What Is to Blame for the Connecticut Shooting? Does the Blame Lie with the Right to Bear Arms Or Can It Be Found Elsewhere?

In the 18th century — the century at the end of which the Second Amendment was being passed in the newly-born United States — the biggest problem for the majority of the world's population was not the right to keep and bear arms.

It was the lack of the right to keep and bear arms.

In the 19th century, likewise, the greatest problem for most people on this planet was not the absence of gun control.

It was the presence of gun control.

In the 20th century, most people did not suffer from the right to keep and bear arms.

They suffered from the lack of the right to keep and bear arms.

As can be attested by the victims (assuming they could talk) of the likes of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Milosevic, along with the Hutus… As an aside, one of the first measures taken by each of the aforementioned (ahem) leaders after coming to power — for the good of the people, needless to say — was to impose or to tighten arms control.

And it is no different today.

Look at Saddam's Iraq, at Khadaffi's Libya, at the Assads' Syria…

(Would not the average Iraqi citizen, the average Libyan citizen, the average Syrian citizen over the past 30 to 40 years have been better off with the right to keep and bear arms?)

1. Has Anything Changed and, If So, What Is That Something?

Nothing has changed.

Or has it?

There does seem to have been one major change, at least in the West — has there not?

Let's go back into history again…

What do we see? Or rather… what do we fail to see?

Few, if any, school shootings in the 18th century — certainly not in the land of the Second Amendment.
(I originally wrote "no shootings whatsoever", but since I cannot be 100% positive — in view of the fact that it's hard to prove a negative — I changed the wording…)

Few, if any, school shootings in the 19th century.

Few, if any, school shootings in first half of the 20th century.

In arguing on French TV for Europe-like arms control in the United States, a guest on the iTélé news show made a point of enumerating "all" the shootings that have occurred in America — among them, the 1966 University of Texas sniper shooting, the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, the 2007 Virginia Tech slaughter, the 2011 Arizona shooting spree, and the 2012 Colorado movie theater killings. [This post has been slightly updated in the wake of the 2014 Santa Barbara massacre.]

Now — in the wake of the 2012 Connecticut elementary school massacre — she erupted:
What is wrong with Americans?! When are they finally going to come to their senses and impose gun control?! When will the NRA finally be silenced?! When will ordinary Americans, not least ordinary members of the Republican Party, stand up to the GOP leadership and demand that gun possession be banished, or at least, curtailed — and that, sharply?!

But there is a better question to be asked:
between the past and the present, what is the difference that we see?

Why no examples from the 1950s and from prior decades and centuries?

The deadliest gun rampages started in the 1960s and 1970…

Hm…

I wonder what happened, or started to happen, in the 1960s and 1970s…

Oh — that's right: the left's youth revolution with the "victory" of more and more of the "modern" ideas of the progressives…

Now let's see — what did, and what do, these entail?

Well, among other things, the triumph of the ideas of compassion, of tolerance, of understanding…

Of empathy for all kinds of groups, not least the mentally ill — who turn out to be nothing more than merely misunderstood and who therefore deserve freedom from straitjackets…

And the ensuing political correctness demanded the dismantling of mental institutions or the limiting of their use and refraining from confining mental cases (who of course turn out not to be mental cases) thereto. ("Guffaw! You want to keep insane asylums open?! How can you be so reactionary, so backwards?! It's everybody else who should be in a nuthouse! Snort!")

We should not judge these people, we can not judge these people; with some compassion and understanding, if only we are willing to make an effort, we can allow such people to live amongst us.

Rather than the judgments we pass on them, which show our cluelessness and — our hatred… (Maybe we — us "normal" people — are the mental cases! And maybe we need to be institutionalized!)

Mental cases are even given hero status in the left's narratives (winning several Oscars from Hollywood in the process) — as indeed are all the usual members of the left's victimhood brigade (women, gays, blacks, Indians, primitive peoples living close to nature, etc etc etc).

From Forrest Gump to John Coffey via Raymond Babbitt, these messiah-like beings turn out to be (far) more loving than us regular people, superior souls who touch everybody they meet, leading to miracles by helping "normal" (blinded) people to become better human beings and fulfill their destinies, if these saints do not healing said mortals outright, physically or otherwise.

In other words, what artists, and leftists, are basically helping to "prove", over and over again, is that the average American, the average citizen, the average human being (who is unlike themselves) is a clueless and/or bigoted moron (someone obviously in need of some sort of betterment treatment).

As with everything else the Left touches, slowly, one brick at a time, common sense is overturned, and normal, regular law-abiding, citizens are demonized and made to be those who obviously ought to be the true outcasts of society (among other things, these bigoted oafs obviously ought to be without weapons or the rights thereto).

2. What, for Ideological Reasons, the Left Ignores

But back to the massacres of the past half century:

Unless I am mistaken, there was not a single occasion of a shootist over the past 50 years, whether underage kids or grown-up adults, who did not previously show warning signs — if only the fact that they were described as "remote" — warning signs that were deliberately and repeatedly ignored, by family and friends as well as by professionals and people in authority; and that, for fear of the left's PC police.

(This is true even in the military; think only of the warning signs concerning Major Nidal Hassan, universally and persistently ignored, prior to the Islamist's 2009 Fort Hood massacre.)

Indeed, writes Dr Keith Ablow, in Adam Lanza's case, there is every probability that he expressed very concerning thoughts or feelings to more than one person before Friday.

After a shooting spree, as William S. Burroughs once said, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it and who, (not at all) incidentally, would never do anything remotely like it.

Of course, contrary to what the iTélé guest said or implied, the presence of guns alone does not ensure that massacres such as that in Sandy Hook will become more and more common or simply commonplace.

Indeed, had an armed American — had the average armed American — been present at the school or at the university, he (or she) would have used his (or her) weapon to start firing back at Adam Lanza or Elliot Rodger, and either hit the gunman or forced him to take cover, preventing him from continuing his deadly spree. (Could an armed teacher or an armed firefighter from the fire station next door not have intervened much earlier?) Besides writing (in The Atlantic) that "We must find a way to make it more difficult for the non-adjudicated mentally ill to come into possession of weapons,"Jeffrey Goldberg points out that

Mass shootings take many lives in part because no one is firing back at the shooters. The shooters in recent massacres have had many minutes to complete their evil work, while their victims cower under desks or in closets. One response to the tragic reality that we are a gun-saturated country is to understand that law-abiding, well-trained, non-criminal, wholly sane citizens who are screened by the government have a role to play in their own self-defense, and in the defense of others … it seems fairly obvious that there was no one at or near the school who could have tried to fight back.

 
(Goldberg develops this issue in a separate, longer article, replete with examples of armed citizens putting a stop to killing sprees: "in other cases, massacres were stopped early by the intervention of armed civilians, or off-duty or retired police officers who happened to be nearby.")

Indeed, what the news services rarely tell you — because the statistics, deliberately or otherwise, are simplified or skewered — is that the gun-free zones, whether a nation like Britain, a state like New Jersey, a city like Chicago, or a campus or a school like Sandy Hook Elementary, are oftenest (if only by comparison) the deadliest ones. Indeed, adds Glenn Reynolds,

One of the interesting characteristics of mass shootings is that they generally occur in places where firearms are banned: malls, schools, etc.

For instance, the murder capital of America turns out also to be… the capital proper of America. When foreigners hear that unpalatable fact about Washington, they often shake their heads: How scandalous! Shouldn't Americans at least make their own capital secure?! What they do not understand is that it is precisely — precisely — because Washington (already) has the most draconian gun laws in the nation — and because its law-abiding citizens therefore have no weapons, i.e., no means of defending themselves — that (law-breaking) criminals (scofflaws, they were referred to under Prohibition), who also read the newspapers, choose DC as their place of predilection.

So, as the Blogfather notes on Instapundit, Gun-free zones provide a false sense of security, and as Dr Keith Ablow adds, they do not therefore provide a solution. Adds the Tennessee law professor, it is "an insult to honest people":

Gun-free zones are premised on a lie: that murderers will follow rules, and that [ordinary people with permits to carry guns] are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers.

(Incidentally, I am wondering whether the gun laws in Connecticut, although far from the strictest in the nation, similarly seem to have been tweaked, if not broken, by the 20-year-old gunman ("It is unlawful to sell or permanently transfer a handgun to any person who is forbidden to possess a handgun, or to a person under 21"). Indeed, if Drew Zahn is to be believed, Adam Lanza broke "a half-dozen laws in his crime," including "at least three" of Connecticut's gun-control laws. "Of course, these laws were violated because Lanza did not own any of the firearms in question, but rather stole them, and he clearly had no regard for the law in committing his crime.")

