French Revolt and BBC’s Shame
November 20, 2007
Recall the disgraceful role played by the British state propaganda organ, BBC, in helping defeat Margaret Thatcher defeat the miners’ strike in Britain? If anything, things have only gotten worse at the corporation, as evident from this propagandistic article about the strikes in France. Indeed, the Independent — only marginally better than the BBC in this instance — is raising the question whether this is going to be Sarkozy’s Thatcher moment.
Strikes. Sabotage. Student unrest. Transport, schools and hospitals disrupted. National newspapers halted. Factories running out of raw materials.
France faces a Black Tuesday today. Is this President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ” Thatcher moment”? Is this another May 1968? Is the New France promised last spring by a combative new president, struggling to emerge from the muddled, but often charming, Old France of street protests, government climbdowns and generous social benefits?
“Fascislamism” Versus “Shoah Business”
November 2, 2007
Diana Johnstone dissects the modus operandi of Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s most pernicious Zionist propagandists. (Also check out Doug Ireland’s piece on this intellectual impostor’s comic attempt at playing de Toqueville).
The most discussed political book in France this autumn is Ce grand cadavre à la renverse, literally, “this big corpse lying on its back”), by Bernard-Henri Lévy (Grasset, Paris, 2007). It is supposed to be a book about the French left. But oddly enough, it is not really about the left, and it is not even really a political book.
Bernard-Henri Lévy is by far the most notorious of the small coterie of propagandists who, some thirty years ago, under the label of “New Philosophers”, began a highly publicized campaign to reverse the anti-imperialist sentiment that had become dominant worldwide in reaction to the U.S. war in Vietnam.
The Manchurian President
October 29, 2007
Reality no doubt is stranger than fiction. In the Manchurian Candidate, the Soviet mole never makes it to the White House. However, Gamal Nkrumah quoting Le Figaro reveals that the Israeli mole, Nikolas Sarkozy, has successfully installed himself as the President of France.
As if his marital challenges were not enough cause for concern, “Sarco the Sayan” has suddenly emerged as the most infamous accolade of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The influential French daily Le Figaro last week revealed that the French leader once worked for — and perhaps still does, it hinted — Israeli intelligence as a sayan (Hebrew for helper), one of the thousands of Jewish citizens of countries other than Israel who cooperate with the katsas (Mossad case-officers).
War in the Name of Peace
October 5, 2007
The world’s best news service Inter Press Service interviews Jean Bricmont, the author of Humanitarian Imperialism.
BRUSSELS, Sep 20 (IPS) – International law is seen by many to have been shunted aside by Western powers when launching their most significant military operations in the past decade.
In 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation lacked any mandate from the United Nations when it attacked Serbia. In Afghanistan, the U.S. continued bombing in 2002, even when the government that replaced the Taliban asked it to stop (lest the civilian death toll rise).
And the United States asserted a highly disputed entitlement to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iraq a year later, citing bogus claims that the country had weapons of mass destruction and had played a role in the Sep 11, 2001 attacks.
In his new book ‘Humanitarian Imperialism’, the pacifist intellectual Jean Bricmont exposes how human rights have been used to justify military exploits that he regards as legally dubious and morally odious.
A 55-year-old professor of theoretical physics in Belgium’s University of Louvain, Bricmont is also editor of ‘Chomsky’, a new collection of articles on the linguist and trenchant political analyst Noam Chomsky.
Bricmont spoke to IPS Brussels correspondent David Cronin.
IPS: You have suggested that NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 was a turning point for a new form of imperialism. Why do you think so?
JB: There were several reasons against that war but there was so little reaction from people on the left. If you exclude a very small number of individuals who knew better, everyone was convinced the war was necessary and the U.S. should intervene for humanitarian reasons, irrespective of the particularities of the case.
I don’t agree that it was a good thing to destroy international law. I don’t agree that the situation in Kosovo was so dire, that it was necessary to bomb (Serbia). And I don’t agree that the removal of (then Serbian president Slobodan) Milosevic was a good thing, irrespective of everything else.
