Posted on 01/28/2005 4:19:45 PM PST by Cornpone
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney raised eyebrows on Friday for wearing an olive-drab parka, hiking boots and knit ski cap to represent the United States at a solemn ceremony remembering the liberation of Auschwitz.
Other leaders at the event in Poland on Thursday marking the 60th anniversary of the death camp's liberation, such as French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, wore dark, formal overcoats and dress shoes or boots.
"The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower," Robin Givhan, The Washington Post's fashion writer, wrote in the newspaper's Friday editions.
Between the somber, dark-coated leaders at the outdoor ceremony sat Cheney, resplendent in a green parka embroidered with his name and featuring a fur-trimmed hood, the laced brown boots and a knit ski cap reading "Staff 2001."
"And, indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults," Givhan wrote.
Britain's Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph newspapers also both noted that Cheney had opted for casual attire.
The Post's Givhan said Cheney might have been hoping to avoid the cold weather in Oswiecim, but noted he had worn a dark overcoat and no hat at all at another recent winter occasion -- his own swearing-in ceremony on Inauguration Day on Jan. 20 in snow-dusted Washington.
"The vice president might have been warm in his parka, ski cap and hiking boots," Givhan said. "But they had the unfortunate effect of suggesting he was more concerned with his own comfort than the reason for braving the cold at all."
Cheney's staff had no comment on the story.
He did it to offend the French.
And they also found out that the parka was from Halliburton, I think.
These people are sick. They would rather see our Vice President dead and fashionable, than healthy and a little dowdy.
Too bad they didn't rate the fashions of some of the DemonRATS attending the swearing in on the 20th.
The way they build those reviewing stands today I imagine he was sweating in his overcoat.
They used to criticize the Reagans for wearing designer formal wear. Now they criticize Cheney because he is too "off-the-rack." No wonder the public increasingly hates the press.
Sittin' in the catbird seat, Cheney can wear whatever he wants.....no matter how many "fashion writers" the MSM quotes!
Hey Robin, Senator Leahy has an important message for you from the Vice President.
at least he shaved, something the fella behind him didn't think to do...
From today’s Mercury News:
By Matthew Schofield
Knight Ridder
PARIS - For the past four years – as friends erased “Dirty Jew” graffiti from their office plaques and her French-born daughter puzzled over “go back where you belong” comments from strangers on the street – Evelyne Chiche has spent a piece of each day wondering if she is living in the wrong country.
This spring, the 62-year-old Jewish radio host plans to move to Miami. “I think it’s important for my grandchildren here that I move, to provide them with a safe place should they need to get away,” she said, waiting until a nearby businessman left the restaurant before talking about being Jewish. “France has changed.”
Today, 27 world leaders – a king and queen, presidents and prime ministers – will gather in Poland to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, where 1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed.
But as the world focuses on the past, an increasing number of European Jews are concerned, to quote Sammy Ghozlan, a retired Calais police chief who now investigates anti-Semitic crimes, that “after decades of peace, the old taboos against anti-Semitism are broken. There is no future here for a Jew.”
More concern
Nobody maintains that Europe is again suffering the kind of hatred that gave rise to Auschwitz and other death camps that claimed 6 million Jews in Adolf Hitler’s mad rush to his “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”
But the rise in anti-Semitism, chronicled in upward trend lines of European reports on attacks and threats against Jews, has prompted open concern in a continent whose history, from the Spanish Inquisition and medieval ghettos to the Dreyfus affair and Hitler’s rise, is riven with attacks on Jews.
In the past few months a Jewish school has been firebombed in suburban Paris, Jewish gravestones have been painted with swastikas in Germany, France and Russia, and Jews have been verbally abused, spat on and beaten in England and France.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, an international Jewish human rights organization, calls the wave of violence “the largest onslaught against European synagogues and Jewish schools since Kristallnacht,” the night in 1938 when Nazi sympathizers stormed the shops and homes of Jews throughout Germany, smashing property and beating people. Nearly 100 Jews were killed.
This week, leaders throughout Europe have taken pains to use the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz as a pledge not to forget or repeat the atrocities. Tuesday, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder told a gathering of Holocaust survivors, “Never again should anti-Semites succeed in haunting and hurting Jewish citizens and bringing shame over our nation.”
Still, Deidre Berger, the director of the American Jewish Council in Berlin, admits to an eerie feeling as she tracks studies from around the continent that show rising attacks and threats against Jews. She speaks in an office that is protected by three sets of security doors.
“The medieval stereotypes of Jews – controlling, bloodthirsty, vengeful, unscrupulous – are back,” she said.
