Long-time readers of EuroSavant (Hi Mom!) will recall that this blog has certainly not been averse in the past to checking out what L’Humanité has to say from time to time – after all, the paper has a constituency to represent (one whose political views I do find hard to understand, particularly in light of the failure of Communism towards the end of the preceding century), and it represents that political cohort consistently and well. But now is a particularly good time to check out their site – well, if you’re comfortable reading French. For while the national powers-that-be might want to give off an impression that the demonstrations are petering out, with maybe a little police intervention here and there mainly to unblock the oil refineries, this Communist paper gives quite a different view, with its headline article at the present time a bona fide hour-by-hour, blow-by-blow listing of various violent demonstrator-police confrontations happening throughout the country.

Typical is this account of such a confrontation at an industrial-zone near the Northern French city of Amiens, which apparently doesn’t even have any sort of refinery facility (but was at the center of violence of a different sort almost a century ago when it was on the front lines of the Western Front during World War I). From L’Humanité correspondent Jean-Marie Faucillon:

The forces of repression were sent to the industrial zone north of Amiens, on Thursday, 21 October at 23.00 hours, to brutally charge the demonstrators. . . . The charge was brutal with the firing-off of tear-gas at more than 100 meters, whereupon the demonstrators left the premises. “It’s truly a punitive expedition,” declared an official for the Somme departmental [i.e. local] union of the CGT [that's the Communist-run trade union confederation].

But that’s not all! Attached to that piece with a link is a picture-series of the late-night confrontation. To be sure, there’s nothing nice and bloody here that would draw those interested in that sort of thing away from their World Wrestling Federation TV broadcasts, but it’s interesting to see the policemen marching up along the highway, and in the later pictures there is certainly a thick fog of what must be tear-gas seemingly everywhere.

                          

Then again, that’s also a little disingenuous; a unique viewpoint on virtually any European economic or political issue is almost always to be had from L’Humanité, the organ of the French Communist Party. Naturally, those folks have also been glad to hold forth on the new measures and funding facilities arising from last weekend’s Eurozone crisis meetings over the Greek debt problem, as we see in the piece by Bruno Odent provocatively entitled Euro: the plan aimed at saving the hostage-takers.

With all the alternate commentary that the French Communists can be counted upon to provide, much of it will at the same time be all-too-predictable. Indeed, we see that also here, especially in the second half of Odent’s piece (under the sub-title Terrible contradiction). For example, that section advances the assertion that all these summit machinations are not to save countries, but to save the banks. It mentions the (alleged) growing “resistance” at street-level to these EU leaders’ plans, and also takes time to plug the petition-drive that L’Humanité has launched (the link to add your own electronic signature is in the webpage’s upper-right corner) in support of the Greek people.

On the other hand, there are some elements within these polemics that strike an uncomfortable chord for anyone with even half an open mind: the article’s very lede, for example, declaring that “The leaders of the EU are seeking to impose austerity and to maintain the capacity of States to repay their creditors.” And what of Odent’s eloquent phrase sauve-qui-peut-l’euro, or “do whatever it takes to save the euro,” reflecting what seems to have been the sheer panic among the Eurozone leaders assembled in Brussels last weekend, who were willing to consider any matter of “transgressions against the euro’s founding dogmas” – e.g. direct purchases of member-state bonds by the European Central Bank – to try to recover the situation? In truth, conventional concepts about what the European Union is supposed to be all about, about the powers it is to be granted, have taken a quantum leap forward over just the past couple of days. There’s now talk even of some sort of common economic government, of review by EU-level bodies of national budgets, of what possibly could be truly serious sanctions applied against member-states which in the future transgress against common EU rules, even to the point of denying them voting-rights within the Union even as they remain part of it.

“Stated another way,” as Odent puts it, “they want at all costs to make the [various European] peoples don the straitjacket of austerity to force them to pay the price for the bursting of this ‘last of the big bubbles.” OK, once again here his rhetoric starts to overheat. My point, however, is that tectonic plates seem to be moving on the age-old issue of what the EU is supposed to exist to be and to do, and too many in the more conventional media don’t seem to realize this. To adapt a phrase, just because we think those on the Communist Left are paranoid doesn’t mean that the capitalist powers-that-be aren’t actually out to get the common people they claim to represent. Organs like L’Humanité have ultra-sensitive antennae for important structural phenomena like what we are witnessing, and so we might consider listening to them more carefully and more often.

