their aid for humanitarian reasons and, again, not to leave them alone to face the Americans.
ß	A mere two years after the BBC, that cutting edge culture journal, did it, lemonde.fr helped its readers stay hip on Tuesday by informing them of the Google Bomb phenomenon. They point to the WMD and miserable failure pranks but they forget — or are too clueless to be aware — that they are themselves the victims of such a prank.
Γ	Having found a distributor, Mel Gibson's Passion of the Qrap opens on more than 520 screens in France next Wednesday where, though it contains perhaps a little bit of violence, it will only be forbidden to children under 12. The AFP is reporting that three Jewish brothers, the Benlolos, who have not seen the film, went to court to-day, seeking to have the movie banned. Patrick Benlolo called the film an "incitation to racial hatred because it is the result of an erroneous presentation of the bible, portraying Jews as deicides, which is the cause of the Jews' persecutions." Olivier Laude, the lawyer representing distributor Quinta Communications claims the Benlolos' complaint should be dismissed because it seeks redress for potential violence, which only criminal authorities can prosecute, though it seems that the movie has already provoked its fair share of violence elsewhere. [3/28: In the comments below, a reader points out that in fact the film prompted the murderer to confess, not to kill — which I'd have noticed if I'd bothered to read the articled linked here. ¡No Pasarán! regrets the error.] Meanwhile, Marin Karmitz, head of the MK2 movieplex chain, has refused to screen the film, calling it "fascist." His interview with Télérama provoked a flurry of hate mail but also approbation. In particular, he said: It's a film that turns barbarism and violence into a spectacle. For two hours, we see a man being tortured, nothing more. Second fascistic element: revisionism, the way in which History is charicatured, reduced to aphasia for the sole benefit of noises, blows and cries. To deny Christianity its words it to deny its greatness. At last, given the depiction of the Jews, anti-Semitism is the third element of this fascist ideology. But, in America, the Jewish lobbies have led themselves astray by putting the debate in this framework only: they have unwittingly fed the far right attack of which this film is evidence. Paris Archbishop, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who was born Jewish but converted, has decried the film's "sadism." He told the Catholic TV station KTO that "the Gospels are neither the Gallic Wars nor Napoleon's memoirs." The love of God "is not measured in liters of hemoglobin and spilled blood," he said. "For us, Christ's blood is in the chalice during the liturgy." (The film meeting with great success in Lebanon: "the fact that the film is being shown in the current context of the Middle East conflict, opposing Israel and Arabs, is not unrelated to the success of the film," said one spectator.) Lustiger, you'll remembe, is the one who criticized Abbé Pierre for endorsing the Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy
Δ	Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo has an essay in Thursday's Le Monde entitled "Return to Reason." While the war in Afghanistan, decided on both in the framework of international law and out of the pressing need to end the obscurantist Taliban regime that acted as a refuge for bin Laden and his organization, partially attained its goals (partially, because the number one terrorist and one of his closest followers still move about freely), the Invasion of Iraq to put an end to the alleged threat of Saddam Hussein has been (with the not negligible exception of the latter's arrest and the dismantling of his regime) a total absurdity. [...] The phraseology of the current occupant of the White House regarding "international terrorism" has nevertheless had an immediate effect, both in the East and the West, in the European Union and in Russia. Sharon has seized on it to crush the Palestinians and pen them in ghettos encircled by a wall even more bloody than the one erected in Berlin a half century ago. Had enough? You may remember that, like Russell Banks and Oliver Stone, Goytisolo is a member of the International Parliament of Writers who visited Yasser Arafat in 2002. While there, one member, Nobelist José Saramago, told reporters that "What is happening in Palestine is a crime which we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz, at Buchenwald," adding that "There are no gas chambers yet. But that does not mean there will never be gas chambers . . . one can kill without having gas chambers." Following these remarks, Saramago was denounced by other IPW members. However, philosopher Alain Finkielkraut also reported the IPW subsequently "appealed to the director of France Culture to rescind the invitation extended to [then Israeli ambassador to France] Elie Barnavi, the representative of a “terrorist, neo-fascist and nazi” government, to a radio program which they were also to attend. Laure Adler didn’t give in so Juan Goytisolo refused to sit at the same table as the ambassador."
Ε	Le Nouvel Observateur has posted its cover story from March 25, 1974: "Can we do without the Americans?" ...of the thirteen divisions that the American army currently comprises, four (a third!) are in Europe. Of the 2,250,000 men in the the US Armed forces, all services combined, including the Marines, 313,000 are supposed to defend us. There are 228,000 of them in West Germany, 3,000 in Greece, 2,000 in Holland, 3,000 in Iceland, 10,000 in Italy, 1,000 in Morocco, 2,000 in Portugal, 7,000 in Turkey, 23,000 in the Sixth Fleet and 2,000 roving. [...] If one considers, in addition to this spearhead, the deployment of the 8,000 nuclear warheads located somewhere in Germany, one can form a rather precise impression of the great atomic umbrella that the United States — for the modest sum of $7 million a year — graciously extend over European heads that are grateful or that should be...

Reprieve?

French Police Arrest 3 for 'AZF' Terrorist Threats, RTL Says

March 26 (Bloomberg) -- Paris police have detained three suspects in the course of their investigation into threats by the previously unknown "AZF'' group to bomb French railroads, RTL radio reported, without saying where it obtained the information.

Yesterday, repeating a demand for about $6 million, AZF said it was ending its bomb threats in France temporarily, according to a letter released by the French Interior Ministry. The group said the suspension would allow it to address "technological, logistic and other shortcomings.''

French embassies in Djibouti, Mali receive threat letters

DJIBOUTI (AFP) - The French embassies in Djibouti and Mali have received letters threatening French interests in the two African countries, the embassy in Djibouti and sources in Mali said Wednesday.

Several letters have been received in recent days by French embassies in "seven or eight predominantly Muslim countries," a judicial source in Paris said Wednesday.

"The threats against French interests in Djibouti were contained in a letter" sent from France, a French diplomat in Djibouti said.

He said the letter had been signed by "Mosvar Barayev, commando."

Commander Abu Sayaf: 'No brigade of Movsar Barayev is in existence'

[from Kavkaz Center]

In a brief interview to Kavkaz Center news and information agency Chechen Commander, Amir of the Islamic Regiment of CRI Armed Forces, Abu-Sayaf (Said-Emin) strongly denied the media report that Chechen fighters (Mujahideen) allegedly have anything to do with the letter containing threats to carry out terrorist acts on the French soil, which French authorities mentioned not too long ago:

"There is no 'Brigade of Movsar Barayev' in existence. This is a lie. There is the Islamic Regiment of CRI Armed Forces, which is a part of the Southwestern Front of CRI Armed Forces and which Movsar used to be in command of earlier. And today I am the Commander of this Regiment. All of our military targets are located in Chechnya or in Russia. We are not waging a war against France. France did not attack us. We are waging a war against the Russian empire and we are conducting strikes on our military adversary. This is why I am calling on the French Government to stop its anti-Chechen hysteria, to stop the filthy political fuss around Chechens and to stop echoing Moscow."

