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 arms were found in a garage in Clichy-sous-Bois just north of Paris. Agents found several pounds of TNT, assault rifles, revolvers, ammunition, ski masks and bulletproof vests.
Investigators believe the weapons were used to carry out robberies in France. Some money may have gone to Abu Musab Zarqawi's group Al Qaeda in Iraq, officials said.»
Thanks to your vote, we are the runner-up in the European department of the 2005 Weblog Awards. Thanks to all the blogs which participated, thanks to all the people who voted, and well-deserved congratulations to David and Ray of Medienkritik.
Today, my letter to the editor was printed, slightly shortened, in the International Herald Tribune. FYI, here is the original version:
Scot Lehigh claims that anti-Americanism is at best non-existent and at worst exaggerated, referring to the tired old canard that "it is only our leaders they are against" (Anti-Americans? Not on my trip to Europe, Dec. 10-11). Really? Is that so?Tell me, how often have the Europeans commented on the disdain they have for, say, the leaders and/or administrations of Russia, China, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Iran, and (Saddam's) Iraq, and that with the same vehemence they reserve for Uncle Sam?
How often have they held mass demonstrations against the fighting in Chechnya, the conflict between Ethiopie and Eritrea, and the Iran-Iraq war?
How often have they held vigils against the death penalty in China, in Saudi Arabia, or in Sudan, and when did they ever express "concern" over how prisoners in those countries were treated?
Those Frenchmen who stated proudly "Chirac had the balls to stand up to Bush", how did they react when their president said that France would not mention human rights during a visit to the Kremlin because it was necessary "to show consideration for Russian sensibilities"?
How did those humanists react when Paris lit the Eiffel Tower in red for the visit of the Chinese president, when the government banned Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian from attending the Paris Book Fair, or when Chirac, along with fellow peace-lover Gerhard Schröder, tried to resume selling weapons to the saber-rattlers of Beijing?
There was not much of a reaction, was there?
The truth is, the Europeans didn't (and don't) care. They didn't care one way or the other for one simple reason: they were issues in which Uncle Sam was not involved.
Anti-Americanism is quite alive: it is the practice, on a regular basis, of double standards. Nothing more. And nothing less.
Rich Tucker addresses a theme of Euro-politics. Never really doing what you say you will, and becoming defensive and hostile to those who do. After all, who can afford to allow someone to hold one to your own standards:«For some reason, even though most countries are falling short of the pledges they’ve already made, they’re eager to make even more. Before leaving Montreal, delegates agreed to hold new talks “aimed at producing a new set of binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions that would take effect beginning in 2012,” as The Washington Post put it. “We should not underestimate the strength of this package,” Stavros Dimas, the European Union’s commissioner for the environment, said about the new deal. “Kyoto is alive and kicking.”
That’s an air that the fetishists using climate for political purposes never, ever really want to clear. Their meal-ticket is a never ending theater of posturing, imposing new requirements, and ginning up an enemy to the benefit of no-one.
Once again, the U.S. declined to participate in the charade. Our clarity was, apparently, confusing. “If it walks like a duck and talks like duck, it’s a duck,” American climate negotiator Harlan Watson told the other delegates when they tried to lure him into a new round of talks. That was too much for foreign delegates. “I don’t understand your reference to a duck. What about this document is like a duck?” one reportedly asked.
You see, to global elites, Kyoto is like a lousy Christmas gift: It’s the thought that counts. “It was signed up to by every single nation on earth, and if America now tries to walk away ... I think this is not just an environmental issue, it’s an issue of transatlantic global foreign policy.”»
The power hungry "radicals" of the left have to maintain a set of hysterical causes going at any given time to keep themselves on the radar, and to keep their supports purple enough in the face to keep their mean ticket.
Jack Kemp writes about one such front in the left's assaults whose only purpose is to convince themselves that they have some virtue at all: «The Bush administration deserves enormous credit for resisting this thinly disguised attempt to disadvantage America economically under the pretext of environmentalism and the pseudo-science of global warming. Scientists cannot even agree on whether global temperatures are rising, falling or staying the same, much less find scientific consensus on what might account for any changes in average temperatures. The administration should use these discussions to unmask the hostile, anti- American agenda that lies beneath this nonsense.
- as if the Zero Sum Game which was never true can be made true. By McKibben's logic, for him to be concidered wise, everyone else must become a fool. The trend has nothing to do with natural science, but a desire to validate poor scholarship and science in the name of its' authors. It embodies the vanity of the comfortable and detatched who remain enamored with failed ideas and utopian models that have led us to disasters in the past.
According to Fred Singer, University of Virginia scientist and professor emeritus, the data on global temperature are ambiguous, at best. The climate clearly warmed between 1900 and 1940, long before modern industrial activity consumed much energy. Between 1940 and 1975, when industrial carbon emissions accelerated, the climate cooled and then warmed again for a brief five years. Since then, the most reliable data indicate the climate has been cooling just slightly.
"Certainly," Singer says, "it has not been warming ... and there is no evidence that man is causing the warming."