3. And What If the U.S. Were to Emulate Europe?

Some readers, particularly on the East Coast and in Europe (and wholly lacking in racism, naturally), may protest that the modern-day examples given (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, etc) concern Arabs and Africans and so on, and not people in the West, a civilized place where gun control should be a given.

Some of them would hope that, on the subject matter of gun control and others (health care etc), Barack Obama would bypass Congress and simply get some laws passed by diktat. As Harry Belafonte said (echoing words by Woody Allen) — i.e., some of the above-mentioned Hollywood artists — the "only thing left for Barack Obama to do is to work like a third world dictator and just put all [his GOP opponents] in jail."

Adds Michael Moore, The NRA hates freedom and obviously ought to be outlawed, meaning that, there too presumably, jail time is appropriate for any of its proponents who do not give in (and who do not give in their weapons).

As I've written before, that's a whole hell of a lot of people that need to go through jail or, failing that, some sort of reeducation camps.

In any case, the people, from Europe or elsewhere, suggesting that mass killings inspired by the state are no longer operative in the modern West seem to be forgetting where Dolfi, Uncle Joe, and Slobodan hailed from.

Don't you think, for instance, that the French citizens of Oradour-sur-Glane (civilians all, naturally) would have been grateful to have had the right to keep and bear arms (and the concurrent weapons training), along with the concurrent weapons that that right entails?

Before we close this post, let us give a look at the old "violent nature of America" legend.

Take a good look at the entire globe, as well as the history of the globe, and the "violent nature" of America, as well as the "America's love affair with guns", turns out to be pretty much artificial.

Just like the least racist place in the world seems to be America, one has to wonder if one of the least violent places in the world does not seem to be America as well…

Because of course there is violence in many other places, such as Great Britain and France. And how about neighboring Mexico? While we decry "America's love affair with guns", Mexico is rent with violence (and was so far before the recent development of the narco-trafficking problem). Indeed, while America's Wild West is decried for bloodshed (in fact, fewer people were killed in the West between the Civil War and the year 1900 than in one single year in New York City), people, American, Mexican, or other, downplay the innumerable 19th-century deaths in Mexico, even finding such things as the country's executions romantic (ah, señoritas, sombreros, Mariachi bands, and firing squads). Mexicans routinely put whole garrisons of captured rebels to death — not just Anglos, famously, at the Alamo and Goliad but fellow Hispanics in places like Zacatecas as well — or, when they were in a more generous mood, "only" shot one prisoner at random out of every 10.

To return to the present, it is easy for leftists, American or foreign, like the iTélé guest, to tout the success of the gun control laws in the rest of the Western world when you (or they) ignore the 1996 massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school; the 2000 killing of eight kids in Japan; the 2002 deaths of eight people in Nanterre, France; the 2002 killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany; the 2007 shootings to death of eight people in Tuusula, Finland; the killing of 10 people at a Finnish university less than a year later; the 2009 killing of 15 people in Winnenden, Germany; and, needless to say, Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers.

(Is it unrealistic to wonder whether the tolls would have been lower had a few of the adults in each place — as well as at Paris's Bataclan in 2015 — carried a weapon and tried to shoot back at the respective killers?)

But, of course, t'is easier to condemn gun violence in America when you ignore, or downplay, gun violence in your own country, including not giving a second thought to the widespread presence of Kalashnikovs.

What criticism regarding "America's love affair with guns" amounts to is that gun violence involving uncontrollable private citizens is ghastly — while that initiated by the state, and by authorities, somehow seems much less of a big deal. ("Sure it's horrible that the communists killed millions of people, but, y'know… at least they had good intentions!") That indeed turns out to be the only way to support the United Nations system, where diplomats and the media alike ignore or downplay violence ignited by governments (unless they're Western), while focusing on violence against a government by the West (Bush's outrageous war against Saddam Hussein).

Oradour-sur-Glane

Update: Instapundit links a must-read article from National Review's John Fund:

A few things you won’t hear about from the saturation coverage of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre:

Mass shootings are no more common than they have been in past decades, despite the impression given by the media.

In fact, the high point for mass killings in the U.S. was 1929, according to criminologist Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections.

Incidents of mass murder in the U.S. declined from 42 in the 1990s to 26 in the first decade of this century.

The chances of being killed in a mass shooting are about what they are for being struck by lightning.

Until the Newtown horror, the three worst K–12 school shootings ever had taken place in either Britain or Germany.  

… We would be better off debating two taboo subjects — the laws that make it difficult to control people with mental illness and the growing body of evidence that “gun-free” zones, which ban the carrying of firearms by law-abiding individuals, don’t work.

… Gun-free zones have been the most popular response to previous mass killings. But many law-enforcement officials say they are actually counterproductive. “Guns are already banned in schools. That is why the shootings happen in schools. A school is a ‘helpless-victim zone,’” says Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff. “Preventing any adult at a school from having access to a firearm eliminates any chance the killer can be stopped in time to prevent a rampage,” Jim Kouri, the public-information officer of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, told me earlier this year at the time of the Aurora, Colo., Batman-movie shooting. Indeed, there have been many instances — from the high-school shooting by Luke Woodham in Mississippi, to the New Life Church shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo. — where a killer has been stopped after someone got a gun from a parked car or elsewhere and confronted the shooter.

Economists John Lott and William Landes conducted a groundbreaking study in 1999, and found that a common theme of mass shootings is that they occur in places where guns are banned and killers know everyone will be unarmed, such as shopping malls and schools.

… Lott offers a final damning statistic: “With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.”

 Update 2 — by Ann Coulter:

All these shootings are united by one clear thread: They all were committed by visibly crazy people, known to be nuts but not institutionalized.

Mental illness was blindingly clear in the cases of Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), Maj. Nidal Hasan (Fort Hood), Jared Loughner (Arizona shopping mall), James Holmes (Colorado movie theater), and a dozen other mass shootings in the past few decades.

But in every instance, Democrats’ response was: Let’s ban high-capacity magazines! Let’s limit private gun sales! Let’s publish the names of everyone who owns a registered gun!

Mass shootings don’t correlate with any of these things. They correlate with not locking up crazy people. We’re not worried about school kids being systematically gunned down by angry husbands, gang members or antique gun collectors. We’re worried about a psychotic showing up in a public place and shooting everyone in sight.

 … In every one of these mass shootings, there was someone in a position to say before the attack, “Trust me, this person is a psycho.” Try getting Jared Loughner or James Holmes through any mental illness hearing in which they’re required to speak. (Though both might end up being offered their own shows on MSNBC.) 

If someone was brought back from the 1950s to today, he’d tell us: “I couldn’t help but notice that all the people who committed mass shootings were batsh*t crazy. Why were they not locked up or forced to take medication?”

We’d have to say, “Because some people — we call them ‘liberals’ — get a warm feeling of self-righteousness by defending the right of the deranged to crap in a shoebox, carefully label it and put it in a closet.” 

Democrats absolutely will not address the one thing that was screaming out from all of the mass shootings: a crazy person committing the crime. We can’t medicate them and we can’t lock them up because the ACLU has handcuffed society’s ability to deal rationally with the mentally disturbed.

Not only will Democrats refuse to address the problem of the mentally ill on their own, but they will fight to the last ditch to protect any crazy person’s right not to take his medication.

At some point in the 1980s, not being “judgmental” became the highest form of virtue — although the left is plenty judgmental about things they don’t like, such as white males, smokers, Christianity, Wal-Mart, Fox News, talk radio and NASCAR.

Liberals are so determined not to stigmatize anybody that their solution is always to make all of society suffer instead:

– To avoid hurting Muslims’ feelings, everyone has to strip to his underwear at the airport.

– So no one feels excluded, we’re not allowed to say “Merry Christmas!”

– To avoid singling out gays, the government and media lied to Americans for a decade about the coming explosion of heterosexual AIDS. (We’re still waiting.)

– To stop people from noticing patterns, the media bend over backward to avoid telling us the race of dangerous criminals on the loose.

– To prevent hurt feelings, everybody gets an “A.”

– And to avoid “stigmatizing” the mentally ill, society has to live with the occasional mass murder.

These anti-stigmatization rules don’t even help the people they claim to be protecting. But defending ridiculous rules that ruin things for everyone else makes liberals feel heroic.

