Across-the-board anti-Americanism at a newsstand near you	Anti-américanisme universel dans les kiosks à journaux
Americans, you are hated here. Hated more than you can possibly imagine. Despite the claims made by clown-faced paternalistic spittle driveling morons. Thanks to Doug.	Les américains, vous êtes détestés ici. Détestés bien plus que vous ne pouvez l'imaginer. Malgré les péroraisons rabâchées par les postillonnants bouseux paternalistes aux bouilles à bozo. Merci à Doug.

Who's on First?

Even Le Monde has to admit that Uncle Sam is the largest contributor of aid to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami…

…although France's newspaper of reference did try to do that surreptitiously, by hiding that information inside Jean-Pierre Langellier's article devoted to the fact that Great Britain is the second-largest contributor of aid to tsunami victims (!)…

Two days later (only), Eric Leser does have a piece on the size of the American contribution but, needless to say, it is replete with criticism. And when Andrew Natsios tells Fox News that France, in turn, can hardly be called a major contributor of aid (as compared with Britain, Japan, the EU, Canada, and Australia), of course, the independent newspaper must devote the entire last paragraph to the French response to that charge, and to the French ambassador's putting Washington's motivations into question…

Meanwhile, Plantu's love-in with the United Nations — the paragon of virtue, the bastion of legality, and the epitome of efficiency — continues…
(Click here for a list of aid groups accepting donations for the victims…)

Across-the-board anti-Americanism	Anti-américanisme universel
Americans, you are hated here. Hated more than you can possibly imagine.	Les américains, vous êtes détestés ici. Détestés bien plus que vous ne pouvez l'imaginer.

On the rag	Toujours avec leurs ragnagnas
$350 million. The French panty-waist bloggers will still find reason to bitch. $350 million would buy 'em alot of Tampax.	$350 million. La frange pédaloïde de la blogosphère franchouille trouvera toujours une bonne raison pour rouspéter. $350 million leur acheteraient beaucoup de serviettes hygiéniques.

Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke	Aucun sens de l'humour ces connards
Obsessed with their own decline, the French are more and more depressed.	Obsédés par leur propre déclin, les franchouilles sont de plus en plus déprimés.

Bonne année et bonne santé

Happy New Year, to One and to All!

McOndo: McDonalds Macintosh Condos
Magical realism is dead. With Allende out of the way: Progess through market-driven bilingualism in Chile.	Le réalisme magique est mort. Allende aux chiottes: Le progrès grâce au bilinguisme et marchés ouverts au Chili.

Palme d'or Cannes 2005
Fugettaboutit!	Nan!

What Type of Iraqi Citizen Should a Journalist Choose as Guide in Order to Send Home the Most Objective Articles Possible?

When reporting from the new Iraq — you know, the Iraq that has been existing since the fall of the Ba'ath dictatorship in April 2003 — what type of local native should an independent journalist choose to take with him as his guide for the most objective, penetrating articles possible?

If you are a French journalist, the answer is a Syrian member of the Ba'ath party, of course, preferably one who still refers to Saddam Hussein as "president"…

Tewfik Hakem reports in Le Monde that the former chauffeur of Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot dreams of a pan-Arabic world.

A partisan of Arab unity since his youth, faithful [notice the presence of the positive-sounding word fidèle] to the Ba'ath movement created by the Christian Michel Aflaq in Damascus in the 1940s, [Mohamed al-Joundi] forsook Syria for Iraq a short time after Hafez al-Assad's régime forced the party's founders, including Michel Aflaq, into exile in 1963. In Baghdad, he became an employee in the party of Saddam Hussein, whom he still calls 'president'. His contacts at the heart of the fallen régime interested the two French reporters who were investigating 'the Iraq resistance'.

(Strange. When mentioning the birth of Ba'athism, why would anyone forget that the movement was modeled after Hitler's Nazi party? Probably nothing more than a slip of the pen…)

During a release celebration at the Paris townhall on December 22, during which he gave a toast not only "to the health of Georges and Christian" but also "to Jacques Chirac and the French government", Mohamed al-Joundi said that as early as two days after all three men's kidnapping, he knew that "things could only go well, because our kidnappers were resistants to the American occupation, and not crooks."

