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…
The French believe that they are intellectually superior to any other nationality. The length and magnificence of their historical achievements leave the French convinced that they have a mission to teach and to civilise others. Their political, military and economic strengths may no longer predominate as they once did, but they perceive no diminishment or fading of their moral and didactic authority.So we learn from the Daily Telegraph's National Cultural Profiles page devoted to France.
In homage of an emblematic figure, legendary Ernesto Ché Guevara was known for sound effort and for his fight counter the inequalities for a world righter. Far from any political ideology or partisanship, the company “El Ché-Cola” is the first commercial operation to take choose to divert 50% of its net profit to NGOs that fight world hunger, and humanitarian organizations coming to the assistance of orphans and the needy in France and throughout the world. Sharing the wealth to fight together against hunger in the world is our goal.
- The Founder, J.M. Ferreira
Yeah, right. Whatever you say, spanky. Link omitted.
Thin skinned, outraged, millionaire ‘revolutionaries’ like the unctuous poster-child for the decay of the public mind Tracy Emin are out raising all the ‘awareness’ that they can sell you or parlay into public exposure. But criticize the echo chamber that serves them and the parasites living off of them and they would call you “stuck”.
The torrent pointed at the handful of people who merely asked the question as to why the Turner Prize has grown into a sick joke has mutated into an annual event involving those feeding off the institutions going on the defensive against society at large. It goes so far as to find them opposing a zeitgeist that holds similar, if not nearly identical world view to that generally found uniformly among the ‘revolutionaries’ of the art racket with a few important ethically founded distinctions: one that holds that the publicized personalization of the artist is not art.
Every year, the elite wanting to be “controversial” without the attendant criticism exhibits something more akin to pack animal behaviour: the wagons are circled, and the public are frowned upon in a Pomish way not seen since the lost days of the Raj.
“Stuckism” calls itself [a] Radical international art movement for new figurative painting with ideas. Anti the pretensions of conceptual art. Anti-anti-art. The first Remodernist art group. Daubers (daubing is the new painting).
It is. And fascism is the new black. Noted one dejected juror: There was a pre-party party for the judges and shortlisted artists but I was so busy keeping my lips sealed that it wasn't much fun. Then we went through to join the main thrash in the Duveen gallery where Yoko Ono (dressed bizarrely as a French mime artist) announced the result. In previous years it has been a sitdown dinner but this was a milling-about party with mouse-sized food. (No wonder Nick Serota and all the Tate curators are so thin - they subsist on fairy dust.) And of course there was no smoking, so I was soon out on the front steps in the rain with the artists, and delighted to find Sarah Lucas among them. I thought she disapproved of the Turner Prize because she has always refused to accept nomination, but she says no, she doesn't disapprove per se, she just thinks it's not her thing. Anyway, she is doing the Tate's Christmas tree this year - she showed me photos of her decorations which I think were all genitalia but I didn't have my glasses on.
Ariane Chemin has a long portrait of Ségolène Royal (more blunt outspokenness and bravitude on the issue of basic principles and human rights during her visit to China here) and how François Mitterrand has been a central feature in her political life.
Quickly! Go visit La Baf in order to sign the international petition for the pardon of Jacques Chirac, President of France ("Let's stand united against the execution of Jacques Chirac by the puppet governement of Ségolène Royal").
We are against the death penalty. It is a shameful abomination (and a disaster and a catastrophe)!it is hard to draw a portrait of Saddam Hussein. The man, like numerous dictators [like Castro, like Deng, like Kim Il Sung, but not like Pinochet (!)] presents numerous sides. His paranoia does not make the task easier…
Whereas the MSM had called unequivocably for moving heaven and earth to go after Pinochet while depicting Chile's former head as nothing but a monster, they have taken to referring to the environment in which Warsaw's Stanislaw Wojciech Wielgus met his fate as "Eastern Europe's widening witch hunt for former Communist secret police informers".The New York Times headline noted Pinochet was a "Dictator Who Ruled by Terror in Chile." The Times began by describing him as "the brutal dictator who repressed and reshaped Chile for nearly two decades and became a notorious symbol of human rights abuse and corruption." He was "never brought to trial." Both the Post and the Times used post-Pinochet government estimates that more than 3,000 people were executed or disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship.
