http://www.d-intl.com/not-welcome-at-the-free-press-society/ Not welcome at The Free Press Society Ferocious jihad is not a deviation from “true Islam” PARIS. The Copenhagen Post relays, at great length, the complaint of Jihad Taha whose reservation for a Free Press Association meeting was rejected for security reasons. The twenty year-old student says it’s discriminatory–based on his name– and hypocritical […]
Lars Hedegaard, co-editor in chief of Dispatch International is under police protection since an attempted assassination on February 5th. You can read a series of articles and follow links to the (rare) coverage of the attack in other media. As if press freedom only mattered when the media could display a “free of Islamophobia additives.” Of the few who even bothered to cover the incident, most did not hesitate to use the epithet “anti-Islam” to define Hedegaard. Strange world in which murderous jihadis are called freedom fighters and a man who defends freedom is labeled anti-Islam. After you’ve read the free-access article, how about subscribing to Dispatch to help defend our freedom? It is a bargain!!!N.P.
http://www.d-intl.com/in-the-family-way/
PARIS. Everything is flitting, flying, zinging, zapping in our developed world: Money, ideas, and information speed down cyber highways. People and their baggage zip around in fast trains and high flying jets. We go from the idea to the pitch to publication and remuneration in less time than it took to send a letter. Ordinary people carry in their pockets communications devices that CEOs didn’t have 20 years ago. Labor saving devices make household drudgery a museum item.
But it still takes nine months to carry a baby. Nine months of anatomical incongruity. If you have never carried a baby to term you can’t imagine the challenge of accommodating the beloved creature that presses on your bladder, weighs on your lower abdomen making it sting, pushes up on your diaphragm giving you heartburn, kicks you around by day and leaves you nowhere to turn in bed at night. Most pregnant women in developed countries have access to excellent prenatal care. They know better than previous generations how to keep fit during pregnancy and emerge with minimum damage. Though we don’t live in dread of dying in childbirth every minute from conception to delivery is still fraught with risk. Maternity clothes aren’t ugly anymore, even in Japan, where women used to wear potato sack maternity pinafores. Here in France, as might be expected, there’s no limit to the charm and chirpy bounce of sexy clothes adapted or designed for the mother to be. So much has changed but it still takes nine months to carry a baby and no one can help you pull the weight.
http://www.meforum.org/3447/islamism-france-election
What is Europe going to do about Islam? Submit? Resist? Or just wait it out, dimwittedly? The recent French presidential election offers insight into the way Islam, or more exactly the Islamist factor, may eventually play out in European politics.
Despite attempts by the Left to focus the debate on the economic crisis, Islam played a decisive role in the contest. The Socialist candidate, whose platform was tilted to favor the party’s Muslim clientele, could not have won without total support in the second round of voting from far Left parties marked by zealous anti-Zionism and a full range of anti-Western ideologies. The question of Islam-in-France was raised with unprecedented candor by incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy of the Movement for a Popular Majority (UMP). For the first time in France, a major party clearly advocated a push back against Islam (qualified of course with the adjective “radical”). This strategy fired up the enthusiasm of the base, mobilized voters, brought tens of thousands to party rallies, and led to a daily increase in Sarkozy’s polling figures. It would be fair to estimate that if he had had one more week to campaign he might have defeated Hollande during the second-round vote on May 6, 2012.
But his momentum had already been slowed by Marine Le Pen, candidate of a refurbished Front National. During the first-round campaign of April 9-22, the media kept its spotlight on her in a replay of the strategy used by the last Socialist president, François Mitterrand, who deployed them to exaggerate her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s importance and weaken the conservative opposition. While accusing the Right of dallying with the Front National “fascists,” Mitterrand had unashamedly governed with a coalition of communists and the far Left without which the Socialists could never have won. A variation on this strategy was used in 2012: Anyone who dared question the virtues of “immigration” (code word for Islam) or defend national identity (code word for Islamexasperation) was smeared with pejoratives, all related to Nazism and the Holocaust.
French exasperation with Islam is prompted by situations such as this where Muslims illegally take over streets in Paris in order to pray. Authorities look the other way while the French are left wondering what has happened to their country.
