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Wednesday, September 01, 2004Distressing, puzzling days in FranceThe jihadists in Iraq have now turned on France, one of the foremost Western critics of the US invasion. And the reaction in France has been troubling, weird.  Since the beginning of the crisis of the two French journalists kidnapped in Iraq and facing the expiry of their captors' ultimatum, the reaction of official France has left me with an increasingly freakish feeling.
The terrorists say they want the French Government to scrap a controversial ban on wearing Islamic head scarves in schools, but it seems that there is more to it than what meets the eye. Something is very wrong from the beginning of the episode… perhaps it is my apprehension that this time the distance is just too big between what the French government is telling the public and what they know by now. I may be wrong, but I feel deeply uneasy when all the mediae in a free country deliver the very same version of a critical event. And that’s exactly what we are experiencing in France these days. Has it something to do with the fact that the hostages are journalists? Perhaps. It would be ironic since, in the months before the invasion of Iraq by the Coalition of the Willing, the French press participated enthusiastically in whipping up the national mood against the Americans and the British. Now I have the hunch that what is happening goes beyond all that. People in decisive positions in France are doing a lot of hard thinking right now. Old truths are re-examined and new hypothesis tentatively elicited… in private. Because in public everybody seems busy chassing shadows. All of France’s officialdom has scrambled, launched an unprecedented diplomatic campaign in the Middle East, sometimes not without some arm twisting, to obtain an unanimous choir of Muslim voices asking for the kidnappers to spare the lives of the French hostages. One could have wished that the emphasis had been on the word hostages rather than, as it has too often been the case, in French. But there are so many weird things going on these days…  First and foremost, very few people have attended the demonstrations and meeting to express support for the hostages. The biggest of them all, yesterday in Paris, attracted only 3,000 people, despite the presence of many first-rank politicians, unionists and TV anchors. On Tuesday, French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin and Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe joined prayers at the Paris mosque for the release of the two journalists. The prayer, conducted by Dalil Boubakeur, the president of the French Council for the Muslim Religion, was meant to be a show of solidarity from the good Muslims, but only a few dozens attended. There are over two million Muslims in the Paris region.
 Just as a benchmark: on march 20, over 10,000 people marched in Paris to protest the “war against Iraq” and “Yankee imperialism”
Meanwhile, the world delivered its load of jarring news in the global war between terror and democracy. A suicide bomber blew herself in a busy subway station in Moscow. Hamas proudly took responsibility for blowing up two buses in Israel. And a Web site offered a link to a video showing the methodical, grisly killings of 12 Nepalese construction workers kidnapped in Iraq. Not much about that in today’s French press. UPDATE From Letters from New York City 400 Children Seized by Chechnyan Rebels UPDATE From BARCEPUNDIT THE NEW EXPERTS IN SURRENDER advising the old experts in surrender on how to surrender again:
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