Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: [OT] facism gaining ground in US

[Stéphane Payrard]

On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 05:37:24PM -0700, Pierce T.Wetter III wrote:
> 
> On Jul 18, 2004, at 4:18 PM, Jean-Michel FAYARD wrote:
> 
> >Pierce T.Wetter III a écrit :
> >> Contrast this with just a casual reading of my European sources, and
> >>they seem more racist then we do lately. I hear anti-semitism is on  
> >>the
> >>rise in Europe...I hear about beatings of guest workers...I hear  
> >>you're
> >>thinking about not letting Turkey in the EU.
> >
> >Anti-semitism is on the rise in Europe ?
> >
> >You probably have heard of the disgusting story of Marie L.(24 years  
> >old) who was attacked in the subway of Paris, France, by 5 mueslims  
> >and black people, who began to be histeric when they thought she was a  
> >jew (she is not), cut her hair and her clothes, painted on her back a  
> >swastika and hurted her baby. The most disgusting part of the story  
> >was that ~20 people watched the scene, and nobody reacted.

Crusty bit of what is purposed to be info but eventually proved
to be altogether invented.

So good for some american xenophb media. Unstated but implied:
French are either racist or coward. We, american are not so
apathic. I can hear from here another Bush: "This will not
stand". Sorry, we are no worse, nor better than the rest of
humanity and the story was to "good" to be true.

Dangerous to think and to act moved by indignation. Some people
are just staging this kind of moves. And we have repeatedly seen
seen where it goes.

The facts: the woman was a mythoman, she invented the whole
story. The French president and the French media swallowed it
hook and sink. The president because he needed a clear-cut fact
to talk about the purported ambient antisemistism problem. 

Too bad, clear-cut facts usually are plain inventions or
distorsions. Reality is ambiguous or complex. Media and
politician drops the condtionnal tense, See the Blair affair
about the mass-destructions arms about replacing conditionnal ny
present tense.

When hysteria sets in, every affabulation immediatly becomes a
fact and is appropriately amplified largely by mistakes and
sometimes on purpose. But I doubt that the media who harped on
that story did as much for the follow up.

Now, some context:

There is in France a instrumentalisation of this hysteria by an
activist jew lobby, generally to portray the antipathy created by
Israel misdeeds in Palestine as antijew racism; This lobby also
try to scare the press by suing for racism:

http://www.acrimed.org/article247.html (in French)

It also tries to portray the France as racist to isolate it to
neutralize the traditionally balanced French position in a world
more and more extremist. Balance may here a purely interested
position but at least it avoid to go to extrems. It certainly
helped during the cold war; now we know that info peddled on both
sides was mostly desinformation.

Back to this lobby. it now try to incite French jews to migrate
to Israel to counter Palestine demographic war (sic! how nasty of
them). If this is was clear enough, Sharon made it so.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_20-7-2004_pg4_5

France has long ago gone as far as to vote and enforce a law to
punish negationism which is paradoxically a way to single-out
jews. One can safely deny the armenian genocide by the turks but
will fall under the law if he denies the genocid of the jews by
the nazis. Note that I avoid using the widispread words of
holocaust or shoah (and the capitalization of the words) because
giving a religious significance to the genocid is already an
bias. Human history is littered by mass-killings. Only, the
motivations, the purposes, the scale and the methods change
overtime.

Chomsky rightly wrote that right of free speech was more
important than an ad-hoc law, his letter was promptly
instrumentalized by a negationist and he was promptly derided by
a stupid French press that did not support an american
intellectual to meddle with our politics.

http://www.chomsky.info/letters/1989----.htm

Well, I got carried away and fed the very thread I wanted to
stop. :( This was to set the facts straight. And don't get me
wrong. This particular jew lobby has no exclusive of evil.
And he does not represent the majority of French jews. There is
all sort of nasty lobbies out there. It is so sad to see this
escalation of hate and righteousness from every single side.
Initial motivations are just greed for money and power and then a
run-away process sets-up leading to wars. And the word "State"
and "God" is used to justify about anything.

Let's return to our Open Source activities. At least we have the
power to positively affect the course of things here instead of
merely venting our anger and frustration.

--
 stef