In fact, this worked to the advantage of Le Pen, who came in third with 17.9 percent of the vote in the first round. What explains her pulling power? Did millions of French voters, disappointed with Sarkozy’s failure to release the pent up energies of the French economy, go for the Front National’s unrealistic economic program? Or did they, like the more vocal counter-jihad activists who rushed into her arms, simply ignore it and focus strictly on her championing of Islamexasperation? The activists, blaming Sarkozy for being big on rhetoric but soft on Islam, placed their faith in Le Pen, who came out beating the drum against Muslim street prayers (“an invasion without tanks”) and marched forward, stressing all the issues about which they themselves were blogging. They believed she would put an end to shameful compromises by the Right and the Left, which they designated by the composite “UMPS” (UMP + PS [Parti socialiste]).
Enchanted by her tough-on-Islam rhetoric, the new enthusiasts ignored the core of small-minded, retrograde anticapitalist—and often anti-Semitic—Front National stalwarts. Members of the “Jews-for-Marine” faction gave credibility to her clumsy visits to the United States and Israel. Her secularist Jewish supporters hardly noticed the way she lumped Judaism together with Islam, willing to sacrifice kosher slaughter if Islamic halal could be abolished along with it.[1] They did not even hear her declare that the U.N. Security Council should recognize Palestine.[2]
Heady with power after her good first round showing, Le Pen orchestrated the defeat of Sarkozy by convincing half of her supporters to cast a blank ballot in the second round of voting. Bloggers and activists associated with the counter-jihad site, Riposte Laïque,[3] believed that the UMP, condemned for its failure to stop the Islamic onslaught, would fall apart, and Le Pen would pick up the pieces. Confident that a slew of deputies would be elected in a Front National wave, they said she would be the leader of a new conservative party and, in 2017, why not Présidente de la République?
The True Victims
There is one category of the indigenous European population that is clearly persecuted by Muslim immigration: the Jews.
Not all Muslims attack Jews but virtually all anti-Jewish violence in France is committed by Muslims. And it is so widespread, so merciless, so stubbornly resistant that thousands of Jews have chosen to emigrate.[4] Of those who remain, many valiantly devote their energies to denouncing the violence and trying to defend Jews against it. But no less shocking than the flight or fight choice imposed on Jews is the general indifference to their dilemma.
The expulsion of a few illegal immigrants can monopolize prime time news for days while most attacks against Jews are ignored by the national media. Those that are reported are twisted out of shape by fabricated ambiguity. The victim says he was beaten/knocked down/kicked/slashed/bombarded with anti-Semitic insults. The perpetrator denies the insults. The journalist gives equal credibility to the Jew-basher and the bashed Jew, and the story quickly drops out of sight.[5]
On the rare occasion when an anti-Semitic crime is too big to ignore, it is drowned in a flood of emotion: Solemn public figures in skull caps attend synagogue ceremonies, Jewish community leaders and intellectuals publicly agonize in the media, and minutes of silence and solemn marches are organized. But the connection between Islam, Jew hatred, the specific killer, and the criminal act is severed. This was the case with the murder of Sébastien Selam by a Muslim neighbor in 2003 and the kidnap-torture murder of Ilan Halimi by an Islamist gang in 2006.[6]
Islamism’s brutal face showed up once again on the eve of the official presidential campaign in the form of Muhammad Merah, who assassinated three paratroopers of fellow North African origin—Abel Chennouf, Imad Iban Ziaten, and Muhammad Legouade—and then on March 19, executed Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Aryeh and Gavriel, and 7-year-old Miriam Monsonego at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse. A surviving soldier, Loic Liber, is a tetraplegic while student Bryan Aaron Bajoui is recuperating from critical chest wounds and the shock of witnessing the murders.