If the models don't even square with what's going on now in the real world, how can any reasonable person place confidence in what they predict for the future, especially if taking action based on those dubious predictions means inflicting incredible damage on the economy and consigning people to a declining standard of living?
The calls for radical reductions in carbon emissions are a frontal attack on American global economic pre-eminence and a pretext for replacing the current international system of sovereign nation states with a global government possessing the far-reaching authority to engage in economic leveling and redistribution.
The best statement of this [the Kyoto supports'] agenda can be found in a Harper's magazine article by Bill McKibben titled "The Great Leap."
McKibben revealed the real agenda behind Kyoto and its progeny when he said, "The goal of the 21st century must somehow be to simultaneously develop the economies of the poorest parts of the world and undevelop those of the rich - to transfer enough technology and wealth that we're able to meet somewhere in the middle."
Global warming is not really about the global climate at all; it's about global government turning the whole world into Old Europe or stagnating Japan. This most recent round of eco-hysteria - along with its predecessors - is simply a thinly veiled effort to do by international treaty, and eventually global government, what Communism failed to do, namely define global prosperity down in the name of "equality."»
The idea that these jerks have is that in order to make the rest of civilization "feel better" that we have to be worse off, so that they don't have any goals in life. It's a joke to the rest of us, including the developing world, but in the sankpdbox that it's advocates live in it's supposed to be globally meaningful. In reality it's an emotional problem shared by leftists.
They want the admiration that comes with being the first to change things somehow and we're supposed to admire them unquestionably for simply knowing better. If you've ever witnessed a faculty lounge disagreement, you'll notice that they even do this among themselves.
It's about personal power, or more accurately their own powerlessness because the rest of the world doesn't drop everything and carry through their ideas into practice.
Il faut les attraper, les salopards, il faut les choper et en buter un.Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme tell us the last hours of Firmin Mahé, the Ivory Coast rebel who died while in custody of the French military.
Roulez doucement, vous me comprenez.
The youngest Hakim detained was only 14. His father and two brothers, together with 13 other relatives, were executed within the first weeks of detention. He and the rest were held in Abu Ghraib, 22 in a cell that measured 4mx6m. There was no running water and a hole in the corner served as a toilet. Recounting his detention in the book, Abdoul al-Hakim says: "The worst moments? It was all terrible, but the worst was the fear of being executed. Each time we heard the lock turn we were silent; it could be the moment to leave, for me, for another. I am angry with those who mix the crimes of the Americans with those of Saddam when they are not comparable."The best riposte to the God-damn-America camp, Rebecca Weisser notes (merci à RV), is a scholarly and sober 700-page volume that has just been published.
Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein) is a robust denunciation of Saddam's regime that does not fall into the trap of viewing everything in Iraq through a US-centric prism. The writers - Arabs, Americans, Germans, French and Iranian - have produced the most comprehensive work to date on the former Iraqi president's war crimes, assembling a mass of evidence that makes the anti-intervention arguments redundant.While the "robust denunciation of Saddam's regime that does not fall into the trap of viewing everything in Iraq through a US-centric prism", unfortunately the editor could not refrain from putting up on the back cover precisely those parts of Bernard Kouchner's introduction that form an anti-American, pro-peace-camp diatribe (see Présentation de l'éditeur).…The obsession of many journalists and commentators with the fruitless hunt for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons has meant much of the evidence of Saddam's atrocities in liberated Iraq has been under-reported. Sinje Caren Stoyke, a German archeologist and president of Archeologists for Human Rights, catalogues 288 mass graves, a list that is already out of date with the discovery of fresh sites every week.
"There is no secret about these mass graves," Stoyke writes. "Military convoys crossed towns, full of civilian prisoners, and returned empty. People living near execution sites heard the cries of men, women and children. They heard shots followed by silence."
…Saadoun Kassab, an engineer who helped build Abu Ghraib in 1957, a prison that was designed to hold 4000 prisoners, was later to be held there for a year. He told Chris Kutschera, the book's editor: "When I was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib in 1985, there were 48,500 prisoners. I was imprisoned for eight months in a space 1mx1.5m, a box. I was sometimes in there for a fortnight without going outside. I wanted to be interrogated to get outside, to see daylight and human beings. All that because I said hello to Saad Saleh Jaber [son of a former Shi'ite prime minister from the time of the monarchy]. I saw people die."
…In Saddam's Iraq no one, not even the dictator's closest relatives and collaborators, was safe. Tariq Ali Saleh, a former Iraqi judge and the president of the Iraqi Jurists Association, writes that during the reign of the Baath party from 1968 to 2003, the security services arrested and imprisoned people without charging them, with no access to a lawyer or contact with their family. Everyone was targeted, including women and children. Torture was systematically used to secure confessions including beating, burning, ripping out finger nails, rape, electric shocks, acid baths and deprivation of sleep, food or water.
