A ban by France’s socialist government on the registration of several top-end Mercedes-Benz models has infuriated the German luxury carmaker and forced Brussels to step in to try to defuse the growing dispute.
Sales of thousands of the most prestigious Mercedes cars have been halted in France since Paris last month refused to allow the registration of four new models that include a refrigerant in their air-conditioning systems that has been banned by the EU on environmental grounds.
The issue escalated late last week when the government invoked an EU “safeguard procedure”, allowing it to act unilaterally to prevent a serious risk to road safety, the environment or public health. It acted after a French court had ordered a 10-day stay of execution for Daimler while the registration block was reviewed.
“The registration of Daimler/Mercedes vehicles classes A, B, CLA and SL remain banned in France as long as the company does not conform to active European regulation,” the environment ministry said.
Daimler said the French decision – Paris is to date the only EU country to issue a ban – was “absolutely inexplicable” and added it would take further legal action as a result.
Officials in Brussels said on Monday they were consulting with Berlin and Paris on the issue and would bring the two sides together in September in a bid to resolve it.
The dispute has highlighted the marked contrast between the state of the car industry in the two countries. PSA Peugeot Citroën, and to a lesser extent Renault, have suffered heavily from a big slump in demand for their mainly small and medium-sized cars.
Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen have, meanwhile, surged ahead, profiting from their premium models that have proved highly popular in emerging markets. France was riled last month when Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, blocked an EU move to impose tougher curbs on auto emissions that would have hit German makers of big cars.
The Mercedes issue revolves around an air-conditioning coolant called R134a which the EU outlawed from January. Daimler argues that the replacement coolant is dangerously flammable.
Jean-Claude Bernard, head of the Association of Mercedes-Benz dealers in France, said the action was politically motivated “to please the greens and damage a German manufacturer”.
The coolant is used in 95 per cent of cars in France with air conditioning.
The association wrote to the environment minister complaining that 11,000 jobs were at stake and demanding an end to the ban. – FT
A staggering 40 million euro ($53 million) worth of diamonds and other jewels was stolen Sunday from the Carlton Intercontinental Hotel in Cannes, in one of Europe’s biggest jewelry heists in recent years, police said. One expert noted the crime follows recent jail escapes by members of the notorious “Pink Panther” jewel thief gang.
The hotel in the sweltering French Riviera was hosting a temporary jewelry exhibit over the summer from the prestigious Leviev diamond house, which is owned by Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev.
A police spokesman said the theft took place around noon, but he could not confirm local media reports that the robber was a single gunman who stuffed a suitcase with the gems before making a swift exit. The spokesman spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter on the record.
The luxury Carlton hotel featured prominently in Alfred Hitchcok’s “To Catch a Thief,” which starred Cary Grant as a reformed burglar chasing a jewel thief. It is situated on the exclusive Promenade de la Croisette that stretches a mile and a half (2.4 kilometers) along the French Riviera, and is thronged by the rich and famous throughout the year. The hotel’s position provides not only a beautiful view of the sea but also an easy getaway for potential jewel thieves along the long stretch of road.
“It’s a huge theft. Anytime you talk about a heist with many millions of dollars it turns heads and feeds the imagination,” said Jonathan Sazonoff, U.S. editor for the Museum Security Network website and an authority on high-value crime.
He said the likelihood of recovering the stolen diamonds and jewels is slim, because the thieves can easily sell them. “The fear is, if you’re dealing with high-quality minerals, it’s hard to get them back,” Sazonoff said. “They can be broken up and so they can be easily smuggled and sold.”
The valuable gems were supposed to be on public display until the end of August. It was not immediately clear how many pieces were stolen.
Leviev, in a brief statement, said: “Company officials are cooperating with local authorities investigating the loss and are relieved that no one was injured in the robbery.”
Several police officers were placed in front of the Carlton exhibition room – near a Cartier diamond boutique – to prevent the dozens of journalists and photographers from getting a look at the scene of the crime.
Hotel officials would not comment, and attempts to get comments from Leviev or his company were not immediately successful.
Europe has been struck by several brazen jewelry thefts in recent years, some of which have involved tens of millions of dollars in treasure.
On Feb. 18 in Belgium, some $50 million worth of diamonds were stolen. In that heist, robbers targeted stones from the global diamond center of Antwerp that had been loaded on a plane headed to Zurich. Authorities have since detained dozens of people and recovered much of the items stolen in that operation.
Five years ago, in December 2008, armed robbers wearing women’s wigs and clothing made off with diamond rings, gem-studded bracelets and other jewelry said then to be worth $108 million from a Harry Winston boutique in Paris.
Also in 2008 – in February of that year – in a scene reminiscent of the movie “The Italian Job,” masked thieves drilled a tunnel into a Damiani jewelry company showroom in Milan, Italy. They tied up the staff with plastic cable and sticky tape, then made off with gold, diamonds and rubies worth some $20 million. The robbers had been digging for several weeks from a building under construction next door.