But the same liberal press that despises right-wing autocrats cannot bring that same vigorous denunciation to bear when a communist dictator dies. When Chinese dictator Deng Xiaoping died in 1997, the Post mentioned the "bloody crackdown" in Tiananmen Square in 1989, but the words "dictator" or "dark legacy" did not appear in the headline, which simply recited the fact of death: "China's Deng Xiaoping, Dead at 92." The Post reporter did not attempt to enumerate the thousands or millions killed on Deng's watch, or wonder why he was never put on trial.
The Post presented Deng as a great liberalizer, to a point. "Deng had guided the country out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, flung open China's doors to the outside world and loosened the grip of central economic planning," while, ahem, "insisting that the Communist Party's monopoly on power go unchallenged."
Some communist leaders couldn't even be accused of liberalizing tendencies. When Korean despot Kim Il Sung died in 1994, The New York Times couldn't call him a dictator in their headlines, let along mention ruling by terror. The second story on the death was headlined, "Kim Il Sung, Enigmatic 'Great Leader' of North Korea for 5 Decades, Dies at 82." (…)
So let's review. A right-wing ruler responsible for the deaths of 3,000 -- but also responsible for an economic miracle of free enterprise, and who allowed the democratic process which forced him from power: "dictator." But communist despots who controlled their citizens with iron fists until the day they died, preventing all manner of political, economic and religious freedoms, and who caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions: "leaders."
The more things change, the more they stay the same. While conservatives still seek to defend both democracy and American interests, liberals are still fawning over communist and terrorist thugs.
How about Russia (whose "sensibilities" France's president said the French "should manage") and China (for whose leader's state visit the Eiffel Tower was lit up in red)? Where Moscow and Beijing and their "extremely sensitive political questions" are concerned, the Europeans haven't exactly come around to making a stand and stating their principles forcefully yet, but don't worry. The Chinese will soon feel the full force of France's outrage (danke zu Jörg Wolf) and the Russians can't be far behind. Here is a French government tip on how best to do business with the Chinese: Do not mention Tibet, Taiwan or the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators.
…And do not mention politics, the guide says. "Avoid speaking about Chinese politics, for example: The events on Tiananmen Square, strategic questions of Taiwan or of Tibet," it says.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed protesters were killed when the Chinese army cleared the square in the heart of Beijing of student demonstrators on June 4, 1989. China has threatened to use force to assert its claim of sovereignty over the self-ruling island of Taiwan and has been accused of widespread human rights abuses in Tibet since it invaded the Himalayan territory in 1950.
Update: Currently on a visit to China, Ségolène Royal, who famously told a Hezbollah (!) "lawmaker" how awful Bush was and who like most French people is constantly trying to give Americans lessons, The French Socialists' presidential candidate has gone out of her way to minimize human rights, an issue that is "sensitive" to the Chinese (no sh-t!), in favor of questions like globalisation and ecological rights.told reporters that she plans to discuss human rights — without browbeating her Communist Party hosts. "I am not going as a giver of lessons," she told reporters.
An in-depth article by Mouna Naïm on Saddam Hussein graces the pages of Le Monde, but to judge by the comments by average French readers (those paragons of lucidity), George W Bush is at least as (translation = far more) guilty than the Iraqi dictator.
Speaking of comments, Hervé asks us to have "a compassionate look at those moderate posts at this peaceful url:" the Voice of the Oppressed. 
Tsk, tsk. Lose the green halo.
Although I’ll bet they sit down for it anyway. Tally-Ho!