Growling for Colombani

Any of you who have seen me over the past 10 days knows how furious I get anytime I read or hear the French media trying to stuff down our throats their self-serving lying charges (those against Aznar, Bush, and Blair, i.e., anybody whom they don't feel any sympathy with).

So when I read that the Mémorial de Caen was organizing a conference with Jean-Marie Colombani, among others ("QUELLE LIBERTÉ POUR L'INFORMATION DANS UN MONDE INQUIÉTANT ?", organized in tandem with Les Amis de l'hebdomadaire La Vie and Reporters sans Frontières), I knew I had to attend. I wanted to give Le Monde's director a piece of my mind (in a diplomatic manner, natch). Three hours before it started at 7 pm on March 23, 2004, I jumped into my trusty jalopy, and drove the 260 km to Caen, arriving just in the nick of time.

And sure enough, the first thing any of the five intervenants did (with a constant wry smile on his face) was to attack the lies of politicians, ridicule the partisanship of the media, and bemoan the jingoism of the population (meaning those of the US, the UK, and Aznar's Spain exclusively, bien sûr). It was Jean-Marie Charon, "Sociologue des médias" (whatever that means), who opened the débat — the others being (left to right on the admittedly unclear photo) Colombani, Walter Wells, Directeur de l'International Herald Tribune (beard), Jean-Jacques Lerosier, Grand reporter à Ouest-France, and Jacqueline Papet, Rédactrice-en-chef de RFI, with the moderators answering to the names of Daniel Junqua, Journaliste et Vice-président de RSF, and Jean-Claude Escaffit, Journaliste à La Vie et Directeur des Amis de La Vie.

Before I left Paris, I'd reviewed and written down (in telegraph-style) a handful of arguments: these ranged from the Iraqis quoted in Reason, on Iraq the Model, and in Le Monde itself, to Doug's post on Le Monde's partisan mistranslation of Michael Ignatieff's piece in the New York Times.

The only problem was a rather big one, I learned as a I headed for my seat: questions would not be permitted, except in written form on small pieces of paper handed over to one of the animators. So I knew I had to pay close attention if I wanted to find an appropriate moment when to jump in. And I would obviously not have time to develop any of the arguments (especially since Eskaffit seemed to be a control freak).

It happened towards the end. There was a brief lull as Wells was about to make his last extensive remarks. Suddenly everybody turned to me as I let out : "Je pense que nous devons tous remercier les médias français pour leur admirable abilité à détecter les mensonges. Mais je ne comprends pas pourquoi ces spécialistes en la matière ignorent des sujets qui ont été traités dans le Herald Tribune, par exemple." (This was punctuated by Eskaffit's protests on his mike, you realize.) "Nous avons pu y lire des articles détaillant ce qu'on pourrait taxer de mensonges dans le camp de la paix, comme le fait que les Allemands, les Russes, et les Français avaient pas mal d'affaires avec les autorités baasistes, et que Total devait avoir un contrat exclusif avec Saddam Hussein. Pourquoi les médias français n'en font-ils pas autant état que de ce qui concerne les Ricains, les Rosbifs, et les Espagnols?"

Eskaffit was growing increasingly more vocal in asking/telling me to keep quiet (shades of Chirac?) — he claimed that "de toutes façons", nobody could hear me — so seeing the end approaching (and having a hard time competing against a microphone), I pulled out my final ace — the final ace being a book, which I held above my head. (Yes, there did seem to be a somewhat theatrical element to this scene; why do you ask?) "Et en matière de mensonges, il y a ce livre d'un rédacteur de La Croix, qui a été licencié pour l'avoir publié, qui s'appelle Comment la presse nous a désinformés sur l'Irak. Et qui raconte les partis pris des Français pour diaboliser Bush, pour sanctifier Chirac, et pour communier avec les partis de la 'paix'."

Even a few audience members had by now started to tell me to keep quiet, but that seemed an appropriate place to end anyway, so with that I sat down.

As for Eskaffit, he went on talking to the intervenants… ignoring completely what I had said. (While a couple of people behind me asked to see the book.) Well, I felt I had done my blogger's duty, so to speak, so I sat back, pretty content with myself.

Then, as Junqua made his last remarks, I understood that some people had heard me; the RSF moderator surprised me by pulling out his own copy of Alain Hertoghe's book (which he had in his briefcase), and explained that it provided a negative view of the French media during the Iraq war. But then he added that there was another book, detailing the French press's doings during the first Gulf war, with a positive slant, and that one could not read the first book without comparing it to the second. He tried to conclude that Hertoghe's book was a partisan "brûlot" that was not very friendly to his colleagues. (This from a colloque which had just declared that, happily, the old tradition in the press of refusing to criticize one's colleagues had now become "caduc"!)

I wasn't going to let him get away with that as the final word, so I let out another comment: "Les médias ont complètement censuré ce livre!" (But Eskaffit immediately started interrupting again.)

Afterwards, I went up to speak to some of the intervenants. Wells asked to see Hertoghe's book, which he wanted to check out. As for Junqua, he admitted it was news to him that the La Croix editor had been fired as a result of the book's publication.

So, all in all, a satisfying 10 minutes. (But hardly worth doing again, not at that distance. At least not without a couple of chums to have a drink with, afterwards.)

P.S. This is my first post for ¡No Pasarán! Muchas gracias, amigos, for inviting me to participar.

Ha!

"Germany is no threat to terrorism!" writes David Kaspar.

We got that attitude...

sorry folks: we had to smoke a commenter who couldn't mind his manners. That was simply not tolerable. The revolution is aware that the forces of reaction are in our midst and it will act accordingly to stamp them out. Don't make us send H.R. here after you (see left). Therefore, let it be known that we reserve the right to ban discourteous posters immediately and without appeal (especially anyone caught using this juvenile term). This blog represents an unreasonably large portion of our spare time so it ain't here for you to piss on (or.. in better syntax: On for you to piss, it is not here.)

El Justiciero

Time has come for decisions. Either Europe unifies to resist the engineers of the apocalypse, following Tony Blair. Or it poses as an opponent of the United States, following the pseudo-"camp of peace" led by Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin and the hesitating Gerhard Schroeder. The "viva la muerte" chanted by the Islamist legions vindicates Tony Blair. But the terror they spread, petrifying European citizens, threatens to lead to resignation after resignation. — My personal hero André Glucksmann in the Wall Street Journal. (Hat tip: Franco Alemán of Hispa Libertas — sitting in for Tim Blair — Alemán also blogs on recent revelations about what the Aznar government knew and when it revealed it).