Update 3: Everytown for Gun Safety's list was compiled to give the public an exaggerated impression of how many school shootings have taken place. Notes Glenn Reynolds:

IT’S FUNNY THAT THE GUN-CONTROL FOLKS CAN’T SELL THEIR PROGRAM WITHOUT, YOU KNOW, LYING

Update 4: In 2015 alone, France suffered more casualties from gun violence than the U.S. has suffered during Obama's entire presidency

Update 5: a brief outtake from this post was published three years later in the New York Times in response to their front-page editorial on the "Gun Epidemic"

Update 6: Re the BBC's statistics behind gun violence —
Mass shootings in the U.S. have fallen so much in the past century
that the political left has had to redefine what a mass shooting is

Update 7: Registration, confiscation, extermination — in Europe, Hitler and Stalin used registration lists to confiscate guns, create gun-free zones, and then perpetrate mass shootings

Obelix to Flee Gaul and Caesar's 75% Super Tax for the Fiscal Paradise of the Belgians

Plantu comments on Gérard Depardieu's Decision to Flee France and Its 75% Supertax for a (Relative) Fiscal Paradise 1 KM From the French Border.

In Plantu's Le Monde cartoon, we see a cigar-chomping movie star in his recurring role as the Gaul Obélix carrying his safe with the French and Belgian flags (in the same manner that the Astérix series character carries his favorite menhir standing stone around behind his back) during a period of "record unemployment in December" while a film director shouts:

• Concentrate some more, Gérard. One can tell that you are not feeling involved!

Gérard Depardieu as Obelix without the Gaul's moustache in the company of an extra playing a viking (1:20) during the filming of Astérix et Obélix: Au service de sa Majesté (check out the parody of "300" (barely 1 second in the trailer))

Update: Asking a socialist to embrace austerity is like asking a prostitute to embrace chastity

Depardieu Flees France and Its 75% Supertax for a (Relative) Fiscal Paradise 1 KM From the French Border

 Where, on the American continent, have we been seeing something similar for some years?

Hm. I wonder…

After passing a 75% super-tax on the richest Frenchmen (it's for patriotic reasons, they claim haughtily, so the rich ought to feel… privileged), the socialist government is becoming irritated that some of the latter — the most recent and the most famous of whom is none other than Gérard Depardieu — do not want to be milch cows and are emigrating to Belgium or Switzerland — in Gégé's case, to a village (Estaimpuis) less than a mile from France's northern border (and where a fourth of the population is composed of — rich — Frenchmen)… 

The lesson the left takes from this?

Re-think their punitive policies? Pas du tout…

It is to try and strip said rich capitalist pigs of their French nationality!

Meanwhile, the mayor of Estaimpuis explains facetiously the reason why Jayrahd Deepahdyew (merci, Hervé) has moved to Southern Belgium: "the landscape."

Daniel Senesael, le bourgmestre (PS) d'Estaimpuis, a lui-même confirmé l'installation de Gérard Depardieu qui faisait, lundi, la "une" de tous les quotidiens populaires. La rumeur courait depuis des semaines et, dans l'intervalle, les services de police ont vérifié sa domiciliation. "L'acteur a promis de vivre six mois par an dans cette maison ", affirmait, lundi, le quotidien La Province, en montrant l'austère façade grise de la maison acquise par l'acteur.

Selon M. Senesael, celui-ci "voulait surtout quitter la ville et il a apprécié le paysage (...) ainsi que le contact avec la population". Une affirmation qui fait sourire. "Car ce n'est pas uniquement par amour de la région que la star a décidé de s'installer en Belgique, relève Le Soir. Il est plutôt question pour lui de fuir la super-taxe [de 75 % des revenus au-delà d'un million d'euros] imposée aux plus riches par M. Hollande", note le quotidien.

No word on whether Nounours ("Teddy Bear" has been Depardieu's nickname since the actor started gaining weight many years ago) plans to acquire the Belgian nationality — which would make the socialists' attempt to strip the star of his French citizenship somewhat moot — as is being sought by the previously most famous expatriate, LVMH boss Bernard Arnault.
Update: Plantu's Le Monde cartoon shows Depardieu
as Obelix fleeing Gaul with a safe on his back

Gérard Depardieu as Obélix without the Gaul's moustache in the company of an extra playing a viking during the filming of Astérix et Obélix: Au service de sa Majesté

Update: Offended by Taxes and Government Insults, Depardieu Goes a Step Further and Returns His French Passport

Update 2: Asking a socialist to embrace austerity is like asking a prostitute to embrace chastity

"Dirty white! Dirty Frenchman!" Anti-white racism has become a fact of French life

A FEW weeks ago, an esteemed civil rights organization asserted that anti-white racism has become a fact of French life

writes John Vinocur in his International Herald Tribune column.

The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism said that this did not involve specific discrimination of the kind confronted by Arabs and blacks, but held that anti-white racism “exists, and there are no taboos or hesitation about saying so.” 

The organization has become a co-plaintiff in an apparently racially motivated aggravated assault case involving an attack on a white male. According to press reports, the suspect was shown on a video surveillance tape wielding a broken bottle and shouting, “Dirty white, dirty Frenchman,” in French and Arabic. 

“Today,” wrote Pierre-André Taguieff, a sociologist and historian, “in certain ‘difficult neighborhoods,’ so-called poor whites are the primary victims of a majority of so-called poor non-whites. The rejection of whites is, in turn, encouraged by Islamist propaganda that is hostile to Muslims’ integration.” 

Obviously, the majority white population in France is not under siege. And the Muslims here (an estimated five million people, including citizens and the country’s largest immigrant group) continue to face various forms of prejudice and exclusion. 

But the anti-racism league’s stance gives substance to an intensifying antagonism at the heart of French society from years of failed integration — and to what is seen by large segments of French society as Muslim unwillingness to accommodate the law, customs and lifestyle of the majority. 

A survey published Oct. 25 by the Ifop polling organization underscores the clash. It reported that 60 percent of the French consider that “the influence and visibility of Islam in France” is too great, 68 percent believe that Muslims’ nonintegration is their own fault, and that refusal of Western values, fanaticism and submission are the words that best correspond to the idea they have of Islam. 

With the possibility of France entering recession next year, and alongside recent cases of murder and alleged plots by Muslim extremists, this amounts to real grief and tension.

Despairingly, both are compounded by the incapacity of successive governments to deal with the Muslims’ role in France with anything like decisive engagement.

First, no president here has ever made a priority of massive investment — call it high dosage affirmative action — in the newcomers’ future education and employment.

Second, no leader has ever sought to enforce specific standards for Muslim assimilation.

Those standards are not a vague, nonintuitive notion in France. They correspond to the secular character of the French republic, which promises freedom of religion for all, but also demands a complete absence of religion from the activities of the state — and bars the insertion of religion by anyone into those activities.

… Coming on top of greater Muslim alienation and more complaints about Islam from the white majority, the current government effort is the rough equivalent of the denial that often has been the reflexive response to issues involving everyday racism here since the end of French colonialism in the 1960s. 

Clearly, mumbling that the automatic equality attached to French citizenship and the fairness of French society are sufficient guarantees for Muslim integration is a dead incantation in 2012. 

It’s hard to be optimistic about France buying or charming back an estranged community that in some neighborhoods lives life as a partially parallel society. Many Muslims might ask, Why should I accept the values of the republic when I believe they function mostly in theory? 

An extensive affirmative action program, with clear school and job entry quotas might work, but it cannot come now without an accommodating and assimilating new face offered as a quid pro quo from the Muslim side.

 More Vinocur on racism in France…

The Kremlin’s willingness to employ aggressive — even illegal — measures to suppress the political critics of Putin

For two and a half days in October, Leonid Razvozzhayev, a little-known leader of the Russian political opposition, moved furtively from one part of Kiev to another, meeting with political allies and human rights experts about seeking asylum in the West. At times, he was sure he was being followed. He was right.

Thus writes David M Herszenhorn in the New York Times as the mainstream media again ignores Barack Obama's infatuation with Russia (see third debate with Mitt Romney) and his willful ignorance of the Kremlin's hostility to human rights and to the United States itself.

