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| Europe |
| Peril in Paris |
| 2006-03-18 |
| From a Toronto Sun columnist. Paris in the spring. By SALIM MANSUR PARIS - During the Ides of March, the City of Light glows with anticipation of spring. But this year it is deceptively calm, and behind its gaiety lurks doubts and fear for the future. I am in Paris - a city I am always joyful to visit - attending a conference on European security in the post-9/11 world of radical Islamism and the war on terror. It has been a gathering of a few politicians, journalists, academics and community activists, and behind the formal presentations our informal discussions have invariably turned to the peril that France and her neighbours sense is upon them since the suburbs of Paris turned violent and ugly last autumn. Following the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, France and the rest of Europe initially rallied behind the United States. Newspaper headlines in Paris read: "Nous sommes Americains (We are Americans)." But such feelings of solidarity with an America assaulted by terrorists dissipated when President George Bush decided to take the war declared on the U.S. by Osama bin Laden into the heartland of the terror network, first Afghanistan and then Iraq. Then France's President Jacques Chirac, unlike Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, decided to make France the leading opponent of the United States at the United Nations against the war for regime change in Iraq. Behind Chirac's decision to oppose Bush lurked the long-held belief among a segment of French politicians and intellectuals of making France "une puissance musulmane" - a Muslim power - by drawing the Arab-Muslim world under her wings. Charles De Gaulle, France's war hero and founder of the fifth Republic, adopted this belief as a strategic policy after taking France out of Algeria, and then tilted Paris in support of the Arab countries following their debacle in the June 1967 war with Israel. Chirac is De Gaulle's pupil, and his role in shaping Gaullist policy for the Middle East amounts to a case study in stoking the ambitions of Arab dictators, most notoriously that of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The Gaullist ambition is to have France head a coalition of countries as a counterweight to what Parisian intellectuals view as an intolerable hegemony of the United States in world affairs. Chirac and his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, who seems to me to be nursing a nostalgia for Napoleon's fleeting glory, also believed that in opposing Bush's drive to bring democracy to Iraq, they would buy security for France from politics of radical Islamists. But Europe has failed to buy security. On the contrary, France is learning that the agenda of radical Islamists is being supported by Iran, whose bid for nuclear power has so far been uncontainable by European diplomacy. In Lebanon Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister and friend of Chirac, was killed by Syrian agents. With this murder, a message was delivered to Paris not to mess with the Damascus/Tehran axis in the Middle East and its Lebanese proxy, the Hezbollah. Moreover, a cluster of events - the bombings in Madrid and London, the murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland, the riots in the suburbs of Paris, the torture and murder of a young Parisian Jew (Ilan Halimi), a resurgence of anti-Semitic violence, the intimidation of Muslims (particularly women) by Islamists, and the effects of the recent controversy over Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed - have seemingly brought Europe to a tipping point. At last, it is awakening to the perils of a new form of totalitarianism within its borders. In Paris this year, I sense, spring comes as a ghoulish reminder of another time when Europe watched and wondered how France would respond to a deathly menace. Hindsight, an exact science. |
| Posted by:Thinemp Whimble2412 |
| #8 grom, can you send me an email? |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2006-03-18 22:19 |
| #7 Regards from Chen Keinan, Euros. |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2006-03-18 22:15 |
| #6 Newspaper headlines in Paris read: "Nous sommes Americains (We are Americans)." That was in hopes that the U.S. would place its vast assets at the disposal and command of the UN. That hope vanished when the U.S. essentially dusted itself off, shook Europe's hand and said "thanks for the sympathy - but we've work to do". |
| Posted by: Pappy 2006-03-18 20:30 |
| #5 Like secular Commies, the Muslims, i,e, God-based Socialists/Marxists/Bolsheviks, hacve no where to go but up - as illustrated by their demographic probs, or in the alt what both the Commies and Radical Islamists want America to unilater do, Westerm-Euro Socialists are "volunteering" to downwardly regress and, ultimately, to die. The Raddies = Commies > WIN BY DEFAULT, OR WIN AT MINIMUM COSTS!? |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2006-03-18 20:29 |
| #4 Same as the suit some people on Congress slipped into [because it was so 'european' to do so at the time] for about the same amount of time. I'm thinking Kerry, Kennedy, etc.... |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2006-03-18 12:41 |
| #3 Jules, That suit dissolved withing 48 hours...long before we went anywhere to battle the pigs. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2006-03-18 12:33 |
| #2 "Nous sommes Americains (We are Americans)." Sympathy, in many quarters, was nothing more than a flattering suit the Europeans tried on for a few days to impress each other. If sympathy was genuine, it wouldn't have dissolved so quickly or dissolved because we went into Afghanistan to hunt down the murderers. |
| Posted by: Jules 2006-03-18 12:01 |
| #1 Nice clean recitation of events regards la belle France and the cowboy America. I didn't know de Villepin fancied himself in the vein of Napoleon, LOL, but the rest is a solid fit. This is the sort of primer that the kooks I deal with need to begin teething. All they do is suck, at the moment, LOL. Thanks for posting this, TW. I'll try it out on a few people. :) |
| Posted by: Glunter Sneash8888 2006-03-18 11:46 |