Some Europeans are sounding more and more like Juche-Girl every day. Atlantic review is the blog of a group akin to Mensa, all the smart people on Star Trek with large crania, and your younger sibling who was always smarter that you were. Joerg seems to have found a real winner, and a Bavarian CSU guy named Peter Gauweiler at that, which makes his insane assertion prove himself to be unremediably “Coocoo for Coco Puffs”:
And Gauweiler thought the German Military was there just to observe and be supported no doubt, and that fighting meant never really having to fight well with other – something the soldiers themselves know well and are clear about.The military commitment in Afghanistan is on another, much firmer mandate of international-law than the American war in Iraq which is indisputably contrary to international law. Nevertheless one must be blind and deaf not to recognize that we in Afghanistan are actually “Irakifying” the war in the south.
The Bundestag did not give it a mandate, nor does our Basic Law doesn’t even make participation a possible. Mrs. Merkel must make clear to the Americans that it is not applicable for example that Americans can send German Federal Armed Forces as they are presently doing to the south of Afghanistan into confusing and catastrophic conditions. For example, they also want support from our Tornado fighters by calling in positions [ed.: to attack as ground air support, I would guess].
We must make clear to the Americans, or rather more precisely to the current American government, that there can be no difference in cultural efforts worldwide, and that everything isn’t automatically terrorism, and to exterminate whoever they’re able to as they did it with the Apache and the Sioux.
“It is said that Jean-Marie Le Pen is an extremist, that he is of the extreme-right, just to disqualify my message. They’re wrong. I am a man of center-right”, he declared.
Sure. Why don’t you go take a nice little nap and sleep it off.
What’s the first sign of craziness? Referring to oneself in the third person.
It seems that Elton John hasn't just grown delusional about his own importance, but has become quite a fascist when it comes to turdburglar politics: Elton John's convoluted message to the masses is: Religion should be outlawed because it promotes hatred towards homosexuals, that religious hatred is leading us towards World War III, and the only way to prevent another world war is for musicians to solve all the world's problems.
He seems to feel himself at liberty to promote quite a bit of hatred himself. I guess some people are born royal.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
It is comforting to know that if the world would all hold hands and sing Tiny Dancer we would all be safer. But frankly, I'd rather hear Randy Travis sing Three Wooden Crosses.
Oran, Algeria: A woman so saddened by the execution of Saddam Hussein commits suicide.In addition, according to the daily Arabic-language newspaper
Sawt Al-Ahrar, several new-born babies of the area of El-Wadi (southern Algerian) were named for the former Iraqi president and torture victim “in homage to the late Arab leader”.
The local committee for support of the Iraqi people organized the taking care of condolences in the memory of Saddam Hussein, according to the source.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
A turn of the page finds "Green Goddess" and Ablution favourite Julia Stephenson stressed out as well, as her unfortunate boyfriend has made the intolerable mistake of buying her unacceptable undergarments:
"Sadly the garments proffered weren't green but another, much inferior colour, so no good."
- The dry season is over.
Feel free to Ablute.
Sarah croise des étudiants venus d'Europe et d'Amérique du Nord. "Pas toujours des militants, souvent des anarchistes", glisse-t-elle. Elle se prend au jeu, embrasse le mouvement, "forcément". Au mois de novembre, elle se trouve au milieu des affrontements avec les forces fédérales.As I explain in my book, French society has these words and expressions that lead les citoyens into a form of self-hypnosis. Once they hear them (in conversations with friends or acquaintances, on television — they are a staple on the evening news), they go into a form of trance in which they know that they are invariably in the right and they (consequently) don't need to ask whether the description of any given situtation is correct, whether, for example, the militants might be (even theoretically) dishonest, misinformed, or simply retarded. (Words include: lucidité, solidarité, générosité, humanisme, militants.) And they have no reason to do so (to ask such questions), since the words invariably paint a self-serving portrait of them in any given situations, i.e, shows them (the French) as heroes, martyrs, or wise prophets.
