Free Republic

PARIS (Reuters) - Arabs in the Middle East hate the United States more than ever following the invasion of Iraq and Israel's assassination of two Hamas leaders, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said in comments published Tuesday. Mubarak, who visited the United States last week, told French newspaper Le Monde that Washington's actions had caused despair, frustration and a sense of injustice in the Arab world. "Today there is hatred of the Americans like never before in the region," he said in an interview given during a stay in France, where he met President Jacques Chirac Monday. He blamed the hostility...

LE MONDE SWITCHES SIDES: An encouragig sign in France. Le Monde's editorial today, "Tragedie Europeenne," ends with the following sentiment: "If she did not know it yet, she knows it now: Europe is part of the battlefield of hyper-terrorism." Then there's this astonishing piece of black-and-white analysis: "Nothing, evidently, no cause, no context, no supposedly political objective, justifies this kind of [large scale] terrorism." Now they tell us. Whatever happened to all those sophisticated European "gray areas"? With any luck, they died in the wreckage of Madrid's trains. Here's another money quote from the French daily: "If the trail back...

It is the wish of every newspaper to cover the news, not to be the news. So by any measure, this has been an unhappy year for Le Monde, France's best known and weightiest newspaper. Since February, four books have dragged the daily, and particularly its ruling triumvirate, through the mud. And to make things worse, much of the rest of the French press has been enjoying the spectacle. Now, Daniel Schneidermann, Le Monde's longtime television columnist, has been fired for publishing "The Media Nightmare." Devoting 35 pages of the 281-page book to his own employer, the author bemoans...

One war is ending, another beginning. In his office in the heart of the Latin Quarter in Paris, Jean-Marie Colombani has just decided on the headline for the front page of that afternoon's edition of Le Monde. It is not a great news day and, from the five options arranged in 48-point type across his computer screen, he has gone for an uninspiring "The fall of Baghdad is close". It is a safe bet. The next day, Saddam Hussein topples from his plinth and Colombani, one of the most powerful men in France, confronts the tanks at his own city...