                          

Perusing L’Humanité will further inform you – as looking at the Fox News article will not – that the paper that originally broke this story, appropriately enough, was Spain’s El País. So let’s go there and take a look: we can also handle the Spanish beat here on EuroSavant, though we don’t do it often.

There are but a few additional factual bits to add to the story from the El País treatment, by the paper’s correspondents in Havana, Miguel González and Mauricio Vicent, although they are interesting enough. Like perhaps the reaction to Obama’s initiative from Cuban President Raúl Castro, as conveyed afterwards by the Spanish Foreign Minister (who met with him for three hours)? Remember, now: we’re in the realm of diplomat-speak here. Moratinos: “Raúl Castro received Obama’s election positively, and has great respect for him, and has also greeted in a satisfactory manner certain actions and decisions he [Obama] has taken.” That’s it.

Otherwise, there’s the interesting tidbit that Moratinos actually had the chance to speak with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after Obama and Zapatero had met in the Oval Office, but before he went to Cuba; strangely, the two foreign ministers spoke of the situation in the Honduras and the Middle East, but not about Cuba. (I think that right there shows you how serious an initiative this was meant to be by Obama, namely not very: it was really only something that simply occurred to him when he was meeting with Zapatero and learned that his foreign minister would soon have talks with Castro.) Also, Moratinos took the occasion of his visit in Havana to announce that Spain would make it one of its priorities, during the six months as EU president that will start in January, to bring about an “association agreement” between the EU and Cuba.

That is easier said than done, and the El País piece does provide some good background about this whole issue of Cuba vis-à-vis the EU. For the EU, Cuba is supposedly not a matter of foreign policy, but rather domestic, claim González and Vicent, I suppose because of the great interest Spain holds in it. Yet it will be hard for Moratinos to fulfill his “association agreement” promise, for at least two reasons: 1) Several EU countries are not willing to concede so much to Cuba as long as it holds political prisoners and abuses human rights. (Germany, Sweden, and the Czech Republic are specifically named here); and 2) Spain might not get its EU presidency next year anyway, since the Lisbon Treaty – if ratified in time – will do away with country-presidencies and substitute instead an actual one-person “President of the European Council,” elected by EU member-states (represented by their governments) for a two-and-a-half-year term.

                          

Don’t worry: of course the L’Humanité editors do recognize a change, and they are pleased with it. “The possibility of a man from a minority to accede to the White House legitimately stirs up the pride of a people regaining confidence in their capacity to evolve. But for this pride to really influence the conditions of life, there is quite a bit of road to go.” First off, there’s a serious recession to confront, and the editors express their regret that Obama seems to have no intention “to really break with the capitalist fundamentals that have lead to this situation.”

But at least his victory is at the same time a defeat for American neo-conservatism, a defeat which “was just as much awaited, if not even more, on the international scene as in the USA itself.” Now the question is, in the international realm, whether Obama will be able to succeed in leveraging the new spirit of goodwill towards the United States to disarm the reluctance shown, especially within Europe, to what the editors call “the American will to hegemony.”

Credibility is All

So far, so doctrinaire. For an assessment that is a bit deeper as well as more nuanced we can look to former German foreign minister (and famous Green Party head) Joschka Fischer, writing in Die Zeit (Over dream and reality in politics). Fischer is also pleased with Obama’s victory – delighted, in fact. He compares it directly (and you knew this was coming) to November 9, 1989, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, when “once again one thought oneself to be dreaming, because something came true that one had so often hoped for but at the same time not considered possible.”

Still, and just as the L’Humanité editors were so quick to point out, Fischer acknowledges the gravity of the problems awaiting Obama’s assumption of office: there is not only the world economic crisis and its particular incarnation in America to address, but also a war to end in Iraq, the moral standing of his country to rehabilitate, climate change and national health insurance to move forward on, etc. (By the way, Fischer has no problem in calling these “the mountain of unresolved problems, crises, and conflicts left behind by his predecessor George W. Bush.”)