Cannes appears to be a favorite target this year – in May it was struck by other two highly publicized jewelry heists during the Cannes Film Festival.
In the first theft, robbers stole about $1 million worth of jewels after ripping a safe from the wall of a hotel room. In the second, thieves outsmarted 80 security guards in an exclusive hotel and grabbed a De Grisogono necklace that creators said is worth 2 million euros ($2.6 million).
Sazonoff said it is normal for robbers to gravitate to a place like Cannes, whose glimmering harbor and glamorous film festival attract the world’s rich and famous. “Why do thieves target Cannes? It’s simple … On the Cote d’Azur, it’s where the monied people flow,” he said.
Sazonoff also said police would likely probe whether Sunday’s heist is linked to recent jail escapes by alleged members of the Pink Panther jewel thief gang.
On Thursday, gang member Milan Poparic escaped his Swiss prison after accomplices rammed a gate and overpowered guards with bursts from their AK-47s, police said.
Police say the Pink Panther network’s members are prime suspects in a series of daring thefts. According to Interpol, the group has targeted luxury watch and jewelry stores in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the United States, netting more than ?330 million (£285m) since 1999.
Poparic is the third member of the Pink Panthers to escape from a Swiss prison in as many months, according to Vaud police.
“The brazen drama of it is their style… The possibility of the reemergence of the Pink Panther gang is very troubling and taken seriously by law enforcement worldwide,” Sazonoff said. “The theft of high value diamonds is exactly what they do, so it’s not a great leap to assume they are on the warpath again. They are a crime wave waiting to happen.” – AP
Some 20 cars have been torched and four people detained in a second night of violence in suburbs west of Paris, a result of tensions linked to authorities’ handling of France’s ban on Muslim face veils.
France’s interior minister said Sunday that the incidents overnight targeted the town of Elancourt.
Police union official said on BFM television that about 50 assailants were involved, some firing weapons and a gasoline bomb at police.
The night before, about 250 people hurling projectiles clashed with police firing tear gas in the nearby town of Trappes in apparent protest over the enforcement of France’s ban on Islamic face veils. Five people were injured and six detained in the violence, authorities said Saturday.
The interior minister urged calm and dialogue, insisting on both the need for public order and respect for France’s Muslims. The incident in the town of Trappes on Friday night reflected sporadic tensions between police upholding France’s strict policies of secularism and those who accuse authorities of discriminating against France’s No. 2 religion.
A few garbage dumpsters in the area were torched and a bus shelter shattered in the Trappes unrest. Spent tear gas capsules lay on the road Saturday near the police station at the center of the violence.
A 14-year-old boy suffered a serious eye injury in the violence, from a projectile of unknown provenance, Prosecutor Vincent Lesclous told reporters. Four police officers were injured and six people were detained in the violence, said an official with the regional police administration. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be named due to his department’s rules.
On Saturday night, fearing new violence, riot police deployed around the town, but the atmosphere appeared calm.
The Friday night violence came after a gathering of about 200-250 people to protest the arrest of a man whose wife was ticketed Thursday for wearing a face veil. The husband tried to strangle an officer who was doing the ticketing, the prosecutor said.
France has barred face veils since 2011. Proponents of the ban — which enjoyed wide public support across the political spectrum — argue the veil oppresses women and contradicts France’s principles of secularism, which are enshrined in the constitution. In addition to small fines or citizenship classes for women wearing veils, the law includes a hefty 30,000 euro ($39,370) fine for anyone who forces a woman to wear one.
The law affects only a very small proportion of France’s millions of Muslims who wear the niqab, with a slit for the eyes, or the burqa, with a mesh screen for the eyes. But some Muslim groups argue the law stigmatizes moderate Muslims, too. France also bans headscarves in schools and public buildings.
The Collective Against Islamophobia in France urged Interior Minister Manuel Valls, who recently joined Muslim leaders in a fast-breaking sundown feast for holy month of Ramadan, to crack down on insults and attacks against Muslims.
Valls urged calm after the Trappes violence, and pledged to stand against “all those who attack Muslim buildings or our compatriots of Muslim faith.”
But he also came down firmly against those who attack police.
“There is no valid reason for the violence seen in Trappes,” he told reporters in the southern city of Marseille, which has seen a wave of urban unrest. “The law should be applied, and applies to everyone.”
The anti-Islamophobia collective said in a statement that it was contacted by the veiled woman ticketed in Trappes on Thursday, and that she said the police officer yanked her by the veil and pushed her mother.
Police argue they are doing their jobs and that veiled women are breaking a well-known law.
Trappes was among many towns around France that saw rioting in 2005 by disillusioned youth in neglected housing projects, many with origins in former French colonies in North and West Africa.
Valls acknowledged the “difficulty our fellow citizens have living in these working class neighborhoods, especially young people. What they need is jobs, hope, training.”
“Only in dialogue can we find the solutions to the problems of our society, of joblessness, the sentiment of discrimination and exclusion,” he urged. “Violence leads to nothing.” – CBS News
Muslim rioters threw rocks and set fires following a police check of a completely veiled woman in Trappes, a western suburb of Paris, newspaper Le Parisien reported Saturday.
