Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
Michael Winterbottom has a (cough) documentary about Guantanamo, so naturally Le Monde has Thomas Sotinel devote an entire page to the film and the filmmaker. The last time we looked, there was still no trace of Buried in the Sand in France, nor any translation of the Wall Street Journal article, The Savages: A barbaric enemy disqualified from the Geneva Convention.
The headline only makes sense when you realize that Straub was part of Clinton’s failed policy on North Korea which envisioned giving them a reactor in exchange for them saying out loud that they’d play nice – which they didn’t. It is, incidentally, the same thing the EU3 tried to do with Iran – offer them “sweets and nuts”.
One fundamental failure of Bush's approach was the tendency to raise tensions and make South Korea nervous by stating that "all options" were the table, a phrase underscoring U.S. intentions to use force against North Korea if necessary, he said.
It needs to be noted that Straub was not deeply involved in anything that succeeded.
Guess who these folks might be:
[One] was previously a registered nurse. Two others in my company had IQ's over 150 and were members of Mensa. Two more were had law degrees. Several were published authors and poets.Their answer is usually the officially pitiable and those structurally oppressed for the public moral vanity, but sorry Spanky, as usual you’re wrong.The fuse is lit!
Some things inspire popular culture, others infect it, or are infected by it.
I think I have found the object of reference and goal that Greens can use for their future utopia: The survivors of war, overpopulation, and pollution are living in a great domed city, sealed away from the forgotten outside world. Here, in an ecologically balanced world, mankind lives only for pleasure, freed by the servo-mechanism which provides everything,
But all would otherwise not be perfect. Humans need crises to feel anguished and involved. Bleakness is, after all, the new gold standard of art, beauty, and thruth: 
Not only was the world headed for catastrophe, but there was little that could be done to avoid it. Some parts of the world might see some minor and temporary recovery, but "a minimum of ten million people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving before the end of the century"
The consequences are already clear - Earth is under mounting stress from human activities, with its climate changing and its ecosystems failing. But recognition that we must act urgently to preserve our natural habitat has been undermined by persistent failure to admit the multiplier effect of human numbers. Without policies to reduce world population, efforts to save our environment cannot succeed. With smaller populations, living in greater harmony with nature, our horizons may stretch far into the future.
However the science inspired by fiction causes further fiction to accepted as science: Social pressures on both men and women to marry and have children must be removed. If society were convinced of the need for low birth rates, no doubt the stigma that has customarily been assigned to singles and childless couples would soon disappear.
Stunningly, none of the of the fearful theories bandied about can explain our continued existence as a species – our already present sustainability, if you will, and provides insight into the whacky world of the do-gooder and their theories.
Compulsory control of family size is an unpleasant idea to many, but the alternatives may be much worse. Some governments practice involuntary population control, these usually being the poorer, less educated, overpopulated countries. Most times these countries use vasectomies on all fathers of three or more children, or a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child.
Never mind the jihadist trying to kill you now, we have naturally occurring atomized carbon to sequester!
For any reason, reasonable or not. PropagandaStaffel reports that the PS love their poop chutes: At the Gay Pride conference and festival of June 24, Ségolène Royal, the probable candidate for the Socialist Party for the presidential election of 2007, clearly changed her position on gay marriage and the adoption by homosexual couples. In an interview in the monthly magazine « Têtu » (tr.: stubborn) which appears Wednesday, she stated: “I can guarantee that I will advance the issue”, and clearly saying that these issues are part of the Socialist Party platform.
As well as talking out of both sides of their mouths. While saying that anything resembling opposition is a sign of backwardness, Royal promises that she can slime any contraversial initiative through:
With good argument [she said] “with this issue one can anger people for whom homosexual marriage and adoption by couples of the same sex are alien notions (….) I have the will to lead these reforms without wounding anyone’s feelings, without raising the public’s anger”.In other words, they really won’t bother with what the population thinks, and like all good little lefties do something ‘progressive’ to them whether they want it or not.the fuse is lit!
Le Monde editor Frédéric Lemaître had an online debate about the EADS scandal Tuesday afternoon, in which the entire affair (unlike, say, Enron) was relativized with a smile. 
The recent student protests, [Denis Hennequin] says, made him recall the unrest that roiled France in May 1968, when he watched the demonstrations as a 10-year-old from the window of his parents' apartment. "What bothers me is that what they are doing today, in a sense, is protesting in favor of the establishment; they are scared of the future," and hence against change. "I understand where they're coming from," he said. "At the same time, what a waste."
Journalists in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans' faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.Thus writes U.S. News & World Report's Michael Barone (as Sylvie Kauffmann demonstrates perfectly what he is talking about).
That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the "mainstream media" has been plunging. There's also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America--and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?
In taking on Chirac's potential heirs and French society in the International Herald Tribune, John Vinocur writes about such things as Sarkozy, the ruling party, Ségolène, and France's 35-hour workweek ("a Socialist conquest for humanity that has gone without replication elsewhere"), as well as "State interventionism that's been biblical writ forever for both the French left and right".