France's "national psychiatrist" has issued an alarming report on the democratic and social health of the nation as it prepares to select a new presidentwrites John Lichfield in the Independent (merci à RV).
Gérard Mermet, a sociologist who publishes a much respected bulletin on the country's state of mind every two years, suggests that France now suffers from a collective form of three mental illnesses: paranoia, schizophrenia and hypochondria.
In Francosopie 2007, M. Mermet says that France is "schizophrenic", because it finds it difficult to "recognise the realities" of the "great changes" happening in the world around it.
He says France is "paranoid" because it believes itself to be the victim of a "global plot" and to have been betrayed by its own "elites".
Finally, France is a "hypochondriac" because it downplays its achievements and advantages and wilfully exaggerates its economic and social ills.
The New York Times looks with glassy eyed idealism at France the way a Dachshund adores it’s master. At the same time, France looks at Americans the way a cat looks at it’s “human companion”: as a gullible meal ticket.
In 2004, an NYT writer went so far as to say that the French state eliminated homelessness, and that if you did see panhandlers and people living under bridges, that they were Polish. Not from anywhere else, not the benighted French, but Polish. As statistically impossible as that is, the reality of street life disproved that insane assertion. There are (and were) street people all over the place. They are more aggressive and carry themselves with a more miserable air than any crazy person that New York City’s Social Workers can talk in from the cold. Quite simply, they lied.In Summer 2004, the New York Times declared that the great day had arrived: Europe had eliminated -- nay, "abolished," as if by a legislative act-- poverty: or, at any rate, its "desperate" variety. "Even America's defenders must admit to the persistence of poverty amid plenty," the Times reporter Richard Bernstein wrote in an August 8 piece ("Does Europe Need to Get a Life?"), "and, by contrast, the abolition of desperate poverty in Europe."
The fiction continued this past May:
Bernstein attributed this remarkable accomplishment to the European "continent": a continent that notably includes Albania, for instance: a country with a per capita Gross National Income, according to World Bank statistics, of roughly $2,000 per year. But let us be generous and allow that Bernstein was taking poetic license in referring to the "continent" and really meant to refer just to the European Union. And let us be even more generous and assume that the triumphal claim of Europe's "abolition" of poverty was in fact only meant to apply to the "EU-15"On Boulevard Montparnasse, where Polish men have gathered eight tents under a railroad bridge, a middle-aged man named André asked Mr. Borg for help finding a cheap flat and French lessons. He has a job and said his employer had promised to help him get working papers if he could move to a fixed address.
The natives, though seem to bristle at even the slightest criticism, no matter how factual, as one can see from even the NYT’s own Roger Cohen.
Not far away three young Poles, who gave their names as Roberto, Raphael and Annette, huddled in a tent with a pit bull named Ares. A white ceramic dish of dog food sat beside the tent.
The fiction of human superiority continues by reporting on middle-class and middle-minded empathy of something that was presumable “abolished”. Dozens of otherwise well-housed, middle-class French have been spending nights in tents along the canal, in the 10th Arrondissement, in solidarity with the country’s growing number of “sans domicile fixe,” or “without fixed address,” the French euphemism for people living on the street. The bleak yet determinedly cheerful sleep-in is meant to embarrass the French government into doing something about the problem.
John Rosenthal has more to say about the reporting of this “middle class” act of moral vanity which is more telling about the top-down view which is more akin to government social control than engagement. “The state knows best.”: This reassuringly low official French homelessness figure of 86,000 is widely-cited in the docile French media and it is sometimes even dated, as in the NYTimes article, to 2004. In fact, however, it dates from a study conducted by the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies [INSEE] in 2001
More to the point the “inconsequential” nature of the government’s stance on this is to not report the problem, and when that’s unavoidable, to suppress reporting on the scale of the problem. Moreover, even when it was first made public in 2002, the 86,000 INSEE figure was criticized for underestimating the real extent of homelessness in France. Anne-Laure Pham, writing in a recent issue of the French weekly L'Express, notes that French charitable associations -- already at the time -- put the real figure "between 100,000 and 800,000."