Glucksmann also gave an interview to Le Figaro yesterday. "Sleeping soundly is the slogan of every cowardice," he hissed. Here is more:

[...]Are Europeans blind to this threat?
Opposite such a ferocious desire for annihilation, by what perversion of intelligence is one able to chastise not its henchmen or its agents but those who, in churchillian fashion, have from the very first day decried, identified and fought the destructive rage driving the international terrorist organizations? What visual dysfunction must one have to substitute the slogan "Aznar, Basta Ya! for "ETA y al-Qaeda, Basta ya!" and to exorcise a planetary threat by brandishing quaint signs adorned with the word "Paz" ?

Precisely. In your book, West Against West, you talk of Islamism as if of a machine for "total war" against civilians...
The fantasy of a great planetary revolution, anti-Liberal, anti-Western and anti-capitalist has by turns fed the fanaticism of the nazis, the communists and the Islamists. It is their secret nihilist convergence that explains their common taste for redemptive violence. The obsessive fear common to these movements is not of capitalism but of the "spirit of capitalism" (Max Weber) and human rights which are inseparable.

In other words, as you say in your book Dostoevsky in Manhattan, Islamism is one of the many contemporary variants of nihilism. Can you explain this point?
Some commentators would have you believe that Islamism is not nihilistic because those who are mad for Allah "believe" in an absolute. Indeed: their absolute is terror. Islamism, like communism and nazism, is in fact the crowning achievement of a desire for annihilation: better to want nothingness itself than not to want anything at all. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche called that nihilism and Heidegger would call it "desire of desire." The nihilists want to rule by chaos and tyranny. They show themselves to be all the more bloody for thinking, deep down, that evil, like the devil, that other stale idea from the superstitious era, no longer exists. "May the sun burn out!" : that was how Leon Trotsky invoked the "eternal darkness." In Baghdad, Istanbul, Atocha or Jerusalem, the terrorist sacrifices to the same logic. Islamism is the local dialect of a globalized, destructive state of mind. The nihilist, be he Islamist, Bolshevik, fascist, racist or chauvinist, breaks every taboo and shrinks before nothing, like the child soldier of Monrovia who, when asked whether he might slaughter his own parent, answers, "Why not?"

[...]

You call on intellectuals to have more lucidity and courage in the face of international jihadism. What do you mean?
Comes the moment for decisions. Either Europe unites in resistance to the engineers of the apocalypse, as Blair has chosen; or it poses as an opponent of the United States, the path of the pseudo-"peace camp," behind Chirac, Putin and the hesitant Shroeder. The "viva la muerte" chanted by the Islamist legions vindicates Blair. But terror they inspire and that freezes the European citizen risks, on the contrary, compounding retreat upon retreat. For the Old Continent, nothing would be more juvenile and more fruitless than hoping to cement its unity in opposition to the United States.

In other words?
Europe's genuine cement must be the struggle against terror and the absolute rejection of the massacre of civilian populations. Let's judge a political doctrine by its effects. The dainty pleasure of putting sticks between the Americans' spokes leads to European impotence, to the paralysis of the Security Council, to the dramatic weakening of Nato. Let's stop jumping around like baby goats, shouting, "anybody but Bush!" After all, that "cretin" George W. Bush isn't all wrong: a minimum of democracy and a zest of tolerance in the slums of the world, sometimes introduced from outside and manu militari will foment security for Madrid, Paris, London and New York.

See some of my other Glucksmann translations here, here, here and here.

Liars!

Last week, the New York Times Magazine ran Michael Ignatieff's thoughtful essay on the year that has passed since the war first began. Not surprisingly, NYTM's copy editors entitled it, "The Year of Living Dangerously" (after the 1982 Peter Weir movie).

This week it appears in translation in Le Monde. The title? "How I changed my mind on Iraq."

Oh, really? Igantieff changed his mind? Where do they get that? To me at least, it looked as though he explicitly denied this in the third fucking paragraph:

A year later, Iraq is no longer a pretext or an abstraction. It is a place where Americans are dying and Iraqis, too, in ever greater numbers. What makes these deaths especially haunting is that no one can honestly say -- at least not yet -- whether they will be redeemed by the emergence of a free Iraq or squandered by a descent into civil war.

Oh... wait a minute. I see. Ignatieff talks about having "second thoughts." Their translator Florence Lévy-Paoloni did not render this as doutes but as "changing my mind." Rather presumptuous of her, no? For the example sentence "I'm having second thoughts (about it)," my own dictionary gives "Je commence à avoir des doutes (là-dessus)," (I'm starting to have doubts (about it)).

Who is Florence-Lévy-Paoloni? A highly active English-to-French translator it seems. She's also been available for the publications of other illustrious commentators such as Robert Fisk, Scott Ritter (twice!), Robin Cook, Gore Vidal (despite the spelling error, it's her), Engels and Amos Oz (at least when he spoke out against the war).

What an interesting collection of people! I wonder if she shares their views on the Iraq war? Might she have been tempted to translate Ignatieff's words tendentiously because of this?

Man, they are getting a letter from me!

smackdown

My translation of a painful report in Le Monde is up over at Watch:

"While the American leadership is compounding error upon error in Iraq, the Europeans and the French in particular are even stupider because they determine their stance only in reaction to Washington. They do not take Iraq and its inhabitants into account at all," says Fakhri Kareem, editor-in-chief of the newspaper al-Mada, trying to sum up popular sentiment. "Iraqis think France doubly betrayed them, first with Saddam, then with the American occupation. France cares only about its anti-American position. It is forgetting the Iraqis. Chirac and de Villepin must understand that no Iraqi finds their position courageous... What did France do to help Iraq free itself from the dictator and then to help Iraq regain its sovereignty? Nothing!"

As Mårten notes in his presentation, I found this originally through an essay by the intrepid Erik Svane, who points out that appears opposite an interview with the FM, "Dominique 'Who is a Man' Villepin™," as he's called these days. Writes Svane, "what's extraordinary is that the article by Rémy Ourdan completely contradicts (though one can feel that the reporter wrote this article grudgingly) the cartoon by Plantu and also the editorial line of the paper of record and of the French media, and that of the French government."

Two other noteworthy things: Mårten also points out that I wrote to him in an email that "even though it appeared in today's print edition, they've already taken the link to the story off their Web site and I can't find a direct link through the usual means." Svane doesn't link to the story either so I'm assuming he couldn't find it either but found it in the print edition. The only link I can find is to the archived version meaning that, on the date of its publication, it couldn't be found on Le Monde's Web site. If it weren't for Svane, I never would have seen it. How many other politically inconvenient articles have I missed this way? Le Monde does this on occasion: an internet chat with filmmaker Sa'ad Salman (which derided France and Europe's position on Iraq in violent terms) was quickly pulled after it first appeared and replaced with another, more ideologically acceptable one. Salman laughed about this when I interviewed him last summer. (See him talking on French TV: dialup/broadband).