Milosevic was elected. Maybe his election was not pure. But there is no pure democracy in the world. In France, you needed six times as many votes to elect a communist in urban areas as you do to elect a (right-leaning) Gaullist in rural areas. But nobody says France is not a democracy.
IPS: Much of ‘Humanitarian Imperialism’ deals with Iraq. Why do you reject the widely held view that the oil industry should be blamed for the war there?
JB: Of course, oil had a role to play in a trivial sense. The U.S. doesn’t want Iraq’s oil under the feet of Iran, Saudi Arabia or even the present Iraqi government.
But the naïve view of the peace movement that the U.S. went there to rob oil doesn’t seem defensible. I don’t know of any evidence that the oil industry lobbied for war.
Every war needs war propaganda. And the oil industry — to my knowledge — have not done any war propaganda at all.
The Zionist lobby, on the other hand, have always done war propaganda. If you open an American newspaper, you will find columns that are written by people who are Zionist and pro-Israel, even if they are not all Jews. It is fair to call (President George W.) Bush and (Vice-President Dick) Cheney Zionists, even if they are not Jewish. Especially Cheney.
IPS: The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was preceded by huge protests across Europe. Why has the peace movement lost that momentum?JB: I’m not a sociologist but if I can resort to conjecture: many people went out in the streets because they thought the war would turn ugly. Of course, it did turn ugly but not in the way that was thought. There were no weapons of mass destruction. And don’t forget that (then British prime minister) Tony Blair was talking about missiles being launched within 45 minutes.
The people in the peace movement were either genuinely anti-war or genuinely concerned about the interests of their own countries.
There are different situations in different countries. In Britain the anti-war movement faced a problem of deciding who to vote for. The Conservatives are as gung-ho as Labour. And with the Liberal Democrats, the system is biased against them.
IPS: Given your criticism of Israel’s tactics in the Palestinian territories, do you think there is a case for boycotting Israeli goods?
JB: Yes, there should be a campaign for a boycott. That is one way that citizens have to show they are angry.
Some people say: why not boycott the U.S.? I think we should boycott the U.S. but I don’t see how this could be done practically.
In Britain and the U.S., a large part of the population does not agree with the government. In Israel, there is much more homogeneity. Even the moderates in the genuine peace camp are very marginal.
IPS: Reviewers have pointed out that your book doesn’t examine the situation in Darfur. What should the West do about the killings there?JB: My book is not against intervention within the framework of the UN. In principle, maybe something could be negotiated there. A peacekeeping force can be sent when there is a peacekeeping agreement to prevent rogue elements from destroying the peace. But when you send a peacekeeping force before you have a peacekeeping agreement, that is war.
It also seems to me that some people are using Darfur to change the subject away from Iraq. Iraq may be the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. You have three-four million refugees and maybe one million dead.
IPS: You are quite critical of human rights organisations for being selective in deciding what rights they focus on. Why is that?JB: Human Rights Watch says it will not discuss whether a war is legitimate or not. All it wants is for war parties to respect the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention is not respected in any war.
IPS: You’ve also written that the left in Europe is only moderately less in favour of unfettered capitalism than the right. Can you explain what you mean by that?
JB: It is amazing how after the fall of communism, democracy became the new cause. The left adopted this and turned it into a pro-Western, anti-Third World discussion.
Look at the way the left complains about China. When the Chinese said recently that they want to improve the rights of workers in Chinese factories, big Western corporations said: ‘If you do that, we will move abroad, we will move to Vietnam.’ This is not something the left is concerned about. It just blames the Chinese leaders for everything.
IPS: Can I ask you about the European Union and the current efforts by its leaders to introduce a reform treaty that is largely the same as the constitution rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005. I understand you were pleased by the ‘No’ vote in France?JB: I wasn’t entirely happy. I was happy that at least the media was defeated.
But I have no illusion about why people voted ‘No’. They voted because of nationalism. Fifty-five percent of people voted ‘No’ and of that 35 percent were from the left and 20 percent were from the right.