The gathering of 200 to 400 people became “violent” at about 8:30 pm (1830 GMT) Friday, the report said. The mob vandalized a bus shelter and set refuse bins on fire.
Two police officers were injured, a police union spokesman said. An unconfirmed report said that one boy was injured and rushed to hospital.
Police surrounded their station with emergency vehicles to protect it from the rioters.
The mob in the town of 30,000, 30 kilometres from central Paris, was angered by the arrest of a 21-year-old man on Thursday, who attacked a police officer after objecting to a police check of his fully veiled wife.
In France, the wearing of burqas and other veils in public is prohibited. – dpa
The leader of France’s National Front lost her right to legal immunity as a European Parliament deputy on Tuesday, exposing her to possible prosecution over a racism charge.
Marine Le Pen’s loss of immunity came at the request of a Lyon court three years after she was accused of inciting racial hatred for comparing Muslim street prayers to the occupation of France by Nazi Germany.
A majority of parliamentarians voted to ratify the decision, as recommended by a judicial committee, a parliament official said after the hearing at the parliament’s seat in the northern French city of Strasbourg.
A public trial in France would be a setback for the National Front as it seeks to capitalize on her rising popularity to grab territory from the ruling Socialist Party and mainstream right in local and European Parliament elections next year.
Le Pen’s anti-immigrant, anti-EU party is notably gaining support at the expense of President Francois Hollande’s Socialists in a darkening economic context, as high and rising joblessness fuels the spread of her euro-skeptic views.
The National Front has also profited from a tax evasion scandal that prompted the resignation of ex-Budget Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, stealing votes in his former home district during a by-election last month.
It is tipped to make strong gains in May 2014 European elections, with one survey by pollster YouGov in June showing it could reap 18 percent of the vote — ahead of the Socialists but behind the center-right UMP party.
By comparison in 2009, when Le Pen won her EU parliament seat in the North-West France region, the National Front scored a total of just 6.3 percent of the vote, versus 16.4 percent for the Socialists and 27.8 percent for the UMP.
Le Pen was ranked France’s third most popular politician in a web-based poll conducted in May by web site L’Internaute. That placed her one position behind former President Nicolas Sarkozy, and 24 positions ahead of Hollande.
If found guilty of inciting racial hatred, she would face a maximum penalty of one year in prison and 45,000 euros in fines. – Reuters
The so-called “Friends of Syria” group comprises Britain, France, the US, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. We can safely say that America and Britain are the driving forces behind the initiative and that the other countries have merely been roped in to lend some international legitimacy to what is turning into a proxy war between the US-UK and Russia.
The Syrian conflict represents a threat to world peace. In fact, it could lead to the end of civilisation as we know it!
That may sound like an outrageous statement, but let me explain.
The civil war in Syria is not only a proxy war between the Atlantic powers (or Atlanticists) and Russia, but once Syria falls, the next target will be Iran and after that Russia itself.
Putin understands this. He is also correct when he accuses the American and British governments of disregarding the sovereignty of other states and nations. Especially Democratic and Labour governments have in recent decades embraced the doctrine of “regime change” whereby the two Anglo-Saxon powers see fit to start wars and uprisings in other countries to serve their own interests. However, a lot of the time they are not even serving their own interests but are acting to promote the new Soviet ideology of multiculturalism. Racial equality, or “equality of outcomes” is to the Atlanticists what class equality was to the former totalitarian states of Eastern Europe.
Elsewhere on this website, Felicity Arbuthnot quotes Sbigniew Brzesinski as saying that the United States is courting “large-scale disaster” in Syria:
“Having covertly provided arms and equipment to insurgents from numerous different countries for over two years, they have now moved to the overt stage, a move over which even arch hawks such as former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former Republican Senator Richard Luger, six term leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged caution.
“Luger said such action would boost extremists, with Brzezinski dismissing Obama’s talk of ‘red lines’ as thoughtless and risking “a large-scale disaster for the United States.”
Carl Schmitt
The geostrategic scenario predicted by Russian writer and commentator Aleksandr Dugin, is being realised. I posted his essay The Great War of Continents on my personal blog some time ago. Dugin was influenced by the great German legal philosopher, Carl Schmitt, who was skeptical of democracy. In fact, we can see how democracy plays hardly any role in the decisions taken by the Atlanticists as the populations of both the US and the UK are vehemently opposed to further wars. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that Americans (are) overwhelmingly against arming Syrian rebels. Schmitt also wrote a book on Land and sea in which he theorised about the conflict between the Atlantic “sea powers” and the Eurasian “land powers”.
However, I think the Syrian conflict, together with the so-called “Arab Spring”, colour revolutions, as well as the South African revolution of 1994 portend a major movement with the ultimate objective of abolishing the nation state as we know it. Almost all of these revolutions were fomented from the outside by Atlanticists who discerned weaknesses in the ethnic, religious and multinational compositions of the states being attacked. The use of media and the arming or financing of “rebels” and terrorists were features of all these revolutions or “regime changes”.