(Here is some more Iraqi praise for 'the president' along with another example of the typical dastardly deeds carried out by the villainous American occupiers which manages to parallel a description of the proud, brave, and noble members of the Baghdad resistance — as well as their legendary mutual solidarity.)

Al-Joundi has said he is planning to sue the American army for "ill treatment and death threats". Before their release, he had not made any comments, because as long as Malbrunot and Chesnot were still being held captive, the "highest French authorities" had asked him not to go public with his grievances against the Americans.

Just in case you don't think al-Joundi has been clear enough, he was speaking with a radiant face, and (now that diplomatic niceties were no longer necessary) did not hide his joy when, referring to the release coupled with the attack that killed 19 servicemen inside a Mosul base mess hall, he added that "Yesterday was a very good day for the French and a very bad one for the Americans".

Read Liberal Iraqi's comment on this
(shookhran to MiF), then bookmark his weblog

At last the two French journalists have been released by their kidnapers. See, these terrorists (errr.. freedom fighters) are not dangerous at all! They don't kill you if you don't mess up with them and if you support their just cause. They only kidnap you, hold you for few months and "treat you well" and then release you. That's not bad, is it? I dare say it's even a good reason to celebrate. …

France's opposition to the Iraq war had a soupçon of principle in a kettle of cynicism burbling with Iraqi oil and blood

For centuries France has claimed a monopoly on political virtue by glomming all the credit for the Enlightenment and by pretending to be its anointed protector throughout history

writes Jonah Goldberg as the NRO editor-at-large discusses "two great new books" that attack the French from France's "most vulnerable sides: facts and logic."

… let's also not gloss over the fact that more than a few French intellectuals have been known to look at dictators and mass-murderers the way Michael Jackson gazes at posters of Macaulay Culkin.

… France's opposition to the Iraq war had a soupçon of principle in a kettle of cynicism burbling with Iraqi oil and blood. Indeed, we forget that the phrase "millions for defense, not a penny for tribute" stemmed from [early] America's [1798] refusal to acquiesce to French shakedowns during the XYZ affair.

… But the most annoying irony is that while they ribbit a big game about bringing liberty and civilization to the world, France's record is one of sowing the seeds of tyranny and corruption almost everywhere they've planted their flag.

… The British valued virtue more than liberty; the Americans had it the other way around. But where the French differed is that they sought to replace the religion of old Europe with a new cult of reason. … By making a religion out of politics, with the state at its center, the French never embraced liberty the way Anglo-Americans did. It was this legacy that lent intellectual heft to all the great dictators — Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. …

(Merci à GS)

Stingy?	Radin?
Other countries aren't stingy, they just don't have any pocket change. 'Day by Day' is back.	Les autres pays ne sont pas prêts de leurs sous, ils n'ont pas de sous. 'Day by Day' est de retour.

We Are Wrong, and Damn Proud of It Too!

Which is better: to be right with Aron or to be wrong with Sartre?

was the question asked during the Cold War, when the pro-American, pro-capitalist (and, dare I say, pro-common sense) Raymond Aron took on the pro-Soviet moral relativism spewing out of the mouth of Jean-Paul Sartre (and much of French society). As the very fact that the question was even asked can tell you, the unspoken answer was that it was better to feel good, humanistic, and lucid with the latter's pro-Soviet faction than to boringly agree with the former's pro-common sense faction.

An old fogey in the académie française proves that the question has not (and the feelings have not) gone away. Describing what he calls "the twain attitudes of French thought in the 20th century" (and comparing the two men to rival predecessors such as Corneille and Racine, and Voltaire and Rousseau), Bertrand Poirot-Delpech writes:

Aron frantically sought all that could be said that was truthful, that was logical, and that would shed light on the ideologies in his presence.

That should make him the winner, non?

Non.

Just see how much farther Sartre went:

Sartre made of the act of reading and of writing a challenge of existence. He made a game of exercising his multiple talents by turns, without sacrificing an ounce of lucidité.

Well, no wonder it is better to be wrong with Sartre!

Fallujah Again?

It's a dangerous world, out there, Roland.

