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and Jospin's unwillingness even to address this issue only confirmed their image as the arrogant co-regents of a remote, insulated elite.Europe's ruling class has effortlessly refined Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death my right not to have to listen to you say it. You might disapprove of what Le Pen says on immigration, but to declare that the subject cannot even be raised is profoundly unhealthy for a democracy. The problem with the old one-party states of Africa and Latin America was that they criminalized dissent: You could no longer criticize the President, you could only kill him. In the two-party one-party states of Europe, a similar process is under way: If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable politicians -- as they're doing in France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere. Le Pen is not an aberration. but the logical consequence.
The Eurosnots, of course, learn nothing. President Chirac, for his part, has announced that he will not deign to debate his opponent during the remaining two weeks of the campaign. M. Le Pen beat M. Chirac in nine of France's 22 districts. Unlovely he may be, but he is the legitimate standard-bearer for democratic opposition to Chirac. By refusing to engage, the President is doing a grave disservice to French democracy.
Similarly, Gerhard Schroeder, facing difficult electoral prospects this fall, is now warning German conservatives that he will decline to participate in a "campaign of fear" -- i.e., on touchy issues. But the way you defeat poisonous ideas is to expose them to the bracing air of open debate. In Marseilles, they're burning synagogues. In Berlin, the police advise Jews not to leave their homes in skullcaps or other identifying marks of their faith. But Europe's political establishments insist that, on immigration and crime, there's nothing to talk about.
A century and a half ago, Czar Nicholas I described Turkey as "the sick man of Europe." Today, the sick man of Europe is the European -- the urbane Continental princelings like Chirac and Michel, gliding from capital to capital building their Eutopia, oblivious to the popular will except on those rare occasions, such as Sunday, when the people do something so impertinent they finally catch the eye of their haughty maitre d'. I've said before that September 11th will prove to be like the Archduke's assassination in Sarajevo -- one of those events that shatters the known world. To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history, we must add the European Union and France's Fifth Republic. The only question is how messy their disintegration will be.
This article appeared in The National Post in Canada.
According to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, most of us American journalists are part of an insidious Zionist plot.
Speaking on state-controlled television, he revealed that President George W. Bush recently phoned him to apologize for a spate of U.S. newspaper articles that supposedly slammed Saudi Arabia and the fast-growing worldwide religion centered in Mecca. Abdullah unveiled his conspiracy theory by stating that American journalists who are "writing negative things about us Muslims, and the kingdom, are all paid to do that."
I have news for the aging prince, who is the actual day-to-day ruler of the rich desert kingdom that treats its women no better than the Taliban does (or, should I say, did). The "evil Zionist cabal" that he and most Mideast Muslims believe is clandestinely controlling American journalistic pens, and the government in Washington, does not exist. If anything, there has been a clear tendency in the U.S. government and media to bend over backwards to mollify the prince and his wealthy Islamic ilk, lest "vital" oil supplies be shut off as they were in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war in 1973.
My longtime media employer, CBS, informed me a few months ago that they would no longer air my news reports from Israel. I worked over 12 years for the venerable radio network, two years full-time and the rest part-time. I also did some television reports for CBS, especially during the dramatic Gulf War.
The official reason for crossing my name off of the network reporters' list had nothing to do with my on-air work. Fellow Jerusalem-based journalists who queried my former bosses in New York were told that my reports were fair, accurate and balanced. Indeed, I was careful to never reveal my personal opinions in my radio pieces.
The problem, they were informed, was my association with a Jerusalem-based group called Christian Friends of Israel (CFI). It is true that I write a monthly news summary for the pro-Israel group. However, I also pen articles for many other Christian and secular publications, some of which take no stand on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The reality is that I was already writing for CFI when CBS hired me during the early days of the original Palestinian uprising in 1988. I can almost hear Prince Abdullah shouting out, "I told you so!" But, the truth is, I did not parade all of my other free-lance media connections in front of the network brass, and they did not ask. They were only aware that I had already been reporting for a CBS affiliate in Boston for over three years, and that the news director there was satisfied with the professional quality of my work.
What brought the issue of my monthly CFI news report to the surface after almost 13 years with one of America's oldest radio networks? A complaint from
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Outpost - 6 - May 2002