Corine Lesnes has an article about Jérôme Guillet, a Daily Kos contributor from (surprise, surprise) France who seems to be one of the blog's top stars (although the "Polytechnicien's" suggestion for more taxes on gas didn't go over well, even with progressives)."Je fais partie de — entre guillemets — l'élite technocratique", reconnaît-il. Et, en bon technocrate, il défend l'Etat. "Sur les questions de santé, d'énergie, de régulation des entreprises, on a besoin de gérer les externalités que les mécanismes de marché ne sont pas capables de contrôler, comme la pollution, le changement climatique."
Outre sa contribution à "Daily Kos", il a monté un site européen pour répondre aux médias anglo-saxons, où s'exerce d'après lui "une vraie démonisation" de la France, "le pays qui défend encore le rôle de l'Etat". "Les Anglo-Saxons ne peuvent pas admettre que l'électricité, en Europe, fonctionne grâce aux surcapacités françaises qui ont été planifiées par l'Etat français."
Via Adloyada on the 9 June deaths on a Gaza Beach. Human Rights Watch concludes that it was UXO, and that: the deaths were not directly caused by artillery shelling as they had claimed.
Sounds to me like Human Rights Watch is getting tired of the Pali Psycho Death Cult©® leading them around by the nose.the fuse is lit!
The war against terror is a war against domestic political opposition, not against terrorists. If it were against terrorists, we would have a national-unity type government doing all we need to do against real terrorists with broad consensus. Think WW II and FDR.
- Posted by nohero on June 15, 2006 02:44 AM
Not Bush -- that's not what this war is about at all. Successes such as Zarqawi's death, however significant or not -- we don't know yet -- are a signal to the likes of Rove and the rightwing radio wreckers who plague us to pile on big time: "Democrats would cut and run" and therefore could never have gotten Zarqawi. (Of course, they never would have been so stupid as to get us into the current mess. In fact, NO other president would have.)
The goal of the war on terror is to finish off democrats and other nonconformists asap. Al Qaida can do what they want. In fact, another real attack would enable Bush and co. to further consolidate power.
Links not by the original commentator on the Graun. The current "mess" is no different than any other one. Does the commentator suppose that George Bush was President during the Vietnam War, Korean War, Bosnia, Kosovo...?
Biased BBC asks why the coverage of this story was so limited.
"My grandfather's revolution has devoured its children and has strayed from its course," he told Al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language television station. "I lived through the revolution and it called for freedom and democracy - but it has persecuted its leaders."
It’s simple: it doesn’t fit the media’s script of parading that they seek a diversity of opinion when they prefer that it didn’t challenge their staff’s view of the world.
Writing for the Washington Post’s Editorial page of Monday 16 June 20006, Robert Kagan surprises Post readers with this and provides us with examples of the “depth” (not!) of the incessant nagging:I recently took part in a panel discussion in London about civil conflict and "failed states" around the world, centered on the interesting work of the British economist Paul Collier. The panelists included the son of a famous African liberation-leader-turned-dictator, the former leader of a South American guerrilla group, a Pakistani journalist, a U.N. official and the head of a nongovernmental humanitarian organization. Naturally, our reasoned and learned discussion quickly transmogrified into an extended round-robin denunciation of American foreign policy.
I’m going to leave it at that. It’s safe to say that the panel was made up of the ‘cream of the crop’ of the ‘world’ public opinion that so many people idolize as meaningful. What seems more evident is that there is a emotional avoidance principal at play that is the root cause of much of the passive-aggression that some try to call policy. I really have to wonder though, if those poor folk who are kept miserable by the elite represented by the panel really agree with them, or are just bobbing their heads to get that sack of rice they were promised.
As for "failed states" and civil conflict, several panelists agreed that they were always and everywhere the fault of the United States. The African insisted that Bosnia and Kosovo were destroyed by American military interventions, not by Slobodan Milosevic, and that Somalia was a failed state because of American policy. The Pakistani insisted the United States was to blame for Afghanistan's descent into anarchy in the 1990s. The former guerrilla leader insisted that most if not all problems in the Western Hemisphere were the product of over a century of American imperialism.
When someone pointed out that the young boys fighting in African tribal and ethnic wars could hardly be fighting against American "imperialism," the African dictator's son insisted they were indeed. When the head of the NGO paused from gnashing his teeth at American policy to suggest that perhaps the United States was not to blame for the genocide in Rwanda, the African dictator's son argued that it was, because it had failed to intervene. The United States was to blame both for the suffering it caused and the suffering it did not alleviate.
If we refrained from action out of fear that others around the world would be angry with us, then we would never act. And count on it: They'd blame us for that, too.