Apart from the thalassocratic elements identified by Schmitt and Dugin – the USA and the UK being maritime powers – there is another, archaic driver behind Atlanticist overreach and that is the resurrection of a kind of Zombie British Empire (ZBE). America, being a republic, has always been ill at ease with its role as the New Rome. Americans are not well-versed in foreign languages, customs and geography. The average intern or staffer in Washington would not be able to find Syria on a map, let alone appreciate the ethnic, religious and political complexities of that society.
But in its economic and geostrategic decline, Britain has become the tail wagging the dog. It is clearly seeking to influence and direct the United States in re-establishing its nineteenth-century dominance as a global imperium. Earlier this year, an Historic strategy meeting between the USA and the UK was announced. More recently, it was revealed by Edward Snowden that the British are worse than US in spying. Just yesterday, it appeared that the UK (was) tapping the EU’s data flows and the “German Justice Minister… called the British spy agency’s massive eavesdropping of international fiber-optic cables ‘a catastrophe’.”
There is a long-standing hostility towards the nation state in Britain, which has become deeply rooted in academia, the media, the ubiquitous left-wing NGOs and especially in the Labour Party. European nationalism or the historical desire of European peoples to exercise their right to self-determination is routinely equated with Hitlerism. But even in the United States where Woodrow Wilson is remembered as a champion of self-determination and the nation state, there is another school of thought expressed by Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, in the aftermath of World War I:
“The more I think about the President’s declaration as to ‘self-determination’, the more convinced I am of the dangers of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress, and create trouble in many lands. What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalists among the Boers? Will it not breed discontent, disorder and rebellion?”
The successful suppression of Afrikaner self-determination or “Boer nationalism” over more than a century, as well as the so-called “peaceful regime change” in South Africa in 1994, has emboldened neo-imperialists in the UK and the US to engineer many more regime changes, starting in Iraq, but also the Maghreb and Egypt, with the focus now on Syria.
This is what opponents of the Obama administration in the United States are starting to call the “New World Order”. The adherents of the NWO envisage such a radical change in global government, coupled with Big Brother spying techniques and sci-fi mind control, that we are indeed seeing the end, not only of Wilsonian self-determination, but even of the European order that arose at the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. The so-called “Peace of Westphalia” in 1648 established national sovereignty and religious freedom as the two inviolable principles of European statecraft.
Under its current government, there is religious freedom in Syria, unlike in other Muslim states. On the other hand, we have seen Christian churches being attacked by the so-called rebels. The question has already been asked on this website: Who will the US really arm in Syria? Quoting from that RT report, we can only conclude that it must be radical Islamists opposed to the current modern-Arab regime of Bashar al-Assad:
“The US decision to arm the Syrian rebels fighting government troops has sparked feuds among various rebel factions dominated by radical Islamist fighters. As internal schisms among the rebels deepen, fighters from the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front have reportedly assassinated a large number of officers of the Free Syrian Army.”
The love-hate relationship that the USA is entertaining with Al-Qaeda may be conceptually difficult to grasp. But not if one takes a step back to look at the big picture, both present and past. On the one hand and especially after 9/11, Al-Qaeda was Enemy No. 1, the target for Bush’s “war on terror”. On the other hand, Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and similar fundamentalist groups are being funded, supported and armed by the United States to take over Arab countries and establish a form of theocracy, including shariah. Are the US and the UK being run by idiots who simply do not understand what they are doing?
The answer is no. The ostensible paradox of modern, so-called Western states with same-sex marriage laws, equality of the sexes, religious and political pluralism, aiding and abetting mediaeval, theocratic groups is no paradox at all.
Some years ago I realised with a shock that globalist capitalism would succeed where communism had failed, in establishing a denationalised, internationalist empire. Two Marxists, one American and one Italian – a former member of the Red Brigades – wrote a book looking forward to this global imperium being created by the United States, appropriately entitled Empire. We all know that Lenin was apparently funded by a New York banker called Jacob Schiff.
Like globalism, fundamentalist Islam is also a doctrine that does not recognise secular government within a nation state, of the form established in Europe and America after 1648. Arabic Islamic culture is already transnational, as opposed to the Nasserist nationalist regimes of a Saddam Hussein or a Bashar al-Assad that must be destroyed at all costs. What the proponents of the New World Order, or the Atlanticists, are telling us is that Muslims and Arabs have no need of nation states. Neither do Europeans, Asians or Africans, for that matter. Within the globalist, new-world-order logic, only transnational entities such as the UN, the EU or the African Union matter. The nation state must be razed to the ground.