Because Merah killed both Jews and apparent Muslims (in fact one of his Maghrebi victims was Christian), the crime could not be termed as purely anti-Semitic. The fact that he was a run-of-the-mill punk rather than a wildly deranged one-of-a-kind killer raised no alarms in the public mind: Ominously, a striking increase in attacks against Jews following Merah’s jihadist operation showed that a very broad swath of the French Muslim population is both radicalized and activated.[7]
This does not mean that French society was not shaken by the Merah massacre. The weekly Nouvel Observateur featured a cover story on anti-Semitism in July. Yet, the lead article by Isabelle Monnin, “Journey to the Depths of Anti-Semitism,” meanders with half-closed eyes down the path of the new anti-Semitism. Merah is identified as a jihadist admired by a “small minority.” Several attacks against Jews are described. (Attacked by whom?) Jews who wear skull caps are afraid to go into certain neighborhoods. (What kind of neighborhoods?) Most incidents, it seems, are not violent enough to be worth reporting. Others—in Villurbane, a North African bashed a young Jew’s head with a hammer—are admittedly serious but, writes Monnin, they are whipped up by bloggers, leading to a “paranoid trend that makes every attack on a Jew the absolute proof of rampant anti-Semitism.” Finally, Monnin identifies the Jew-bashers when she states that “today’s anti-Semitism is often [sic] committed by youths of Maghrebi origin or sub-Saharan Africa calling themselves Muslims.” Are they not really Muslims? Or does the author think they do not represent true Islam? She attributes this anti-Semitism to a “political-religious molasses transposed from the Israel-Palestine conflict and anti-Americanism.” But, she alerts her readers to watch out for “a certain number of Jews whose racism and Islamophobia is reinforced by the increase in anti-Semitism.”
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/133742/sec_id/133742
Un enfant quand je veux si je veux… The battle cry of the feminists marching for freedom from fertility—“a baby when I want one if I want one”—was ringing out in the streets of Paris when I came to live here in 1972. After lagging behind the United States, where the diaphragm + spermicide had been available to married women since the 1940s and oral contraception since 1957, France caught up with The Pill in 1967 and legalized abortion in 1975, championed by Auschwitz survivor and then Health Minister Simone Veil. The process has gone forward on all fronts, with generalized use of fail-proof methods, unfettered access to abortion when fail-proof fails, reimbursement across the board including, just recently, 100% free contraceptive pills for women 15 to 18.
Contraception and abortion alone could not bring about the desired transformation of the female condition. They were the technology. The metaphysics was what has become known as “gender studies.” In the early days of Women’s Liberation it was makeshift ideology peddled in volumes of look-alike fiction and non-fiction best sellers shouting that maternity was a drag, femininity a hype, sexual differences induced by cynical manipulation, love and marriage an extension of the military industrial complex, and men were chauvinist pigs. No more pink for girls and blue for boys. Sexually marked toys were not abandoned but switched: cars and trucks for girls, dolls and tea sets for boys. Women wanted, or were told they wanted, something called equality.
The harbingers of this “sexual revolution” were, more often than not, closet lesbians. Later we not only discovered that they were lesbians telling heterosexual women to kick their men in the balls and out of their lives, they were also playing stereotypical sexual roles in private, some as simpering mistresses to others more macho than any man could be.
In the space of one generation we went from the prohibition of pre-marital sex to promiscuity for all. The stakes were high for a young woman in the 50s. Sleeping around or, oh horrors, getting pregnant killed her chances of a good marriage… only way to climb the social ladder. Unmarried women could not be fitted for a diaphragm. There was no place to make love decently. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in 1952, female students under 21 were not allowed to live off campus. We were quartered in dorms, with 10 PM curfews. The lower classes and a dissolute bohemian minority did what they wanted and dealt with the consequences as best they could. Decent women waited to discover the pleasures or disappointments of conjugal life. Twenty years later, a young man with nothing to offer and nothing to lose, would mumble his momentary itch; if the chick dared to decline, he’d toss off a whiny “what’s the matter, you got hangups?” before shuffling off to another.
