04/22/2006: "Eurabia"

Europe, Parishioners, is apparently In Crisis!

Bruce Bawer (author of While Europe Slept) has a swing at the issue of Muslim immigrants in Europe.



And who is to blame?

The French!

(of course..)

As Ye'or recounts decades of behind-the-scenes Euro-Arab collaboration through dialogue, Kenneth R. Timmerman, in The French Betrayal of America, recounts decades of secret French-Iraqi collaboration through arms deals, kickbacks, and payoffs. Timmerman - an American investigative reporter who lived in France for many years - is no glib France-basher, happily acknowledging America- and Israel-friendly actions by France during the Cold War, mostly when François Mitterand was president. For example, Mitterand secretly assisted Israel when it took out Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear reactor, covertly arranged to keep strategic mobilization plans out of the hands of his Communist transportation minister (who would've turned them over to the Soviets), and, most impressively, shared with the U.S. a breathtaking trove of information acquired by French spies about Soviet attempts to acquire Western military technology.

Though a Socialist, in short, Mitterand "chose America as his ally" and thus "helped President Reagan win the cold war." Yet if Mitterand stood by America's side in the confrontation with the Soviet Union, he rejected U.S. involvement in North Africa (notably the 1986 attack on Libya), since his country's political class regarded that continent, a rich source of "commissions and kickbacks to French political parties," as "its baronial domain." Nor did Mitterand's staunch cold-war support last: in the late 1980s, pecuniary considerations led him to "switch sides" on the issue of military sales to the Soviets.

Still, he was a better ally than his predecessor, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (whose government agreed, in a nuclear cooperation treaty with Iraq, to bar Jews from participating), or his successor, Chirac, who repeatedly called Saddam his "friend" and helped him skirt UN sanctions after the Gulf War. Chirac's corruption, which would appear to be of Dantesque proportions, nearly destroyed his career; 9/11 saved it. The terrorist attacks, and America's response to them, deflected attention from his sleazy shenanigans and enabled him to posture on the world stage as a statesman and peacemaker. And what the 9/11 terrorists couldn't accomplish, the right-wing extremist Jean Le Pen did: in the 2002 election, Le Pen ended up as Chirac's challenger, causing everyone in France except the Le Pen fringe to rally behind Chirac, who, after winning over eighty percent of the vote, was seen as his country's savior, "the very incarnation of the permanent values of La France."

All of which makes it even more fascinating to read Timmerman on Chirac's shabby little demimonde of bribes and bagmen. From the cash stashes in Chirac's office toilet to the Quai d'Orsay diplomat caught poking through garbage bags outside a Houston home to the classified U.S. and UN data that Chirac, unforgivably, shared with Saddam right up to the invasion of Iraq, Timmerman's account makes the entire history of Washington scandals from Watergate onward look like a Girl Scout cookie drive. He makes a point that's actually occurred to me before, too: that the French are so accustomed to their politicians being profoundly cynical and corrupt that they naturally assume all American politicians are like that, too. One recalls the cheers at Cannes for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, that pastiche of falsehood and cheap innuendo; the bitter irony is that the scale of French leaders' real-life avarice and perfidy dwarfs even the worst of that film's accusations against their American counterparts.

The French Betrayal of America, however, is not just a chronicle of unexampled greed. It is also a story of obsession with power and nostalgia for French glory. A U.S. official who works closely with the French tells Timmerman: "France is not the United States. And they just can't seem to get over it." Passages quoted by Timmerman from a book by Chirac crony Dominique de Villepin (now the French prime minister) provide disturbing insight into the mentality of a political elite that, as Timmerman puts it, has "consistently favored authoritarian regimes over democracy, not just in the third world but also in Europe." He observes that Villepin's naked envy of American power and his nostalgia for a return to a time (Napoleon's) "when France was ruled by an all-powerful state, that had only to appear to be obeyed" bespeak "a dangerous delusion and a penchant for authoritarianism." They certainly paint a picture of a government that seems to have learned little from modern European history. "French diplomacy today," a French politician tells Timmerman, "continues to consider Iraq as a cake to be divided and not as a democracy to be constructed." And get a load of this comment by a Villepin adviser: "We get all the blame [for making illegal arms deals], but not the signature [on the contract]!... We pass for a country that is cynical and immoral without getting the business such an attitude is presumed to bring."

Timmerman agrees with Guy Milliére that Chirac's support for Saddam was based largely on the latter's high standing among French Muslims. "French leaders," he quotes Millére as saying, "will never take a decision that could make young radical Muslims angry"; had Chirac supported the Iraq invasion, there would have been "riots in the suburbs." (Most Muslim neighborhoods in France are on the outskirts of cities.) In France, this appeasement mentality is reflexive. Timmerman quotes a local French official who, prior to the sixtieth-anniversary D-day commemoration, worried out loud in Le Monde that "What image will we send of Normandy to Arab and Islamic countries by receiving Bush and Putin with pomp and circumstance?"

* * *

BUT!

FAR more evil than even the French, 'Tish, is

Timothy Garton Ash!




a farcically self-absorbed star academic out of a David Lodge novel


Read the article & see.


* * *

And who is Bruce Bawer?

Mark Steyn sez:

he's a gay American who moved to Holland because it was more open and tolerant than his repressed uptight theocratic native land yet in the end he was driven out of the Netherlands by a - what's the phrase? - "rising tide" of gay bashing and other forms of homophobia from the ever more culturally confident young Muslim men who now dominate urban life up the European coast from France through Belgium to Scandinavia.

* * *

Now, what I haven't seen

is the rise of Fanatical Aztec™

(or Inca or something),

with all the thugs of South America (and they are far, far more brutal than those nice Islamic people)

flooding back to Spain & Portugal

and screwing up those countries.


I wonder why...


lerevdr on Sat 22-Apr-2006 @ 22:35 e.s.t [permalink]
[One Lonely Comment]