Will he be able to make any progress? Will the main result over a couple of years be disappointment? After all, writes Fischer, look at how Bill Clinton’s ambitious legislative agenda (mainly centering around health care reform) was stifled within his first year in office, which was then followed in the 1994 elections by the Newt Gingrich-led “Conservative Revolution” in Congress.

Fischer does hold out hope that Obama will be able to match the sky-high expectations now surrounding him. In his view, the achievements of Obama’s campaign team against first the Clinton and then the Republican political machines have already shown his considerable potential for accomplishing policy success. Yes, there will inevitably be gaps between a policy vision and what that policy turns out to be upon implementation; there will be gaps of time, when what progress that is happening proceeds too slowly in the eyes of those who feel that they are his constituency; and there will of course be mistakes – not to mention completely unexpected events coming along to upset all calculations.

In Fischer’s view, though, all of that can be handled, as long as Obama realizes that his main resource is his great stock of credibility (Glaubwürdigkeit) – the credibility of his person, but also what will presumably be the credibility of his proposed policies. That will get him through whatever setbacks, emergencies or unavoidable compromises occur with his political support intact; Fischer warns that he needs to “protect it like the apple of his eye.” After that, he needs to have the ability to see things through (Durchsetzungsfähigkeit) and, don’t forget, also luck and intrepidness – because “whoever in politics does not get up again after blows, and who completely lacks the necessary luck, will not have success for very long.”

But Joschka Fischer sees no reason for worry in any of those areas. In fact, he expects the successful beginning of an “Obama Epoch.”

                          

Democratic convention: plenty of black-, brown-, etc. skinned people hanging around, many of which female; Republican convention: Very few of these; instead, relatively many “sturdy to fat white men,” in clothes more formal than he remembers seeing in Denver. Democratic: live band in the hall, lots of dancing; Republican: piped-in music, about the only dancing being that routine with all their identical cowboy hats that the Texas delegation performs. Democratic: a high-tech podium with a large video-screen upon which you are sure to see the live head-shot of someone being mentioned in the speaker’s speech, if said subject-person is at all to be found in the convention hall; Republican: an installation not so technically adept, basically calibrated to display humongous photos of a young, wounded John McCain. (Say, did you know that he spent quite a few years captive in Hanoi as a North Vietnamese POW?)

C’mon Levi – Lose the Kid Already!

Remarque actually uses the majority of space in this blog-post of his to grouch about his lack of access to those whom he really would like to interview. I guess that’s about what we can expect from such a rank journalistic outsider (“Interview request from the Volkskrant? Who dat?”), but he also does not help his cause with his rather eccentric choice of subjects. He wants to interview the McCain boys, because he remembers reading in John McCain’s autobiography about how McCain really didn’t want to go into the military, but felt he had no choice because both his grandfather and his father had become highly-accomplished naval officers. They have also gone into the military: do they feel the same way? And he also desires dearly the opportunity to pose a question to another figure scheduled to show up in St. Paul, one cast into public renown only recently, namely Levi Johnston, that hockey-mad Wasilla High School senior who got Bristol Palin with child. And the question would be along the lines of “C’mon Levi, what if your future mother-in-law didn’t happen to be the right-wing, anti-abortionist Alaska state governor: would you still be getting married and having the kid?” From the indication on Levi’s MySpace page (“I don’t want kids” – MySpace profile since taken down), he rather suspects the answers would be in the negative.

Remarque also has includes a head-shot of Levi in this article, and he is indeed said to be a hunky redneck, but ladies (and you non-traditional males), there’s no need to click on Remarque’s link just for that. That very same head-shot, plus another photo of him in action on the hockey-rink, plus a demure portrait of the mother-to-be in hoodie-sweatshirt, and then of course all the details about the love-affair known as of this point are available in English courtesy of the New York Daily News. (Britol Palin’s pregnancy was an open secret back home, and the lede: “He’s a superhunky bad-boy ice hockey player from cold country; she’s a chestnut-haired beauty and popular high school senior.”) In fact, if you compare them you can tell that that’s the same photo of Levi that Remarque uses on the Volkskrant page, but it’s somewhat distorted. Oh, and check out the hockey-rink picture, specifically the advertising hoarding to the rear. “Supporting Valley Hockey: Valley Urology“: Alaska really does seem to be some sort of different country, doesn’t it?