On a Friday afternoon in clear daylight, masked men grabbed Mr. Razvozzhayev and shoved him into a black van outside the office of a lawyer who was preparing his asylum application on behalf of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The van sped away. Mr. Razvozzhayev’s personal belongings were left behind. More than the prosecution of the punk band Pussy Riot or the criminal inquiries into numerous opposition figures, the abduction of Mr. Razvozzhayev has showcased the Kremlin’s willingness to employ aggressive — even illegal — measures to suppress the political critics of President Vladimir V. Putin. 

It also fits a pattern of recent cases in which people seeking protection in Ukraine were instead returned to the countries they fled, in violation of Ukrainian law as well as international laws and treaties that protect asylum seekers.

… “We see a problem of disrespect for international law on the part of Ukraine,” said Maksim Butkevych, a rights advocate with Social Action Center in Kiev.

… “If any government was complicit in the abduction of Leonid Razvozzhayev, that government committed a grave violation of Mr. Razvozzhayev’s right under the 1951 Refugee Convention to be protected from involuntary return,” said Mark Hetfield, the interim president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a nonprofit group whose lawyers in Ukraine were preparing Mr. Razvozzhayev’s asylum application.

After Mr. Razvozzhayev resurfaced two days later outside a Moscow courthouse in Russian custody, Vladimir Markin, the spokesman for Russia’s top federal investigator, insisted that he had “turned himself in” — an assertion flatly contradicted by interviews with Mr. Razvozzhayev’s wife, lawyers and associates who saw him in Kiev. While Russia could have requested his extradition legally, international rights monitors say Ukraine routinely flouts normal procedures. 

… Mr. Butkevych said that kidnappings were rare but that asylum seekers were routinely deported or extradited from Ukraine in violation of their rights. “In general terms, Ukraine is not a safe country,” Mr. Butkevych said. “For some people, especially those people who are actually wanted by their countries of origin, it can be dangerous.” 

  That certainly proved true for Mr. Razvozzhayev, a former amateur boxer and native of Siberia who has long been a close associate of Sergei Udaltsov, the leader of the Left Front, a radical socialist group that is at the core of the Russian political opposition. 

Mr. Razvozzhayev’s lawyers say that after he was abducted, he was driven across the Russian border, held for nearly two days in the basement of a house, denied food and subjected to what has been described as psychological torture, including death threats against his family. 

They said he was also forced to write and sign a 10-page confession, admitting to allegations first raised in early October in a documentary on NTV, a government-controlled television channel. The film showed Mr. Udaltsov, Mr. Razvozzhayev and others, in what was said to be a meeting in Minsk, in Belarus, appealing for financial assistance from a political operative from Georgia, the former Soviet republic.

French Foreign Minister: France must "be able to remain an 'influential power' that is expected to speak out and is listened to and respected"

AT the last NATO summit in Chicago, very soon after he took office, President François Hollande set out his vision of our country’s place in the Atlantic alliance

writes French foreign minister Laurent Fabius (as he congratulates Americans for reelecting Barack Obama):

France is an ally that exercises its responsibility as a founding member and is committed to promoting common values but does not hesitate, if necessary, to air its differences honestly. This position is in line with the one the Socialist Party took in particular during the debate in 2009 on France’s return to the integrated command: allied yes, aligned no.

… In 2009, we [French Socialist Party members] did not support a return to the integrated command, but there is no question of organizing a permanent to-ing and fro-ing, and there would be little point in leaving it again today. However, we must ensure that our return, now officially endorsed, does not result in a trivialization of our foreign policy or a deterioration of our ability to make decisions and act, but on the contrary, in the growth of our influence and capabilities. 

In this way, France will play its full role in an organization whose chief mission is to enable democracies with shared values and interests to organize effectively their armed forces’ interoperability while guaranteeing their collective defense. 

The report [pdf] that the former foreign minister Hubert Védrine has just presented to the French president on our country’s role in NATO is a highly useful contribution to the work of the White Paper Commission tasked with considering our defense and security policy agenda. 

The report shares the same agenda. In particular, it emphasizes a twofold need: to strengthen our influence within the alliance by showing ourselves to be vigilant there, and to be more proactive in building a European defense. 

These recommendations are pertinent. In order to implement them and optimize NATO’s role in the new world around us, our policy must set itself at least three goals. 

1) For France, NATO must remain a special instrument of the trans-Atlantic relationship for the sake of values and interests we share — Europeans on the one hand and Americans and Canadians on the other. NATO is the natural framework for our forces’ joint engagement with the Americans. 

In this context, France will act to pursue the reform of the alliance in order to make it more effective. It will continue to shoulder its responsibilities, while preserving autonomy in its fundamental choices: to implement its nuclear deterrent; to withdraw its combat troops from Afghanistan, as it has now done; to develop a NATO anti-missile defense mechanism — for which, at the alliance’s latest summit, President Hollande set out his conditions, endorsed by the other 27 heads of state and government; and more generally, to retain freedom in the use of its forces and develop Defense Europe, which is an integral part of the project of political union. 

France will also continue working to strengthen all areas of cooperation between NATO and Russia, which in our eyes is a vital partner in different fields, such as Afghanistan and the fight against piracy and terrorism. 

2) There must be calm discussion — facilitated by President Obama’s re-election — of a new sharing of security and defense responsibilities between Europeans and Americans. The United States needs a reliable European ally capable of shouldering all its responsibilities. 

The Libya crisis showed that Europeans could play their part in dealing successfully with a conflict. We took on the bulk of the risks, responsibilities and military contributions. But the crisis also showed that we still need the support provided by the United States. Insofar as it has the necessary capabilities — as is not sufficiently the case today — it should be the European Union that acts when Europeans’ security interests are primarily at stake. 

In a few months’ time, for example, the E.U. will have to play its full role supporting the United Nations in helping Mali regain its sovereignty and fight terrorism. For the same reason, it would be good to start thinking about the responsibilities it will have to take on alongside the future Syrian authorities. 

3) The efforts initiated for Defense Europe must be pursued. NATO can make its contribution, but it is up to the Europeans first of all to work on it among themselves. 

This project is consistent with what we are doing to ensure that the European Union has a coordinated foreign policy with the means to make and implement decisions. We must act now toward this end, whereas our country, mobilized these past few years by its return to NATO’s integrated command, has been rather sparing when it comes to the resources devoted to Defense Europe.

We are going to continue working to build support for this project among European institutions and all our European partners, including the British. Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and I recently hosted a meeting with our German, Italian, Spanish and Polish colleagues in order to make progress, calling on all the member states to join us in developing this project in cooperation with our main partners, who obviously include NATO. 

All these approaches must allow France to guarantee its independence and its capacity for action in a new world and at a time when we are facing strong budget constraints. We shall thus be able to remain an “influential power” that is expected to speak out and is listened to and respected.

A responsible citizenry: The rise of the welfare state and the decline of Christianity go hand in hand

Outstanding article by Paul Rahe (via Instapundit). You must read every word — but here's an excerpt:

One of the reasons that Romney was unable, despite my hopes, to do in 2012 what Reagan did in 1980 is that, in the intervening 32 years a great many of the American citizens who voted for Ronald Reagan had died and been replaced by Americans educated and morally formed in a very different fashion.

… The proper setting for the practice of Christian charity is a free-market society. The rise of the welfare state and the decline of Christianity go hand in hand. To see this, one need only go to church in Europe.

  … All of this began in the 1960s, and it has grown and grown and grown. We now live in a society educated by televisions series like Sex and the City and its successors, and it is in no way surprising that single mothers are almost as common as married mothers -- and they now feel entitled to our respect and support. The most astonishing aspect of the November, 2012 election was that the Democratic Party took as one of its slogans: "Sluts vote!" And, by golly, they did.

… We now, in fact, presume that [the single mother] is entitled to our help -- and we now have a political party in power built on that premise. We are to pay for her groceries through WIC (Women, Infants, Children), for her medical care through Medicaid, for the contraceptives that she does not have the discipline to use properly and for the morning-after pill should she slip up and need an abortion. Her right to be promiscuous trumps our right to the fruits of our own labor.

What I would say to libertarians is this: Liberty requires a responsible citizenry, and the sexual revolution (very much like the drug culture, which was and is its Doppelgänger) promotes irresponsibility of every kind. It promotes dependence, and it fosters an ethos in which those who exercise the virtues fostered by the market are punished for doing so and in which those who live for present pleasure are rewarded.