Secondly, Svane observes that Ourdan was one of the French reporters fingered by whistle-blower Alain Hertoghe in his book for having written on more than one occasion that the taking of Baghdad would be a "21st Century Stalingrad." Hertoghe writes that some French journalists seemed ready "to fight to the last Baghdadi."

ALSO: See this little article over at LOTF.

journalism... ?

"'A lot of French journalists are shit,' Wady, the sculptor, observed one afternoon as we shared a narghile filled with apple-flavored tobacco. 'They come here and talk against the U.S. in a stupid way. They don’t care about the crimes of Saddam Hussein.' And it’s not only the French, noted Esam Pasha, a painter and translator for the U.S. military: 'European and Arab journalists talk to us, but they don’t care about our happiness in being liberated. They only want us to make anti-American comments.' Even a cabbie who took me to the Shabander one afternoon weighed in. 'Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia TV, no good,' he said. 'They only show pictures of bombings and killings of Americans -- always how things are bad in Iraq, never how they are getting better.'

"Worse, I heard many stories at the Shabander about foreign correspondents staging news events to discredit the U.S. One young man introduced me to a Spanish photographer who, he later reported, had just finished posing an Iraqi woman in a nearby pile of rubble looking plaintively toward heaven, as if seeking deliverance from U.S. bombs. Rasim, the painter, claimed he witnessed Arab TV journalists pay idle Iraqis to light a car on fire and throw rocks to create an 'anti-American' demonstration. 'These journalists come here with their minds already made up,' he groused. 'They’re not interested in anything that contradicts their anti-American viewpoint.'"
— Steven Vincent in this month's Reason. (Hat tip: the Web-majestic Erik Svane.)

The Letter

Regarding the letter below, Mosvar Barayev is apprently this guy. However, the authors misspelled his first name, which is supposed to be Movsar. He was the leader of the Chechen group that took a Moscow theater audience hostage in 2002.

The letter was also received by Le Monde and Le Parisien. Authorities are now stating that the letter doesn't fit normal patterns and the police are openly skeptical, saying they've never heard of the group (feh!) and that Islamist terrorists don't usually announce the steps they intend to take. Le Monde's Piotr Smolar also says that the reference to Charles Martel is more reminiscent of far-right ideology.

Whatever the doubts of the police, the public is very much on the qui vive, as can be seen from the behavior of the delirious motorist Jonathan blogged below. To-night, the 8 o'clock nightly news on France 2 showed the Paris bomb squad blowing shit up all over town and dynamiting the tailgates of abandoned trucks. The Prime Minister's office is stepping up it's a security plan known as vigipirate (the name of which is a combination of vigilance and pirate, or "high-jacker" or "terrorist." Not obvious what an English equivalent would be... "operation vigirist"? There's a reason this sort of thing is rarely immitated.)

UPDATE: The Beeb reports that "a suspicious object on a railway line north of Paris hit rail services, including the Eurostar, but it turned out to be an oxygen canister. ¶ The bomb disposal experts who examined the object marked 'AZF, do not touch' dismissed the threat as a bad joke."

FURTHER UPDATE: [deleted: it was boring]

Red alert

In 2003, public debt reached €16,000 per French citizen: The state's finances have seriously deteriorated and the shortfall in Social Security is growing. The accrued deficit is now as high as €63.4 billion. Faltering growth will not bring things back into the black. Fees withheld have risen for the first time since 1999. [...] Since December 31, 2003, France has effectively no longer met the two Maastricht criteria that established a ceiling for public deficit at 3% of GDP and debt at 60%: the former has reached 4.1% and the latter, 63%. [...] Nevertheless, the deterioration of public finances is unprecedented. Since the 1974 oil shock, France has never been able to end a fiscal year with a budget surplus; it always spent more than it took from taxpayers. In 2003, it spent €273.8 billion for €239.8 billion in revenues, generating a record deficit of €56 billion. One fifth of spending is not covered.

2004 will not be the year of reversal: the forecasted deficit is €55.5 billion, which means that come the end of September, the administrations will be living on credit. The deficit is not due to investment, capitalizing on low interest rates. Only 10% of state expenditures are invested. [...]

The state isn't the only one in the red. In 2003, public corporations — health and unemployment insurance — watched their deficits explode, reaching €9.4 billion. Social security now has a discovery authorization of more than €30 million with the deposit insurance corporation [did I get that right? — D] In all, 43.9% of the wealth produced by the economy that is received in the form taxes and withholdings is not enough to cover the cost of services.

Bombs 'to split Spain from allies'

A document published months before national elections reveals al Qaeda planned to separate Spain from its allies by carrying out terror attacks. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Slante!

Are they any safer?

TF1 news reports that "a letter signed 'Mosvar Barayev commando,' addressed to the prime minister, threatens France with attacks if the law on secularism which specifically forbids wearing the Islamic veil in public schools is not withdrawn. Here are the main elements."

'In the name of Allah, forgiving and merciful on behalf of the the servants of Allah, the Mighty and Wise to the servants of the French Republic (...), this message is addressed to the leader of the government, Mr. Raffarin:

'On 10 February 2004, a new height was reached in the war being waged against Islam by the Coalition with the passage of a law barring the hijab from grammar and high schools and public places by the Assembée nationale. (...) We had excluded you from a certain category among your infidel brethren because of your opposition to the unjust aggression of the Crusaders in Iraq but you yourselves have taken the decision to put your names on the list of the most dogged enemies of Islam. (...)

'We take France for an avowed enemy of Islam along with the rest of the Coalition and the Maghreban and Arab governments that collaborate with you and we intend to retaliate. With this hateful, discriminatory and anti-Muslim law, you have shown the whole world and all Muslims that you were well and truly on the side of the devil and we shall treat you as such until the Final Day unless you reverse your decision and comply with the will of Allah who is also your God.

'Know that we have succeeded in penetrating, and establishing ourselves on your soil, the same land in which Charles Martel and his troops defied us, land of pride and arrogance, people of wine and pork, of licentiousness and nudity (...)

'Our organization, though wounded, has been able to right itself, thanks be to Allah and even to become larger and master new technologies and secure massive recruitment of volunteers specifically for jihad, and Europe is a new land of jihad.

'France will be safe neither on its soil nor in its interests abroad (...).

'Present in France for some time but also very mobile, we were waiting for three sings before making ourselves known:

• The passage of the 10 February law constituted a first sign to us

• The signal clearly and explicitly given by Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri (Osama bin Laden's second in Command. A February 24 audio recording attributed to him explicitly denounced France for having forbidden the wearing of the veil in public school, — Ed.)

'It has been forbidden to us to reveal the third sign but this is the one that will determine for us the moment when we shall act.

'Mr. Raffarin, know that what is promised to you is certain (...). We ask that you immediately withdraw your law on secularism (...). If you do not withdraw it immediately, we shall respond severely and with an intensity not seen before in your country since the acts of 1995. We ask Muslim men and women to avoid crowded places and to cling to Allah's moorings.'"