It follows that a failed state is always preferable to a functional one. Iraq was attacked and in its wake there is now a failed state, more or less bordering on chaos. Africa is littered with failed states, including Zimbabwe, the creation of British foreign policy. Many of these states cannot even supply potable water to their citizens, yet they are praised to high heaven as examples of “postcolonial democracy”. The New York Times recently declared Zimbabwe’s disastrous “land reform” a “success”, during which the property of private white land owners was confiscated. South Africa too, is on its way to becoming a failed state with rampant, crime, corruption and marauding bandits attacking houses and farms, often torturing white farmers to death. But South Africa is the darling of the Anglo-American world, as a transnational state with more or less open borders – that which is envisaged for the whole planet as peoples, races and cultures mingle and we all sit at McDonald’s having a Coke. However, some of us will be wearing the burka and others will be sacrificing a goat outside to appease the forefathers.
Apart from the ideological imperative to destroy national identities and nation states wherever they are to be found, the globalist powers also have an economic imperative. As we all know, the United States has to a large extent transferred its manufacturing to China and the Far East. Both American and Britain have financial and service economies that depend on capital flows and trade. Up to a quarter of British GDP is generated in the City of London, by bankers, brokers, traders, consultants, accountants and other economic parasites that produce absolutely nothing. They are so-called “intermediaries”.
The British bank HSBC, one of the world’s largest, has been described as a criminal enterprise, for its role in money laundering.
The two bellicose countries are also bankrupt, amassing mountains of government and private debt. Successive bailouts of the banking industry have left them with amounts of debt that normal handheld calculators cannot even process unless one leaves out substantial numbers of zeroes. It is an old adage that war is the only way out of a prolonged economic downturn and financial melt-down. After the failure of quantative easing to kickstart the US economy, war is all that America has left.
The war economy is, by definition, a subsidised economy. The American taxpayer is funding the military-industrial complex, which can almost charge what it likes, having a captive market for its goods. Free weapons for Syrian rebels may therefore be seen as the latest round of quantitative easing and “stimulus”.
America will not attack China because, as some commentator put it the other day on a blog, that country represents “our T-bill sugar daddy”. China is the biggest buyer and holder of US debt, so for the moment no Chinese rebels will be armed.
Not so Russia, which competes with the USA in fhe only field where it has real industrial capacity left: armaments. With its military parades, patriotism and sense of tradition, Russia is the exact antithesis of globalist transnationalism. It also celebrates its own language, music and literature. In the USA and Britain, what passes these days for “literature” is mostly guilt-ridden, anti-white tracts attacking any sense of identity, tradition, genius or cultural standards. Nietzsche called it “nihilism”. Risking opprobium, one may even resuscitate a German term from the 1930s, Entartete Kunst or “degenerate art”. Let’s stick to “nihilism”.
The Nasserist, nationalist Arab regimes have fallen like the proverbial dominoes, pushed by American money and CIA tricks. Syria is proving a harder nut to crack. After Syria, Iran will be next, that citadel of Shiite power. Not only is Iran a country with a large population, but it also has a unique sense of self, with its religion and traditions.
However, the ultimate target is Russia. Whatever one may think of Russia and its role in the twentieth century, it is obvious that it has become a “guarantor of sovereignty” of sorts. Many Afrikaners muse today that we would have been better off if Vorster had surrendered to the Soviet Union in the 1970s than De Klerk’s capitulation to the Nordic and British-backed “rebels” of the ANC in 1994. Soviet nationalities policy was an enlightened way of allowing regional and national identities to flourish. Even as communists, Russians had respect for culture, including the culture of others.
Looking at pictures of Syrian churches being vandalised and sacked by the US-backed rebels, it saddens one to think that such acts are being condoned by some of the fresh-faced, all-American and probably Christian boys and girls that one still encounters in Washington offices, although they will probably soon be replaced by multicultural imports.
The modern civilisation whose fruits we are enjoying today came about during the European Renaissance and after the Peace of Wesphalia during 1648. French Socialist President François Mitterand was wrong when he stated: Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre. (“Nationalism means war.”) More often than not, nation states have created institutions, schools, universities, academies, opera houses, and theatres; such states have allowed peoples to determine their own destiny. As Woodrow Wilson put it to Congress a month after his famous Fourteen Points Speech, sometimes referred to as his “Four Point Speech” on 11 February 1918:
“National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action…”
In Syria and elsewhere, Obama and Cameron, like Bush and Blair before them, are pitting themselves against this principle and that of sovereignty. If the Atlanticists succeed, a global disaster might ensue which could take us back to a high-tech version of the Middle Ages. We will be subjected to and even forcibly converted to various faiths, of which fundamentalist Islam is one and multicultural leftism is another. Heretics will again be persecuted, stoned to death or simply executed by various uniformed militiamen, either belonging to rebel movements or government forces.
Perhaps some of the global corporations and oil companies, employing their own private armies for protection, will do quite well in such a postnational world. But the rest of us will be terrorised by gangs, mobs and armed “rebels”, as is happening in many parts of Africa already.
Of course, South Africa is the guinea pig country, the first open-border, transnational state with hardly any sovereignty where any government official may be bought. Organised crime and multinational corporations share the spoils. Private property is open to interpretation and any Marxist historian’s vague theories about exploitation could jeopardise your title deed.