There are many reasons why Mitt Romney lost in 2012. Some, as I suggested in an earlier post, were his fault. Some of them were not. One of the latter is that the demographic deck was stacked against him in a fashion that it was not stacked against Ronald Reagan in 2008. If we do not find a way to reverse the sexual revolution, we are doomed. The future of liberty is contingent on the success of the social conservatives. The libertinism that some libertarians ostentatiously embrace provides the growth in the administrative entitlements state with its impetus. If to be a libertarian is to favor political liberty, then libertarians must embrace social conservatism. If to be a libertarian is to embrace sex, drugs, and rock and roll, then libertarians are the proponents -- whether witting or not -- of the soft despotism that threatens to engulf us.

"I'm leaving the Senate now, but I'm not leaving the fight" — Breaking: Senator Jim DeMint to Resign

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint is leaving Congress to head the conservative Heritage Foundation 

reports Fox News.

The Tea Party-backed senator announced the move Thursday, saying he will step down from the Senate in January to become president of The Heritage Foundation think tank.
"I'm leaving the Senate now, but I'm not leaving the fight. I've decided to join The Heritage Foundation at a time when the conservative movement needs strong leadership in the battle of ideas," he said in a statement. "No organization is better equipped to lead this fight and I believe my experience in public office as well as in the private sector as a business owner will help Heritage become even more effective in the years to come."

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/12/06/demint-leaving-senate-to-head-heritage-foundation/#ixzz2EI5RRb1i

The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger (thanks to Damian Bennett) adds that

Jim DeMint will replace Ed Feulner as president of the Heritage Foundation. Mr. DeMint will leave his post as South Carolina's junior senator in early January to take control of the Washington think tank, which has an annual budget of about $80 million.

Sen. DeMint's departure means that South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a Republican, will name a successor, who will have to run in a special election in 2014. In that year, both Mr. DeMint's replacement and Sen. Lindsey Graham will be running for reelection in South Carolina.

… In an interview preceding the succession announcement, Sen. DeMint said he is taking the Heritage job because he sees it as a vehicle to popularize conservative ideas in a way that connects with a broader public. "This is an urgent time," the senator said, "because we saw in the last election we were not able to communicate conservative ideas that win elections." 

Send a message to Obama, Boehner, and all the bureaucrats in D.C. that enough is enough

All the Blame for the Fiscal Cliff Dumped on the Back of the Republican Elephant

While the toiling Democratic donkey strives to pull Uncle Sam's cart ahead, Le Monde's (i.e., the MSM's) Serguei puts — needless to say — all the blame for the close quarters of the Fiscal Cliff on the (allegedly recalcitrant) Republican elephant.

• Obama: C'mon, big fella!

Global Warming Update: Britain preparing for what may be the coldest winter in a century

As scientists go on and on and on about global warming, Britain prepares for what may be the coldest winter in a century.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph takes a tour of some of the British Isles' most beautiful cities clad in winter white.
 




In other ecology news from the UK, an energy minister says that wind farms can be "wonderful" and "majestic" despite complaints they blight the British countryside.

Reminder — A LOOK BACK: More global warming and more heat waves — from the winter of last year, the winter of 2010 ("The coldest start to December for centuries"), the winter of 2009, the winter of 2008, and the winter of 2007…

Who is the real enemy of the Arab world? Israel? Or Arab dictators, corruption, lack of freedom, lack of respect for human lives?

Thirty-nine years ago, on Oct. 6, 1973, the third major war between the Arabs and Israel broke out

writes Abdulateef Al-Mulhim, of the Saudi Navy (retired).

The two sides were engaged in two other major wars, in 1948 and 1967.

The 1967 War lasted only six days. But, these three wars were not the only Arab-Israel confrontations. From the period of 1948 and to this day many confrontations have taken place. Some of them were small clashes and many of them were full-scale battles, but there were no major wars apart from the ones mentioned above. The Arab-Israeli conflict is the most complicated conflict the world ever experienced. On the anniversary of the 1973 War between the Arab and the Israelis, many people in the Arab world are beginning to ask many questions about the past, present and the future with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The questions now are: What was the real cost of these wars to the Arab world and its people. And the harder question that no Arab national wants to ask is: What was the real cost for not recognizing Israel in 1948 and why didn’t the Arab states spend their assets on education, health care and the infrastructures instead of wars? But, the hardest question that no Arab national wants to hear is whether Israel is the real enemy of the Arab world and the Arab people.

I decided to write this article after I saw photos and reports about a starving child in Yemen, a burned ancient Aleppo souk in Syria, the under developed Sinai in Egypt, car bombs in Iraq and the destroyed buildings in Libya. The photos and the reports were shown on the Al-Arabiya network, which is the most watched and respected news outlet in the Middle East.

The common thing among all what I saw is that the destruction and the atrocities are not done by an outside enemy. The starvation, the killings and the destruction in these Arab countries are done by the same hands that are supposed to protect and build the unity of these countries and safeguard the people of these countries. So, the question now is that who is the real enemy of the Arab world?

The Arab world wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of innocent lives fighting Israel, which they considered is their sworn enemy, an enemy whose existence they never recognized. The Arab world has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people.

These dictators’ atrocities against their own people are far worse than all the full-scale Arab-Israeli wars.

In the past, we have talked about why some Israeli soldiers attack and mistreat Palestinians. Also, we saw Israeli planes and tanks attack various Arab countries. But, do these attacks match the current atrocities being committed by some Arab states against their own people[?]

In Syria, the atrocities are beyond anybody’s imaginations? And, isn’t the Iraqis are the ones who are destroying their own country? Wasn’t it Tunisia’s dictator who was able to steal 13 billion dollars from the poor Tunisians? And how can a child starve in Yemen if their land is the most fertile land in the world? Why would Iraqi brains leave Iraq in a country that makes 110 billion dollars from oil export? Why do the Lebanese fail to govern one of the tiniest countries in the world? And what made the Arab states start sinking into chaos?

On May 14, 1948 the state of Israel was declared. And just one day after that, on May 15, 1948 the Arabs declared war on Israel to get back Palestine. The war ended on March 10, 1949. It lasted for nine months, three weeks and two days. The Arabs lost the war and called this war Nakbah (catastrophic war). The Arabs gained nothing and thousands of Palestinians became refugees.

And on 1967, the Arabs led by Egypt under the rule of Gamal Abdul Nasser, went in war with Israel and lost more Palestinian land and made more Palestinian refugees who are now on the mercy of the countries that host them. The Arabs called this war Naksah (upset). The Arabs never admitted defeat in both wars and the Palestinian cause got more complicated. And now, with the never ending Arab Spring, the Arab world has no time for the Palestinians refugees or Palestinian cause, because many Arabs are refugees themselves and under constant attacks from their own forces. Syrians are leaving their own country, not because of the Israeli planes dropping bombs on them. It is the Syrian Air Force which is dropping the bombs. And now, Iraqi Arab Muslims, most intelligent brains, are leaving Iraq for the est. In Yemen, the world’s saddest human tragedy play is being written by the Yemenis. In Egypt, the people in Sinai are forgotten.

Finally, if many of the Arab states are in such disarray, then what happened to the Arabs’ sworn enemy (Israel)? Israel now has the most advanced research facilities, top universities and advanced infrastructure. Many Arabs don’t know that the life expectancy of the Palestinians living in Israel is far longer than many Arab states and they enjoy far better political and social freedom than many of their Arab brothers. Even the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip enjoy more political and social rights than some places in the Arab World. Wasn’t one of the judges who sent a former Israeli president to jail is an Israeli-Palestinian?

The Arab Spring showed the world that the Palestinians are happier and in better situation than their Arab brothers who fought to liberate them from the Israelis. Now, it is time to stop the hatred and wars and start to create better living conditions for the future Arab generations.

Sold-Out Play Takes On DSK's Sofitel Run-In; Lead Player Compares "Shock" of Seeing DSK in Handcuffs to 911 Attacks

… “any resemblance to reality is nothing but coincidence,” professes the playbill a new production in Paris that reimagines the fateful encounter that wrecked the presidential ambitions of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund head.

Thus writes Doreen Carvajal from the French capital in the International Herald Tribune of a play on DSK whose Sofitel run-in with the maid is elsewhere in the news.

Called “Suite 2806,” the play is a sly wink at reality with occasional facts changed. Its title comes from the number of the room where Mr. Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a West African immigrant maid named Nafissatou Diallo, whose credibility was later discounted by legal authorities.

No doubt many French, Mr. Strauss-Kahn not least of them, wish that the D.S.K. affair, as it is known here, would simply go away. But the play’s sold-out premiere this month was a measure of France’s lingering fascination with a case that has caused a societal reflection on money, privilege and power — particularly as it relates to the sexes. 

