16 May 2007 @ 9:08AM >> I guess al Qaeda was hoping that the Socialist would win:

An Al-Qaeda front group in Europe threatened on Tuesday to launch bloody attacks in France in response to the election of “crusader and Zionist” Nicolas Sarkozy as president.

“As you have chosen the crusader and Zionist Sarkozy as a leader ... we in the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades warn you that the coming days will see a bloody jihadist campaign ... in the capital of Sarkozy,” the group’s “Europe division” said in an Internet statement addressed to the French people.

[...]

The group previously claimed responsibility for the July 2005 terror attacks in London, as well those in Madrid in March 2004 and in Istanbul in November 2003.

The only way for Western nations to be safe from this type of terrorism is to let al Qaeda choose our future heads of state.

10 May 2007 @ 8:18AM >> In a fascinating and in-depth piece from The Wall Street Journal, the president of the Rousseau Institute in Paris wonders whether France’s decline will accelerate to an unstoppable fall—or whether newly-elected French President Nicholas Sarkozy can save the Fifth Republic.

30 March 2007 @ 7:52AM >> Hours of rioting in a central Paris train terminal recall the two-week-long waves of riots that broke out all over France a year-and-a-half ago. Some of the elements are quite similar, such as how word-of-mouth propaganda recast criminals into victims, and how the local media refused to identify the rioters by any label other than “youths.” Nidra Poller reports from Paris on the latest turbulence:

24 hours after the punk jihad riots, the media delivered a profile of the “kid” whose arrest sparked 8 hours of mayhem in the bowels of the Gare du Nord.

The “kid” is one Angelo H. He is, it turns out, 32 years old, an illegal Congolese immigrant, and subject to a deportation order 1993.

The “kid” has been in trouble since he came to France at the age of ten—twenty-two registered condemnations for violent incidents and many that went unreported.

The cops initially went to arrest a little cheater and found they had bagged a hardened criminal. Instead of paying for a ticket like millions of law-abiding passengers Angelo H. jumped the turnstile and was, exceptionally, arrested. In a matter of seconds he had head-butted—or slapped—one of the RATP agents. When the agents wrestled him to the ground, Angelo screamed bloody murder, a small crowd gathered in protest against the agents’ brutality. And the call to battle rang out.

Almost instantly Angelo became a thirteen year-old boy whose arms were fractured by the cruel agents (shades of Mohamed al Dura). Then a pregnant woman was added to the list of victims of police brutality. All that was missing was “the infidels set fire to the mosque.”

23 March 2007 @ 10:36AM >> Europe is increasingly surrenduring its own culture and bowing to the mandates of Sharia law.

First, from Germany:

A 26-year-old mother of two wanted to free herself from what had become a miserable and abusive marriage. The police had even been called to their apartment to separate the two — both of Moroccan origin — after her husband got violent in May 2006. The husband was forced to move out, but the terror continued: Even after they separated, the spurned husband threatened to kill his wife.

A quick divorce seemed to be the only solution — the 26-year-old was unwilling to wait the year between separation and divorce mandated by German law. She hoped that as soon as they were no longer married, her husband would leave her alone. Her lawyer, Barbara Becker-Rojczyk agreed and she filed for immediate divorce with a Frankfurt court last October. They both felt that the domestic violence and death threats easily fulfilled the “hardship” criteria necessary for such an accelerated split.

In January, though, a letter arrived from the judge adjudicating the case. The judge rejected the application for a speedy divorce by referring to a passage in the Koran that some have controversially interpreted to mean that a husband can beat his wife. It’s a supposed right which is the subject of intense debate among Muslim scholars and clerics alike. “The exercise of the right to castigate does not fulfill the hardship criteria as defined by Paragraph 1565 (of German federal law),” the daily Frankfurter Rundschau quoted the judge’s letter as saying. It must be taken into account, the judge argued, that both man and wife have Moroccan backgrounds.

“The right to castigate means for me: the husband can beat his wife,” Becker-Rojczyk said, interpreting the judge’s verdict.

And from France, newspaper editor Philippe Val describes the trouble he’s in as a result of publishing those Mohammad cartoons:

A French court is tomorrow expected to decide whether I and the newspaper I edit, Charlie Hebdo, committed a crime by publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. If the court finds me guilty of “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion,” in effect racism, as the organizations of French Muslims that are plaintiffs in this case claim, I could be imprisoned for six months and fined thousands of euros. A great deal is at stake, for free speech in France and Europe, in the outcome of this trial.

[...]