There is nothing telling me that that the reason why people on the left voted ‘No’ was all for social reasons and not for reasons of nationalism. With the victory of (centre-right candidate Nicolas) Sarkozy (in a presidential election earlier this year), a lot of people who voted for him had voted ‘No’. People over 65 who voted overwhelmingly for Sarkozy had voted ‘No’.
The failure I see in Belgium at the moment (where Dutch and French-speaking parties have not yet formed a coalition government several months after a general election) could anticipate the future of Europe. Why should the Finns, Portuguese, Irish and Greeks be feeling closer to each other, more than Flemish and Walloons feeling closer to each other?Without a common feeling, how do you build a country with bureaucracy and free markets? There is an enormous amount of delusion (about European integration).
IPS: Finally, I’ve been told that you are the man who effectively introduced Noam Chomsky to francophone Europe. Is that true?
JB: I first met Chomsky when I went to listen to him in Princeton (the U.S. university) in the early 1980s. After the first Gulf War, I invited him to Belgium to speak at the Flemish university VUB.
In France it has been an uphill battle to put him on the map. (Journalist) Philippe Val attacked him recently because (Osama) bin Laden mentioned him in his recent video.
He is still being demonised and misrepresented.
Kouchner Does Iran
September 17, 2007
Israel’s man at the Quai d’Orsay and renowned warmonger, Bernard Kouchner, is settling comfortably into his new role — he has just threatened war. However, this time he appears to have gotten ahead of himself. Even the generally staid IAEA has been impelled to rebuke his crude warmongering (recall that in the past Kouchner has been wise enough to cloak his martial ambitions in humanitarian garb), along with the generally restrained Austrians.
It is not clear how the rest of France feels about Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, but the lobby has for some time been annoyed with IAEA’s refusal to play ball (even though IAEA inspectors have been turning over data from their tours of Irani nuclear facilities to Israeli and US intelligence ever since Iran began the voluntary cooperation. I emphasize the ‘voluntary’ because Iran is not required through its NPT obligations to submit to these inspections). It has been ratcheting up its rhetoric to pressure the agency into taking a more hardline position. The lobby is also concerned with the recent focus on its role in urging US on towards the Iraq war; a new war will relieve the pressure, albeit temporarily, as the nation will predictably respond with characteristic jingoism, lining up behind ‘our boys’.
Like Tariq Ali, even some astute observers have been dismissing the possibility of war too lightly. Col. Sam Gardiner of the USAF who was here in Glasgow recently in fact believes (based on information from insiders) that the decision to bomb Iran has already been taken. And if you think war with Iran is too improbable, then this article from Jean Bricmont should disabuse you of such false complacence.
Sartre and de Beauvoir
August 2, 2007
Lisa Appignanesi on Sartre and de Beauvoir’s relationship. This is a couple of years old, but interesting.
‘Our relationship was the greatest achievement of my life’
‘Women, you owe her everything!” So read the headline announcing Simone de Beauvoir’s death in April 1986. It was a phrase repeated over and over at her funeral, where some 5,000 mourners gathered to pay tribute to the writer many consider the greatest French woman of the 20th century, author of The Second Sex, mother of the modern women’s movement. De Beauvoir’s ashes duly found their place next to those of Jean-Paul Sartre, her partner in life, though never in marriage. He had died six years almost to the hour before her, and her last book, Farewell to Sartre, was the only one he had never read prior to publication.
De Beauvoir had declared that whatever her many books and literary prizes, whatever her role in the women’s movement or as an intellectual ambassador championing causes such as Algerian independence, her greatest achievement in life was her relationship with Sartre – philosopher, playwright, philanderer, born 100 years ago this month.
There is something mysterious in De Beauvoir’s insistence. Given Sartre’s other liaisons, and that this was the height of the women’s movement, it seems to fly in the face of common sense. Yet the Simone who had flouted convention in the 20s by entering into an open liaison with an ugly, charismatic young unknown was not about to conform to expectations.