Ségo, as we call her in France, is a different, altogether more seductive creature than the dumpy hausfrau Angela Merkel, the new German Chancellor. This is a woman who wouldn't look out of place on a catwalk despite what she lacks in stature (she's just 5 foot 2) and has been dubbed the ''Socialist in Stilettos'' and ''Madame Charisma''.
Fake. A total creation of a press so lazy to know what they’ll write about in the next year, that they need to create it. It’s just like the 4 unctuous “Jersey Girls”, the leftist agitators who use the seeming infallibility of being 9-11 widows to put them above criticism or discussion in order to rail at conservatives. They are such an apparent fabrication of the press that it reeks. In New Jersey, most people hate the term “Jersey Girl.” The cranky foursome clearly didn’t come up with it – some insulated Manahattanite did in order to put on them what people west of Ohio might find to be a charming spin on them.
When I met her recently in her office at the National Assembly in Paris, she was, inevitably, running late. It gave me a chance to snoop. On a round table in the centre of the room there was a notepad, a pen - and lip- gloss.
Their only purpose for the press is to give them a vehicle to opine and provide them insurance against having to argue their own idea – the goal was to make arguing with anything they say have all the appeal of a child molester - a sexist move if there ever was one, since it's hard for a man to be a bereved widow and mother, and would never garner the same sort of attention. Let's hop back to the other side of the pond:There is something undeniably sexy about a woman in power and Ségolène embodies it. We may not agree with President Mitterand's assertion that Margaret Thatcher had ''the mouth of Marilyn Monroe'' but some of her cabinet were certainly in thrall to her.
Actually they weren't inthralled by her lips, but by what came from them. They were inspired by the depth of Thatcher’s intellect and courage, possibly even a bit scared of it. A fact a pandering writer even in the Telegraph would happily jettison.
By saying that anyone is ‘using sex’, they must mean being a female – merely another number in the genetic lottery which is only a issue for SOME people between the very narrow class-theory bookends of Euro-thought. A leader needs leadership charisma, not lip-gloss. If there is any of that rare leadership ability to be found in Royal, the press isn’t capable of finding it because of the inescapable cultural clamp of being typically European narrow-minded cultural “successes” as they like to define their own social set. It somehow validated calling Merkel a "dumpy hausfrau".
The sexism – the real sexism – and rank hatefulness and hypocrisy is palpable for a nation and continent that will evangelize and browbeat anyone they can force to listen with lectures about even handed treatment, human rights, and any other social vanity lingering in the bottom of their rocks-glasses.
If any Arab leader were to take a “President Royal” seriously, it would only be for the experience they have with the seriousness of Secretary of State Rice who treats their wife-beating instincts for what they are – another hangup that's keeping them from getting beyond the 9th century in many ways, just as Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Indira Ghandi handled their challenges. The conceit of using a term like "dumpy hausfrau" is a cheap and vicious smear that's beneath contempt because it isn't critque, but rather abuse.
Should Royal, or Bachelet for that matter, avoid similar treatment she would owe it to the real leaders who are women, not the social movements in the least. The big lie is any claim that the Marxist dominated feminist movement can make to the success of those that really broke through a glass ceiling - the conservatives. The fuse is lit!
The image of Airbus in the United States has been tarnished in the past few weeks, while that of Boeing is gilded anew. The two manufacturers have devoted themselves to a merciless commercial war using the active economic diplomacy of their governments. But their conflict is also exposed in the media. Boeing underwent quite a bit of criticisms in the press because several chairmen were unable to keep up sales. Today, the tide has turned and it’s Airbus which becomes the target of critics.It can only be about ‘image’ when you’re trying to convince yourself that it isn’t about making good planes that sell well. Chirac arranges state visits just to sell planes. Bush doesn’t seem to have time for that kind of thing. As for Boeing being ‘gilded’, one wonders if this writer has ever been to the United States. Americans aren’t nationalistic about companies, and we don’t rely on corporate sales figures to provide then with their self esteem. The fuse is lit!
The A380 is the subject of attacks over its fuel consumption, its weight, and its excessive size.
I sympathize with Domenic de Villepin, morally at-sea as he is, I really pity the guy who has to deal with people like this: POISSY, France, June 8 (Reuters) - French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, under fire after a stalled effort to cut youth unemployment, took more flak on Thursday from angry auto workers who lambasted his plans to keep older people in work.
They should simply change protocol and start officially referring to the Prime Minister and the President as “Mommy” and “Daddy” from now on.
"You don't learn anything!" one of a group of demonstrators from the CGT union called out as Villepin visited automaker Peugeot's plant in Poissy near Paris to promote his initiative to cut joblessness among older workers.
"There are 500 young people who've just been laid off while the older ones have been broken down by their working conditions and ask only to be allowed to leave in dignity!" one protester said.
Last time I checked, a government can’t create private sector jobs. They can, at best, smother it with taxes and regulation and “make employment history”, but can a government force a plant magically create work for these clowns if they shoot down any initiative to bring them into the 21st century by incrementally getting them out of the 19th century?