Before publication, I was pressured not to go ahead and summoned to the Hotel Matignon to see the prime minister’s chief of staff; I refused to go. The next day, summary proceedings were initiated by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of Islamic Organizations of France to stop this issue of Charlie Hebdo from hitting newsstands. The government encouraged them, but their suit was dismissed.

After the cartoons appeared, the Muslim groups attacked me by filing suit against me on racism charges. President Jacques Chirac, who campaigned for this just-completed trial, offered them the services of his own personal lawyer, Francis Szpiner. Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Grand Mosque, who always took orders from the Elysee, was apparently not convinced this case was necessary; he told me as much several times. But Mr. Boubakeur was under pressure from the fundamentalists at the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France), who had come to dominate the French Council of Muslim Worship, which he heads, and Mr. Chirac. Why? Only he knows. We can only guess. Probably to nurture his friendships in the Middle East and win arms contracts for France, while at home playing to Muslim public opinion that’s supposedly in thrall to fundamentalism.

[...]

Since it is hardly thinkable that the French parliament could be persuaded to re-establish the crime of blasphemy, the plaintiffs chose the legal path to try to obtain a ruling condemning all criticism of religion. But in order to survive, democracy needs to confront dogmas. We saw this happening when rights for women and homosexuals were established; we see it again today in defending genetic research on stem cells, for instance.

This trial is important for all the forms of expression that should flourish in democracy: painting, cinema, literature, journalism, scientific research, and even the free speech exercised in everyday life. The limits to this freedom are already fixed by laws that protect life, and that penalize racism, insults and defamation. In publishing the Danish cartoons, no one broke any of them.

30 November 2006 >> France launches airstrikes against an African town. Surprisingly, there are no demands yet that French foreign policy be submitted to the rest of the world for approval.

5 November 2006 >> Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe reports on a few fronts in the global Jihad:

Australia: Australia’s foremost Muslim cleric triggers an uproar when he likens women who don’t wear an Islamic headscarf to “uncovered meat” and blames them for attracting sexual predators.

Afghanistan: The kidnappers of Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello threaten to murder him unless Abdul Rahman, an Afghan Christian convert, is returned to Afghanistan and handed over to an Islamic court.

Iran: The president of Iran calls Israel “a group of terrorists” and threatens to harm any country that supports the Jewish state. “This is an ultimatum,” warns Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the elmination of Israel and the United States.

Thailand: Islamist terrorists bomb a column of Buddhist monks as they collect offerings of food in Narathiwat, a city in southern Thailand. One person is killed; 12 are injured.

France: “We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists,” says police union leader Michel Thoomis. “This is not a question of urban violence any more. It is an intifadah, with stones and firebombs.”

Britain: In a “true Islamic state,” sexually active homosexuals would be executed, says Arshad Misbahi, an imam in Manchester’s Central Mosque.

Meanwhile, Muslim Kurds in Iraq prefer to live in peace:

There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. [...] Iraqi Kurdistan is optimistic, full of hope, infused top to bottom with a go-go, build-build attitude.

Who would have thought that a glimmer of hope for peaceful coexistence with our Muslim brothers could be found in—of all places—Iraq?

11 April 2006 >> If agreeing to a date with someone meant that you had to marry and spend the rest of your life with that person, how many dates would you go on?

France puts employers in much the same position. Once someone is hired, French employment laws make it virtually impossible for that person to be fired. Naturally, this makes companies quite leery about taking on new employees. It’s a huge risk to hire someone who might prove to be lazy or incompetent down the road. But in France, lifetime employment laws mean that employers are stuck.

This sort of economic thinking is one of the reasons that the French unemployment rate for people under 30 rivals the American unemployment rate during the Great Depression. It is also one of the reasons that the French government quite sensibly tried to reform the law.

The proposed change—intended to make hiring younger workers more palatable—was quite modest: new hires under the age of 26 could be fired within the first two years of employment. This way, companies could make sure there’d be a good fit before being locked in to a lifetime commitment. Companies would be more likely to hire people if there was less of a risk of hiring someone who might not work out.

But in France, the prospect of having to earn your job through sustained good performance was just too much for people to bear. So the country erupted in mass strikes and riots, as it tends to do for various reasons every few months. The leadership of France saw all this turmoil and surrendered yet again, as it tends to do every few years:

French President Jacques Chirac has announced that the new youth employment law that sparked weeks of sometimes violent protests will be scrapped.

He said it would be replaced by other measures to tackle youth unemployment.

Millions of students and union members have taken to the streets over the last month in protest against the law, which made it easier to fire young workers.