Whether we agree with her own startling assessment or not, it’s clear that De Beauvoir was neither lying nor, as some misogynist commentators have argued, simply writing herself into a life more important than her own. After all, for 51 years, whether they were living close to one another or apart, she edited and, as Sartre himself put it, “filtered” his work, which he dedicated to her (some have ventured that, on occasion, she wrote it too). For 51 years, the conversations between them created ideas, books, and a bond which other passions enraged or enriched, but never altogether ruptured. It was, for De Beauvoir, an experiment in loving of which “existentialism” was the child.
When I was growing up in the 60s, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were a model couple, already legendary creatures, rebels with a great many causes, and leaders of what could be called the first postwar youth movement: existentialism – a philosophy that rejected all absolutes and talked of freedom, authenticity, and difficult choices. It had its own music and garb of sophisticated black which looked wonderful against a cafe backdrop. Sartre and De Beauvoir were its Bogart and Bacall, partners in a gloriously modern love affair lived out between jazz club, cafe and writing desk, with forays on to the platforms and streets of protest. Despite being indissolubly united and bound by ideas, they remained unmarried and free to engage openly in any number of relationships. This radical departure from convention seemed breathtaking at the time.
De Beauvoir wrote about this in the autobiography she began to publish in the late 50s, after the scandalous success of her exposé of being female, The Second Sex, and her Goncourt prize-winning novel, The Mandarins, where she chronicles, among much else, her postwar affair with the American novelist Nelson Algren, whom she left in order to return to Sartre, abandoning passion for public responsibility.
De Beauvoir and Sartre met in 1929 when they were both studying for the aggregation in philosophy, the elite French graduate degree. De Beauvoir came second to Sartre’s first, though the examiners agreed she was strictly the better philosopher and at the age of 21 the youngest person ever to have sat the exam. But Sartre, the future author of Being and Nothingness, was bold, ingenious, exuberant in his youthful excess, the satirical rebel who shouted, “Thus pissed Zarathustra” as he hurled water bombs out of classroom windows.
Sartre was the pampered son of a widowed mother. Educated in French and German by his pedagogue grandfather, the young Sartre, diminutive, wall-eyed, was corresponding in alexandrines by the age of 10 and something of an outcast at his provincial school. By the time he returned to Paris, he had learned to make up for his physical lacks by the sheer force of his personality. De Beauvoir was captivated by the intensity with which he also listened.
The young Sartre already saw himself as a Don Juan, a seducer who ruptured outworn convention, and whose presence revealed things in their fundamental light. Seduction and writing, he believed, had their source in the same intellectual process.
Late in life, he admitted that he had fantasised a succession of women for himself, each one meaning everything for a given moment. De Beauvoir had astonished him by agreeing to the experiment he had outlined. She accepted the freedom he insisted on and became its custodian.
“What we have,” he said early on to De Beauvoir, “is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.” Recording Sartre’s proposal, De Beauvoir writes: “We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people.”
It is difficult to underestimate the sheer adventurousness of this pact forged in 1929. Particularly on De Beauvoir’s side, the break from accepted norms was monumental, as was the social stigma. For De Beauvoir, Sartre seemed only to be repeating what, from her father’s example and bourgeois practice, she understood as a male prerogative. What was different about their relationships was that she, the woman, would be equally free to engage in other affairs. Then, too, there was Sartre’s important dictum of “transparency” – the vow that they would never lie to each other the way married couples did. They would tell each other everything, share feelings, work, projects.
Yet in this lifelong relationship of supposed equals, he, it turned out, was far more equal than she was. It was he who engaged in countless affairs, to which she responded on only a few occasions with longer-lasting passions of her own. Between the lines of her fiction and what are in effect six volumes of autobiography, it is also evident that De Beauvoir suffered deeply from jealousy. She wanted to keep the image of a model life intact. There were no children. They never shared a house and their sexual relations were more or less over by the end of the war, though for much of their life and certainly at the last, they saw each other daily.