Lou Minatti says: follow the money. It leads to the usual suspects who supported Saddam.
15 June 2006 -As an overall picture, time has been an element in affecting negatively the forces of the occupying countries, due to the losses they sustain economically in human lives, which are increasing with time. However, here in Iraq, time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance
- From a document found in Abu Musa al Zarkawi’s cache after his defeat. It was release by the Iraqi government.
25 December 2004 -On Christmas Day former Senator and former presidential candidate George McGovern wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times (and probably many other papers) calling for an American surrender in Iraq.
- David Horowitz on former U.S. Senator George McGovern’s call for the U.S. to “surrender” in Iraq.
Again, I ask, surrender to whom?
McGovern carelessly called for an American retreat from Iraq before a government could even be established. It was such a bad assertion, that even then that the left had to turn on its’ famous noise machine to get some credibility back, and still keep up its’ ‘fight’.
Also doing the service of emboldening the argument of the U.S.’ opponents in the war on terror, one year before Zarkawi’s admission Jude Wanniski writing his monthly article in al Jazeera, tried to whitewash McGovern’s taciturn demand that the United States should make a show of weakness and insincerity:Former Senator George McGovern, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1972 as the Democratic nominee in opposition to the Vietnam war, last week proposed a solution tied to the president's position that the US would only stay as long as it took to train Iraqis to maintain order by themselves.
[ ... ]
They [the critics of the Bush Administration] argue that a fixed timetable for a complete withdrawal would change the behavior of the insurgents and lead to a more favorable outcome.Sure pal, sure.the fuse is lit!
Thank you for sending your article to the IHT. Unfortunately the editors have not been able to find a place for it.In response to an International Herald Tribune front-page article concerning a poll showing that the global image of the United States has (again) fallen, I submitted the following Op-Ed article. As the information contained therein was obviously not of much interest to the general public, the piece was turned down. (Incidentally, here is more on polls that fail to rouse the interest of the MSM.)
A Danish-American journalist living in Paris, Erik Svane is the author of La Bannière Étalée, a book on anti-Americanism in France and Europe. His latest book is Général Leonardo.How about the polls from Iraq?
Erik Svane
I understand fully well why so many people hold a dim view of the U.S. (or its leaders) and feel the war in Iraq has made the world a more dangerous place (Image of U.S. falls again, June 14). After all, we keep hearing and reading about polls showing how vast majorities in Europe distrust Bush and the reason for the Iraq war, how vast majorities in the Arab world distrust Bush and the reason for the Iraq war, and how America is divided over Bush and the Iraq war.
Now, if Brian Knowlton thought it necessary to mention that Spain was "deeply affected" by the March 2004 bombings in Madrid, one might think that he might point out that the very least that an organization could have done while gathering material for a global opinion poll centered on the war in Iraq would be to attempt to include a number of Iraqi nationals in said poll — who, if I am not mistaken, happen to be the population most affected by the current situation in Mesopotamia. Rather than interview people nonchalantly sharing their facile opinions that "the world has become more dangerous since Saddam Hussein's removal from power in 2003" and that, from the safety of their armchair in their comfortable living room (most of them living in Western democracies), the Pew Research Center might have questioned people who had to fend for themselves in what can only be called a barbaric police state.Indeed, one reason that "the global image of America has slipped," that "pessimism about the future of Iraq was widespread," and that "Iraq is sapping good will to the United States" may be that they see so few polls from Iraq. As it happens, polls from Iraq — both Western and Iraqi — do exist. To mention only four (that are quoted in my book on anti-Americanism in France and Europe, La Bannière Étalée): in March 2004, a BBC poll found that 56% of Iraqis said life was better than before the war (only 17% thought it was worse) while 71% said life would improve and only 15% wanted foreign troops to leave the country. A January 2005 poll by the Iraqi daily Sabah found that 88% of respondents supported military action against the so-called "insurgents," while only 13% in a poll by the Al Midhar newspaper wished for the immediate departure of foreign troops. In polls conducted by Iraqi universities in the Fall of 2005, two thirds of respondents said life was better than under Saddam while no less than 82% expected their personal lives to be even better one year in the future. (Oh, and in case anyone is interested, a BBC poll from Afghanistan in October 2005 reported that 87% of respondents thought that Bush's overthrow of the Taliban was a good thing and that 83% of Afghans had a favorable opinion of the United States.)
Of course, were Western citizens slightly more aware of such viewpoints (rather than the hand-wringing, the tch-tching, and the apocalyptic scare-mongering of their own élites), their opinions of America, Bush, and/or the war might be neither so definite nor so negative. Then again, if Iraqis' (and Afgans') views had mirrored those of the members of the ever-so-lucid European élite more, you can bet that European editors would be all over themselves printing and reprinting them all over their front pages. (Pew might even have sent one of its research teams to Iraq.)