Is this the kind of world we want?
If Germany and France want to follow the arming of rebels and the destabilisation of whole countries, we should start boycotting their cars and buy Korean or Japanese. Russia should also do its best to wake Europe up to the dangers of the New World Order unfolding before our very eyes. Patriotic Americans and Britons who oppose the inteventionist role of their countries in wrecking the states and societies of other peoples, should also make their voices heard. Many are already doing so, via radio staions and the internet, but if we are to stop the powerful insiders taking control of the globe, much more action and information are needed.
A 23-year old candidate from France’s right-wing Front National, Étienne Bousquet-Cassagne, has lost against the mainstream UMP candidate during a by-election in south western France, but scored an overall 46% of the votes, sending shivers through the Socialist government.
Jean-Louis Costes of the UMP yesterday obtained 53,76% of the votes and so prevented Mrs. Marine Le Pen’s Front National from sending a third MP to the French Assemblée. Adding to Socialist woes and causing the governing party to be eliminated during the first round of the contest, was a financial scandal surrounding its candidate and a former junior minister, Jérôme Cahuzac. Accused of tax fraud, Mr. Cahuzac admitted to maintaining a secret bank account abroad for 20 years.
During the first round, the young National Front candidate obtained 26,04% of the votes against Jean-Louis Costes’s 28,71%, ahead of the Socialist Bernard Barral’s 23,69%. On the eve of the second round of voting, the secretary general of the Socialist Party and long-time anti-racist activist, Harlem Désir, called on all voters to “block the Front National candidate”. Both the French President, François Hollande and Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault repeated Désir’s message to voters.
Bousquet-Cassagne stated that the results of the second round showed “an electoral defeat but an ideological victory”. The leader of the Front National, Mrs. Marine Le Pen, said last night that the “primary lesson” to be drawn from this by-election was that the “so-called republican front against us was dead”. She noted the spectacular progress made by her party during the two rounds and maintained that “it shows that the combined left-liberal parties are no longer able to mobilise their electorate to prevent the Front National from gaining votes”.
Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s anti-immigration National Front (FN) party, has demanded that the country give former American defense contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden immediate political asylum.
In an open message, Le Pen said she was demanding French President François Hollande “to give, in the name of the French Republic, asylum to this young man who had the courage to reveal to humanity a very serious threat to democracy and to public freedoms.”
The FN leader is better known for calling on cuts to French asylum quotas.
During her campaign ahead of the 2012 presidential election, she called for an 80 percent reduction in the number of refugees taken in by France over five years.
Snowden, a former low-level CIA employee and sub-contractor to the US National Security Agency, revealed on Sunday that he was the source of a leak about a top-secret US program code named PRISM that monitored internet use and phone records.
The 29-year-old told the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers that he had blown the whistle on the NSA’s activity to protect “basic liberties for people around the world”.
On Monday, he told the Guardian he was holed up Hong Kong, which has an extradition treaty with the United States.
He said he was looking at trying to get political asylum in a country that shared his values – and that “the nation that most encompasses this is Iceland.”
Icelandic authorities said on Monday that they had not been contacted by Snowden, and that the only way to apply for asylum there was to arrive in the country itself. – France24
France on Thursday threatened Google with a fine of up to 150,000 euros ($198,000) if it does not bring its privacy procedures into line with French law on data protection within three months.
In a move that France hopes will be followed by other European states, the national data protection agency Cnil said the US Internet giant had failed to provide it with sufficient assurances about the storing and use of data it obtains from users.
“The information received in respect to this have so far been too imprecise or vague,” Cnil President Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin told AFP.
She said that Google must set a clear limit on the length of time it can store the data obtained from web surfers and seek prior approval from them before installing cookies on their devices.
France’s move follows Google’s introduction last year of a new privacy policy which enables it to track users activity across its search engine, gmail, the Google+ social networking platform and other services it owns, which include YouTube.
The changes make it easier for Google to collect and process data that could be used by advertisers to target individuals with offers tailored to their specific interest, thereby increasing the company’s revenue potential.
The changes have been widely criticised because of the implications for privacy but the pressure on Google to change how it operates has been limited to date.
The 27-member European Union warned Google in October 2012 that its data protection procedures did not comply with an EU directive on the subject and gave the company four months to change them.
That deadline passed without any action, prompting France to set up a task force of individual member states interested in pursuing the issue that involved Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.
Cnil President Falque-Pierrotin noted that while the maximum fine Google could face under French law was relatively small, Spain has the capacity of impose a penalty of up to one million euros ($1.3m).
Google has defended the changes it made last year on the ground that they simplify and standardise its approach across its various services.
But critics argue that the policy, which offers no ability to opt out aside from refraining from signing into Google services, gives the operator of the world’s largest search engine unprecedented ability to monitor its users.
Google has repeatedly stated that its privacy policy respects European law. – AFP
Marine Le Pen faces prosecution for comparing Muslim immigration to the Nazi occupation of France after the European Parliament’s legal committee recommended that the nationalist leader be stripped of her immunity.