RWANDA

This is an old skeleton in France's closet yet it appears the MFA has no prepared response. It came up when the final subject was discussed during to-day's press conference. The matter elicited a pregnant reply:

President Kagamé has leveled extremely serious accusations against France, which he accuses of having participated in the Rwandan genocide. What is your initial reaction to these statements?

Spokesman: I have no reaction.

In your face, Zapatero!

The BBC reports on the results of a study (PDF, 249k/27 pp) — one the Beeb commissioned itself and which it calls "authoritative" — of Iraqi public opinion on the occupation and the future of Iraq:

An opinion poll carried out in Iraq will make good reading for US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The poll suggests that Iraqis are happier than they were before the invasion, optimistic about the future and opposed to violence.

[...]

It suggests that the reporting of the daily attacks on the occupying forces in Iraq could be obscuring another picture.

Seventy percent said that things were going well or quite well in their lives, while only 29% felt things were going bad.

And 56% said that things were better now than they were before the war.

Can you imagine?!!

French forces nearly captured Bin Laden — perhaps several times

AP Paris Osama bin Laden narrowly escaped capture by French troops working with American forces in Afghanistan, perhaps several times, the head of France’s armed forces said Monday.
.
French soldiers are determined to capture the fugitive head of the al-Qaida network by the end of the year, Gen. Henri Bentegeat said Monday.
.
‘‘Our men were not very far,’’ Bentegeat told France’s Europe-1 radio station. ‘‘On several occasions, I even think that he slipped out of a net that was well closed.’’

...as I was saying

"'¡No pasarán!' was the message of those defending ballot-box democracy during the Spanish civil war. As the full horror of the Madrid atrocity unfolds, surely the time has come to unite against terrorism — the new fascism of the 21st century, wherever it takes place." — Rotherham MP Denis McShane in Thursday's Guardian, in case you missed it.

keynote address: Sheikh Yassin

Tim Blair wonders in a recent post about the dubious suggestion by the Guardian that terrorism should be warded off by some sort of interfaith conference that could slake the anger of the Muslim world. Can they really be unaware that such conferences occur regularly and that they this isn't already happening? Window in Lebanon's entry for February 25 reads as follows:

For those who had doubts, the views that the radio station RFI (Radio France Internationale) holds on the Middle-East remain rather pronounced. The proof: the visit by Richard Labévière, world service editor in chief of the and editorialist for RFI, to study and documentation center, linked to Hezbollah, which contacted him so that he could participate in a conference on dialogue between Europe and the Islamic world. M. Labévière claims that it is important to converse with everyone, and not to be sectarian. This is very naïve. Accepting the invitation of a party that openly calls for the destruction of Israel is not discussion. It's taking sides. And this isn't the first time RFI has taken sides against Israel as a state.

Good reporter that he is, Mr. Labévière nevertheless got a scoop: "First off, I'd say that al-Qaeda no longer exists. At any rate, it's no longer an operational organization since September 11, 2001. That date was in a sense the result of the rise in power of an organization that is now no more than an empty shell, a kind of franchise, an ideological logo."

In a book hailed by the talking heads, Gilles Kepel, eminent Islam expert from the Center for International Research and Study [a.k.a. Sciences-Pô], also once ventured that Islamist terrorism was no longer a threat. Six months before September 11, 2001.

Do a search for Mr. LaBavure... sorry Labévière and you'll find he appears in all the wrong (read paranoid) places. Recently translated into Engish, his book, Dollars for Terror, was a boon to conspiracy theorists everywhere. Here's a Brazilian Web site accusing him of "base anti-Americanism." Since I once studied Portuguese for all of ten days, hold your applause while I try my hand at translating the first sentence:

Richard Labévière is an editorialist for Rádio França Ineternacional and a well-regarded journalist, however, it remains that his theses are always permeated with an anti-Americanism, which stands out and is similar the Brazilian kind, which bears the marks of primariness.

I'll appreciate pointers if I screwed this up.

...can't believe the news to-day

Tomorrow's edition of Le Monde, which hit the streets this evening, contains the following editorial on the recent purchase of one of France's largest media groups by one its largest defense contractors.

Le Monde Editorial

The French Exception
LE MONDE | 13.03.04 | 11h32

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%.

Not only has Le Figaro fallen into the hands of the company that manufactures the Mirage, but with it, L'Express, L'Etudiant, Le Progrès, Le Dauphiné libéré, La Voix du Nord.... Seventy publications in all. Curiously, this maneuver has not caused national upset over the future of the press and its independence from the economic and political powers. When one adds that groupe Lagardère, formerly Matra, owns the Hachette empire, one can calculate that in all 70% of national newspapers are the property of two weapons manufacturers. At the very least, this ought make one think.

France has also entered into the grand movement that is concentrating the world press, with smaller newspapers being absorbed into big corporations. The reasons are the same for the press as they are for other industries: a need for internationalization and greater reach. But France adds other incentives for concentration by imposing very poor general conditions on its press groups. That French newspapers should be reduced to throwing themselves at the feet of companies in other industries (weapons, in this instance, but also construction for Bouygues [a telecoms giant] or luxury goods for LVMH and Pinault) speaks volumes about the many difficulties: want for capital, inflated printing costs, distribution hurt by a dramatic reduction in the number of points of sale. The handicaps are legion against those who would survive in the information business. The government should be alarmed by this French exception, a deplorable one, and consider it relevant to democracy.

The things at stake here are at the heart of causes taken up by Le Monde, be they editorial or economic. It is in response tot this that our newspaper has sought to join with others in a group predicated on independence from the political and economical powers. In so doing, our desire is to help better the structures of a sector that is ill and frail.

Therefore we 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.

• ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN THE 14.03.04 EDITION

Anti-corruption crusader and former investigating magistrate Eva Joly (previously discussed here, here and here) writes in her memoires (pp. 274-75):

Of the 16 largest companies in France, 11 are active in an area where the practice of high corruption is common: Total, Vivendi environnement, Bouygues, Vinci, Airbus... [based on 2002 figures, see here for 2003 figures]. But this fact is rarely mentioned; above all because most of the national media belong to these groups, which encourages neither to curiosity nor to debate. [The TV station] TF1 belongs to the Bouygues group [NB: Bouygues was part of the consortium involved in building Osirak], Le Figaro and L'Express are controlled by the Dassault group. [Radio station] Europe 1, Paris Match and the majority of publishing belong to Lagardère.

Joly doesn't take the time to lay the full extent of Lagardère's presence in the publishing, broadcast and advertising industries. Separate from its defense activites, Largardère Media is has considerable operations in four areas: publishing, print media, distribution and broadcast. The site reads that "Hachette Filipacchi Médias, a Lagardère Media subsidiary, is the world’s top publisher of magazines. Its 238 titles in 36 countries total over one billion copies and more than 130,000 pages of paid advertising annually. HFM has turnover of 2.2 billion euros, 54% of it generated abroad." Tenth largest publisher in the world, Lagardère also owns 40% of Editis (formerly Vivendi Universal Publishing).