As France heads the list of nations thinking that the Iraq war has made the world a more dangerous place, it is instructive to mention how the war has (not) been reported there. When the French daily of reference asked its Baghdad correspondant to question common Iraqis about their opinions of the war on the first anniversary of the invasion, it apparently expected to get confirmation of its (self-serving) view of the situation which it systematically describes with expressions such as "chaos," "violence," "massacres," and the "reign of insecurity." Not only did Rémy Ourdan report in Le Monde that the vast majority of Iraqis thought the invasion was the best thing to happen to Iraq in the past 30 years, he also reported that if Iraqis questioned any country's policies and second-guessed anybody's reasons for their decisions with regards to the crisis, it was not those of the allegedly oil-hungry Americans but those of the allegedly principled members of the so-called "Peace Camp" who, directly or indirectly, ended up defending Saddam Hussein (oil-for-food and UN corruption ring a bell?).
The Baghdad correspondant was soon "promoted" to a desk job in Paris and Iraqis' views have rarely been seen in the French media since. With partial (and partisan) reporting like that (the October 2004 discovery of a mass grave in Hatra, with nine trenches near the northern Kurdistan village including the skeletons of toddlers, pregnant women, and unborn babies, went totally unreported in the French press), no wonder people the world over have a dim view of the United States and/or its president and his policies.
Once, when Churchill was treated to yet another harangue about the evils, the failures, the mistakes, and the inequalities of democracy, the old statesman acquiesced with his idealistic interlocutor: "Democracy is the worst form of government," the Old Lion agreed, pausing before adding, "except for all the others." That expresses exactly how I feel when I hear the umpteenth litany enumerating the so-called sins of America, its awful leaders, its lying politicians, its cowering press, its unjust foreign policy, and/or its clueless citizens.
Le Monde is running an article on the lack of popularity of the mall-punk style organization of political fringe loonies called Attac. The irony is that they are losing favor with « altermondialistes » in all likelihood because they now seem too “establishment”.
There entire dealio is getting worked up over the existence of people who have some money (unless their name is Castro or Chavez.)
However their Trotskite vision of endless protest and revolution has it’s weakness, apart from the fact that it destroys any society it infects.
It’s easy for people to step away from their cannibalistic vision of society when they see their own career efforts providing them with a decent living. In other word, their ideas are a sort of recessive gene in a successful society, and the only way to keep their meal ticket is to continue pushing the envelope of extreme measures and proposals. But with the battiest of moonbats battered by a lack of success of their world-view, that isn’t enough.
Like all lefty hypocrites, one of their hundreds of efforts was that they advocated taxing all financial transactions in order to chip away at capitalism by ending the buying and selling of stocks and other instruments. As advocates of high taxation socialist redistribution, they know full well that if you want to kill anything vibrant, all you have to do is tax it to death. It’s precisely what they advocate for the society at large as well.
Nonetheless they are all largely raving capitalists who froth at the mouth:
«Whereas altermondialism produces bestselling books, sells documentaries, and is continually putting out press conferences in France, Attac plays less of a part in this. “it’s obvious that Attac has less influence”, says Cédric Durand, joint author of the book Altermondialists, chronicles of a changing revolution.Criticism came even from the most puzzling of places:
[ ... ]
[They had a] small presence during the anti-CPE protests, and didn’t succeed in entering the debate on immigration… They don’t seem to know how to rebound, even if the local committees are still very active.
They debates with the knife in a conflict without end under the inspiration of its’ president Jacques Nikonoff, but has worn out a lot of its’ goodwill. They have been losing manpower for two years. After a losing touch with the young: “Attac is perceived to be a traditional organization and lost of its influence in the young people”, notes Nicolas Haeringer of the Brigade Activist Clowns, a civil disobedience group.Does this just shows the strength of the powerful Clown lobby, or are we talking real trouble here for Attac? Tune in next week, since Bozo and friends are sure to be with us for quite a while.
Le Monde uses as it’s cover story a news item from September of last year for this weekend’s magazine cover story.
Jean-Pierre Langellier recounts the story of the famous Che Guevara photo in relation to the Revolutionary and Icon exhibit at London's Victoria and Albert Museum…
As he is ousted from Libération after a third of a century (33 years), Serge July is lionized by Marion Van Renterghem…
Compare and contrast:
Lefty crank Margo Kingston’s Webdiary and ¡No Pasarán!
| Brand X | ¡No Pasarán! | |
| Paid staff: | Yes | henh? |
| Income: | AUS$ 1667 | nix |
| Outlays: | AUS$ 3125 | bupkus, the occasional 6 pack |
| A9 Ranking: | 1 263 856th | 241 546th |
| Sites linked in: | 3 | 242 |
| Bankruptcy threats: | frequent, nagging | never |
| Juju | Bad - Boring | Good - Not Boring |
| Conclusion | Bilious, misanthropic losers | The amiable blogging Elves of Internet-land |
As a devoted Webdiary reader, here’s my view. Project Syndicate’s articles may belinked to by any website for free. You are paying $US750 each month for the pointless indulgence of republishing every word of those pieces.Ogram N'otsgnik needs to develop a little perspective – you’r going into debt over a blog. Lighten up, cowpoke!
