Posted on 03/18/2006 7:53:14 AM PST by Clive
Peril in Paris By SALIM MANSUR
PARIS - During the Ides of March, the City of Light glows with anticipation of spring. But this year it is deceptively calm, and behind its gaiety lurks doubts and fear for the future.
I am in Paris - a city I am always joyful to visit - attending a conference on European security in the post-9/11 world of radical Islamism and the war on terror.
It has been a gathering of a few politicians, journalists, academics and community activists, and behind the formal presentations our informal discussions have invariably turned to the peril that France and her neighbours sense is upon them since the suburbs of Paris turned violent and ugly last autumn.
Following the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, France and the rest of Europe initially rallied behind the United States. Newspaper headlines in Paris read: "Nous sommes Americains (We are Americans)."
But such feelings of solidarity with an America assaulted by terrorists dissipated when President George Bush decided to take the war declared on the U.S. by Osama bin Laden into the heartland of the terror network, first Afghanistan and then Iraq.
Then France's President Jacques Chirac, unlike Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, decided to make France the leading opponent of the United States at the United Nations against the war for regime change in Iraq.
Behind Chirac's decision to oppose Bush lurked the long-held belief among a segment of French politicians and intellectuals of making France "une puissance musulmane" - a Muslim power - by drawing the Arab-Muslim world under her wings.
Charles De Gaulle, France's war hero and founder of the fifth Republic, adopted this belief as a strategic policy after taking France out of Algeria, and then tilted Paris in support of the Arab countries following their debacle in the June 1967 war with Israel.
Chirac is De Gaulle's pupil, and his role in shaping Gaullist policy for the Middle East amounts to a case study in stoking the ambitions of Arab dictators, most notoriously that of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The Gaullist ambition is to have France head a coalition of countries as a counterweight to what Parisian intellectuals view as an intolerable hegemony of the United States in world affairs.
Chirac and his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, who seems to me to be nursing a nostalgia for Napoleon's fleeting glory, also believed that in opposing Bush's drive to bring democracy to Iraq, they would buy security for France from politics of radical Islamists.
But Europe has failed to buy security. On the contrary, France is learning that the agenda of radical Islamists is being supported by Iran, whose bid for nuclear power has so far been uncontainable by European diplomacy.
In Lebanon Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister and friend of Chirac, was killed by Syrian agents. With this murder, a message was delivered to Paris not to mess with the Damascus/Tehran axis in the Middle East and its Lebanese proxy, the Hezbollah.
Moreover, a cluster of events - the bombings in Madrid and London, the murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland, the riots in the suburbs of Paris, the torture and murder of a young Parisian Jew (Ilan Halimi), a resurgence of anti-Semitic violence, the intimidation of Muslims (particularly women) by Islamists, and the effects of the recent controversy over Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed - have seemingly brought Europe to a tipping point. At last, it is awakening to the perils of a new form of totalitarianism within its borders.
In Paris this year, I sense, spring comes as a ghoulish reminder of another time when Europe watched and wondered how France would respond to a deathly menace.
Salim Mansur ping.
Who was it said "The lamps are going out all over Europe"?
Chamberlain?
ping
Don't think so- it was said in 1914.
Wrong war. But Chamberlain never leaned anything from Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary speaking to the House of Commons as World War I loomed:
“Today it is clear that the peace of Europe cannot be preserved.
The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
That was replaced by Multi Culuralism.
Where have you been?
Wow, a Canadian jounalist who gets it? Now I have seen everything.
yup , concise , thoughts expressed well ,...
... will the AntiqueMedia be this clear , with a snapshot that readers can understand??
...[oh STOP it! they'll just continue with their convoluted leftie double-speak , switchback , innuendo journalism ,... that is why Salim Mansur is refreshing]
Of course he did also say;
"I cannot conceive any point which can arise in the immediate future which would bring ourselves and the Germans into antagonism of interests," so perhaps he had his bad moments, as well
Exactly, don't go to the country to live unless you want to BE like those in that country.
"When in Rome..."
In fact...
Weren't the "ugly Americans" the ones who expected the world to conform to them?
To them, that is being "nuanced" and shows their intellectual superiority over us knuckledraggers.
At least to themselves, it does.
U2 s song burning down the house comes to mind.
Oh well think I'll go fishing and not lose any sleep for parisians.
Wasn't u2 but I can't remember who did it.
Talking Heads
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