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Ultranationalist appeasers: Le Pen, Mélenchon & Zemmour side with Russia: a discussion with Nidra Poller  by Jerry Gordon

https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/ultranationalist-appeasers-le-pen-melenchon-zemmour-side-with-russia-a-discussion-with-nidra-poller/

On the cusp of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there were disturbing revelations about this issue in the French Presidential election campaign in this our fifth monthly discussion with Nidra Poller, on February 18th There were statements by ultranationalist candidates on both the far left and far right dismissing the looming threat of Russian President to the Western alliance and world order.

President Macron shifted into high gear in diplomatic initiatives having an audience with Putin in Moscow and on the eve of Russia’s invasion Macron made a 105-minute phone call with Putin followed by one with Ukraine’s President Wolodymyr Zelensky, who promptly announced that he would meet with Putin. Zelensky made a sudden trip to the Munich Security Conference the same day, chastising Western appeasement of Putin pressing for immediate imposition of sanctions. He remarked:

“Ukraine is longing for peace, Europe is longing for Peace, the world is saying it doesn’t want any war, while Russia claiming she doesn’t want to intervene – someone here is lying.”

Zelensky got his answer that evening. Backed by Russia’s Duma, Putin signed treaties with the unelected leaders of the two breakaway Ukrainian provinces recognizing their “independence.”  Brushing aside last-minute calls for diplomatic initiatives, Putin used the pretext of “false Flag” Ukrainian actions to send in so-called “peacekeepers” followed by tanks, vehicles and more. The reaction was a salvo of world critical of Putin’s demarch followed by a veritable fusillade of economic and financial sanctions directed at key Russian Banks and oligarchs close to Putin announced by US President Biden, the UK, EU, Japan, South Korea. Even China’s Xi-Jinping urged “caution” to his erstwhile geo-political partner. Ukrainian President Zelensky announced a State of Emergency mobilizing his 250,000 troops to oppose the 190,000 Russian forces surrounding his country on three sides. We knew what would come of this Russian action given Putin’s precedents in the 2008 War against The Republic of Georgia, which resulted his seizure of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and in 2014 seizure of the Crimea and sending in troops to support the rebels in the breakaway eastern Donetsk and Luhansk region. French philosopher and activist Bernard-Henri Lévy penned a Tablet op ed, “The Rape of Ukraine.”  His dour forecast: “Taking Putin’s grievances seriously would be nothing more than a death wish for a return to the terrible 20th Century.”

Everyone is Talking about Zemmour A Discussion with Nidra Poller By Jerry Gordon

https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=190971&sec_id=190971

France’s Jewish community—Europe’s largest—is confronting the rise of Eric Zemmour, a columnist, TV personality, bestselling author, and undeclared candidate in the April 2022 French Presidential elections. Paris-born son of Algerian-Jewish-Berber background whose parents came to mainland France in 1952, he trades in controversial assertions that have caught a wave of enthusiastic support: The “Grand Replacement,” the replacement of French culture and civilization by an immigrant Muslim population; that Maréchal Pétain saved French Jews by sacrificing foreign Jews; that Captain Dreyfus was more German than French, and others. Zemmour’s insensitive comments about the burial in Israel of several French-Jewish victims of antisemitic murders was a low point in a flow of ambiguous statements condemned by the President of the French Jewish CRIF and the Chief Rabbi of France.

        Zemmour has been polling ahead of Marine Le Pen of the far-right Rassemblement National, reaching a peak of 18-19% versus 15 to 16% —capturing some of her base with his French nationalist and anti-Muslim immigration memes. Current polls indicate he might make the Second Round in contention with incumbent French President Macron, who is shown winning re-election against all currently known candidates.

        On the commemoration of the sixth anniversary of the November 13th, 2015, Islamic terror attack, Zemmour showed up at the Bataclan theater where 90 people—of the more than 130—were savagely massacred that day and accused former President Hollande of “criminal negligence” for letting the attackers slip in with the wave of Syrian refugees. Survivors and families of victims were outraged at the political exploitation of their distress.

        These developments come amid the judgment in the case of the savage anti-Semitic murder, in 2018, of 85-year Mirelle Knoll, who narrowly escaped deportation in July 1942. Yacine Mihoub was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole before 22 years. His accomplice, Alex Carrimbacus, received a 15-year sentence for aggravated theft. Mihoub’s mother, Zouliikha Khellaf was sentenced to three years in prison, with two years suspended, for cleaning and hiding the bloodied knife used by her son to slit Mirelle Knol’s throat, slashing her 11 times before setting her body on fire. The victim’s sons, Alain, and Daniel, were “greatly relieved” by the judgment. Their lawyer, Gilles-William Goldnadel, tweeted; “Justice has been done and well done.”