Street-Fighting for Universal Health Care?

Speaking of a different country, let’s turn briefly now to France, to the French Communist Party organ L’Humanité and its coverage of (as you might expect) the street-demonstrations happening outside the Republican convention itself (Wave of arrests at the Republican convention; no by-line). The article writes of 10,000 showing up to protest on Monday even as the convention itself was reduced to the bare administrative minimum out of consideration for Hurricane Gustav. According to L’Humanité, those protestors were objecting to the War in Iraq, which is also how I heard it elsewhere. On the other hand, yesterday’s (i.e. Tuesday’s) protestors were said to be demonstrating “for universal health care, better social protection, and free university tuition.” Those are all things the French Communist Party stands for, but somehow I tend to doubt that this is an accurate portrayal of their policy platform. The article does also note how these demonstrations in Minnesota sparked a number of violent confrontations with the police, as compared with the demonstrations at the Democratic convention in Denver which passed without any such incidents. It also mentions three journalists who were arrested while covering the demonstrations (against “this convention,” as the article puts it, “which would not suffer any criticism”), including the founder of Democracy Now, Amy Goodman.

This is all good red-blooded leftist journalism, from a source which, even if foreign, George W. Bush would still also be glad to label as the “angry left”, describing circumstances that certainly lead to violent confrontations between demonstrators and police (although the question remains open whether that violence was mainly the fault of the former or of the latter). I was disappointed, though, because it seems there was a deliberate wave of preventive searches and arrests that occurred last weekend, before the convention even started. Talk about your violation of First Amendment (and Fourth Amendment) rights, talk about intimations of an incipient police state: L’Humanité could really have had a field day reporting on that! I’m sorry I didn’t see anything like that, but perhaps I just missed it – remind me to go back and search through my RSS reader again.

                          

(If you’d like a bit of English-language amusement, you can check out the on-line article about this from Xinhua, one of China’s two official news agencies. The respective park managers are diligently boning up on the national “law on assemblies, procession and demonstrations” to get prepared; meanwhile, park visitors express alarm that their lives could be disturbed.)

No, of course they were not serious. Kim Rathcke Jensen of the Danish daily Berlingske Tidende did a bit of follow-up on these alleged “protest zones,” and found results that were about what you would expect (Demonstrators “Disappear” at the Olympic Games). “Protesters? No, I haven’t seen any of them,” is the reply one old man gives to the inquiring reporter in Ritan Park, and he comes there every day. Of course, Jensen takes care to go further up the chain to find out how many applications have so far been approved. Answer: none. And yes, there have been applications submitted. Jensen knows of at least five – resulting not just in rejected applications, but also three of the applicants being forced to leave Beijing, while two have disappeared entirely.

“It’s a trap,” says Jiang Tianyong, whom Jensen calls China’s foremost human-rights lawyer. “Either the applicants disappear, they are detained, or their application is denied.” He can only point out that, in effect, the Chinese government is once again breaking a pre-Olympic promise, just as it did in the matter of free Internet access. Oh, and none of the government authorities whom Jensen tried to contact to speak about the matter were willing to cooperate.

Meanwhile we have word from the French Communist Party organ L’Humanité that certain pro-Tibet demonstrators have seen through the “protest zone” farce and chosen to try their luck just where the authorities don’t want to see them, namely at one of the Olympics sites. The article does not state which one, but does report that there was an attempted demonstration Wednesday morning (today, but Beijing time), which was “brutally suppressed” according to the French news-agency AFP. What’s more, a British television journalist who was trying to cover it (namely John Ray of Independent Television News) was rather roughly dragged to the ground by policemen and then imprisoned for twenty minutes in a near-by restaurant. The IOC, in reaction, issued a statement that “the media must be free to cover the Olympic Games” and promised to take up their concerns with the Chinese authorities should their investigation of what happened show that that is called for.