…  A majority of newspaper readers responded “oui” to various online surveys that asked if they were shocked by the D.S.K. affair’s becoming the subject of a play. 

… For the stage drama, the names of the two key characters are changed to Daniel Weissberg and Evangeline. And the actual nine-minute encounter in New York has been stretched to more than an hour in a duel of words and psychological torment. 

Guillaume Landrot, 42, the author of the play, said he wrote the script in a burst of inspiration in one month after Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in New York in May 2011 on charges that were later dropped. 

That would be enough to merit a No Pasarán post, and this post might stop at this point — except that we again get the usual French comparison of a comparatively banal event to the mass murder of 3,000 Americans on 911.

… But there is no doubt about who the characters represent, especially as portrayed by Eric Debrosse, who bleached his hair white and gained more than 13 pounds  on a diet of sausage and French fries. To master Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s signature sidelong glance and papal wave, he studied videos and speaks in slow, professorial tones.

“I will always remember the surreal moment when I read about his arrest in the newspaper,” Mr. Debrosse said in an interview. “I turned off the television and saw him in handcuffs and it was almost like watching the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. It was news you couldn’t understand. It was hard to believe because he could have been the next president of France.”

Klaus Schütz, Rest in Peace

Klaus Schütz, mayor of west-Berlin from 1967–1977 has passed away at the age of 86.

For four years, he was the ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Israel. In 1981 he took over the directorship of the Deutsche Welle, and in 1988, he was appointed director of the National Institute of Broadcasting in North Rhine-Westphalia. After his retirement in 1992 Klaus Schütz returned to Berlin to take up journalistic tasks and activities as president of the Berlin State Association of the German Red Cross.

He was active in postwar coping and formation politics when being a democratic socialist still actually meant something, at least as far as human freedom was concerned:

1946 Klaus Schütz enrolled at Berlin's Humboldt University majoring in History and German Literature. He joined the Association of Social Democratic students in 1947 and belonged to the student council. Soon thereafter, he was a delegate to the National Committee of Young Socialists in Wilmersdorf (a neighborhood in west-Berlin) for the SPD. When, in June 1948, three students were expelled by the administration for plagiarism at Humboldt University (in the Soviet sector, and under suspicious motives) he along with other members of the student council took action and and moved to the Free University in the American sector. From 1949-50, he completed a political science postgraduate studies at Harvard University.

The years that he was in the Mayor’s office were relevant ones. A kind of détente was developing, and border crossings opened, which relieved some of the hardship separated families endured. A political kinsman of Willy Brandt, he aided in the building of the fine-line between defiance to the DDR and Soviet policies, and an unavoidable need to engage with them. They were the years a kind of normality was developed in the life of West-Berlin, albeit one that eternally seemed temporary, even at the hands of DDR inspired western radicals who went so far as to kidnap his election opponent, and then make demands of him, not to mention the cruel practices of leftist totalitarians.

They were not easy times.

Real, Living Socialism!

Likely nostalgic for some image of the 19th Century, blowhard Arnaud Montebourg (who once called for the formation of 6th republic,) France’s industry minister declared how proud he is of the nationalization of a failed steel plant, saying “the whole world is doing it”, and calling it a “modern solution”. He returned into his shag carpeted van shortly thereafter. The owner of the plants’ comments? Eat me. They only ended up with it because it was bankrupt in the first place. It’s dragging a multi-national maker of the productive world’s feedstock down.

For not making their outlandish delusion about economics feasible, they “hate” you, and their politician can’t wait to shoot themselves in the foot to pander to the even more irrational constituents of the department where the failed mill is located.

Lakshmi Mittal is a household name in France now but not for the right reasons. Ever since he took over Europe's Arcelor in 2006, Mittal hasn't been able to shed his image as the big-bad mega-rich Indian who came to France to lay off workers and drive French steel industry to ruin.

[ ... ]

The recent Mittal row in France is over ArcelorMittal closing two furnaces that employed 629 workers at Florange in eastern France. The furnaces were temporarily closed for nearly 14 months but Mittal said on October 1 that the closure will be permanent, citing difficulties affecting the French and European economies.

This is what you end up with, when you see society as an extension of the state.

How the French Use the Word "Extremist" and the Prefix "Ultra-" to Demonize Everything Conservative

More demonizing of the Tea Party in France, as Le Monde's Christian Salmon mentions the dangers of the " 'no worries' right nourished with the neo-conservative milk which flirts at times with the extremism of the ultra-conservative Tea Party".

Loin d'en faire l'analyse, l'UMP a mis en scène un conflit d'ambitions, un débat entre deux styles ou deux tempéraments, occultant le profond clivage qui existe entre une droite "décomplexée", nourrie au lait néoconservateur qui flirte parfois avec l'extrémisme du mouvement ultraconservateur Tea Party, et un gaullisme social désormais hors sol.

As Jeff Belmont has written, people in France are always throwing around the word "ultra" for the simple reason that the newspaper

reader must be frightened at all costs and [that America's] Republicans must be demonized at all costs

As Corentin de Salle has put it (merci à David A) — tongue-in-cheek:

Trucs & Astuces.

Aujourd'hui: l'ultralibéralisme.

Quand vous entendez l'expression "ultralibéralisme", il y a quatre hypothèses.

• Primo, celui qui prononce ce mot est "ultra-stupide" (exemple: "la politique ultralibérale de l'Union Europénne"; "la politique ultra-libérale du gouvernement Sarkozy). 

• Deuxio, celui qui parle est "ultra-ignorant" et n'a aucune idée de la manière dont se structure le champ des idées et doctrines politiques.

• Tertio, celui qui parle est "ultra-intolérant". Le préfixe péjoratif "ultra" a évidemment pour but de disqualifier d'emblée une personne qui intervient dans un débat, raison pour laquelle la gauche médiatique se sert abondamment de ce terme.
Par contre, on ne parlera jamais "d'ultrasocialisme" ou "d'ultraécologisme".

• Quatro, celui qui dit cela est "ultra-conforrmiste" et, faute de disposer du goût ou des capacités pour réfléchir par lui-même, il se contente de répéter, par un réflexe moutonnier, cette expression utilisée par les trois premières catégories.

Undermining journalistic impartiality: The line between politicians and the news media can be blurry in France

The nation’s leading conservative newspaper ousted its top editor, apparently hoping to ingratiate itself with the new government. A cultural magazine brought in a new editor as well, opting for the partner of a newly minted government minister.

Thus reports Scott Sayare from Paris, in an article the New York Times entitled Where ‘In Bed With Media’ Can Be Taken More Literally. (See also Le Monde's Les Liaisons Dangereuses).

The man she replaced took a job working for the new president. The springtime election of François Hollande, the first French president from the left in 17 years, has brought about a shuffling of the news media ranks, along with a host of potential conflicts of interest.

Coverage has shifted too. Much of the news media, which largely lean left, used to revel in denouncing Mr. Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, but now many journalists are feeling bereft of material because of the new president’s less dramatic governing style. Mr. Hollande has proved confoundedly boring, they say, especially for news outlets that sometimes cover the government as if nothing else matters, relying on Paris politics to drive the news. 

The line between politicians and the news media can be blurry in France, where the fates of some journalists have long been hitched to those in the government they pester or please. Mr. Sarkozy’s close ties to media executives were considered something of a scandal, and his presidency drew greater scrutiny to the incestuous relationships. 

Mr. Hollande campaigned on a pledge to be “exemplary.” But in a country where much of the Paris elite share a common background, attended the same schools and go to the same parties, the traditional commingling of journalists and politicians has endured. Daniel Carton, a former reporter in France, blames the news media for not doing more to resist such close ties.

“They know exactly what they need to do to avoid things getting out of hand, but they won’t do it,” said Mr. Carton, an outspoken critic of conflicts of interest in French journalism.

For decades, newspapers have relied heavily on state subsidies. The public media, which account for perhaps half of mainstream television and radio news, are still run by political appointees. Private media outlets belong to companies or investors with demonstrated political leanings or business connections to the state, undermining journalistic impartiality. 

Perhaps most striking this election cycle was the situation of Étienne Mougeotte, whose run as top editor at the rightist daily Le Figaro began and ended with the presidency of Mr. Sarkozy, the politician he championed and whom he was said to advise. 