Open to debate
Why anti-Semitism is growing is open to debate. Ghozlan, who grew up in the Paris suburbs and founded an organization to track anti-Semitic attacks, traces the rise to the Palestinian uprising against Israel that began four years ago. He also thinks that part of the rise is demographic: Arab immigrants now make up about 10 percent of the French population.
There are no official statistics on what percentage of anti-Semitic acts have been committed by ethnic Arabs. In France, for example, it’s illegal even officially to quantify the population by ethnic categories.
Comprehensive European figures are also difficult to come by. Figures collected by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, the European Union’s clearinghouse for data on the subject, show an uptick in attacks since 2000, though the most recent report contains comprehensive statistics only through 2002.
Tracking anti-Semitism also is complicated because each country has a different way of collecting statistics and a different way of defining an anti-Semitic crime. For example, uttering the words “the Jews should be gassed” is a crime in Germany, while in Belgium the threshold is much higher.
Still, the trend seems clear. In Germany, according to statistics from the Federal Office for Internal Security, crimes “with an anti-Semitic background” grew from 817 in 1999 to 1,334 in 2002. More ominous may be the increase in the number of crimes German police described as violent: from 16 percent of the total in 1999 to 28 percent in 2002.
In Belgium, police recorded a 72 percent increase in anti-Semitic acts from 2000 to 2002, from 36 to 62. The Netherlands reported 46 cases of anti-Semitic violence in 2002.
Nowhere is the trend more visible than in France, where numbers from the Interior Ministry show that anti-Semitic acts – attacks and threats – reached a high of 1,513 in 2004, up from 593 the previous year. And Jewish groups say most anti-Semitic acts aren’t reported.
France is home to both Europe’s largest Jewish population, 600,000, and its largest Muslim population, about 6 million.
French President Jacques Chirac speaks urgently about the need to fight anti-Semitism and has formed high-level committees to study it. He has said there is no need for Jews to leave France.
Yet concern remains high among many Jews that anti-Semitism is growing faster than officials are willing to acknowledge.
Ghozlan founded the Bureau Against Anti-Semitism in France in fall 2001 and began logging incidents that the police had not categorized as anti-Semitic. When he began, he figured it would be a short-lived diversion. But more than three years into it, he can’t see the workload lessening.
“In the beginning, buildings were the victims,” he said. “So security was increased, and the buildings are fortresses now. But people – on the Metro, in school, at work, on the sidewalk – are not safe, and the phone calls come every day.”
Sylvie Rasset, a lifelong Parisian, is another one who worries. Last April, her 17-year-old son was riding a city bus home when a group of Arab-looking young men – guessing his heritage – forced “the dirty Jew” off the bus at knifepoint, before beating, kicking and spitting on him as he lay on the sidewalk.
“He worries about leaving the house since then,” she said. “I do, too. I have two years before retirement, but when that has passed, we will move, to Israel or the United States, but away from the fear.”
In 2004, the number of French Jews immigrating to Israel rose 15 percent, to about 2,400, according to Emmanuel Weintraub, executive committee member for a coalition of Jewish groups in France. There are no similar figures for how many may have left for the United States or elsewhere, but Weintraub said talk of leaving France was a constant source of conversation among Jews.
He maintains that while he’s convinced the French government is working on the problem, concern is warranted.
“I equate today’s problems to the anti-Semitism of 120 years ago,” he said. “This is not progress. People everywhere are wondering if there is a Jewish future in Europe. The question is not easily answered.”
The concern is common.
“More and more, we hear that while we’re doing a very good job of being concerned about dead Jews, there’s not much interest in dealing with the issues of living ones,” said Anne-Élisabeth Moutet, a journalist who tracks the rise in anti-Semitism for a number of European publications. “Nobody would say that Paris 2005 is Berlin 1935. But there is an increasing feeling here that nobody really cares about what happens to the Jews.”
Added Ghozlan: “I would very much like to say that our work will result in a change for the better in France, but I am a pessimist. Look, Jews in France come from families who either survived the Holocaust or were chased from northern Africa. This does not breed optimism.”
ONZ, is it hot in here, or is it Cheney?
Oh, I get it. They didn't like his knit cap because it didn't have that stylish roll like the guy about four seats to the right of him. Its just hard for a busy man to keep up with the latest fashion trends these days.
While this is much adoo about nothing I must admit for such a solemn event his attire does make him stick out from the crowd. Can't tell me there is not a nice black outer coat that is also quite warm. The best part of it though is to see the outraged reaction by some, go have a look at FARK, haven't seen DU yet but I'm going over now to check it out
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