Estimates varying by a factor of 8 tell us that the allegation is as political as the effort to silence it, but a simple observation of life on the street showing homelessness to be no less visible or widespread as New York, Philadelphia, or Washington, DC takes the Mickey out of a figure like 86.000 people bei9ng homeless in a nation of 60 million.
Jumping stateside again, it needs to be understood that for about 6 years now, American leftists wanting to make some kind of point about conservatives evincing more homelessness than leftists (which they haven’t) – have duped high-school kids and college students to engage in empathetic “urban camping” for the purpose of “solidarity” with the homeless. The difference is that a cadre of compliant adults are hovering around to protect the “urban campers” from being violated or ripped off by the less scrupulous homeless in a manner that they would never protect the rest of the homeless.
If this isn’t a personal display and a political gin-up, I don’t know what is – it has the same stench of the assertion that anyone, anywhere even in the totalitarian days of the eastern block ever “eliminated” homelessness. In fact it has the same stench as the pocket parts and quays of the Seine where the homeless “camp”.
The French outrage over foie gras boils down to this: getting over-emotional in order to eliminate economic competition wherever possible.Patería de Sousa was awarded the Coup de Coeur by the Paris International Food Salon for innovation.
The animals are not force-fed.
Yet it is precisely its innovative techniques that have set French foie gras makers in a flutter. They claim that the Spanish version of the goose liver extract is not foie gras at all and have demanded the prize is withdrawn.Animal rights activists criticise the practice of force-feeding a duck or a goose for four weeks before they are slaughtered, claiming that it is cruel. Producers say that they fatten the birds’ livers to add flavour to the foie gras.
Needless to say, it is not exported to France.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
Marie-Pierre Pée, secretary-general of the French Professional Committee of Foie Gras Producers, condemned the Sousa version of the luxury paste: “This cannot be called foie gras because it is strictly defined as a product from an animal which has been fattened,” he said.
Eduardo Sousa, president of the Spanish company, which is based in Badajoz, was unabashed by the French criticism: “It’s normal that they have asked for their prize back because they are scared.
“We have won a prize in Paris where the jury has given (the French) a clip round the ears because we have shown that you can make a good foie gras without mistreating the animals.”
The usual small-mined Euro enmities and petty racism make for the ultimate political rope-a-dope. This, from a note from a friend: ...this is something I actually heard back in 1999-2002 when I lived in Bobigny (93).
The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
This brings me back to the old days: When I was young I grew up in a small city near Lyon, and I had a good Gypsy friend. He came from Dreux, a city located 80km west of Paris: the first big city to have a FN mayor in 1983. What sounded strange back in these days of Universal Peace and Prosperity of the Mitterand reign was that Dreux was highly multicultural as we say nowadays. My friend explained me that basically Portugese voted FN against Blacks that voted FN against Arabs that voted FN against Gypsies that voted FN against Portugese...
Do Muslims lacking perspective in Brazil drive cars?
Speaking of smarts, I never cease to be amazed:In Turkey, at least 1,179 people - dubbed "amateur butchers" by the Turkish media - were treated at hospitals across the country, most suffering cuts to their hands and legs.
The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
This is the safe life full of “solidarity” that your Lit 101 Teaching Assistant was trying to turn you on to.
Among hyper-ventilating left-liberals, hatred of Bush is so intense that rational argument usually goes out the window
writes Roger Cohen (himself usually a rather left-leaning liberal — read how he haughtily disparages Dubya — but otherwise he is here right on the money), who has a good read in the New York Times for those who are "tired of sterile screaming in the wilderness, tired of the comfortably ensconced "hindsighters" poring over every American error in Iraq, tired of facile anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism". The result is a mindless cacophony. … Much of the left, in both Europe and the United States, is so convinced that the Iraq invasion was no more than an American grab for oil and military bases, it seems to have forgotten the myriad crimes of Saddam Hussein.