One of Doonesbury's liberal reporters flies off "to some dusty backwater with inedible food, an incomprehensible culture, and hordes of hostile fundamentalists!"

Kipling on Being a Man…

Today is the birthday of Rudyard Kipling, the British author (1865-1936) who said

A man's mind is wont to tell him more than seven watchmen sitting in a tower.

All the people like us are we, and everyone else is They.

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbors.

What happened at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo was, and is, beyond belief…

…an infamy which the world's press must focus on to prevent the planet from descending into barbarism…

In France, "Islam has replaced Marxism as the ideology of contestation" with a transnational ideology tilting toward an eventual utopian vision

In his Letter from France, Craig S Smith reports in the International Herald Tribune that in Europe, Islam fills Marxism's old shoes:

When Azzedine Belthoub was growing up in the shantytowns outside of Nanterre, France, 40 years ago, the people who came to take the young North African kids to swim in the community pool, to register them for school and give them candy and comic books, were Marxists. The French Communist Party offered a political voice for the working classes, including the growing number of North African immigrants imported to fill labor shortages after World War II.

Today, Islam plays that role, especially in France, where men like Belthoub, wearing long beards and short djellabas, reach out to the poor and disillusioned in the country's working-class neighborhoods.

Young Arabs and Africans here have turned to Islam with the same fervor that the idealistic youth of the 1960s turned toward Marxism.

"Now, religion has become our identity," Belthoub said last week, sitting in a friend's apartment in a largely Muslim suburb north of Paris.

The question is whether Islam in Europe will follow the same path that communism did here, shedding its revolutionary extremism, electing mayors and legislators and assimilating itself into normal democratic political life.

As with Marxism in the 1960s, Islam in Europe has its radical fringe and its pragmatic mainstream. The latter is much the broader, intent on expanding Muslims' political power in French society. It has consciously mimicked many of the tactics of the left, including organizing summer camps where urban young people learn the tenets of the movement.

… Islam's growth in Europe as the most vibrant ideology of the downtrodden is part of a wave of religiosity that has swept the Arab world in the past 30 years, propelled by frustration over feeble economies, uneven distribution of wealth and the absence of political freedom.

Like communism, it represents for many of its devoted adherents a transnational ideology tilting toward an eventual utopian vision, in this case of a vast, if not global, caliphate governed according to sharia, the legal code based on the Koran.

But the religion's appeal reaches beyond the communities of Arab and African immigrants born to the faith. … "Islam has replaced Marxism as the ideology of contestation," says Olivier Roy, a French scholar of European Islam. "When the left collapsed, the Islamists stepped in."

… The map of France's Islamists today largely matches that of the country's Marxists from decades ago. Many predominantly Muslim municipalities are still under Communist-led administrations, but Islamic organizations are now the active ones. …

In similar news, the AP's Anthony Deutsch has reported that (dank u to GS) "The Netherlands' intelligence service [has warned] that radical Islamic ideology is spreading to thousands of young Dutch Muslims through Internet sites and online chat rooms." …

It's just a blip on the screen	Ce n'est qu'un blip sur l'écran
So while Pavlovian bitches continue to bark at the slightest mention of the United States or Bush, Zeropa has dropped off the US' radar.	Alors que les petites lopes pavloviennes se mettent à aboyer dès qu'on parle des Etats-unis ou de Bush, la Zéropa a disparu du radar aux Etats-unis.

Go for the jugular	Arrachez la jugulaire
A new Iraqi blogger trashes France.	Un nouveau bloggeur irakien s'en prend à la Fwance.

Blind hatred	Haine aveugle
The false accusations of stinginess have already made the rounds here in Fwance. The panty-waist wing of the French blogosphere does not yet know that their puny little country was Amazoned. That doesn't stop them from going at it like Pavlov's dogs (bitches).	Les fausses accusations de radinerie ont fait la tour de la Fwance. La frange pédaloïde de la blogosphère franchouille n'a pas encore compris que son pays de gagne-petits était foudroyé par Amazon. Ça ne les arrête pas d'y aller avec leurs reflexes pavloviens (et on ne peut pas être certain que ce soit de la bave aux lèvres avec eux).