Relative to Dassault's relationship to the government, page 70 of Notre allié Saddam (a book I have discussed here and here) gives us an illustrative anecdote:

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].

Just to give you an idea of what exactly we're talking about, let's consider one example of how the French defense industry reacts when people get too close to sensitive matters. On pages 70-1 of her book, Joly writes:

Such a threatening reality sometimes becomes hazy in my mind. I learn to live without thinking about it. But the backlash is hard. As was the very high-ranking French general with star-spangled epaulettes whose acquaintance I made during an impromptu cocktail party at an embassy. We engaged in light conversation for a few moments. Then suddenly he put his blue eyes right in mine.

"I imagine it must not be much fun for you everyday, ma'am. Such agitiation, the pressure, the threats. But I'll think you'll make it in the end."

I didn't answer. He paused for two seconds. I started to smile in thanks. Then he continued, coldly.

"It'd be another matter if you left the petroleum business to look at weapons sales. With us, there's no warning. If you start an investigation, I'll give you 48 hours..."

Bland Spongiformity

Before he became the lightening rod that he is today, member of the Académie française and philosopher Jean-François Revel traveled to Italy and returned with the accounts that would form the book Pour l'Italie ("For Italy"). The book was an argument about the nature of Italian society, its social conservatism, sexual practices and its treatment of women. Yet even before his transformative Vietnam-era visit to American University campuses (after which he wrote his pro-American polemic Without Marx or Jesus), one can see traces of the figure that was to emerge. Here's a quick rendering of a passage from page 136:

The commonplaces of international psychology are as stubborn as they are numerous and false. This is why the quality (and the demerit) of being cartesian is attributed to French intellectuals. The author of the most wooly-minded page will write: "We French, born cartesians...," etc. However, in our time, the French are anything but cartesian: they are claudelian, heideggerian, Christian, spenglerian or malrausian but not cartesian. Even scholarly works are beset with obscurity, prolixity and disorder. Given that the entire French system of evaluation and examination is founded on the art of dissertation, it is surprising to learn that most French academics can neither write not compose.

By contrast, the only true cartesians to-day are the English. Their academic works are the only ones that are rigorous and well-written. It is the same with their newspapers: reading the weekly The New Statesman [Oh! How the mighty have fallen!] is consolation for the bland spongiformity of so many French weeklies that think themselves "alive" and "spirited," etc.

UPDATE: I posted some of the dirty bits over at LOTF. In case you're interested...

Dieudo gets the egghead treatment...

Prof. Eric Marty, author and editor of numerous books, gives a rather abstruse analysis of the content of Dieudonné's statements.

VIEWPOINT

Take heart, Dieudonné!, by Eric Marty

LE MONDE | 06.03.04 | 13h58

Israel, the land that, in its flesh, is surely the most comfortably universal and cosmopolitan of all.

The Dieudonné scandal is pronounced in three parts. The first is his appearance on the Marc-Olivier Fogiel's show dressed as an orthodox Jew, with the accouterments of a Palestinian terrorist and shouting "Isra...Heil!" : here the Jewish victim materializes as his two executioners.

The second part are the political statements in which it appears that Jews are "slave drivers converted to banking" and that Israel has "financed apartheid its final solution projects" (Le Journal du Dimanche, February 8).

Third part: his appearance through numerous media, yelling about conspiracies, particularly on Canal+, on the evening of Saturday, February 28, for example ("7 jours au Groland"), where he acted the part of the banished, and where it emerged that his banishment illustrates the fact that he is speaking a truth that everyone wishes to silence.

This anti-Semitic farce in three acts is easily recognizable; so much has it been played out in history that now it only exists in parodic form, in which until then, the last known actor had been Jean-Marie Le Pen.

[...]

It shall be said that a victim — and blacks are obviously victims —ultimately has two choices: he can either condemn his genuine, historic tormentor — and this is the case with current historical projects on slavery — and thus cease to be a victim; or he can play on what René Girard has called mimetic rivalry: the victim choses not the enemy but the rival, that is to say the one who appears, in his eyes, unjustly, as identified by the world as being more of a victim than he is.

The rival victim is the one who prevents the victim from being, and proclaiming himself a victim the way he wants to. In the mind of anti-Semites, such is the place of the Jew. The ideas emerging from this small but virulent fraction of anti-Semites among the black community eliminates the Jews as victims by making them into executioners (executioners of the Palestinians), but, as if this weren't enough to cancel out the weight of mimetic rivalry, the Jews must be made into their own executioners: the Jew is a slave driver, a financier of apartheid, etc.

[...]Dieudonné and his friends should take heart: Israel is the first civilization in the world to have admitted the absolute anthropological equality of blacks by viewing the sons of Cham as the direct descendants of a universal parent (Adam), and this isn't the least benefit of monotheism that the self-proclaimed atheist that is Dieudonné might think on.

Moreover, because the notion of "race" is foreign to the Jewish being, there are even Jewish "Negroes" — the Falashas — that Operation Moses, starting in 1984, and then Operation Solomon, in 1991, have saved from the discriminations they suffered in Ethiopia and integrated into the land of Sem, Israel, the country that, in its flesh is surely the most comfortably universal and cosmopolitan of all.

During the Dieudonné scandal, an AFP bulletin informed us that the mayor of Nablus resigned in the face of the terror that the Palestinian militias (including the al-Aqsa martyrs brigades) had been inflicting on the population since the start of the Intifada (September 2000) and of which the latest incidents had caused the death of 30 people, including the mayor's own brother. That I know, the French media took little notice, if any. That's another one for Dieudonné and co. to think on: the real criminal is rarely the scapegoat!

Eric Marty is professor of contemporary French literature at université Paris-VII - Denis-Diderot.

• ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN THE 07.03.04 EDITION

Ouch!!

Remember Tim Blair's Beat-up of the week? Le Monde has just fallen for it, hook, line and sinker. It's also shot up the reader recommended list to first place.

UPDATE: Le Monde responds over at LOTF.

You forgot your turtle-neck!

Hi! I'm a horse's ass!
—Robert Harvey

I did say that France had been unlucky recently in the quality of people publicly associated with it. Here's yet more proof.

Surely, Yale professor Farid Laroussi's essay, "Why I became an American," was a painful moment for Le Monde's readers. Into the breach comes Stony Brook professor of Comparative "Studies" Robert Harvey, with his essay, "Why I became French" :

When Farid Laroussi brandished his "Why I became American" (Le Monde, 10 December 2003), without ever really explaining why he had become American, but rather to spit on the country where he obtained the degrees that have allowed him to take a position at an important private American university, I was outraged.