        Still outstanding is the case of the brutal antisemitic murder, in April 2017, of Sarah Halimi, at the hands of her drug-addled Muslim neighbor, Kobili Traoré. The highest court (Cassation) rejected all appeals and sustained the judgment of the lower court that Traoré was unfit to stand trial. An ongoing and very thorough parliamentary investigation is bringing to light the judicial errors in this case.

A.R.T. for All & Sundry: Sterile Social Progress and Sexless Equality Nidra Poller

https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=190868&sec_id=190868

[This article is translated from the original French by the author. The article is a response to the debate in France on legislation that will extend access to PMA, Procréation Médicalement Assistée (or ART, Assisted Reproduction Technology) to lesbian couples and single women in France.]

Isn’t it heartless to block the flow of such tender desires? Where is the “why” strong enough to answer the “why not?”

        Society is about to assume divine powers to compensate for the stinginess of a God who’s lost His glory. Enthusiasts only count the positive side of the calculation: the 1 + 1 = 2 love of the same-sex couple + their love for the wanted child cancels the minus-one of the father. And the absent mother of the child born by gestation pour autrui, known as GPA (inevitable authorization of surrogate motherhood) will be compensated by the sweet tale of the sperm-donator and the womb-lender, venerated like the mythical genitors of an ancient people.

        How should we calculate the deliberate deprivation for the child born of these equations, of splendid male/female dynamics? Militants of the cause write it off as a sustainable loss. The father or mother of a “conventional” couple can disappear by accident or by choice, n’est-ce pas? So, it’s doable. No room for old-fashioned sexual differentiation hang-ups. Move over, buddy!

        Transgenderism helps erase the father + mother = child formula by positing a range of possibilities that denies the essential difference between a man and a woman. An ill-defined aberration—dysphoria—becomes a sort of state of mind that will be soothed by “medical treatment” (that has nothing to do with healthcare), boosted by a proselyte ideology that seeps into society as a whole.

        In one of the more grotesque variations on the theme, we have the “man” that claims to be the father and/ or mother of the child carried in the uterus she kept, at least temporarily, during the male-to-female transition.

France Today / Interview with Nidra Poller by Jerome Gordon

https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=190674&sec_id=190674

France is embroiled with protests over the court decision not to try the Muslim killer of the Orthodox Jewish retired teacher, Sarah Halimi, for alleged mental incapacity to stand trial. The decision gave rise to protests in France, Canada, UK, and Israel seeking justice. The Jerusalem Post reported in late May 2021, “Leaders and officials from France, Canada, Israel and the United Nations held a special digital rally demanding justice for Sarah Halimi, a French Jewish grandmother murdered by Kobili Traore.” France hosts Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim Communities.

        This news came shortly after the cease fire ending the 11 day Fourth Israel-Hamas war during which more than 4,000 rockets and missiles were launched by the Gaza Muslim Brotherhood extremists and Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad. That reign of terror was thwarted by Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defense system in a nightly ‘Star Wars’ display with a 90 percent downing of incoming rockets fired indiscriminately by these Islamist extremists. Hamas aroused sectarian protests in the West Bank, Temple Mount, Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah section—originally a Jewish area seized by Jordan during the 1948—over legal evictions of Arabs who lacked deeds of ownership. Add to the outbreak pogroms in joint Arab-Jewish towns in Israel like Lod, Jaffa, Acre, and others. Israel made ‘precision’ attacks on Hamas tunnels, command structures sparing as much as possible Gazan civilians. That was, admitted by the UNWRA director before being forced to recant by Hamas. Because the US and international media provocatively portrayed Israel’s defense as “excessive” the Jewish nation’s usual Democratic supporters in Congress were riven given calls by so-called progressives of “apartheid” and “occupation” insinuating a racist anti-Semitic toxic meme. That led to an outburst of Palestinian protesters attacking Jews in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles spiking anti-Semitic incidents. Concerns over existential threats to Israel and the American Jewish community were expressed by the Biden White House, major Jewish communal leaders, and condemned by the leaders of the Democratic majority and Republican opposition in Congress.

        France by contrast banned Palestinian protests given nightly protests and burnings during Ramadan among the Muslim banlieues suburbs. The French National Assembly had introduction legislation against “separatism” —a euphemism for dealing Islamic extremism. In late April, a French policewoman was killed by a Tunisian émigré. Those illegal Palestinian protests that did occur through France were relatively smaller than in prior outbursts. The National Police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse protesters in Paris and other major French cities. The separatism issue was the subject of an open letter from 1,000 French Servicemen, including 20 former generals raising the threat of insurrection, especially in the predominantly Muslim banlieues. The separatism issue will figure prominently in the upcoming 2022 Presidential election in France pitting President Macron against Marine Le Pen of the National Rally. There is also concerns about France commitment to combatting rising Islamist extremist threats to the G-5 countries in former French Equatorial Africa region of Sahel.