[...]

The new package of measures includes offering state support for employers hiring young people who face the most difficulties in gaining access to the labour market.

Apparently, the French have figured out that the way to cure the problems of socialism is with more socialism. That hasn’t worked anywhere else on the planet, but I wish the French the best with their noble experiment.

21 November 2005 @ 12:57PM >> Slowly but surely, the corruption of French and U.N. officials is being exposed:

One of France’s most distinguished diplomats has confessed to an investigating judge that he accepted oil allocations from Saddam Hussein [...]

Jean-Bernard Merimee is thought to be the first senior figure to admit his role in the oil-for-food scandal, a United Nations humanitarian aid scheme hijacked by Saddam to buy influence.

The Frenchman, who holds the title “ambassador for life”, told authorities that he regretted taking payments amounting to $156,000 [...]

The money was used to renovate a holiday home he owned in southern Morocco. At the time, Mr Merimee was a special adviser to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general.

[...]

The ambassador said the French authorities had known of his every move. France has been gravely embarrassed by oil-for-food allegations against senior figures, including Charles Pasqua, the former interior minister. He has denied receiving any benefit from the oil allocations issued in his name.

Inquiries have also found that French firms benefited disproportionately from oil-for-food contracts as part of an Iraqi policy to influence French votes on the UN Security Council.

11 November 2005 >> Media bias isn’t limited to the U.S., obviously. If anything, the left-wing domination of the media may be even more pronounced in Europe.

Case in point: French newsman Jean-Claude Dassier, who readily admits to skewing coverage of the recent French riots. As violence and fires raged in some 300 French cities and towns, Dassier, the general director of the French TCI news channel, was doing his best to downplay them. Why? He feared that showing images of the riots would build support for right-wing politicians. Not only did he hide certain images from the public, but he readily admits his motivation:

“Politics in France is heading to the right and I don’t want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television,” Mr Dassier told an audience of broadcasters at the News Xchange conference in Amsterdam today.

“Having satellites trained on towns across France 24 hours a day showing the violence would have been wrong and totally disproportionate ... Journalism is not simply a matter of switching on the cameras and letting them roll. You have to think about what you’re broadcasting,” he said.

The American media plays similar tricks. Throughout my life, I’ve seen the horror of President Kennedy’s assassination replayed countless times—despite it happening nearly a decade before my birth—yet the horrors of people jumping from the World Trade Center towers are never shown on television, not anymore. That, I guess, might inflame passions.

In the French media, Dassier isn’t alone:

“Do we send teams of journalists because cars are burning, or are the cars burning because we sent teams of journalists?” asked Patrick Lecocq, editor-in-chief of France 2.

Once could ask the same question about terrorist attacks in Iraq, which seem designed to demoralize the American public and weaken our resolve as much as they’re designed to strike fear into the souls of Iraqis. Yet each attack ends up being the top story on the news. Could it be that political calculations are shaping news coverage here at home, too?

You’ve got to give Dassier credit for one thing: at least he owns up to his bias. Our media isn’t honest enough to do that.

6 July 2005 @ 2:18PM >> London edges out Paris for the 2012 Olympics. This apparently came as a shock to the French:

Paris had been the front-runner throughout the campaign, but London picked up momentum in the late stages with strong support from Prime Minister Tony Blair.

One blogger, noting that two of the Olympic Committee voters were Finnish, speculates that outrage over the French President’s recent comments may have tipped the scales away from Paris towards London. Right before the Olympic Committee voting took place, Jacques Chirac offended both the British and the Finns by declaring their food terrible and that their poor culinary skills were grounds to distrust them as people.

As a New Yorker, I must say I’m relieved that the Olympics won’t be coming to my home town. To me, the Olympics seems like an endless parade of fringe sports that nobody cares about until the hype machine kicks into high gear every few years. Then all of a sudden, we’re obsessed for a few weeks with various sports so contrived that they could only have been invented by people trying—and failing—to prove that all the good sports hadn’t yet been created. But don’t listen to me, I’m just an old grouch trapped in a young person’s body who is happy that years of Olympic construction won’t be tying up traffic in a city already known as the gridlock capital of the world.