http://dev.d-intl.com/en/articles/international/2013-01-31/french-journalism-drowns-trying-save-charles-enderlin PARIS. The honor of French journalism reached new depths on January 16 with one more absurd hearing in the lawsuit brought by France 2/Charles Enderlin against Philippe Karsenty, convicted of slander in 2006, acquitted in 2008, thrown back into Appellate Court after the highest court (Cour de Cassation) rejected the 2008 judgment on a […]
http://dev.d-intl.com/en/articles/international/2013-01-17/and-suddenly-its-war%22Freedom
This is reminding us that things could change, our nations may be ready to defend themselves
PARIS. And suddenly it’s war! President François Holland announced early Friday evening that French troops had intervened in Mali and would stay as long as necessary. The military action came in response to an urgent request from Mali’s interim president Dioncounda Traoré whose army was unable to stop the advance of a column of some 1500 Islamists that had taken Konna and were heading for Mopti, a strategic town on the route to the capital, Bamako. Surprising enough in itself, this abrupt open-ended military operation ordered by the slow-moving socialist president offers a gold mine of lexical accuracy that should not be squandered. This war is upsetting the Arab Spring apple cart and tossing its fruits into a different basket.
I am not on the front lines… but then again, the front lines are everywhere today and that is what we might call the collateral benefits of this military operation and its enveloping narrative. The exact terms that are deliberately not used to describe the gentlemen of Hamas, Hizbullah, Muslim Brotherhood or the punks in Europe’s banlieues are now pinned on the jihadis who have been occupying the northern deserts of Mali. Unlike the Brotherhood and its multiple affiliates, these Islamists have not had a good press in France. Their brutality has been abundantly displayed: flogging adulterers, amputating thieves, imposing niqab, smashing up bars, restaurants, and music joints, tearing the tombs of Muslim saints in Timbuktu. They have always been shown in a scary light, their heads wrapped in scarves, weapons brandished. In fact, they look just like their fellow warriors in Libya, Syria, wherever. But somehow these religious extremists were not seen to have any redeeming features.
Still, the occupation dragged on and there was no audible call for quick action. Reports of an ECOWAS intervention scheduled for September were almost comical; as if the bad guys, duly informed of the timetable, would park their trucks, sit in the shade and palaver, patiently waiting for the big battle. Eight French hostages who worked for the French nuclear consortium AREVA have been in the hands of these thugs for over a year. This too was accepted with calm verging on boredom. No big mobilizations like the ones for French journalists kidnaped in Iraq. The Left doesn’t fancy the nuclear industry!
By the time the president announced that we are at war most TV channels were already in weekend mode, but the independent all-news BFM-TV has been covering the story non-stop. Here is the picture that emerges: with the exception of the president’s far left friends and foes—the Communists, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Noël Mamère of the Greens, and the anti-capitalists —political leaders across the board immediately declared their unambiguous support for the intervention. They also supported then President Sarkozy’s forceful leadership in the Libyan operation which actually fed into the Islamist offensive in Mali, but that is another story and we live in a time of disjointed narratives that will someday be joined. A host of specialists have appeared in the media and their opinions are close to unanimous.
And Mohamed al Durah begat Mohamed Merah… http://www.dispatchinternational.com/ (CURRENTLY BEING RENOVATED) The fabricated murder of Mohamed al Dura has not lost its sting. Produced and broadcast by state-owned France 2 TV on September 30, 2000, the staged scene of the “death of a Palestinian child targeted by Israeli gunfire” has replaced “Christ killer” as a […]
http://www.d-intl.com/articles/international/2012-11-29/talking-turkey
N.B. Update on last week’s Let them eat their Pain au Chocolat: François Fillon will not accept defeat. He and his followers have launched a massive temper tantrum that has kept the UMP squabble on the front pages all week. There are predictions of two-way, three-way, four-way splits, demands for referendum, revoting, and intervention of former(ly disgraced) minister Alain Juppé and ex-president Sarkozy and reports that UMP activists are running off to the new Centrist UDI and, of course, the Front National. I stand by my prediction: the spat will be settled, the wounds will be healed. I think Copé will hold on to the presidency because he knows how to fight to win. To be continued…
Back in her home country, Dispatch International’s correspondent finds that the glow of Obama has worn off leaving disenchantment verging on cynicism
SOMEWHERE IN THE USA.« I did not know that death exile had undone so many… » Our old friend T.S. Eliot didn’t have in mind the stream of Americans of all sizes, shapes, and origins winding through the left to right, right to left, left to right & so on queue waiting to go through passport control at Dulles airport last Thursday afternoon, arriving just in time for Thanksgiving dinner. Joined in the baggage claim area by the other stream of non-Americans that had passed through their checkpoint, we got stuck in a bottleneck at customs before finally reaching the arrival hall where greeters held up signs and families came forward to embrace the wayward sons and daughters. A tiny vaguely Oriental looking woman wearing a black sleeveless cocktail dress and a red flower in her hair asked me where I had flown in from. When I said Paris we switched to French and she was reassured… the lines are long… he’ll be getting through soon…
Less than an hour later I am “home” and unpacking the delicacies. Exquisite chocolates, foie gras, elegant little tinned terrines, exotically flavored mustards and, for the fourth generation, a notebook with a period drawing of the top of the Tour Eiffel. He loves it! His grandfather had just given him the other kind of notebook, one of those neither here nor there portable computers that can’t meet our needs but is a high tech delight to an 8 year-old. And he loves both notebooks and the Hanukah gelt from the same French chocolatier that delights his great grandmother. I wish I could have brought them a farm fresh turkey from the open market on boulevard Richard Lenoir. J. says, “If you dressed in a burqa you could bring a turkey and a goat.”