And this, from a man who is supposed to teach comparison!!? Pity the poor students at SUNY Stony Brook who have this doddering idiot inflicted on them. I found that Laroussi's incisive and deft language resisted translation, as is often the case with good writers. An immediate comparison reveals that Harvey is decidedly out of his depth (and if anyone fails to address his stated subject!... note that Harvey spends much of his essay, explaining not why he became French but rather his frustration with the conventional misuse of the word "American" to refer to US nationals).

Let's recall what Laroussi said about migrating to the US:

I chose the United States. It is moving to learn that you are offered a second chance without having to prove your hands are clean [i.e. “white”]. Neither my name, nor my professed religion or ethic origins have been an obstacle in this. The police leave me alone because here one is not subject to spot identity checks. My friends never feel it necessary to share a good Arab joke with me. ... I was already an American the minute one of my ancestors left his village on the edge of the Sahara, leaving behind him a world without possibilities.

Today, while there may always be things to be criticized, they are less decisive, less cutting, than suffering the judgment of more than five million of my former compatriots who, during the last presidential elections, told me by voting for the far-right candidate that they would never want me around.

How did Harvey miss that? The foul stench coming form his direction indicates that the "outrage" he felt was in seeing criticism of France, the object of his devotion and the instrument of his thick-witted vanity. Of those who saw Laroussi's essay, the ones more nearly approaching literacy understood that his French/Arab origins make his criticism of France all the more stinging. Harvey, who describes himself as a "privileged" white Christian and "international academic" (not a playboy), sees only an Arab doing what he thinks Arabs aren't supposed to do: criticize France and praise the United States. Pressed to respond, Harvey stumbles all over himself and, in their eagerness to print an American in praise of France, Le Monde's editors overlooked Harvey's embarrassing stupidity.

"Agreeing with Laroussi on many points," writes Harvey, "I prefer here to offer a few thoughts on my recent decision to 'become French.'" This, Harvey tells us, is because he wants "to continue participating in the public life of the two countries where I still principally practice my profession." (Which is comparing things, in case you've forgotten.)

Yet, having said this, Harvey doesn't feel he's achieved his appointed task (i.e. explaining why he's now French). He continues and reveals, perhaps unwittingly, the real reason:

At bottom, I don't believe a given individual is of a determined nationality from birth.

Which is as much to say that for many long years of anguish, Harvey could only be French when his head hit the pillow.

It remains that isolationism, protectionism, obese arrogance and the irascible theocratic reaction of the United States have become atavistic. In this country, which is nevertheless my own, the power does what it wishes. No discussion with it is possible. In my view, the US model is at once inexorable and intolerable.

....Ah! An American who hates himself: this is the peak of "anti-Americanism." Let's be clear: I am a US citizen; I have a great many reservations about the domestic and foreign policy of the United States; I don't much like the US mentality.

So, it's clear to those of us who might have thought that Harvey was a dork on Long Island who couldn't get tenure: he is in fact a post-national citizen of the world, one of the enlightened, the great and the good, dusting off American provincialism like so much dandruff. Let's just hope that he renews the prescription on his wire-frames in time for that Lars Von Trier retrospective...

...and that one day he reads this post after googling his own name

¡socialismo sí!

Hola camaradas!

We have made some changes to the appearance of our blog. In bolshevik terms, of course, this is a matter of indifference. Yet we feel that, for our readers, nothing is too good.

We are none of us the best at Web design so if you encounter any problems viewing this blog, please avail yourselves of the comments function or email us through our respective blogs to let us know about these problems.

¡Vivan los héroes de las Brigadas Internacionales!

Bullet holes in the cemetery walls...

We, of ¡No Pasarán!, are duty-bound to remember.

Get To Work

Tonight, you've a chance to save a woman's life merely by wiggling your fingers about on a keyboard. An Iranian friend in Paris emails to say that he has received word that the execution of Ms. Mandana Nik-khou Monfared, 25, called "imminent" Amnesty on February 3, is now truly drawing near.

The word comes from among Iranian exiles in contact with Amnesty, who are asking concerned individuals to write to the Iranian authorities, asking for clemency. They say the Supreme Court has upheld her death sentence for the murder of her fiancé — barring a pardon, this can only be commuted if the victim's kin waive their right to retribution and accept blood money.

Amnesty also reports that last year, Mandana retracted the confession she reportedly gave police while in custody and insisted she was innocent, stating that it was her husband (whom she planned to leave for Masoud Khazi, the victim) who committed the crime. This January, Mandana's nine year-old son wrote an open letter to Ayatollah Shahrudi, head of Iran's judiciary, saying "We do not have a father and only have our mother. We ask you to let her come home to us... Our mother is innocent."

Only the French-language "urgent action" alert gives the addresses of those persons to whom pleas for Mandana's life should be addressed. They are

Judicial Authority: His Excellency Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi Ministry of Justice, Park-e Shahr Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran Telegrams: Head of Judiciary, Ministry of Justice, Tehran, Iran Fax: +98 21 879 6671 (send messages, "care of Director of International Affairs, Judiciary") Term of address: Your Excellency

Spritual Guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran: His Excellency Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei The Presidency, Palestine Avenue Azerbaijan Intersection Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran Telegrams: Leader of the Islamic Republic, Tehran, Iran Email:webmaster@wilayah.org (In the subject field, write "To the attention of His Excellency, Ayatollah al Udhma Khamenei, Qom") Term of Address: Your Excellency,

President of the Islamic Republic of Iran His Excellency Hojjatoleslam val Moslemin Sayed Mohammad Khatami The Presidency, Palestine Avenue Azerbaijan Intersection Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran Email:khatami@president.ir (please resend the message if it bounces) Term of Address: Your Excellency

Send copies to: Mr Mohammad Hassan Zia'i-Far Secretary, Islamic Human Rights Commission PO Box 13165-137 Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran Fax: +98 21 204 0541 and to the Iranian diplomatic representatives in your country.

For more information, please also see this matter, which may also require immediate action, though Amnesty's French language alert writes "after 23 February 2004, please check with your section about whether intervention is still necessary. Thank you."

They say each letter genuinely helps. Please write.

Boni-Fascism

In recent weeks, France has been particularly unlucky: some ugly characters have come to the fore to greet the public and hey have not made the greatest of ambassadors.

In addition to Mr. IsraHeil, or Dieudonné, there was our friend Franck "boum!" Moulet. On Thursday, Libération told us (misspelling "Rikers" yet again) that Franck lives with his younger sister, has barely any belongings and earns his living doing odd jobs (packaging, pizza, handing out flyers and two years in a university library in Marseilles). He also "cries easily and sometimes his tears have nothing to do with America and prison. But he doesn't want the help of a psychiatrist. His family regrets this."

Worst of all, however, was the reemergence of Pascal Boniface, who published an unusually stupid essay in last Saturday's Le Monde. In responding to an earlier essay by Francis Fukuyama — who had argued that France's Arab minority has an influence over French public policy — Boniface demonstrates why audacity is sometimes a minor virtue, writing:

It is amusing to see an American criticize a country on the pretext that its foreign policy is supposedly influenced by the electoral weight of certain communities. Isn't this one of the characteristics of American foreign policy?