“We’re a newspaper of the center and the right, and we support Nicolas Sarkozy,” Mr. Mougeotte told the center-left Le Monde last year. Under Mr. Mougeotte, Le Figaro was routinely criticized, sometimes by its own reporters, as being a mouthpiece for the government. 

Mr. Hollande was said to have requested Mr. Mougeotte’s dismissal, according to French media reports, and it came in July.

The publisher, Serge Dassault, is a senator from Mr. Sarkozy’s political party. But Mr. Dassault also heads a major military contractor, and there was widespread speculation that Mr. Mougeotte’s ouster was meant to put the Daussault group in good stead with the new president. 

The news and culture magazine Les inRockuptibles hired as its new top editor Audrey Pulvar, a radio and television personality who was also the partner of Arnaud Montebourg, a government minister and a prominent member of the Socialist Party. 

Mr. Pulvar recently announced the end of her relationship with Mr. Montebourg, but other such relationships have continued. Valérie Trierweiler, Mr. Hollande’s current partner, began an affair with him while reporting on him in the early 2000s, when he was a member of the National Assembly. She grudgingly passed on a television news job this fall and stayed at the magazine Paris Match as a critic. 

Ms. Pulvar replaced David Kessler, who left to join Mr. Hollande as an adviser. Also, a legal affairs reporter at Europe 1 radio became the spokesman for the justice ministry. A political reporter at Les Échos, a leading French financial newspaper, joined the prime minister’s press office. 

The public media have gone through postelection changes too. In October, Mr. Hollande named a new director for the country’s international radio and television news networks, RFI and France 24. He has pledged to reform the law that allowed him to make that appointment, but not until next year. The directors of Radio France and France Télévisions, both appointed by Mr. Sarkozy, are expected to be replaced. The current law, which makes the naming of public media chiefs a presidential prerogative, was introduced by Mr. Sarkozy in 2009. At the time, commentators called the measure a power grab. Mr. Sarkozy said it was meant to remove a layer of “hypocrisy” from the appointment process, which was controlled by a handpicked government council. 

The public media no longer serve as state propagandists, as they effectively were until at least the late 1960s, but remain under government “oversight,” said Jean-Marie Charon, a sociologist who studies the news media. 

Private publications are also beholden to the state, at least financially. The government provided $1.5 billion in subsidies to them last year. 

Publications on the left are struggling to “find the right distance” from the government, Mr. Charon said. The jubilation that dominated political coverage last summer in Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde has since given way to acrimony. Whichever way the French news media lean, the departure of Mr. Sarkozy has left many outlets yearning for more excitement. 

“We had five years that were pretty exceptional; we had a man who was the center of everything,” said Pierre Haski, co-founder and editor of Rue89, a news Web site. “All of a sudden, we’ve gone from an overload to an underload.” 

“Sarkozy was good for sales,” Mr. Haski added. “Hollande is not good for sales.”

American Racism?! In Racist U.S., Says French Media, "The Post-Racial Era Will Still Have to Wait"

And so we here we have it: as more than a few of us have been predicting over the years, including myself in an in-depth post before the 2008 vote, the 2008 election of Barack Obama would not end the endless accusations of racism and/or cluelessness towards the average (white) American — nor indeed would Obama's reelection four years later.

… the basic truth about racism is as follows: racism is far less an accurate description of an attitude prevalent in a given society, in a given individual, than it is a weapon that is wielded to demonize one's opponents while making oneself appear heroic by parroting (and by doing nothing else than parroting) politically correct platitudes. More often than not, in other words, the fight against alleged pockets of racism is nothing more noble than a self-serving act of self-praise.

As James Taranto puts it (thanks to Instapundit), Antiwhite bigotry has gone mainstream, and indeed, over here in Europe, Louise Couvelaire proves that by stating in Le Monde, aka France's newspaper of record, that four years after the election of the first African-American president, "the black community and minorities in general have reason to worry." Because no candidate has received such an important part of the white vote since Ronald Reagan as Mitt Romney has, it turns out that (to use the old formula) "racism has reared its ugly head".

So, got that, white Americans? Voting against Barack Hussein Obama can only be proof of the unspeakable racism in the dark corners of your sinister soul…

Because "several hundred students" at the University of Mississippi burned signs with the name of Barack Obama while shouting racist slogans (even the Huffington Post raises its eyebrows by deliberately referring to this — rare — event as " 'riots' " with cynical-sounding quotation marks), The Post-Racial Era Will Still Have to Wait, as the title of her article says.

Le Monde goes on to describe the "most conservative zealots' outrageous attacks" in forcing Barack Obama to… make public his birth certificate, while quoting an Associated Press poll that claims that 51% of Americans express themselves in "explicitly racist" terms (up from 48% in 2008), while 56% of them demonstrated "implicitly xenophobic behavior" (up from 49%). (The claims have been, ahem, addressed by Hot Air and Newsbusters…)

The Le Monde writer ends her article with some quotes from a Professor of African-American Studies. Mark Naison of… Fordham university, a paragon of tolerance and free speech as is well known, claims that the Republican Party's "main motor is fear and white anger against people of color or minorities."

Il n'aura pas fallu attendre longtemps. A peine quelques minutes après l'annonce de la victoire de Barack Obama, le 6 novembre, plusieurs centaines d'étudiants de l'université du Mississippi ont brûlé des pancartes portant le nom du président et scandé des slogans racistes.

…L'élection, en 2008, du premier président afro-américain de l'histoire des Etats-Unis devait consacrer l'avènement d'une nouvelle ère post-raciale. Quatre ans plus tard, la communauté noire et les minorités en général ont de quoi s'inquiéter. Fin octobre, un sondage de l'Associated Press indiquait que 51 % des Américains exprimaient des idées explicitement racistes, contre 48 % en 2008, et que 56 % d'entre eux affichaient des comportements implicitement xénophobes, contre 49 % il y a quatre ans. Depuis son discours historique de mars 2008 intitulé "De la race en Amérique", le locataire de la Maison Blanche, refusant d'être le "président des Noirs", joue la prudence. Il n'a jamais abordé ouvertement la question pendant son premier mandat.

… "La rage d'une partie des Blancs qui s'est exprimée pendant la campagne de 2008 ne présageait rien de bon et elle s'est encore intensifiée, analyse Mark Naison, professeur d'études afro-américaines à l'université de Fordham, à New York. L'Amérique ne sera bientôt plus un "pays de Blancs" et ça les terrifie." Les plus optimistes espèrent un rapport de forces plus égalitaire entre les différentes communautés, mais au Parti républicain, la partie s'annonce délicate. "Leur principal moteur est la peur et la colère des Blancs envers les gens de couleur ou encore les gays, poursuit Mark Naison. S'ils lancent une opération de séduction envers les minorités, ils perdront leur électorat de base, mais s'ils ne le font pas, ils n'auront aucune chance de gagner. Il va falloir qu'ils trouvent un autre sujet rassembleur."

Did U.S. Intruders Manage to Hack the French Presidency's Computers Through a FaceBook Trick?

According to Le Monde's Philippe Bernard and Corine Lesnes, the French presidency's computers were hacked last May, and the finger seems to point at the United States.

Right before the presidential election, claims a Le Telegramme article by journalist Jean Guisnel, "secret notes and strategic plans" were filched by intruders who made their entrance to the Élysée Palace by contacting French government workers through FaceBook and asking to become their friends, subsequent to which they managed to get their hands on the workers' IDs and passwords.

In Washington, Homeland Security Department spokesman Matthew Chandler has "categorically denied" that the United States has "participated in a cyberattack on France … one of our closest allies", but the French government has not yet formally denied the news reports that appeared in the L'Express weekly.

Contrairement à l'administration américaine, le gouvernement français n'a pas formellement démenti les affirmations de L'Express, mercredi 21 novembre, sur un piratage américain des ordinateurs de l'Elysée. La porte-parole du gouvernement, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, s'est contentée de signaler qu'elle n'avait pas d'information précise, ajoutant : "Je ne crois pas que nous ayons de quelconques inquiétudes."

De source diplomatique, on indique que la France attend des explications du gouvernement américain. Dans son édition publiée mercredi, l'hebdomadaire affirme qu'en mai, quelques jours avant le second tour de l'élection présidentielle française, les réseaux informatiques de l'Elysée avaient été piratés, permettant à des intrus de récupérer "des notes secrètes et des plans stratégiques".

