Italian journalist Luca Bottura spotted these guys hanging out last Friday in a picture on his Twitter-feed, and just had to sound the alarm:

Basically: “Here’s your government money, these guys go shopping for Prada with their €35! Share this if you are as angry as I am!” And that one-word comment up top: “Shame!”

The key element here was the €35 part, this is the daily money the Italian government provides refugees to survive on while their individual asylum cases are being processed. Meanwhile: what a good life, eh? Sitting around with their new Prada clothes, smilin’, jivin’ – all on the Italian taxpayer’s dime!

Not really, though. Surely most of you recognized these guys, namely the movie star Samuel L. Jackson and the LA Lakers basketball legend Magic Johnson. Lately they’ve been on vacation together in Italy (Capri, Sorrento, that sort of thing) along with their families and other friends. This tweet from Magic Johnson’s own feed shows what was really going on:

How could Bottura get things so wrong? He didn’t; he’s a journalist and columnist for the Corriere della Sera newspaper (and other media outlets, including radio), but he’s mainly known as a satirist, and here he was trying something out, seeing how far he could push the widespread prejudice and resentment against refugees among the Italian population, to see who took the bait.

Indeed, his tweet was widely spread, also through Facebook, and attracted a good bit of racist comment. The biggest fish Bottura caught was Nina Morić, a Croatian model who lives in and is relatively well-known in Italy; once the truth about these gentlemen was out, Ms. Morić then claimed that her own unseemly reaction to Bottura’s tweet was her just playing around as well, to fool all the rubes.

That truth was out as of last Sunday, two days after he had set things going, and Bottura also shared some interesting statistics:

The meme was shared thousands of times. Forty percent grasped the provocation, thirty percent were angry about it, twenty percent found it to be racist and scolded me for not recognizing Samuel L. Jackson and Magic Johnson. Ten percent passed it on with no comment.

Yes, that “forty percent” part is confusing; I interpret that forty percent gave indications that they understood the surface meaning of the incident, i.e. that something “wrong” was being depicted, but did not comment on it further. But you see, I had to translate Bottura’s report at second-hand, from the Dutch that had been translated from the Italian, since a write-up in the Flemish newspaper De Morgen was my main source and how I found out about this in the first place. Otherwise, reports are only starting to creep onto the edges of the EN-language press, such as Mashable (with more detail on the source of that government money) and . . . er . . . the Quebec Times.

The French edition of the Huffington Post, that media outlet’s first presence in a non-English-speaking country which dates from January 2012, is the “new boy” on the French media scene. That’s probably what makes it think it has extra license to come up with this sort of on-the-edge coverage of the upcoming regional (“departmental”) elections there:

First, the tweet text: “The FN [that’s Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Front National] and its hundred-or-so repulsive candidates.” But how can they legitimately call them dérangeants (“disagreeable,” “repulsive”)?

Libération, L’Obs, Rue89, Le Figaro, France3, La Nouvelle République… All have worked hands-on to dissect the social media accounts of some thousands of candidates put forward by the party of Marine Le Pen, aided considerably by cybermilitants . . . more-or-less openly hostile to the FN.

In other words, a pack of researchers from the news organizations named above supplemented by interested “cybermilitants” have simply dug deeply into what these candidates have themselves been putting out to the public on social media.

The result is a Google Maps mash-up which you can see at small-scale in the tweet, and which you can examine in all its glory by clicking through to the article. But what do all those little flame-like marks mean? Here’s the Key to them; I think no translation is really necessary, other than “Combo” = “Combination”:

And there you have your handy guide to the FN’s more distasteful candidates for those upcoming elections, and why they are distasteful. Now, it’s true that much of this can be merely a matter of opinion: again, it has to do with interpreting the language on various social media messages, although I should think that in many cases it’s fairly clear when someone is being anti-Semitic, racist, etc.

Although certainly partisan, this sort of enterprise is all the more a necessary contribution because French opinion polls show that the FN is the party most likely to gain the most representation from those elections. One would think this sort of mash-up technique cannot be copyrighted – wouldn’t we like to see the same sort of thing as well just before national elections held elsewhere, e.g. Israel, the US?

UPDATE: While we’re on the subject of innovative, informative maps of France, here is another one (this time from Le Monde which shows, again by département, the number of cases of “radicalization” reported since last April, basically incidents of people either succeeding or not in traveling to Syria to fight for ISIL. As you would expect, the Paris area takes the prize.

So what’s your prescription, Doctor? But wait: this is an age-old politician speaking here, and a former French Legionnaire, but not any man of medicine:

Jean-Marie Le Pen, honorary president of the Front national (FN) and candidate in the European elections for the Southeast district, has some radical ideas for countering “the demographic explosion.” Radical, or infectious: “Monseigneur Ebola can take care of that in three months” is what he let loose with during a discussion on Tuesday, 20 May, before giving a speech [in Marseille].

Nasty! Hey, let’s just let some judiciously-applied epidemics take care of all those immigrants whom we don’t want in France! And the old goat is actually standing as a candidate in the upcoming French MEP election!

Still, I think that the key aspect of this Le Monde piece is that, during these Marseille campaign appearances, Le Pen was accompanied at the podium by his daughter, Marine Le Pen – who happens to head the FN these days, who is running for re-election to her own seat in the European Parliament and who – most importantly – did nothing to disavow her father’s statements!

Let’s face it: Jean-Marie himself is 86, and I’m told people run a higher risk of getting rather dotty at such an age. He’s been kicked upstairs to an “honorary” position at the FN, so that it’s clear he has no policy-making role there anymore. Now yes, the party did put him up as a candidate for an MEP seat, but nonetheless it’s easy to imagine how, with a little political finesse, the organization could dismiss and separate itself from these wild Ebola exclamations.

Maybe they will still do so; the incident happened yesterday, there’s probably still time. But certainly not if they wait until the French start voting on Sunday. In the meantime, the rest of us can only tip our hats in gratitude at the old codger for a timely reminder, just before the elections, of the essence of those various far-right parties from all over Europe who will be trying to get their candidates into the European Parliament in the coming days.

(Thanks to @ajboekestijn, on whose feed – rather than that of @lemondefr – I first caught notice of this.)

As long as we’re still covering the various reactions to Obama’s presidential victory of last week, let’s be sure not to miss the musings of Berlingske Tidende’s Poul Høi, who in his reporting and now in his own blog Amerikanske Tilstande (= “American Conditions”; here is the homepage), has had interesting things to say about the US – inspired by his on-the-scene reporting – for a number of years now. And in reaction to this historical election result he doesn’t come up short: his latest post is even entitled Obama and Sambo.

(Maybe I should have just stolen that title to make a more eye-catching heading for this blogpost, but I decided against it. By the way, the only other European columnist I can think of that I would want to watch specifically for any reaction to the election would be Agnès Giard, sex-blogger for France’s Libération, whom I have certainly covered before. But it seems politics generally lie outside of what she regards as her journalistic remit; the article she happened to post right after the election was actually entitled Declaration of love to the zombies. So there you have the link, although I’m not going to deal with that one, you’ll have to read the piece in French yourself. But no, rest assured that it has nothing to do with any politician, whether American or not.) (more…)