You know how America is; unlike the wise and avant-garde Europeans, the Yanks are lied to and deceived by their stupid leaders, their evil CEOS and élites, and their clueless media…
PARIS - The highest court in France on Wednesday rejected a bid by George Soros, the billionaire investor, to overturn a conviction for insider trading in a case dating back nearly 20 years, leaving the first blemish on his five-decade investing career
Good riddance, malaka.
The Diplomad (not featuring Mr. Mad himself) may be back.
Hey – I can dream, can’t I?
When a French inventor (he had invented, among other things, a retractable spiral staircase for small two-floor apartments) explained on TV how some of his earlier inventions had been pilfered in America, the program's host asked rhetorically, "les Américains l'ont volé?!"
"The Americans stole it?!" Thus I opened an article meant to illustrate Old Europe's penchant for creating (and entertaining) collective guilt (or, when it concerns their own selves, collective wisdom, collective tolerance, collective heroics, etc, etc, etc). Think only of "They deserved 9-11!"to give credit where credit is due – after passing through Charles de Gaulle airport for the second time last week, I was treated to a very pleasant experience, which seldom occurs when I travel. I was about to miss a connection in Paris (because of some Scottish problems in Scotland), but some good guys with Air France and the airport managed to figure this out before I landed, and were there to hustle me off the plane in a van as soon as I arrived. I was aided by a nice kid who helped me jump ahead in the security line, passport controls, and all of the other fun stops at the airport. So, I was able to make the connection.
To the casual observer, I must have seemed very important, like a surgeon who needed to make a flight on his way to save a head of state. If the people who were pushed aside for me knew the truly trivial nature of my existence, there would have been a riot, but fortunately for me, they barely had time to complain before I disappeared. Anyway, without the foresight of the French Connection-People, I would have had to hang around Paris offending Parisians with my Americaness.
Was made the victim of a very crass press. to broadcast a video of a little girl in spastic shock over her freshly killed father's body is inconceivably disrespectful. I don't care if it furthers your cause or not, it is an abhorrent thing to do
Adloyada surveys blog reactions on the Gaza Beach shelling fallout. She reminds us of what many news makers and news “consumers” have gown immune and ignorate of – propriety.Huda screamed when asked by journalists on her feeling during the first night she spent without her family, prompting her uncle to calm her down and ask the journalist to consider his niece's psychological shock, adding that all relatives of the family were in a state of shock.
At a recent UAW meeting, UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger spoke about the need for the union to deal with the auto makers. He talked about the dreadful state of Ford and GM and how they are both losing jobs. UAW jobs.
"But it's going to take more than what we can do at the bargaining table. There are failed [political] strategies that have failed to protect our jobs."Making it more difficult to get rid of workers makes it less likely the workers will be hired in the first place. There's a whole country that's tried this. It's called France.
Tell me if you think the promotion of this story (which is 3 months old) isn’t nicely timed, and that this Marine’s song to entertain his friends doesn’t have anything to do with trying to cope with the predilections of the press when they’re trying to do their jobs.
Posted on the YouTube website, the video shows a man in uniform strumming a guitar while singing about killing Iraqis, as others laugh and cheer.What the BBC left out is the part of the Marine’s joke about the men of the family showing off their AK-47s, which is probably closer to the truth than a Marine killing civilians.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
Friday 9 June – A shell, or something explodes on the beach in Gaza.
The Arabs removed all evidence of shrapnel that could prove whose shell was to blame:Seven Arab Muslim Palestinians were killed. One dramatic picture on the cover of the NYT, page 3 of the Chicago Trib, etc. showed a beautiful young girl screaming in agony over the death of her father lying next to her. This is the lasting image and the entire story to be told. By Monday the NYT headline is: "Errant Shell Turns Girl Into Palestinian Icon".
I don’t wonder how. I don’t even wonder why. I wonder why so few are so skeptical of it.
One commentator wondered how the camera got there so fast or was the scene re-enacted?
The Arabs removed all the wounded and dead with the shrapnel in them also removed to eliminate any evidence. They refused to have the bodies examined for forensic evidence of what actually killed the seven. Two are being treated in Israeli hospitals.
Saturday 10 June - Regardless of what the Israeli Defense Forces had to say, the “world” Press would have none of it. Radar? Timestamped data? Ten minutes between the end of the shelling and the explosion? No matter. They pile it on because they think it SHOULD be true. Fake, but accurate?The third observation casting doubt on the possibility that IDF shelling was the cause of the Palestinian deaths was that the IDF had accounted for five of the six shells that it fired in the area before the explosion and the shell that was unaccounted for was fired more than 10 minutes before the blast that killed the Palestinians.