        Against this background we brought back very dear friend, Nidra Poller, long-term American expat in Paris, talented writer, author, and activist for her views. Nidra (right) has written extensively on Islamic Antisemitism, murders of French Jews, terrorist events in France and elsewhere. She is most noted for being one of the earliest investigators in the Muhammad al-Dura affair that involved a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was allegedly killed by Israeli gunfire on September 30th, 2000, at the start of the second Intifada. That was a piece of classic Palestinian propaganda. It was made up. Unfortunately, it involved a French, Jewish producer for France 2 tv whose 54-second film clip triggered this entire investigation. I met Nidra Poller nearly 18 years ago in Boston to go over some of the original findings in that groundbreaking effort. Much of that has been captured in a book that she wrote, published in 2014, called Al Dura: Long-Range Ballistic Myth  Poller contributes commentary on English-speaking media for ELNET which is a strong international organization defending Israel and defending democracy.

Myth, Fact, and the al-Dura Affair Nidra Poller

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/nidra-poller/myth-fact-and-the-al-dur

This past June, Wafa Samir al-Bis, an aspiring twenty-one-year-old shahida, or “martyr,” was apprehended by Israeli guards at the Erez checkpoint in Gaza and found to be carrying 20 pounds of explosives in her underwear. The young woman intended to make a last trip to the Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva, where she had been receiving medical treatment for severe burns incurred in a domestic accident. Her goal this time was to blow herself up and kill as many young people as possible. Asked why she was aiming specifically at children, she replied that she wanted to retaliate for the death of Muhammad al-Dura.

Wafa Samir al-Bis is but one in a long line of shahids and would-be shahids inspired by the image of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy whose death scene was broadcast worldwide at the very onset of the so-called al-Aqsa intifada that broke out in September 2000. Televised images of the boy, reportedly killed by Israeli soldiers, instantly ignited anti-Israel and anti-Jewish passions all over the world, provoking a wave of violence from the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah to synagogue burnings in France. In the ensuing years, the story of Muhammad al-Dura has attained near-mythic stature in the Arab and Muslim world. In the West, though its essence is largely forgotten, it has fired the political imagination of many who accept it as emblematic proof of Israeli culpability for the outbreak of the armed conflict and even for Palestinian “martyrdom operations” against Israel’s civilian population.

The killing of Muhammad al-Dura is not the only long-lived accusation against Israel in the last five years. Another tale of atrocity, perhaps even better known, is the Jenin “massacre.” In the spring of 2002, the Israeli army moved into that West Bank city to wipe out a nest of terrorists responsible for a particularly intense sequence of murder and mayhem. Immediately, Palestinian sources claimed a figure of 5,000 dead (later reduced to a more modest 500) and an entire “refugee camp” bulldozed to rubble. By the time the truth emerged—Palestinians themselves finally confirmed a total of 56 dead, most of them in armed combat, and aerial views demonstrated the pinpoint nature of the Israeli operation—the damage had been done. Still today the Jenin “massacre” endures, out of reach of rational refutation.

But at least there is reliable information on what really happened in Jenin. That is not the case with the death scene of Muhammad al-Dura.

Tom Gross Interviews Nidra Poller about her parents and her life….see note

Nidra is my dear friend- a fascinating woman and brilliant writer….rsk

* Nidra Poller (Paris) https://youtu.be/wHky3gPi0oA

Writer Nidra Poller discusses hanging out with James Baldwin and other African-American writers and musicians in 1970s Paris, the origins of the name Nidra, how her Japanese partner introduced her to Israel, and the position of women in the modern world.

NIDRA POLLER’S NEW BOOK

Baltimore is in the news! Is it a sin to tell the truth about Baltimore …Or is Baltimore getting badmouthed with ulterior motives? Hard to say, if you’ve never been there.Do you know any writer, besides Edgar Allan Poe,that ever lived in Baltimore? Yes. The author of So Courage & Gypsy Motion

So Courage & Gypsy Motion

by Nidra Poller

AVAILABLE IN KINDLE  AND PAPERBACK

— I know what that’s about. That’s what he does to a woman… he’s so damned ro-man-tic, your dream come true, looking deep in your eyes and holding your hand across the table, candlelight and all that shit, but he did it goo-ood! Movie star lover… and then there’s something stone cold at the center of him, a falseness… no, it’s deeper than that … he doesn’t even know himself… but I dig. Do you know what he told me? He was madly in love with a chick but she was married and turned him down so he went out to get drunk… all the way to Baltimore down by the docks he ended up in this Greek place and he met this Barbara and he started in courting her you know sort of to get revenge against the other one, but she took him serious and before he knew it they were living together and so he said now he thinks he fell in love with her … So they’re still together?