With the posthumous publication in 1988 of her letters to Sartre, a good proportion of them written during the war years when he was at the front and then a prisoner, gaps that were left out of the autobiography are filled in. What the letters express is not only De Beauvoir’s overarching love for a man who is never sexually faithful to her, a man she addresses as her “dear little being” and whose work she loyally edits. They also underline the mundanity of De Beauvoir’s early accommodation to his wishes, her acceptance of what many women would reject as demeaning, her dependence.
But this dependence is hardly simple or passive. It is a shared attachment from which power also comes – as De Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, shows it does for all women. From early on, Notre-Dame-de-Sartre, as the wits dubbed her, organises the comings and goings of Sartre’s “contingent” women; she encourages, consoles, manipulates, and continues to do so until the very end for that loose grouping of friends and exes they called their “family”. With a few exceptions, she performs whatever Sartre at the Front asks of her, including finding money for him, or having an affair.
The voyeuristic narration of the details of sexual passion for the other’s entertainment, the ups and downs and seamy manoeuvres of these relationships give Sartre and De Beauvoir the aura of a latter-day Valmont and Merteuil, planning and reporting on their dangerous liaisons, analysing assaults and retreats, and deliberating over the propaganda which is to surround them. On top of all this are De Beauvoir’s lesbian pursuits and her sharing of Sartre’s partners. Bluestocking she might have been, but De Beauvoir was never averse to taking hers off, and then letting Sartre know.
It would be easy to condemn Sartre and De Beauvoir, to dismiss their sex lives as squalid and find therein reason to undermine their intellectual or political projects. This would be to miss the great edifice that De Beauvoir constructed out of their mutual experiment in living; the often gruelling honesty they both brought to bear on each other; and the ways in which the living and changing organism that was their partnership shaped both their philosophical writings and their fiction. It was clear to De Beauvoir that Sartre was a great thinker: thought needed tending. Happiness, that state she claimed she had a talent for, was not the point.
Then, too, there may be another very good reason why De Beauvoir thought her relationship was her greatest achievement. The Second Sex is her encyclopaedic and shocking account of woman’s condition as “other” in a world where the norm, with all its overarching and defining power, was male. The book analyses how women have been made over in a world of male descriptions, the contortions performed in order to draw something from the secondary role, the mutilation, the pain. In the experiment of her relationship with Sartre, De Beauvoir took over the power of description. She writes him in and through her life. Maybe that was partly what she meant by her greatest achievement – alongside a generous love, respect and abiding loyalty.
Kouchner Beats a Dead Horse
July 20, 2007
In his zeal to prove his hardline-Zionist credentials Israel’s man in the French foreign ministry, Bernard Kouchner, is making claims that even the Israeli intelligence disputes. “Palestinian militant group Hamas has contacts with Al-Qaida”, he tells Ha’aretz, “adding that this was not the result of Western pressure to isolate the movement”.
“I think Hamas did not wait for this extreme situation – the current terrible situation in Gaza – to have contacts with Al-Qaida. And it would perhaps be too simple to think that we, the international community, are responsible,” Kouchner said.
Kouchner, who was speaking at a news conference, did not elaborate.
He did not of course, because he can not. Incidentally, the only two parties making this charge are Israel’s foreign supporters, and its quislings in Abbas’s Vichy government.
Also check out Alistair’s Crooke’s excellent commentary on the subject.
Have You No McShame, Sir?
July 10, 2007
Denis MacShane MP, a member of the UK Israel Lobby Labour Friends of Israel‘s Policy Council, never lets an opportunity go by to spit venom at Muslims. In the wake of the Istanbul bombing in 2003 he caused much outrage when he called on Muslims to choose between the ‘British way’ or ‘the way of terrorists’ (How many other alternatives do they have after all?). Under fire from Muslims and people within the Blair government MacShane quickly altered the text of his speech. So the statement,
[It is] time for the elected and community leaders of British Muslims to make a choice: the British way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests, or the way of the terrorists against which the whole democratic world is uniting
Was changed to,
It is time for the elected and community leaders of British Muslims to make a choice…It is the democratic, rule of law – if you like, the British or Turkish or American way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests like the one we saw in London yesterday – or it is the way of the terrorists.