Knowing that a mercenary investigator from Human Rights Watch can only report on what he can honestly see, the scene of the explosion on the beach in Gaza was cleaned up before his arrival. They show him a hole in the ground, and he has to dance with the one who brung ‘im.
Monday 12 June – The report in favor of Hamas’ interpretation of events is released by HRW Flunky enters the area. The analyst, Marc Garalsco, is the senior military analyst for Janes’ Defence fierce competator, Mother Jones Magazine.
No one is publishing when Garalsco entered the area of the investigation, but the brevity of his comment is that it most occurred late in the day on the 10th or on the 11th. The Fact that Friday and Saturday are the weekend there limits the removal of shrapnel to anytime between the event itself and Friday afternoon, since onlookers are more likely to be out and about after sunset on Friday.
Regardless, this will never penetrate the thickest of heads. Le Monde today referred to them thus:« la mort de sept Palestiniens, vendredi 9 juin, sur une plage du nord de la bande de Gaza est due non pas à un bombardement israélien mais à l'explosion d'une mine posée par des activists, a affirmé un haut responsable militaire qui a requis l'anonymat. »
They aren’t activists, they’re bombers trying to make news for themselves by killing people.
They are activists in the same way Carlos the Jackal was.
13 June – “World” Press starts publishing the fact that there is some skepticism. Too late – the feeding frenzy is over.
Here's a country where 17 Muslims at home in Canada's relentlessly projected image as the Nicer New World — a Unicef Seasons Greetings card tableau of smiley-faced sarong, sombrero and tarboosh-wearers — lurched out of the picture of multicultural harmony and plotted to invade Parliament and cut off the prime minister's headwrites John Vinocur in his International Herald Tribune article on a new multicultural definition of Canada as the Non-America, including maple leaf patches on backpacks signaling don't-worry-I-only-sound-American.
Here's also a country, locked into the same self-portrait, that blinks in we're-good-guys bewilderment to think that savaging gentle, tolerant Canada was the idea driving these Islamic extremists from Toronto's immigrant community.
In a very politically correct place, the implications of what prosecutors have said are awful.
Like the notion that the enshrined status of multiculturalism in Canada may not provide some of its "visible minorities" (That's Canadian "correctspeak") with a new identity strong enough to drown out jihadist calls that their greatest loyalties and even murderous obligations are elsewhere.
This implication — that for all of immigrants' enrichment of Canada, something essential has gone wrong in an approach to integration that offers total accommodation but demands only limited compatibility — is resisted by a multicultural establishment.
But the issue may have started to tear at the nation's heart.
Here's the skirmish line: establishment forces against renegades drawing the conclusion that when it comes to Muslim extremism and homegrown groups of Muslims engaged in anti-Western violence, Canada's self-definition as Not The United States (or France or the Netherlands — hey, the Canadians would never force assimilation on an immigrant!) is a conceit that shields this country neither from hatred or reality.
The establishment's all-is-well reflexes can be extraordinary. After arresting 17 alleged Islamic extremists, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police insisted they "represented a broad strata of our community. It's hard to find a common denominator." Toronto's police chief, Bill Blair, even said, "I would remind you that there was not one single reference made by law enforcement to Muslims." …
Regarding the photos of the dead Al-Qaeda leader, Patrice Claude speaks of the "strange, even shocking" scene and the "degrading and macabre exercise". He proceeds to evoke the "fable" of the weapons of mass destruction, "invented by Washington in 2002 and 2003 to justify the invasion of the former Mesopotamia"; the "filmed parade of Saddam Hussein as a hobo" ("it was clearly to humiliate him", rails Claude); the Pentagon's being found out "with a smoking gun" (when it paid Iraqi journalists to write un-MSM, i.e., more realistic, articles); and oh-so-principled journalists remembering "with disgust" the spectacle of the dictator's dead sons.
Needless to say, Claude presents as undisputed fact that a squad of Marines "assassinated 24 civilians, women and children included". Le Monde colleague Eric Fottorino goes on to rail against America because of three Guantanamo prisoners who committed suicide. Just about the only thing missing now is an article relativizing 9-11, and Fabienne Darge is nice enough to provide that to Le Monde's readers.
I’m quite certain that the Grauniad maintains blogs for the amusement of the people who wouldn’t take them seriously anyway. Get a load of this: Meanwhile, the "war on terror" raged on outside our conference hall. A British solider dies in Afghanistan protecting a regime "accused of orchestrating massacres, torture, mass rape and other war crimes". A triple suicide by Muslims who have been detained for four years at Guantanamo Bay outside any legal process whatsoever leads to accusations by the US head of "public diplomacy" that the dead were cunningly conducting "asymmetric warfare"
So sputtered the lucid and all-knowing oracle, Andrew Murray a former employee of the Soviet Novosti reactionary messaging agency and leading light in the British Communist party who can always be depended on to have a clear, evenhanded opinion when it comes to the United States.