UPDATE: Speaking of Humanité, there is then the ignoble depth of cruelty to which the Chinese authorities descended by sentencing two women in their late 70s to “re-education through labor” for daring to believe that they could apply during the Games to protest the way local authorities had treated them in seizing their homes for development.

                          

Those 650 tests have been carried out since 27 July, when the Olympic Village in Beijing officially opened – but they have been done not only in the Chinese capital, but also at training camps even outside the country: in Singapore, in Hong Kong, even in the US – “everywhere.” The speaker here is IOC medical director Patrick Schamasch, who made the announcement.

IOC President Jacques Rogge also had a piece to say. He announced that those first 650 were part of the 4,500 tests that Olympic authorities ultimately plan to carry out. Of course, he expects that there will be positive results at some point: specifically, and extrapolating from the 26 cases that were uncovered from the 3,500 test done in Athens four years ago, he expects there to be around 30 to 40 positives by the time testing ceases on 24 August. Of course, if there turn out to be less he would be mightily pleased, he added (if not in those words).

                          

That doesn’t mean that this leftist newspaper doesn’t have anything to say about the American presidential campaign. Writer “M.K.” has just had a piece published noting the emergence of First Lady Laura Bush into a more-active campaign role.

The reason for this is clear: the president’s re-election prospects now appear distinctly “iffy.” So that, while she maintains confidently that Bush’s “force, discipline, and concentration” makes him deserve a second presidential term, her task is to make “Americans see my husband as I see him myself.” And also to put herself on display to the electorate: as a “model mother, a woman entirely devoted to her family.”

The problem to be overcome here is that, by her own admission, politics is just not her “thing” (her truc). In fact, she likes to tell the story of how, when George W. proposed to her, her one condition in agreeing to marriage was that he would never make her give a speech. And M.K. notes how, in the 2000 presidential campaign, reporters were unsuccessful in eliciting from her any point-of-view on issues such as the death penalty or abortion; “I’m not the candidate here,” she would say. Surely something has got to give way here soon.

Perhaps that very process has gotten a start with the First Lady’s recent Time Magazine interview. (I’m afraid we’ll be waiting a long time for her interview with L’Humanité, even if conducted in English.) In that chat she dismisses the possibility that the anti-Kerry advertisements by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” were at all unfair to the Democratic candidate. This rather upset blogger Atrios, of “Eschaton” fame. But as for myself, I can’t quite get so up-in-arms about the remark – precisely because, to me, Laura Bush still lacks any credibility on such political issues (including most especially on stem-call research, about which she recently issued a pronouncement). To the extent this attitude is shared in America, this “coming out” of Laura Bush of which L’Humanité has taken note isn’t going to be good for much.

                          

Coverage by Pierre Prier in the conservative newspaper Le Figaro (France Is Waiting For Explanations from Israel) provides some more background to the controversy. In fact, relations between Israel and France have been strained for some time, one important reason being French support for Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians – as embodied lately in the visit foreign minister Barnier paid to Arafat at his headquarters in Ramallah last June 29, which the Israeli government called a “grave error.” But as long ago as January, 2002, Prier recalls, Israeli vice-minister for foreign affairs Michael Melchior had characterized France as “the worst Western state” when it came to fighting anti-semitism. The Jewish Agency – the organization charged with encouraging and assisting emigration to Israel – even back then listed France as a country in which Jews were threatened, and enjoyed financial support from the Israeli government of $9,000 per emigrant from France, to assist in the move and the emigrant’s transition to the new society.