However, in the wake of recent eevents, he wrote: ‘I regret now my temporising’. In the same article, he misrepresents the statement which had caused the outrage by publishing the altered version of the speech, which was change as a result of the furore. So he writes,
I made what I thought were banal points, saying a choice had to be made between “the democratic rule of law, if you like the British or Turkish or American or European way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests, or the way of the terrorists, against which the whole democratic world is now uniting. We need to move away from talk of martyrs and I hope we will see clearer, stronger language that there is no future for any Muslim cause anywhere in the world that validates, or implicitly supports, the use of political violence in any way.”
The statement is no less Islamophobic of course, as once again it implies violence is intrinsic to Muslim’s own ’way’, and the statement is also rather amusing coming from someone who has arrogated Britain and US the right to use political violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. But nevertheless, it is a distortion of a different nature. Muslims did protest, but it was against his earlier, more extreme statement.
But what of the rest of his politics?
MacShane and France
In the leadup to the 2007 French presidential elections, the pro-Israel MacShane supported the far-Right Sarkozy, son of a Nazi sympathiser, and engaged in smearing the Socialist candidate Segolene Royal. He wrote,
Royal has driven France’s Jewish voters into Sarkozy’s camp by appearing to endorse a venomous anti-Semitic attack on Israel by Islamist fundamentalists during a visit to the Middle East.
He is referring here to a statement by a Hizbullah MP to the effect that their organization draws inspiration from the French resistance during WWII. Since most sane people won’t detect the purported ‘antisemtism’ in that statement, one can forgive Royal for not having reacted in the Zionist’s desired manner. But for a Labourite, his other barb at Royal is downright amusing.
Her language is like that of Labour in the 1980s – hostile to America, to Europe, and to open world economics.
MacShane and Israel
With Israel’s declining image in the aftermath of its invasion of Lebanon, MacShane participated in the damage-control operation that relied on the familiar ploy of ascribing criticism of Israel to a resurgent antisemitism. Norman Finkelstein writes,
- “So, predictably, just after Israel faced another image problem due to its murderous destruction of Lebanon, a British all-party parliamentary group led by notorious Israel-firster Denis MacShane MP (Labor) released yet another report alleging a resurgence of anti-Semitism (Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry Into Antisemitism, September 2006). To judge by the witnesses (David Cesarani, Lord Janner, Oona King, Emanuele Ottolenghi, Melanie Phillips) and sources (MEMRI, Holocaust Education Trust) cited in the body of the report, much time and money could have been saved had it just been contracted out to the Israel Foreign Ministry.”
It is worth noting here that when this report was issued, the committee had not status, and its members were self-selected. More tellingly, the committee was comprised exclusivley of the supporters of the invasion of Iraq.
MacShane and Venezuela
A New Labour MP, MacShane seems to have great admiration for Margaret Thatcher. He called Chavez ‘sensible’ because he was behaving as a ‘Thatcherite’, but he found the 2002 coup predictable. ‘What has happened in Caracas is no surprise but it should be a warning’, wrote MacShane, went on to label Chavez ‘a ranting, populist demogogue’. With great prescience he added, ‘Hugo Chavez, the former President, was a political leader who lived by permanent mobilisation…This week the people of Venezuela did mobilise, but it was against Senor Chavez.’ The president was restored to his seat of course — by popular mobilisation.
In the face of the subsequent embarassment, MacShane has tried to recast his endorsement of the coup as a call for the restoration of Democracy. Except, his exact statement was ‘Venezuela now needs to move swiftly to restore full democracy’ — as opposed to Chavez’s democracy, which presumably wasn’t ‘full’. MacShane is also sceptical of the Venezuelan people’s capacity to act in their best interest since he is convinced they ‘deserve better’ than the government they elected. Incidentally, most Venezuelans hold exaclty the same view of the British people.