There appears to be little hope that Bush will ever abandon his with-us-or-against-us take on the post-9/11 world. Division is the president's adrenalin; he abhors shades of gray. Nor does it seem likely that the America-hating, over-the-top ranting of the left — the kind that equates Guantánamo with the Gulag and holds that the real threat to human rights comes from the White House rather than Al Qaeda — will abate during the Bush presidency.This state of affairs is grave. The threat posed by Islamic fanaticism, inside and outside Iraq, requires the lucid analysis and informed disagreement of civilized minds. Bush's certainties are dangerous. But so is the moral equivalency of the left, the kind that during the Cold War could not see the crimes of communism, and now seems ready to equate the conservative leadership of a great democracy with dictatorship.
…the leftist Respect coalition represented in the British Parliament by George Galloway had this to say about Iraq:
"The resistance in Iraq is engaged in a battle to liberate the country. The Iraqi resistance deserves the support of the international antiwar movement."
That's a call for the mass of European pacifists to back the beheading brigade, the child-bombers and other fundamentalist loonies who want to restore the Caliphate. A call made in the name of defeating what Galloway and his ilk see as the greater evil, the United States.
Fortunately, in the face of such hysteria, an expression of moderate sanity has emerged over the past year. Precisely because of its sanity, it has received too little attention.
I refer to the Euston Manifesto (www.eustonmanifesto.org), published last March by a group of mainly left-of-center thinkers, and the supporting statement called American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto, published by U.S. intellectuals in September.
… The Euston Manifesto says: "We reject without qualification the anti-Americanism now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking."
It also declares: "Drawing the lesson of the disastrous history of left apologetics over the crimes of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as more recent exercises in the same vein (some of the reaction to the crimes of 9/11, the excuse making for suicide-terrorism, the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the antiwar movement with illiberal theocrats), we reject the notion that there no opponents on the left."
It states: "We stand against all claims to a total — unquestionable or unquestioning — truth."
It supports a global "responsibility to protect" — the principle of armed intervention in a state where the slaughter and torture of citizens is rampant.
On Iraq, it has this to say: "We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for the successful implementation of democratic change. We are, however, united in our view about the reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Baathist regime in Iraq, and we recognize the overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people."
The proper concern of the left after Saddam's overthrow should have been "the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order" rather than "picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention."
The manifesto observes that: "The many left opponents of regime change in Iraq who have been unable to understand the considerations that led others on the left to support it, dishing out anathema and excommunication, more lately demanding apology or repentance, betray the democratic values they profess." …
They deplore the tendency on the left to substitute hatred of Bush for thought about fighting jihadism. Why, they ask, is the left more incensed by America's errors in Iraq than "terrorist outrages by Islamic extremists?"
They note: "In World War II and the Cold War, liberals, centrists and conservatives found moments of commonality. Indeed, if those efforts had been borne exclusively by the left or the right they very well might have failed."
…If you're tired of sterile screaming in the wilderness, tired of the comfortably ensconced "hindsighters" poring over every American error in Iraq, tired of facile anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism, try the Euston road in 2007. It might actually lead somewhere.
Live from the KOSian dystopia:I have just read that Saddam Hussein is dead. Hung by the neck until dead – isn’t that the phrase they always use on television?
And I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness. Everybody has to start by saying that it isn’t bad that Saddam Hussein is dead – he was an evil man. But what is evil? It is a religious denunciation, a way to set a person apart from humanity. We need to do this I suppose. And if we say that Saddam Hussein is an evil man, don’t we then have to say that other men are good? Who is good I wonder? Where do we find these men of goodness? To say Saddam Hussein was evil is too easy, it lets us off the hook. Saddam Hussein was a cruel man, a selfish man, a desperate man, a sad man.