The conference where the “war” on “terror” was "continuing" to rage on outside of is in “Britain.”
Apart from teaching geography, he can reliably keep cranking away at the house organ and encouraging lighthearted freedom and openness as we see from his “softly, softly” management style: Despite the best efforts of chair Andrew Murray to impose a drab Stalinist uniformity over the proceedings, the cracks and divisions were all too evident..
The shame is that even Jihadists have always found Communism repellent, but will take any sucker they can find.
Discussing an opinion published in Le Figaro which this blog has recently translated a message board and two blogs are running into some difficulties peddling the usual line. Let’s be clear, Guantanamo bothers me, but it’s low on the list of things I hate. Three suicides with Gitmo, and is it an outrage, “America, what kid of monster have you become!”In France, a prisoner commits suicide on average every three days. 2006 seem to be a mild year (world cup effect), with 23 suicides or suspicious deaths. 23. Since [the prison camp at] Gitmo opened in 2002, there were 41 attempts by 23 prisoners, out of which the three succeeded. Three suicides in four years, and most of America shouts scandal. 23 suicides in 6 months in France, and everyone looks dimly at each other. No, the United States did not become a monster. The monster, is us, here, now. Jacques Attali, former "special advisor" (hear "sherpa") to french president Mitterrand tells this story about George Bush (the father) inviting Mitterrand and his team in his family house in New England ; Attali spent the night in George Walker Bush's personal bedroom, and he was told him nothing was removed or even moved because of his presence. So he took a look at George W. Bush's books, and was amazed to see only a few comics and detective stories, nothing else... Hum. How surprising.
Quite naturally, it’s about Gitmo, and the opportunity for francophone bloggers have to parade their moral vanity. America, what kind of monster have you become?
Using any and every report or ginned-up event that they can, such as “combating terror only creates more terror”, and any other convenience, Americans, no matter who they are, are the indiscriminate target of their pointless verbal hectoring.The arguments like that of Mr. Roucaute are deeply intellectual dishonest, consisting in changing the debate to avoid the real problem (Guantanamo) by pointing to another odious situations. To claim that all those which criticize the illegal prison run by the USA close their eyes to the violation of human rights in Cuba, it is absurd and insulting.
Except that HRW and Amnesty were not the subject he was addressing as much as a public which is more than willing to close their eyes. The length people will go to - to ignore the severe opression of the Cubans in order to lecture their imagined America was precisely Roucaute's point. Ones the bloggers were willing to ignore, but the commenters understood.
But even in their comments there are more rumblings against the assertion than for it. People seem to get it:
Quite simply what the guys countering the active opposition to terrorism don’t understand is that the current Jihad has been around for decades, and they have chose to attack Europe and the US more directly. The suicides are not the issue. They don't even make much of a stick to beat the coalition with, but some flea will crawl out and try anyway. Say anything, do anything...
Ignoring Jihad will not make it go away, but causing the targeted populations to incrementally accommodate that concept until it’s ubiquitous. If it comes to that point, the public can permanently kiss their personal freedoms goodbye. What is most evident is the lack of perspective of the consequences of the 'peace' camp's detachment from this.Rumsfeld said today about Iraq "This is a sovereign country, and they are making impressive progress". Yep, their use of the AK47, hand grenades and road mines improve every day.
With verisimilitudinous attention to detail like that, you can depend on these guys to do a great job interpreting the Geneva Convention, the laws of war, and such.
So they reach the point of invention. Say anything, do anything. Here's a little test:
Infidel dogs, sons of apes and pigs, we are not scared of your round balls made of evil pentagons put there by those who play volleyball and backgammon with Zionists.
Do you think we are children who can be given sweets and almonds in exchange for our human right for victory?
al Queda will have even further difficulty creating a hero for their potential supporters to look up to now that Zarkawi is dead. The fact that the illiterate, murdering brute was the best they could do at the time is telling as well.
The very real benefit of putting that thug out of commission also has a symbolic power not just in Iraq where he was trying to turn opposition between Shiites and Sunnis into a civil war, but doesn’t do much for Jihad’s appeal anywhere else. What took place is the real and unemotional removal of a symbol.
Contrast that with western leftist shaking their little fists and stamping their feet in an attempt to construct negative symbols of anyone trying to oppose terror out of thin air, and has encountered difficulties in using that to make anything significant happen as a result.
As is the norm with the unaccountable agitators of the left, they tried and will continue to try to play at the public’s fears and emotions just as a terrorist would, and preyed on the youngest and dimmest like cowards always have, taking their verbal fight to those they think won’t retaliate. Talking in circles doesn’t require much of a physical or intellectual investment. True to that, the mendicants have benefited very little from it, and found a public exhausted by them. In large part, Michael Moore bin-forgotten.