For an admirer of Thatcher, he seems to show a great deal of concern for the poverty of ‘social justice’ in Venezuela. Even the conservative Financial Times was left bemused by MacShane’s glee at the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Venezuela (April 15, 2002). It wrote, ‘at least the White House did not go as far as Denis MacShane, British junior foreign office minister. MacShane described in The Times newspaper on Saturday how Chavez had at times acted as a “ranting, populist demagogue”‘. However, MacShane charitably lays our fears to rest. He assures us, ’Hugo is no Hitler’.
As one similar propagandist was one once asked, ‘Have you no shame, sir?’
Believe It or Not
June 10, 2007
Here is Fisk offering a much needed relief from the prevalent historical amnesia:
When I was a schoolboy, I loved a column which regularly appeared in British papers called “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”. In a single rectangular box filled with naively drawn illustrations, Ripley – Bob Ripley – would try to astonish his readers with amazing facts:
“Believe It or Not, in California, an entire museum is dedicated to candy dispensers … Believe It or Not, a County Kerry man possesses an orange that is 25 years old … Believe It or Not, a weather researcher had his ashes scattered on the eve of Hurricane Danielle 400 miles off the coast of Miama, Florida.” Etc, etc, etc.
Incredibly, Ripley’s column lives on, and there is even a collection of “Ripley Believe It or Not” museums in the United States.
The problem, of course, is that these are all extraordinary facts which will not offend anyone. There are no suicide bombers in Ripley, no Israeli air strikes (“Believe It or Not, 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon”), no major casualty tolls (“Believe It or Not, up to 650,000 Iraqis died in the four years following the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq”). See what I mean? Just a bit too close to the bone (or bones).
But I was reminded of dear old Ripley when I was prowling through the articles marking the anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Memoirs there have been aplenty, but I think only the French press – in the shape of Le Monde Diplomatique – was prepared to confront a bit of “Believe It or Not”.
It recalled vividly – and shamefully – how the world’s newspapers covered the story of Egypt’s “aggression” against Israel. In reality – Believe It or Not – it was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran and ordered UN troops out of Sinai and Gaza following his vituperative threats to destroy Israel. “The Egyptians attack Israel,” France-Soir told its readers on 5 June 1967, a whopper so big that it later amended its headline to “It’s Middle East War!”.
Quite so. Next day, the socialist Le Populaire headlined its story “Attacked on all sides, Israel resists victoriously”. On the same day, Le Figaro carried an article announcing that “the victory of the army of David is one of the greatest of all time”. Believe It or Not, the Second World War – which might be counted one of the greatest of all time, had ended only 22 years earlier.
Johnny Hallyday, France’s undie-able pop star, sang for 50,000 French supporters of Israel – for whom solidarity was expressed in the French press by Serge Gainsbourg, Juliette Gréco, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterand. Believe It or Not – and you can believe it – Mitterand once received the coveted Francisque medal from Pétain’s Vichy collaborationists.
Only the president of France, General de Gaulle, moved into political isolation by telling a press conference several months later that Israel “is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions – and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called ‘terrorism’”. This accurate prophecy earned reproof from the Nouvel Observateur – to the effect that “Gaullist France has no friends; it has only interests”. And Believe It or Not, with the exception of one small Christian paper, there was in the entire French press one missing word: Palestinians.
Bernard Kouchner: Israel Got Lucky
May 19, 2007
In one of his comedy routines, George Carlin describes how he would react if the plane he was flying in were to crashes into the sea: “I’ll go around the fat fuck. Step on the widow’s head. Push those children out of the way. Knock down the paralyzed midget and get out of the plane – so I can help others!”. The reaction of ‘socialist’ Bernard Kouchner to his appointment as the Foreign Minister by the far-right French president Nikolas Sarkozy is somewhat similar.
“This is a bit unusual,” Mr. Kouchner confessed today in accepting his appointment at the Foreign Ministry. He added that he “would not have done it” had he not felt the conviction “to serve our country.”