The full parliament is now expected to formally lift her protection from prosecution as an MEP after a vote on the recommendation on July 3, clearing the way for her to face race hate charges in a French court.
Sajjad Karim, a British Tory MEP on the parliament’s legal affairs committee, voted in favour Ms Le Pen losing her parliamentary immunity.
“There is a red line between freedom of speech and inciting racial hatred,” he said. “I, along with many other MEPs, today voted to drop Ms Le Pen’s immunity and I am confident that the majority of the European Parliament will follow our lead in July.”
French prosecutors asked the EU assembly last November to lift the French National Front leader’s immunity as a lawmaker so she could be prosecuted for remarks likening Islamic prayers to the Nazi occupation.
Ms Le Pen faces charges for comments she made in a speech to National Front supporters in December 2010 when she denounced the holding of Muslim prayers in the streets of France in areas where there are no mosques.
“For those who like to talk about World War II, to talk about occupation, we could talk about, for once, the occupation of our territory. There are no armoured vehicles, no soldiers, but it is an occupation all the same and it weighs on people,” she said.
She follows in the footsteps of her father Jean Marie, founder of the French National Front, who was stripped of his legal protection as an MEP to face German Holocaust denials charges in 1998, he had previously been convicted of similar charge in France. – Daily Telegraph
Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas said that Britain had been preparing gunmen to invade Syria two years before the crisis there flared up in 2011
During a TV show, Dumas said ”I was in Britain two years ago, and I met British officials, some my friends…they admitted that they were up to something in Syria.”
”They even asked me to join them in my capacity as a foreign minister, but I declined,” he added.
He indicated that the plan of striking Syria had been prepared in advance long before the 2011 events, adding that the goal was to overthrow the Syrian government that considers Israel an enemy.
The TV show was dedicated to discussing the war in Syria.
French magazine: ‘Jihadists’ involvement in Syria much bigger than Afghanistan
The French magazine “Le Nouvel Observateur” quoted a senior French official as saying that the participation of French Jihadists in Syria is bigger that their involvement in Afghanistan war.
The French magazine said that the French intelligence verified the identities of 270 French nationals who are fighting in Syria, indicating that their return has become a major concern for the French interior ministry.
The magazine said that the number of European ‘Jihadists’ fighting in Syria ranges between 1,500 and 2,000, in addition to hundreds of Tunisians. – SANA
France’s socialist government suffered the indignity of a first-round exit in a parliamentary by-election to replace a disgrace minister forced out over a tax-dodging scandal.
Former budget minister Jerome Cahuzac, who is facing charges of tax fraud, stepped down from his parliamentary seat in April.
In Sunday’s by-election for his seat in Lot-et-Garonne, southwest France, the socialist candidate was pushed into third place — and thus eliminated.
The second-round run-off on June 23 will be fought between a candidate from the centre-right UMP party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy; and a member of the far-right National Front (FN).
The vote was marked by a turn-out significantly lower than in the 2012 general election: only 46 percent of the 75,000 voters eligible to have their say bothered to do so.
President Francois Hollande acknowledged that the result was fall-out from the scandal around Cahuzac, whose ministerial portfolio had included the fight against tax evasion.
For UMP president Jean-Francois Cope, the result was another “scathing repudiation of Francois Hollande and his policies”.
Socialist party leader Harlem Desir called on voters to ensure the FN candidate did not win the second-round run-off vote.
Sunday’s result was another slap in the face for the ruling Socialists after defeats last weekend in two other by-elections.
The party now has 292 deputies in the National Assembly: just three seats more than the 289 seats that ensures an absolute majority.
Through to the second round are the UMP’s Jean-Louis Costes, who came first with 28.7 percent of the vote; and the FN candidate, 23-year-old Etienne Bousquet-Cassagne, who polled 26 percent.
Socialist candidate Bernard Barral came third with 23.7 percent. – AFP
On June 5, 18-year-old anti-fascist activist Clement Meric was walking with his friends in Paris when he encountered a group of far-right militants and a fight broke out. At the end of the skirmish, Meric lay on the ground. He was hit twice in the head, declared brain-dead at the hospital and died the next day.
His attackers are believed to have links with the far-right Revolutionary Nationalist Youth. The French government has not only arrested the perpetrators, but has also gone one step further by announcing plans to dissolve the group. Painting on an even larger canvas, the government declared that this ban will take place in the context of a review of “extreme right groups that provoke racial, anti-Semitic, xenophobic and homophobic hatred”.
French law allows the government to ban groups without oversight from courts or the legislature. This procedure dates back to the 1930s, when far-right militias roamed the streets and undermined the stability of the French state. As of 1972, the government has also been able to disband groups that provoke discrimination, hatred, or violence against people because of their origin, race, ethnicity, nationality or religion.
From an American perspective, this law and the current steps against the Revolutionary Nationalist Youth are difficult to understand. The US has long had active racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan whose members have been associated with violent acts. However, Americans believe that one should punish the criminals, not criminalise freedom of association, no matter how outrageous the group’s ideas may be.