Four generations, stretching from 8 to 102 going on 103. Where did we come from, how did we get here, how did we fare and what’s in store? Europe, USA, some to Israel and back to the USA and a branch back to Europe and exogamy bringing in new shapes and angles and the spirit of adventure sending out tendrils. Here’s a picture of M.’s son, he’s studying in Osaka this year.
Something has changed. Talking politics is no longer forbidden. Because the glow of Obama has worn off, leaving a subdued disenchantment verging on cynicism. The distaste for Mitt Romney and the belief in his evil intentions was the prime mover. Benghazi? Not really a major concern. I don’t want to focus on the election or the candidates—what’s done is done—I want to grasp the contours of the public mind. En famille, why not? Young couples with children today are often not so young. Women postpone childbirth to lock into their careers first. In most cases it takes two wage owners to support a family. But the woman’s salary goes entirely for child care. No publicly funded daycare like we have in France? No. And it doesn’t end there. We have to send our children to private school. The public schools are terrible.
http://www.d-intl.com/articles/international/2012-11-22/let-them-eat-their-pain-au-chocolat Let them eat their pain au chocolat…… Breaking news: Jean François Copé is officially declared the winner of the hotly contested November 18th election of the president of the UMP (Union for a Popular Majority) by a slim margin of 50.03 percent against François Fillon’s 49.97 percent PARIS. The media are having a feast […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/they_the_people.html
The gap is enormous; it’s an abyss, and its name is Benghazi. They the people have re-elected Barack Hussein Obama, and we have been talking to ourselves. If the disastrous consequences could be clearly perceived, they might lead to a national awakening, but I fear they will be as muddled and confused as the public mind, and the public mind will adjust as it goes along, for the same reasons why it chose to intoxicate itself with the Obama illusion. The hope may well be a crucible of empty promises, but the change is implacable. The United States has slipped out on its history.
It seems that the economic factor was, as expected, decisive for the vast majority of voters. And that’s why they chose Obama over Romney? When European voters dissatisfied with the state of their economies systematically reject incumbents, Americans, of all people, reward economic failure? Foreign policy, on the other hand, apparently weighed less than zero in determining the choice of voters. Logical, isn’t it? Iran races to go nuclear, the Arab-Muslim world is in a paroxysm of rage and destruction, Israel’s existence is under dire threat, European societies tremble as their providential economies run out of gas and their demographics link up with the enraged sharia-imposing forces massed on the borders of the free world, so why should foreign policy be an issue?
Why have issues anyway when you can just groove with a guy who tells you he’s done a great job, the economy is on the mend, al-Qaeda is on the run, and Osama bin Laden is dead? Here comes the 21st-century inside-out version of the Know-nothings — pro-immigrant and anti-American, anti-Christian and Islam-friendly, the Know-nothings welcome with open arms the cool trendy vanguard of totalitarian conquest. And they can’t get enough of it. They sincerely believe they are defending noble humanitarian values against the greatest danger known to humanity — restriction on abortion and gay rights.