… A Washington, le directeur des communications du ministère de la sécurité intérieure, Matthew Chandler, a "catégoriquement démenti" que les Etats-Unis aient "participé a une cyberattaque contre la France". "La France est l'un de nos alliés les plus proches. Notre coopération dans le partage du renseignement, dans l'application de la loi et dans la cyberdéfense n'a jamais été plus étroite et elle demeure essentielle pour lutter efficacement conte la menace commune du terrorisme", a-t-il indiqué au Monde. Ce démenti concerne-t-il aussi l'agence de contre-espionnage cybernétique créée en 2009 par Barack Obama (USCybercom) qui dépend du Pentagone ? Absolument, a assuré le porte-parole.

Long New York Times Article Perpetuates Legend That Anti-Muslim Video Caused Benghazi Deaths

With a prime, central spot on the New York Times homepage, Serge Kovaleski and Brooks Barnes print a long story (I almost wrote an in-depth story) in the newspaper of reference that perpetuates the legend that the four deaths in Benghazi were caused by a video on YouTube — suggesting in the process that Nakoula, besides living "a life in shambles", is a heartless person without any tolerance for people and things Muslim, one who, if he were truly a generous (read: a leftist) soul, would confess to his erroneous ways, make apologies, and try to atone for said errors.

 Fuming for two months in a [Los Angeles jail cell], Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has had plenty of time to reconsider the wisdom of making “Innocence of Muslims,” his crude YouTube movie trailer depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a bloodthirsty, philandering thug. 

Does Mr. Nakoula now regret the footage? After all, it fueled deadly protests across the Islamic world and led the unlikely filmmaker to his own arrest for violating his supervised release on a fraud conviction.

Not at all. In his first public comments since his incarceration soon after the video gained international attention in September, Mr. Nakoula told The New York Times that he would go to great lengths to convey what he called “the actual truth” about Muhammad. “I thought, before I wrote this script,” he said, “that I should burn myself in a public square to let the American people and the people of the world know this message that I believe in.” 

In explaining his reasons for the film, Mr. Nakoula, 55, a Coptic Christian born in Egypt, cited the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood, Tex., as a prime example of the violence committed “under the sign of Allah.”

Thanks to a Mixture of Passion and Comedy, Nigel Farage's UKIP Slated to Become Britain's 3rd-largest political party

The floor of the European Union’s cavernous and mostly vacant parliamentary chamber here is hardly known for its lively debates 

notes Landon Thomas Jr tersely in the International Herald Tribune.

At least not until Nigel Farage, the Brussels-bashing leader of Britain’s fastest-growing political party, gets up to speak.

The vast majority of the European Parliament’s 754 members, as they process the torrent of rules and regulations that Europe bestows upon them, are not inclined to question why it is that they are there. The pay and perks are generous for those elected to five-year terms in low-turnout elections throughout the European Union’s 27 member countries. The mission — to extend the sweep of European federalism — is for most a shared one.

But for Mr. Farage, who has waged a 20-year campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, Strasbourg has become the perfect stage to disseminate his anti-E.U. message by highlighting the project’s bureaucratic absurdities and spendthrift tendencies, and more often than not, to mock with glee the most prominent proponents of a European super state: the head of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and the European Council president, Herman Van Rompuy.

‘‘I said you’d be the quiet assassin of nation-state democracy,’’ Mr. Farage declared last month as his target, Mr. Van Rompuy, squirmed in his seat just opposite, ‘‘and sure enough, in your dull and technocratic way, you’ve gone about your course.’’

His speeches mix the pitch-perfect timing of a stand up comedian — he once told Mr. Van Rompuy that he had the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a bank clerk — with a populist passion that critics say approaches demagoguery, and they have become wildly popular on YouTube. Now, his United Kingdom Independence Party is on the verge of replacing the Liberal Democrats as the country’s third largest political party behind the Conservatives and Labour.

All of which heaps more pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron, whose ability to negotiate effectively in Brussels has been compromised by rising anti-E.U. sentiment within his own Conservative Party and the country at large. [Don't forget to check out the Professor's post on the removal of the three foster children of a couple of UKIP-supporting foster parents.]

‘‘All of us are selling a product,’’ said Mr. Farage, who before turning to politics worked as a commodities trader. He swallowed from his glass of Rioja, on his way to putting a sizable dent in the bottle of Spanish wine during lunch last month in the parliamentary dining room here. ‘‘But none of these guys ever worked in the commercial sector where they had to sell something,’’ he continued. ‘‘They are ghastly people and neither pass the Farage test: Would I employ them or would I want to go have a drink with them?’’

The very thought of raising a pint with either Mr. Barroso or Mr. Van Rompuy elicits a cigarette-scarred chortle from Mr. Farage. Indeed, with his dapper suits, cufflinks and love of a wine-soaked lunch, Mr. Farage can come across as a caricature of a pasthis-prime, City of London financier — a loudish type sounding off on cricket and the latest bureaucratic atrocity in Brussels that one frequently encounters in pubs in the wealthy suburbs surrounding the British capital.

But as politicians in Europe and Britain are now realizing, Mr. Farage’s ‘‘damn the technocrats’’ rallying cry — raw, profane and borne of genuine conviction — is not so easily dismissed. At least, not at a time when officials from the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank are calling the shots in Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Not when a former European commissioner is prime minister of Italy. And increasingly ineffectual career politicians in France, Spain and Britain are struggling to connect with angry voters.

‘‘What I did not understand was the sheer fanaticism behind the project — there is nothing that will stop these guys,’’ Mr. Farage said, drawing deep on one of the countless Rothmans cigarettes he will polish off during the day. ‘‘But what they have completely missed is the rise of identity politics.’’

That, he said, can manifest itself in the form of the U.K. Independence Party. Or, he continued, it can result in ‘‘desperate people doing desperate things,’’ like the extreme nationalism of Greece’s neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, which has ridden a tide of anger against immigrants and Greece’s worsening economy. Still, there is no disputing U.K.I.P.’s rise in Britain under Mr. Farage.

In the 2009 election for the European Parliament, U.K.I.P. came in second to the Conservatives, taking 16 percent of the vote, and in 2014 many expect it to become the number one vote getter. In British elections, U.K.I.P.’s vote share is smaller, due to its narrow focus on leaving the European Union. It tallied just 3 percent in 2010, not enough to secure a seat in Parliament. According to recent polls, however, U.K.I.P.’s support has shot up to between 8 and 10 percent, putting it about equal with the government’s much maligned coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats.

For Mr. Cameron, currently under attack from the potent euro-skeptic flank of his Conservative Party, which is pushing him hard to reduce what the country pays to the European Union each year, the trend is a disturbing one. In fact, Mr. Farage, who is 48, and Mr. Cameron, two years younger, share common origins.

Both sons of stockbrokers, they grew up in prosperous villages in the heart of Tory England, where skepticism toward Brussels runs deep. But as their later paths diverged, so did their views toward Europe. Mr. Cameron went off to Eton and Oxford, and then straight to the Conservative Party, where he rose to the top as a smooth conciliator, pledging to halt the party wars over Europe that ended Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s political career, and plagued the Tories throughout the Labour ascendancy from 1997 to 2010.

Mr. Farage spurned college for a trader’s life in the city of London in 1982, and 10 years later became radicalized when he witnessed firsthand the ejection of the pound from the Europe-imposed system of fixed exchange rates. He concluded that any power ceded to Europe, be it monetary policy or otherwise, would be sheer folly.

Now, with Mr. Farage on the rise and Mr. Cameron struggling to keep his party, not to speak of his government, united the question of how much Britain gains from being part of Europe has once again come to the fore. Last year, in net terms, Britain paid $16 billion to the bloc. But according to a recent study by the economist Tim Congdon, himself a U.K.I.P. member, if you include the cost of regulation, waste and misallocated resources, the annual price of membership rises to $238 billion a year, or about 10 percent of Britain’s economic output.

Perhaps the most egregious example of profligacy is the very spot where Mr. Farage has found his fame — the European Parliament. As most of the legislative work is done in Brussels, the quite grand building finds itself in use for just two days each month. Analysts estimate that it costs the European taxpayer about $250 million each year to transport 754 parliamentarians, several thousand support staff and lobbyists to this sleepy French city on the German border once a month. Which means that more than three weeks out of every four, this towering edifice of glass and steel remains mostly empty.

Mr. Farage lights another Rothmans and shakes his head at the absurdity of it all. ‘‘I just would like for my grandchildren to read someday that I did my part in saving my country from this lunacy,’’ he said with a weary sigh.