[This] is what our soldiers died for: a world in which Middle East dictators no longer murder their own, ruin their own societies, and then cynically use terrorism to whip up the Arab street and deflect their own self-induced miseries onto the United States. This is the calculus that led to 9/11, and the reason why Saddam gave sanctuary to 1980s terrorists, the killer Yasin who failed in his first attempt to take down the twin towers, and the likes of Zarqawi.— Victor Davis Hanson
"Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world!" Borat, as he is known, boasted in a Web site posting that is actually the work of the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, star of "Da Ali G Show," a television comedy in Britain and the United States.Kazakhs are not amused by Ali G's Borat, writes Doreen Carvajal in a frontpage article of the International Herald Tribune."Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hat and age of consent has been raised to 8 years old."
Inside, Dan Bilefsky profiles the Baltic Iron Lady, aka Estonia's Vaira Vike-Freiberga:
…she cautions that Latvia is still living in the shadow of a Russia that, she says, has not come to terms with its lost empire or past transgressions: suppressing Latvia's culture for 50 years, banning its flag and deporting tens of thousands to Siberia as part of an effort to Russify the country.
"It's hard for Russia and its leaders to swallow the independence of countries it has been coveting since the time of Peter the Great," she said, referring to the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
"Russia has a problem recognizing us as a sovereign country. They tell us we never had a Tolstoy or a Dostoevski. I enjoy reading these writers, but they have no bearing on our right to be here."
«HONG KONG bowed to pressure from the French Government yesterday and lifted an expulsion order on Jose Bové.That puts the nanny state in a whole new light, doesn’t it?
Christine Lagarde, the French Trade Minister, asked the authorities to let M Bové into the territory after he performed a characteristically showy stunt, going on to France Inter radio live from a detention centre at the Hong Kong airport.
“Upon my arrival in Hong Kong they seized my passport and took me to a detention centre,” M Bové said.
Mme Lagarde asked the French consul-general in Hong Kong to make contact with the local authorities while her staff sought a promise from M Bové that he would behave during the summit.»
«M Bové, 53, who casts himself as a martyr to capitalist oppression, is awaiting an appeal against a three-month prison sentence for destroying fields of experimental genetically modified crops.
As a known troublemaker with a criminal record, he has been barred from visiting summits in the United States and Canada in the past.»
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Most interesting, perhaps, was the fit that Nicole Bacharan had while looking through her daughter's history book. Where America was discussed, not once would the word "capitalism" be used without a word such as "savage" being used along with it. But where China was discussed, she saw lengthy paragraphs on Mao's economic policies with the phrase "five-year plan" followed by the words "(six million dead)" in parentheses!
Needless to say, Le Monde's Martine Laronche manages to relativise this, but in Unholy Alliance, David Horowitz already established quite conclusively that today's far Left has made common cause with new Islamist fanatics.
Don't forget to vote (nudge nudge wink wink)…
Update: a non-profit association trying to
fight back, SOS Éducation, faces a lawsuit…
"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"(shuffling feet)
"What's for breakfast? said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"
"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
"It's the same thing," he said.
They used to pick off Christians in southern Lebanon because they were Christians - why not in Sydney?«Cardinal Pell says those attending the service at St Joseph's Primary School at Auburn were harassed as it commenced.
Sydney's Catholic Archbishop George Pell said bullets were fired at a school staging Christmas carols in Sydney's west on Monday night.
Towards the end of the event, the local priest heard gunshots. »
Tip of the fez to Tom Pechinski
Confused as ever about the concept of sovereignty, luvvies commenting at the BBC’s Newsnight page are hoppin’ and hoppin’ over the “legal” nature of war. Only they’re doing it at the intellectual level of the sandbox. International law is the interpretation of differences between legal systems and the study of law as it applies to treaties.
There is no “big book of international law,” stupid! That’s called hegemony. Remember that? The thing the US is always accused of?
Tip of the fez to Biased-BBC for tuning us in to the best comments on the Beeb-bot site that I’ve ever seen, especially as it related to yet ANOTHER deconstruction of GWB sorry... Bu$hChimpyHitlerburton, which consumes about 25 to 30% of the airtime output of the BBC World Service: «Oh for Gawd's sake, can't you find something new to talk about?
and this clown who doesn’t seem to be able to recognize the difference between journalism, advocacy, and agitprop anymore:
- Alan»«Without question, the BBC is the best broadcasting organisation in the world - I happily pay my licence fee. Well done, the BBC. I look forward to the programme. For far too long have we had the wool pulled over our eyes! Countless people have been killed and lives destroyed and for what? Let's follow the money and see who is getting rich out of this war. And as for the critics, if you would rather watch Pop Idol, feel free.
The condescension is hilarious. If you didn’t drink from this guys cup, apparently you’re intelligence is at the aomeba level. Elsewhere common sense prevails:
- Arnie, London»«This is disgusting, by even producing this programme it's clear the BBC thinks that the allies are guilty. It's not up to the BBC, or a "selected jury" to decide, but the people by democratic process. Which is what they did at the last election, with not much effect. If this isn't clear unbalanced, bad journalism, then I don't know what is.
The general temprament of the commenters tell me that many 'peace camp' types really ARE confused about what law is anyway - calling the thing a 'trial', pretending that their warm fuzzy intentions are in fact 'law' somewhere, or even knowing that the world is not as requlated as their mircomanaging little town councils.
- Andy»