Americans are fairly unusual in this respect. Many countries permit authorities to outlaw racist groups. Some, like France and Italy, have provisions for the dissolution of private groups. Others, like Germany and the Netherlands, also allow political parties to be banned – a highly contentious step for any self-declared liberal democracy.
Why do these countries endorse such a controversial infringement on freedom of association? Most places that allow it have had first-hand experiences as non-democracies – experiences they are keen not to repeat. France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, for example, go much further than the US, Britain and Australia in permitting their states to outlaw racist groups and parties.
History matters, and it continues to motivate French leaders to this day. Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault declared in vivid fashion last week that he was ready to “cut to pieces… fascist and Nazi-inspired movements”. For his part, Interior Minister Manuel Valls stated, “We will be merciless with those that deny the values of the Republic”, and asserted that France has to “attack the foul ideas that remind us of the worst hours of our history”.
For some, these steps are not as much about history as they are about symbolic politics. When extreme hatred and violence spills out into the streets, citizens want action. Banning a group sends an immediate signal that the government is doing something.
As sceptics are quick to argue, though, simply declaring a racist group or party defunct is not always effective. Sometimes the leaders of these associations simply recreate the group under another name. Or activists may go underground and meet in secret.
This can happen, but France has the power to punish the revival of a banned racist group with seven years in jail and a 100,000-euro ($132,819) fine. Evidence from Germany demonstrates that following waves of bans, the number of racist groups drops over the short-term (but not the long-term), and that the total number of people willing to affiliate with racist right-wing groups also declines over the long-term.
In short, bans can be effective tools for inhibiting rabid racist groups.
The greater concern involves the frequency with which states apply the bans. Happily, so far, they have tended to use these laws sparingly. Since 1936, France has outlawed fewer than 100 groups. Many of the highest-profile bans occurred in the 1930s, during the Algerian war, and surrounding the events of May 1968, because the groups involved were identified as dangerous militias. In recent decades, the bans have been used quite infrequently, with only a handful of groups dissolved in the past decade.
Since the 1972 amendment to the law, however, provocation to racial or religious hatred has played a greater role in decisions about which groups to ban. In 2006, France dissolved the Tribu Ka, a small anti-Semitic group with a goal of “putting the people called ‘black’ at the top of humanity”. In 2012, the state disbanded an association dedicated to establishing sharia law in France.
These groups, like the Revolutionary Nationalist Youth, are ethno-centric and associated with violence. Governments have the right to enforce laws enacted by elected legislatures to dissolve groups that are a pressing threat to social and political stability.
But there is always a risk that states will turn to these laws for a seemingly quick solution to racist violence. These provisions serve a useful purpose, but they come at a cost. They infringe the core liberal democratic norm of allowing people to express their values.
So if France is going to ban the Revolutionary Nationalist Youth, it has to show its citizens and its neighbours that the group deserves to be banned. France must remember its history, but it must also preserve its liberal democratic credentials for the future.
Erik Bleich is a professor of political science and the director of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, and is the author of The Freedom to Be Racist? How the United States and Europe Struggle to Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism, published by Oxford University Press.
The cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Nantes (Western France)
Agence France Presse reports that the Saint Peter’s cathedral in Nantes was vandalised last night, with “symbols of a Nazi type”, according to the prefect of the Loire-Atlantique department, Christian de Lavernée. “The damages affect the sacred part of the chorus as well as the oldest altar at the back of the chorus,” he added.
This latest incident of sacrilege against churches in France comes amid a heated controversy around the death of a young left-wing activist, Clément Méric, during a fight with skinheads, as well as recent demonstrations against homosexual marriage by conservatives, notably Catholic believers.
According to the prefect, “the signs are mixed: there is a 666 (Satan’s number) and some Nazi symbols, a bust of Fermen, as well as some stickmen in the style of (the emblem of) the anti-gay marriage protest movement Manif pour tous.” He said the act was “deplorable”.
“The facts were discovered this morning at 8h15. There was a break-in by means of the high part of the scaffolding” which is being used at the moment along the facade, he explained and “the doors on the ground floor were cracked”. Obscene inscriptions and a broken statue were visible inside, as well as angels with sex organs and little Hitler’s moustaches, someone indicated who had had access to the interior of the cathedral.
Cathedral closed for tourists
“The church does not wish to add oil to the fire,” stated the general vicar of the Nantes diocese, Father Benoît Bertrand, who “condemned this act. We want to appeal to calm and to responsibility.”
At the cathedral several offficials from the police’s forensic department were busy with investigations and banned anyone from entering. An inquiry has been opened by the prosecution under the departmental sûreté of Nantes. The first deputy mayor of the municipality of Nantes, Johanna Rolland (Socialist Party) was also present and condemned the incident “in the strongest possible terms”. For the moment, the monetary value of the damages have not been established, according to the prefect.
The cathedral will be closed for several days for tourists but will be open for religious services.
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