5 July 2005 @ 9:12AM >> In the 2004 election, a sizable bloc of the American electorate felt dissatisfied with what they perceived to be a condescending tone in the foreign policy of the Bush Administration. President Bush’s bluntness, they argued, alienated the more sensitive, cerebral Europeans. Maybe America would be more popular in the world if only Mr. Bush were more subtle, more sophisticated, more—dare I say—French. Fortunately for President Bush, Jacques Chirac, the President of France, was able to take some time out of his busy schedule to demonstrate why the French have been known as masters of delicate diplomacy since the days of Napoleon:

Jacques Chirac stirred the pot at a meeting in Russia on Sunday when he joked to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin and [German Chancellor] Gerhard Schroeder that the British could not be trusted and worse food was only found in Finland.

The French president declared that the only thing the British have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease, the French daily Liberation reported.

Mr Chirac then reportedly said: “You can’t trust people who cook as badly as that. After Finland, it’s the country with the worst food.”

[Chirac’s] jibes may have amused Mr Putin and Mr Schroeder, but they are unlikely to have pleased members of the Paris 2012 bid team lobbying the International Olympic Committee in Singapore. Mr Chirac’s absence while Tony Blair has been working on London’s behalf has been noted, but Paris officials have excused it by insisting that the president would arrive in time for the final presentation on Wednesday, which Mr Blair will miss.

Let’s hope President Bush takes note and adjusts his rhetoric to be more in line with European sensibilities. He might finally be able to win over the French, Russians and Germans.

8 January 2005 >> Not content to keep their socialist paradise within their own borders, the president of France would like to impose a worldwide tax on every citizen of every nation:

French President Jacques Chirac made a new call today for an “international tax”, saying such a levy would help generate funds to help poor countries and those hit by disasters such as the Asian tsunami.

“These events stress the need to increase public aid towards development and to find innovative financing mechanisms such as an international taxation,” Mr Chirac said in a New Year speech to the Paris diplomatic corps.

That’s just what I’ve been thinking since first seeing the horrific devastation of the tsunami: why aren’t there more taxes?

14 May 2004 @ 11:38PM >> Jose Ramos-Horta won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, he had some interesting comments on the justified use of force and Iraq:

Perhaps the French have forgotten how they, too, toppled one of the worst human-rights violators without U.N. approval. I applauded in the early ’80s when French paratroopers landed in the dilapidated capital of the then Central African Empire and deposed “Emperor” Jean Bedel Bokassa, renowned for cannibalism. Almost two decades later, I applauded again as NATO intervened—without a U.N. mandate—to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and liberate an oppressed European Muslim community from Serbian tyranny. And I rejoiced once more in 2001 after the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban liberated Afghanistan from one of the world’s most barbaric regimes.

So why do some think Iraq should be any different?

[...]

Saddam’s overthrow offers a chance to build a new Iraq that is peaceful, tolerant and prosperous. That’s why the stakes are so high, and why extremists from across the Muslim world are fighting to prevent it. They know that a free Iraq would fatally undermine their goal of purging all Western influence from the Muslim world, overthrowing the secular regimes in the region, and imposing Stone Age rule. They know that forcing Western countries to withdraw from Iraq would be a major step toward that goal, imperiling the existence of moderate regimes—from the Middle East to the Magreb and Southeast Asia.

[...]

If we look beyond the TV coverage, there is hope that Washington’s vision of transforming Iraq might still be realized. Credible opinion polls show that a large majority of Iraqis feel better off than a year ago. There is real freedom of the press with newspapers and radio stations mushrooming in the new Iraq. There is unhindered Internet access. NGOs covering everything from human rights to women’s advocacy have emerged. In short, Iraq is experiencing real freedom for the first time in its history. And that is exactly what the religious fanatics fear.

[...]

The consequences of doing nothing in the face of evil were demonstrated when the world did not stop the Rwandan genocide that killed almost a million people in 1994. Where were the peace protesters then? They were just as silent as they are today in the face of the barbaric behavior of religious fanatics.

[...]

It is always easier to say no to war, even at the price of appeasement. But being politically correct means leaving the innocent to suffer the world over, from Phnom Penh to Baghdad. And that is what those who would cut and run from Iraq risk doing.

17 February 2004 >> United Press International recently reported the discovery of documents from Saddam Hussein’s oil ministry that show the Iraqi dictator “used oil to bribe top French officials into opposing the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.” And according to ABC News, allies of Saddam Hussein profited by pocketing the difference between the price of oil under the U.N.’s “Oil for Food” program and the price of oil on the open market. Some of these allies included “a close political associate and financial backer of French President Jacques Chirac”, “Russian political figures” including “the Russian ambassador to Baghdad” and “officials in the office of President Vladimir Putin”, “George Galloway, a British member of Parliament”, and even some—gasp!—”prominent journalists”. So why haven’t you heard about this story yet? More >>