MISSING: THAT FRENCH EXODUS TO ISRAEL

The ultimate objective of this money and these organizations is, in Ariel Sharon’s formulation, to attract “a million Jews” to Israel in the near future. But that is hardly happening from France. Out of an estimated French Jewish population of 600,000, only a bit over 2,000 emigrate to Israel each year, and in fact those numbers dipped a bit in 2003 from a peak in 2002. (It’s true that French immigration to Israel in the 1980s and 90s was more like 1,000 per year; but comparing any of these numbers to that 600,000 total figure should restore some perspective.) What’s more, many of these emigrants find their way back to France after a few months, or maybe a few years, out of disillusion of one sort of another over what they find in Israel. Furthermore, it seems that most that do emigrate do so for ideological reasons – to deepen their religion, to help build the Jewish state further – and so not out of any conviction that life back in France has become too unsafe. (Prier includes a piquant quote from one such emigrant: “We’re not a bunch of milk-sops [in French poules mouillées, or "wimps" in American parlance]. The only country where one risks being killed from being Jewish is right here, in Israel.”)

Why does Sharon want to attract those “million Jews,” anyway? In Prier’s analysis, there’s really no other choice for the Jewish state for preserving its “Jewishness,” if it is to succeed in resisting the demographic pressures arising from the Arabs within its midst breeding much more prolifically than the Jews. There are no more Jews to be attracted from Russia; that wave is done. And American Jews are rather hard to convince to pull up their stakes there and move to Israel, for reasons that should not require too much thought. According to Prier, the two big Jewish “reservoirs” left in the world are precisely those 600,000 in France and the 200,000 in Argentina. We’ve seen the limited success Israel has had in attracting the former, so perhaps at first glance Sharon’s comments can be interpreted as touristic promotion of a rather crude sort.

FRANCE UNJUSTLY ACCUSED

But they go rather beyond that, of course, and the editorial on this issue in Le Monde (Sharon and France) explores several further angles. Like how about the French-Israeli-American triangle: the editorial calls it “not completely due to chance” that Sharon made these remarks in front of an American audience, for both Israel and American Jewish organizations have tried since September 11, 2001, to use various anti-semitic incidents in France to paint that country as one where Jews cannot feel safe. This is a false depiction, since the French state has taken vigorous measures to act against anti-semites, measures that even Sharon acknowledged in those same remarks of last Sunday that touched off the entire controversy. But it seems no one really cares to give France its due; Franco-American relations have worsened in the meantime (although with many other causes, as we know), and in Israel recent polls show that 57% of the inhabitants have a dislike for France.

What was Sharon really trying to gain by saying what he said?, the Le Monde editors ask. Was it really an acceleration of French emigration to Israel? If so, then the vehement negative reactions to his remarks from French Jewish organizations show that he will have failed in this. No, it’s more likely that Sharon wants to sharpen hostility against France in order to hold her, and Europe in general, as far outside of the Middle East peace process (whatever is left of it, anyway) as possible. Far better to proceed alone against the Palestinians (themselves suffering lately from grievous internal strife and disorganization) with the Americans, who have shown themselves refreshingly willing to write blank policy cheques for the Israeli leadership to fill in.

Charles Lambroschini, writing in Le Figaro (Sharon Two Times Unworthy) takes this argument of unjustified hostility towards France and extends it further. Ariel Sharon has acted not once but twice in an unworthy manner with his remarks (as in the article’s title), Lambroschini writes, because 1) France is not anti-semite, and 2) Sharon knows this very well. Rather, the Jewish community in France has deep and solid roots; although various ugly and regrettable incidents against Jews have occurred, ultimately any anti-semitism in France is marginal at best. The country has even finally come to terms with its shameful record towards the Jews during the Second World War, under the Pétain regime – and anyway, Lambroschini claims, three-quarters of French Jews survived that war and the Nazi depredations. No, Sharon attacks France because France defends Yasser Arafat.