Minimize his deeds, pity him through things we can never really know about him (but can contrive), and lento, lento... make him another hero in the great pantheon of politically useful victims. Why don’t the two of them just get a room, and put a heroic misrepresentation of him on a t-shirt, already. He was merely a... a... something I think, but could never know:He was a bully I think. He was a man who never knew happiness I think. He rationalized his actions I’m sure by saying that he did what had to be done. He called his own enemies evil, and tortured them completely. Saddam Hussein was all too human. He walked among us. In this moment of spiritual limbo between Christmas and the start of a new year I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness.
yes, we will. Note too, that part of being a post-modern, decadent, screaming and bedwetting leftist is to emotionalize everything, even to find an emotional angle which isn’t even there. It is to make a feelies’ feelings matter more than trying to cure the disease that’s poisoned the Arab mind for decades, and leaving most Arabs themselves hopeless. A feelies’ feelings felt in Gentleman-Farmtopia, Connecticut matter far more than the hopelessness of any struggling society in the less-than developed world.
We killed his children while he was still alive.
Indeed, they were just poor little children. Just like the ‘children’ we send unwillingly to war under the duress to their mommies and daddies or their two-mommies under that horrible draft...
When Wilbur is sad, I’m sad. ‘Cause ya know what? It’s all about Wilbur being sad. That whole ‘war’ thing was about Wilbur being sad. Nations do things to make Wilbur sad. The press reports things to make Wilbur sad.
I’m sad that Wilbur is sad. I’m even sadder that he’s so abject in his moral confusion and cowardice that his only way to confront an evil man is to feign some notion of ethical evenhandedness and universal humanistic empathy by shedding a tear for a mass-murder.
When Caroline De Gruyter, a journalist from the Netherlands, visited Wallonia five years ago she was amazed to meet several families that had been on the dole for three generations and did not have a single relative who was officially employed. The families liked it that way. They all voted for the Socialist Party, because it guaranteed that Flemish money would keep flowing to Wallonia. They described the attitude of Flemish nationalists “who do not want to pay taxes to support the Walloon jobless” as “unsocial behaviour!”
Remaking the agnostic Saddam as a martyr, a citizen of a non-democracy decries his execution: This is something which can’t b accepted by the world. It’s against the democracy. It’s so brutal, coz bush & his dogs choose this day for the execution. This is an action is not against Saddam but against the entire Muslims, this will divide the world again.
For the record, the Iraqis tried and executed Saddam Hussein, not the US, and not an “International Court.” For the millionth time, sparky: a muslim can be guilty of a crime without you hanging in around the neck of every Muslim in the world.
Sanju, Dubai, UAE
The Guardian defers to Saddam's lawyers:The world will know that Saddam Hussein lived honestly, died honestly, and maintained his principles. He did not lie when he declared his trial null.
NYT “blog” commenter Martha can’t wait to see a “leaked” video that implicates America in this:
I’d think the feeling that hanging a tyrant is something the US would rather LIKE to be “implicated” for. Wouldn’t Martha like to be “implicated” in a plot to eliminate bush? Like Saddam’s fake displays of his faith in the past decade, the prayers of the likes of these commenters are no less contrived.
Funnier still David Corn tries to like “that 2000 election” to that “illegal war” to anything else he can convince people of in his echo chamber. A commenter, to his article has that very special euro-lefty vision that “pressure groups” can somehow alter events. The correspondent isn’t talking about the insurgency:Achieving nothing but carnage was the US's intention. Halt this madness - where in hell is Stop The War what are they doing? The vast majority of Iraqis DON'T want us there. Why do you all think you know better?????
Indignant lefties turning on each other is always a treat.
The terribly predictable Independent dwells otherwise on the ”root causes” of Bush’s motives in Iraq, asking:In an address to the nation just three days before the invasion, Mr Bush declared: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
Surely this could be news to the people in Halabja and many other undocumented locations, to Iranians bombarded with chemical weapons in a decade long war, and in spite of what the New York Times itself reported in an attempt to burn the White House for NOT taking Saddam’s nuke program away.