The fact that Boniface is insinuating that Jews control the United States isn't the only cause for upset. Close readers will notice that he is once again stepping on the very same land-mine that forced his resignation from the Socialist Party in 2003. In an internal memo on campaign strategy to Socialist leader François Hollande (which was later leaked to the press), Boniface wrote:

I am struck by the number of young beurs [i.e. Arabs] and French Muslims of all ages who claim to be on the left but who, due to the situation in the Middle East, say they won't vote for Jospin in the presidential election. An attitude toward the Middle East question that is perceived as unfair and, of course, one they think is yet again at the expense of the Arabs, demonstrates to them that Arab/Muslim community is not considered, if not rejected by the Socialist family. The situation in the Middle East and the timidity of the Socialists in condemning Israeli oppression encourages the alienation of Muslims in France, for which no one, Jew, Muslim or Pagan, can be happy. It is doubtless better to lose an election than one's soul. But, by putting the Israeli government and the Palestinians on equal footing, we're risking the loss of both. Is support for Sharon worth losing 2002?

When this memo is mentioned publically, Boniface makes oblique efforts to deny he ever wrote it but his opponents simply trot out the direct citation above. In August of 2001, Boniface also published an essay in the pages of Le Monde entitled "Letter to an Israeli friend" that read, in part, "By permitting too much of the Israeli government's impunity, France's Jewish community could end up the loser in the medium term. The Arab and/or Muslim community is surely less well organized but it seeks to be a counterweight and will fast outweigh the Jewish one in numbers, if this isn't already the case."

For having essentially told French Jews that they'd better sever ties with Israel or risk alienation, Boniface came in for a bit of a drubbing. Then Israeli ambassador to France, Elie Barnavi shot back with his own essay:

I can't tell what revolted me more about the "Letter to an Israeli friend" (Le Monde, 4 August, 2001), by Pascal Boniface. The insincerity of the title, which infuriatingly reminded me a pamphlet once published by Ibrahim Souss [former PLO Paris representative and author of the pamphlet Letter to a Jewish friend] ? The saccharine and unctuous tone which fails to disguise an implacable hostility? The gulf between the tonality of this text and the brutal one he committed for internal consumption by his party? The content, rich in ideological insinuations but politically vacuous? It was all of the above, probably.

Boniface demurred for 22 days before responding and when he did, the essence of his reply was that he found "unacceptable such intellectual terrorism that consisted in accusing any person of anti-Semitism that dares criticize the Israeli government, an accusation which ought, incidentally, to apply also to Israeli pacifists and to those French Jews who share this point of view."

The title of this response, "Are we allowed to criticize Israel?" lent itself to a book that Boniface published in April of last year (ranked 4,526 on Amazon, even now). Yet soon after this, things got too hot for Boniface and he was made to walk the plank, after a "friendly" luncheon on July 18, 2002. An article appearing that day in Libération (available for free here) revealed that in a note to François Hollande (ya think M. Hollande is simply turning these notes over to the press?...) Boniface wrote that "communitarianism has returned in force to the Socialist Party" (note that it was good old Tariq Ramadan who sparked so much controversy by accusing France's Jewish philosophers of "communautarisme"...) and that certain "friends of Israel" were to blame for his demise, particularly former Finance minister Dominique Strauss-Khan, "When I'm being violently attacked by the Jewish far right, seeing DSK throw me to the wolves among a hostile crowd [...] and call me a 'wretch' is troubling," wrote Boniface. It was deputy mayor of Paris and friend to Lionel Jospin Pierre Schapira who was among the first to point out that "it's rather outrageous of him to criticize communitarianism when he's the one who brought out the idea with his note to Hollande."

Hi there, Clowns

Despite how things may appear, there are, in fact, three of us working on this blog. It's just that I've been busy. Sorry to have so been derelict in my duties, folks.

Here's an update on the Dieudonné matter. At W's request, I'm posting a translation of an open letter to Dieudonné that appeared in Libération last Monday. It's written by Elie Semoun who was once Dieudo's sidekick. (Oh... and he's Jewish.)

Letter to Dieudonné, caught up in controversy
Hi there, clown

By Elie SEMOUN
Monday 23 February 2004

Hi there, clown, it's the Jew "converted to show-biz" writing to you... I'm just writing to say that I like you a lot and it hurts to see you like this. Not because you're a so-called victim, censored by a lobby of slave-owning ancestors, because you've got no more work, no more audience and no more money (that, I can't believe). But because you are no longer the one I used to know and with whom I laughed more than I ever had with anyone else.

Back then, I didn't even know you were bi-racial and I'd forgotten that I was Jewish. And that's of no more importance than if I were Belgian or Breton.

You and me, we didn't give a damn for the whole world, least of all ourselves. People loved that. Among the anti-racists, we were the best. I continue to carry the torch for our humor, even if sometimes I play the nightingale for the young ladies!

This world still scares me as much as it used to and we both dislike the same things. We both laugh at the same idiots. My characters are often yours and vice-versa. I think humor is the best way to talk about what's real in life.

But that's why I feel like I've been betrayed. You're not the same Dieudo. You've had funnier days... you seem to want to remake "Cohen et Bokassa" but you've either forgotten the script or the second character.

I can see you jumping around like a bad minstrel in a two-penny circus, applauded by people who are out of view, lit only by the foot lamps. I see some pretty dodgy guys... some have yarmulkes or keffiyehs. I see one who brought his daughter. He's got one eye and he's rubbing his hands together.

I don't want to get involved in the politics. You're worse at that than I am but talent doesn't excuse everything and some little words start a fire that nobody — except for a few mad men, but not you, I hope — would want to see go out.

I hope that I'll see you again doing what you know how to do best.

I'm writing from the island of Réunion, an exemplary land of miscegenation. That's why it's called Réunion, anyhow, and they all seem to get on well. Makes you wonder, right?

Alright, man. Take care.

ELIE SEMOUN is a comedian.

Note that, though Dieudonné was banned from the Olympia theater, Amazon is offering a DVD of Elie Semoun's performances there. What Semoun told Le Parisien was far less conciliatory than what he's written above. Semoun apparently said:

Before he turned into a fraud, [Dieudonné] made me laugh. When we were a duo, we laughed about everything, the Jews, the blacks the Arabs, but we did it with finesse and smarts. To-day, he's reaping the consequences of his attitude. [...] I don't know if he's aware of what he's provoking but I do know that if today, some people can be unabashedly anti-Semitic, he's contributing to that. Dieudonné exists only through provocation! Right now, he's drawing the whole world into it: he's talking about a plot against him, playing the martyr, but I guarantee you that in fact he is very happy. This whole business has put his name in the papers and serves his own interests.