FRANCE’S SHAMEFUL PAST

The French Communist Party newspaper L’Humanité has not yet posted an article about this controversy – it does usually seem rather slow on the up-take; it must be a weekly – but nonetheless does contribute to the above discussion with an article The Day When France Committed the Irretrievable, about the Vel d’Hiv round-up of Jews in Paris of 62 years ago, in July of 1942. Vel d’Hiv is short for Vélodrome d’Hiver, or “Bicycle-Racing Stadium ‘Winter’,” located near the Eiffel Tower (but torn down long ago), where more than 8,000 Jews were temporarily interned on 16-17 July 1942, rather in the manner that Pinochet in Chile imprisoned his opponents in soccer stadiums during his 1973 coup d’état. These were the largest part of some 12,884 Jews (lots of women and children, it seems) from Paris and the surrounding area rounded up by French authorities, by order of the Nazi occupying authority, preliminary of course to taking that train ride east to Poland to be gassed and cremated. Now 16 July is used every year to commemorate the French racist and anti-semitic crimes of the Second World War – but only since 1993, when a decree from then-President Francois Mitterand initiated the ceremony. Better late than never, one supposes; but that yearly commemoration – attended at the Vel d’Hiv memorial this year by many dignitaries, including six government ministers led by foreign minister Barnier – does suggest that France has come to terms with its anti-semitic demons. Indeed, perhaps the enormous brou-ha-ha that has resulted from Sharon’s remarks is largely attributable to his rather poor timing. His urgent “Jews, come to France!” comments came not only shortly after the Val d’Hiv commemorations, but also after a disgraceful incident in which a French woman alleged herself to have been attacked by several Moslim youths who thought she was Jewish – who overturned the carriage her baby was in and scrawled swastikas on her stomach – only to confess a few days later that she had made the whole story up.

Moving on, the Nouvel Observateur sheds valuable light at the bewilderment and displeasure at Sharon’s remarks among Jewish officials in France, at least, with an interview with Yonathan Arfi, President of the French Jewish Students Union (“We Are Far From Having to Flee”). Arfi makes it clear that Israel does not represent Jews in France; rather, Jewish French organizations represent Jews in France. Interestingly, he deplores Sharon’s remarks for their alarmist effect in heightening the concern that Jews around the world have for the safety of their religious compatriots in France – a concern that French Jews themselves, crucially, do not share. Yes, it’s true that anti-semitic incidents happen there, but French Jews have “opted for mobilization at the very heart of French society [against anti-semitism],” knowing that they can count on the support of that society and its state apparatus.

In other words, Arfi claims that the situation for Jews in France is by no means as perilous as many would make it out to be – the French Jews themselves are confident they can handle it, with the support the rest of French society is willing to provide. In this light, Sharon’s accusations merely reflect on the one hand ignorance, on the other crude “games between states.” He also adds the interesting comment that a full half of the 2,000-or-so yearly French emigrants to Israel wind up returning to France within months, or a few years at most.

AND YET – HOW SAFE DO FRENCH JEWS FEEL?

Letting that all be as it may . . . before I sign off with this entry I feel obliged to mention one final article, written by Silke Koltrowitz and Sandra Buisson for Le Figaro (“Anti-Semitic Violence Does Exist”). These two went for some “wo/man-on-the-street” interviews among Jews living in Paris, and uniformly found among their subjects opinions hewing more closely to Ariel Sharon’s contention that France was becoming a dangerous place to be a Jew, rather than those of the various French Jewish organizations that everything is under control. Says a certain Sylvain, who has already decided to move to Israel: “I find that it is becoming more and more difficult to be Jewish in France at this moment. Go walk on the Champs-Élysées in the evening around 10:00 PM wearing a Star of David and you’ll see what I mean.” Adds Élie, a nineteen-year-old who reports being insulted three times a day, and has had a Jewish friend assaulted, “Everyone thinks like Sharon, but no one dares to speak.” Are these mere anecdotes, or something more representative and meaningful?

                          

As you would expect, the French press just lapped this all up. Surprisingly, though, the vehemence of the French fourth estate’s reaction seemed to vary inversely with the degree of the paper-in-question’s known partisan slant.

DIVIDED JURY

Consider one extreme of the French press’ partisan spectrum: L’Humanité, the organ of the French Communist Party. Naturally, the writers there were delighted with Moore’s victory, with that paper’s lead coverage, by Jean Roy, entitled Fahrenheit 9/11 or Michael Moore’s Triumph over Bush. But I found M. Roy’s glee somewhat restrained. He does point out that that White House communiquée, in response to what ultimately was just a movie-award, was unprecedented. But “Fahrenheit 9/11,” in Roy’s view, was hardly any overwhelming favorite, pre-destined to win the top award at the Festival’s end. There was no such favorite. The fact that the film did ultimately win must also be considered as a testament to the work’s innate qualities: “Let us repeat it loudly and strongly, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a true cinema-goer’s film, a work that magnificently re-discovers the principles of Eisenstein in the direction [and] the clash of heterogeneous elements destined to produce a Truth that exceeds the simple sum of its elements.” It’s not all about politics here, then.