As I had said on another occasion, at times the worst indicments come in the form of praise. Sarkozy’s choice for Foreign Minister seems to have delighted some — the extreme-right Free Republic, and Zionist hawk and anti-Arab/Islamophobic editor of The New Republic, Martin Peretz, for instance. Peretz magnanimously forgives Kouchner’s socialist past; it does not make ’make him foul or “treyf” (non-Kosher)’, because ”Kouchner and Sarkozy have intellectual and political bonds that cross party lines”. He adds:
Andre Glucksmann, a good friend of Kouchner’s but not by any means a socialist, may have planted the idea in Sarkozy’s head [Glucksmann is also a 'good friend' of Alain Finkielkraut, French Zionist comedian who passes for a philosopher in the airier circles of Paris]. Or tilled the idea after someone else or Sarkozy himself had raised it. After all, Glucksmann had campaigned for Sarkozy, loyally and energetically. And the three share many values and convictions, whatever their party loyalties. They are friends of America, not at all friends, but antagonists of militant Islam, allies of the West as idea and reality, sympathetic, empathetic with Israel, aligned with the ex-communist democracies of Eastern Europe, etc. Enough said about this.
Sarkozy and Kouchner may agree on many things, but it would be unfair to consider them identical in their politics. New York Times reports:
Mr. Sarkozy opposed the American invasion of Iraq while Mr. Kouchner, unlike most French people anywhere on the spectrum, supported it.
Richard Holbrooke gushed with further praise for the man described as ‘an effective early advocate of “humanitarian intervention”’:
It will be very positive for U.S.-French relations, because he does not come with a visceral anger towards the American ‘hyperpower.’ ”
Given the fabulous job NATO is carrying out in Afghanistan, “Mr. Kouchner appears to support the maintenance of a strong international — and French — presence in Afghanistan to bring stability to the country”.
If all that weren’t enough to endear him to the average Brit or American, he also always gets ”the best restaurant tables”, and while Sarkozy’s appointed PM is an anglophile, Kouchner is being described by NYT as an “Americaphile, a stance that has led many in the Socialist Party to regard him as a traitor.”
Friends and Foe (of Israel)
Sylvain Semhoun, the representative of Sarkozy’s Union for Popular Movement (UMP), told the Jerusalem Post, “Israel got lucky [with Kouchner]. Israelis should thank God it’s him and not Vedrine“. Far from getting lucky however, it was the very heavy-handed approach of the Israel Lobby that brought about this change. According to Le Canard Enchaine:
As soon as the leaders of CRIF (Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France) learned of the prospect [of the appointment of Vedrine] from the new Head of the State, Roger Cukierman, outgoing president of CRIF [the French Israel lobby], telephoned Claude Guéant with a violent warning.
“We held a meeting with CRIF, today, and the rumour circulated of the nomination of Védrine to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs . That caused panic because, for us, Védrine is worse than the usual anti-Israelis of the Quay D’Orsay.”
A little later, Cukierman directly joined Sarkozy and said to him that the Jewish community would take the nomination of Védrine as a “casus belli”.
It should be understood that Cukierman and its friends had campaigned across the country for Sarko explaining why the victory of Ségolène would cause the return of Védrine to the Quay!
So what makes Kouchner so much more appealing to Israel?
Kouchner, who was born to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, is close to right-wing Jewish MP Pierre Lellouche, who advises Sarkozy on international issues. And Kouchner received an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba at the height of the second intifada…
Kouchner at the diplomatic helm, coupled with the new American-style National Security Adviser Jean-David Levitte – former French ambassador to Washington – Sarkozy is making good on his pledge of support to his American friends.
Kouchner and Levitte broke ranks with the French government in 2003, refusing to oppose the invasion of Iraq. Kouchner published an article in Le Monde arguing the positives in toppling Saddam Hussein.
Meanwhile in Israel, some have already registered their satisfaction:
Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu has said that with the coming to power of his friend Sarkozy, he expects French Middle East policy “will no longer be characterized by reflective anti-Israelism.”
