Foto:anang
Familiar mechanism: no more dancing in the streets of Paris on National Day
PARIS.
Monday, May 13, French soccer fans turned out to honor the local team –
Paris St. Germain – winner for the first time in nineteen years of the
French League cup. A sweet victory for another kind of “local,” Nasser
al-Khalifi, CEO of the club that was bought by Qatari interests two
years ago. A big bash was planned at Place du Trocadéro, with the Eiffel
Tower in the background, as if the vast square were a replica of the
team logo. Fans wearing the jersey with the PSG/Eiffel Tower badge over
the heart and “Fly Emirates” across the chest hooted and hollered.
True
to tradition, smartly dressed players in dark suits stood triumphantly
on the open top deck of the team bus as it traveled from the stadium to
Trocadéro. A few smiles and grins later they were whisked away in
unmarked cars and the celebration turned into a pitched battle between
riot police and the usual suspects. Frantic efforts to pin the blame on
the “ultras” (hooligans), who did make a brief appearance, are
contradicted by ample video evidence. Embarrassed officials and prepaid
journalists, forced to admit that the troublemakers were not the
“ultras” banished from the stadium by its new proprietors, and maybe not
even soccer fans, came up with les casseurs [smashers] and guérilla urbaine [urban guerilla warfare]. Blogger Maxime Lépante identifies them as la racaille [banlieue, particularly Muslim, riff-raff]. I call them punk jihadis.
They did one million
euros of damage that night, running on the rampage for hours,
terrifying fans, tourists, and motorists caught in the middle of the
battlefield. One client arrived at a refined upscale restaurant in
tears; she and her husband were caught in the crossfire on their way to
dinner. Tour busses were blocked, passengers roughed up and robbed,
their luggage stolen from the baggage compartment. Drivers were pulled
out of their cars, beaten, forced to turn over the keys. The Café Kléber
was devastated, shop windows were smashed, shops were pillaged,
customers were terrified. The riot police, outnumbered, were taunted,
defied, outrun. They could not protect people or their property.
Interior
Minister Manuel Valls, the most popular member of the Hollande
government, lost some of his luster in the aftermath. Under the combined
blows of criticism from the right wing opposition and clearly visible
humiliation of law enforcement, his tough law and order discourse
shifted to a stutter of dhimmitude. These things happen, he declared,
listing previous incidents over the past decade and predicting potential
trouble in the future—the Fête de la Musique in June, the 14 Juillet (national holiday).
We’re
not allowed to dance in the streets on Independence Day? Then, adding a
dose of spin, Valls dragged in the verbal and physical violence
associated with anti-gay marriage protests. In fact, a breakaway group,
loosely organized under the questionable “Printemps de Paris” label and
impatient with the “teddy bear” nonviolence of the massive anti-gay
marriage movement, has been engaged in some aggressive operations.
The
Interior Minister who dealt so timidly with the brutal hordes at
Trocadéro and on the Champs Elysées brought out the big guns against a
small brigade of roughies whose strategy added nothing to the movement
and played into the hands of the government.
The mechanism
has become all too familiar. Incidents like the Boston Marathon
bombing, Mohamed Merah killing spree, the Benghazi attack, and now
mayhem at Trocadéro, are deliberately removed from the context of global
conquest. The initial and always baseless attribution to right wingers,
hooligans or legitimate anger at anti-Muslim artifacts creates
confusion in the distracted public mind. This is followed by a slow leak
of details and a rapid focus on something, anything, whatever can push
the story off the screen, making it an isolated incident in a steady
flow of unrelated sensations. If and when—if ever—a few perpetrators are
clearly identified by the police and properly punished, the story will
be too old to matter.
Instead
of analyzing the persistence of an infinite variety of punk jihad
attacks against society (President Hollande did say the violence was an
attack against the nation, but…) the mass media fretted about the future
of Qatari investment in the football club. How utterly naïve! French
journalists say that al-Jazeera Sports (under the direction of the same
Nasser al-Khalifa) didn’t even mention the mayhem at Trocadéro. Qatari
interests are undermining Western societies with underhanded funding of
jihad combined with up front financial investments and clever media
manipulation. And, it seems, they are also buying up politicians. Though
there has been some resistance to proposed massive Qatari investments
in French banlieues, it is probably moving ahead out of the limelight.
To put it simply: the punk jihadis that wreak havoc on the occasion of a
victory ceremony for the Qatar-owned soccer team can eventually be
“reformed,” that is, brought into the sharia-promoting fold.
Is the situation
hopeless? I don’t think so. I have covered countless demonstrations
since 2000—pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas, student protests, and so-called
peace marches that turned into pogroms. Mass media censored or
underplayed the violence associated with these “noble” causes.
Independent producers withdrew their videos of Jews beaten up by peace
marchers, jewelry stores smashed and robbed by anti-Zionists, students
beaten and robbed by the very underprivileged banlieue punks in whose
interests they were supposedly demonstrating.
Today,
there is an abundance of video evidence online. Owners of shops and
cafés were given air time to express their outrage at being abandoned by
law enforcement and left to swallow the damages. But of course there
was no in-depth analysis of the consequences of constant aggression
against the productive elements that keep the economy afloat. Intrepid
journalists and cameramen who found themselves shifting from sports to
war reporting that evening at Trocadéro are more willing than before to
tell the truth. Reader’s comments on media sites demonstrate lucidity
that should leak up to editorial boards.
The
movement for global conquest can lead to international resistance.
Every inch of progress toward a full and comprehensive articulation of
the problem adds an ounce of hope to the safeguard of our freedom.
No comments:
Post a Comment