In another L’Humanité article which serves as a glimpse back across the Atlantic, namely a press-review of the American reaction (Moore’s “Missile” Viewed by the Americans), the paper’s New York correspondent, Natasha Saulnier, is similarly restrained. She notes an alleged tendency on the part of the American media to be less-than-enthusiastic about Moore’s work, even to carp at it – could it be that they are afraid of seeming “unpatriotic” to the Bush administration in the increasingly-polarized American political atmosphere? In any event, she sighs, we now must await the inevitable accusations of anti-Americanism targeted at the French that this incident will engender. And the controversy will hardly stop there, she reminds us; “Moore has promised us other documentaries, on other burning subjects, notably on the Israeli-Palestinian question and the oil industry.”

GLOVES OFF AT LE MONDE

We have to get to Le Monde, which is supposed to be a bit more dignified, to be France’s “paper of record,” for the commentary to get truly nasty. Take the piece by Dominique Dhombres: Michael Moore is a Clown Who Tells the Truth. Dhombres brings up explicitly the fact – which should be obvious by now – that Moore “detests” Bush-the-younger, “of a quasi-delinquent family, and almost illiterate, whom his family and his environment catapulted into the White House.” In contrast to this silver-spoon existence, Moore represents America’s working class. Born in Flint, Michigan, he would have normally grown up to work on the GM assembly lines, if it weren’t for the facts that 1) He escaped to film-making, and 2) The GM plants in Flint disappeared long ago. He certainly looks like a representative of America’s working class, what with his extra-large bermuda-shorts and his baseball cap. And he’s convinced that Bush junior should never have been allowed to enter the White House after the disputed 2000 election – and that, if re-elected, he will reinstate the draft “to pursue his imbecilic war in Iraq.”

Even worse is Eric Fottorino’s companion article in Le Monde (Fahrenheit Bush). Here’s where we encounter mention of the President’s unfortunate experience out on the biking-trail: Fottorino follows the predictable chain-of-logic that I’ve already seen on too many newsgroup postings, to the effect that Bush has choked on a pretzel, tumbled off of a trottinette à moteur (that’s French for Segway, folks), and now this. “What a bunch of screw-ups [maladresses]!” Fottorino exclaims. Could you imagine Bush armed with a weapon? “Even with a movie-studio-issue Colt, he would be capable of shooting himself in the foot.”

Then on to the literary allusions required of any French prose with true ambition: The title “Fahrenheit 911″ is of course derived from “Fahrenheit 451,” the temperature at which paper burns and the name of a renowned science-fiction work by Ray Bradbury, made into a movie by no less than François Truffaut. In that movie, the hero jumps into the fire of burning books to save a few, for the sake of humanity’s sense of beauty and values. Riffing from this, Fottorino asks, “In his role as illiterate beast, what book could ‘W’ save, he for whom every word is a weapon for lying?”

THE CARICATURIST BUSH DESERVES

Whew. Let’s move on to reaction to the prize for “Fahrenheit 911″ from Libération, which even made the event its cover story: Missile de Croisette! (or “Missile from the Croisette,” the location of the film festival). In his editorial entitled Kill Bush 2, editor Jean-Michel Thenard maintains that “the resident of the White House, whose affirmations are sometimes lies, has finally gotten the caricaturist that he deserves: of a redoubtable simplicity and great ferocity.” Moore fights against the propaganda of the powerful by refusing to encumber himself with subtlety – much in the way of José Bové, actually, Thenard writes, although this association with the assaulter of France-based McDonalds may be one that Moore would prefer not to have. In the end, though, perhaps Moore’s victory should not have been so much of a surprise, especially given the way these days, after September 11, reality is often more incredible than fiction and so the documentary film-making genre has truly been able to come into its own.