It quickly became clear that central claim was not true
It always works both ways for the unreconstructed anarchical political zealots hiding behind their press credentials.
Another entirely predictable echo from the divine continent of Europe from an anonymous commenter who would rather believe any western liar with a nice website name like “Scholars for Truth” who agitate against anything the US is remotely involved in than to believe what the Iranians tell of their decade long ordeal with Saddam:FAKE 100%
Everything in the world, you see, is staged in favor of this commenter’s emotions and complaints. It’s a direct cause of his “stance” on events and the otherwise factual.The Fuse is Lit (No Pasaran!)
it was staged in hollywood like 911.
All you really need to do to ridicule the cult of Ché is to expose it for what it is, for the people who support it, and their foolish reasons for clinging to that fiction which has failed people when it wasn’t trying to decimate them.
Considering the tastelessness and crushing stupidity with which they’ve always comported themselves, I never find myself surprised by the left: Which items of revulsion and disillusionment are currently on the NYT agenda of perpetual outrage that will be generally viewed as incorrect as well in the future?
From The Grauniad we find this gem:”The most revealing statistic in recent months was a poll that showed that half of French people believe they could end up as homeless on the street.”
From the intense stupidity of the left that has constructed such a deep fear among the population, a fascist exploiter (who is no less leftist than any other) comes in to capitalize on it. As well they deserve him – the view from a welfare state that homelessness is only a step away is motivated by an intense distruct of themselves and society. So much so that they think that the state is needed to be the conduit of all the conduct of society and culture.
- a lousy hat-tip to Gene Miller, a.k.a. “Pookie”
Head of BBC News Peter Horrocks today banned the use of three key terms on BBC global news output - ‘suicide bombers’ ‘martyrs’ and ‘freedom fighters’. Horrocks made this unusual statement at the inaugural BBC Friends of Israel fundraising dinner. As well as raising thousands of shekels for Israel to spend on reinforcing the controversial security fence, Horrocks said in his after dinner speech ‘it is time the BBC recognises that homicide bombers in the middle east have the same motives as homicide bombers in the west’ and ‘are nothing but barbaric murderous scumbags acting under a veil of pseudo religious nonsense’. Horrocks then sang the Israeli national anthem as a solo before inviting Baroness Jenny Tongue onto the dance floor for the first Chassidic dancing number ‘We want moshiach now!’.
A boy can dream.
[Video] Neil Armstrong saw the Earth was a hanging sphere, and he said that basically it was Allah that hanged it here. They say that the Qaba’a emits infinitely high short wave radiations that they even felt when they've been to Mars. Mecca is a zone with no magnetism field. You live longer and healthier there.
What else could it be other than the incredible collapsing inflated ego of the gulf-Arab. Every man a prince, I’m sure.
It looks like one of our usual crazies has been hitting the sauce especially hard during this time of areligious yet solstice-worshipping time of year.Je veux bien lire votre bouquin mais c´est comme pour American Vertigo de BHL, je ne donne pas de $ aux sionistes alors j´attendrai de pouvoir le faire gratos.
For every Zionist book that our bilious, bulging tumor of anger doesnt read, I promise to give 25 to a Zionist and purchase it through an American online bookseller.
As if Levy was a Sioniste because his name is Levy, anyway... With some of our trolls there is no distinction of any sort. Opinions are genetic, and they seem more than ready to don their brown shirts were they only armed.
Just as long as it’s “green” somehow, that you aren’t getting too many evil artificial chemicals in your diet, and that you can parade your love of Gaia if for no other reason than to prop up your career.
We have one “Moonray Soaring Dove”, to thank for this fit of holiday cheer. I just recommend staying away from the organic chicken at his “non-denominational holiday sort of thing” celebration. I’m told that it actually doesn’t taste like chicken.