Paris Weeps as Notre Dame Burns: Nidra Poller

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/paris-weeps-as-notre-dame-burns/

April 15th, President Macron was scheduled to address the nation at 8 PM, to present a sort of executive summary of government policy, revised but not diverted by five months of weekly Gilet Jaune actions. I switched on the television 10 minutes before the hour, expecting to hear the usual quibbling: The Gilets Jaunes expect nothing and won’t be satisfied until the president resigns. What a surprise. Commentators, specialists, journalists and the man in the street don’t think any real problem will be really solved. That’s a safe bet. They will all, who knows why, entertain the confusion between the Gilets Jaunes, boiled down to some thirty thousand seditionists, and French voters that may or may not have joined in the great national debate. President Macron does not have to satisfy the Gilets Jaunes. We live in a democracy, not a tyranny of turbulent minorities.

I turn on the television.It’s Notre Dame in flames.

You don’t have to be Catholic, Christian, or a lover of cathedral architecture. You don’t have to be Parisian, French, or a citizen of the western world. Raging flames devouring Notre Dame can bring tears to your eyes. It is universally heartbreaking.

Gilets Jaunes: Lost in the Funhouse by Nidra Poller ****

https://isgap.org/flashpoint/gilets-jaunes-lost-in-the-funhouse/

8-11 PM December 11 Strasbourg: Terrorist attack at the Christmas market. The shooter, wounded and on the run, has been identified as 29–year-old Cherif C. a multi-recidivist criminal who has been flagged as a security risk since 2016. The current tally is two dead, a third victim brain-dead, thirteen wounded, six of them critically.

Since November 17, I have been gathering available information on the Gilets Jaunes (GJs), or “Yellow Vest Movement”, observing, analyzing, and testing my insights against accepted opinion. With rare exceptions, the GJs have been received with exceptional indulgence. The violence they spawn is both condoned and denied…attributed to the GJs and lifted from them by hair-splitting distinctions, as if, in a raging crowd of thousands, one could separate the real GJs from the opportunistic thugs, all dressed in yellow vests, all surging in the same direction. Murderous hatred and unprecedented destruction are dismissed with a Gallic shrug as an epiphenomenon that can’t discredit the voice of the people crying for justice.

What about jihad (the so-called terrorist attacks) on these same streets and boulevards such a short time ago and one after the other? Some commentators and officials did mention the danger of creating opportunities for terrorist attacks in the midst of a Gilet Jaune “demonstration.” But, I told myself, these GJ actions are in themselves terrorism, and these common ordinary Frenchmen are behaving as if they were inspired by Islamic mobs in Kabul, Peshawar, or… Gaza.

How blind, deaf, and dumb to create chaos in an already beleaguered democracy. And now the inevitable has happened. A jihad attack between one Yellow Saturday and the next. The baseless speculation that President Macron would declare a state of emergency to put an end to those pointless actions is becoming a reasonable option.

I still feel as though I have to apologize for my harsh judgment of giletjaunisme. But I will trust my intuition.

Lost in the funhouse

How can the Gilets Jaunes “movement” be evaluated on the basis of a bowdlerized version of their grievances, propositions, and actions, packaged in comparisons with the French Revolution and mai 68 to make a palatable story adapted to a variety of tastes? That narrative cannot encompass the scope, the concrete realities, and the glaring contradictions of an incendiary outburst of negative energy in the heart of a European democracy.

NIDRA POLLER: JUSTICE FOR DR. FORD

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/justice-for-dr-ford/

In a healthy democracy, one private unelected individual would not determine the future of the US Supreme Court. The appointment of a justice is a political decision that should be debated rationally and ultimately decided by an up down vote, reflecting the balance of political power. The current US president chose a candidate compatible with his politics.But the normal process of appointing a new justice has been jolted out of reality and thrust into a virtual time machine.

At the eleventh hour, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford accuses Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault… in 1982…when she was 15 and he was 17. And suddenly the 21 members of the Senate Judiciary committee are sucked into a grotesque debate over a hypothetical incident that cannot possibly be retrieved for scrupulous investigation. No matter how hard they peer into the crystal ball of the past, they will never find their way to a home that has no address, on a day that exists on no calendar, in the presence of witnesses that were not there.

The question is not he-said-she-said. The question is the civic duty of a responsible citizen, male or female, tempted to come forth with an accusation that would inevitably destroy the reputation of the accused. Whether true or false, an accusation of sexual assault in the age of MeToo is sure to cause irreparable damage to the accused. No due process there!