why don't i think we'll be seeing these frogs pull off their hoods and proclaim "I'll show you how a frenchman dies!!!" like that Italian guy did???
Posted on 08/30/2004 2:04:13 PM PDT by The_Englishman
Hostages urge France to lift veil ban
DUBAI (Reuters) - Militants holding two French journalists hostage in Iraq have given France another 24 hours to agree to their demands and scrap a ban on Muslim headscarves in schools, Al Jazeera reports.
The Arabic TV station on Monday showed a tape of the two journalists urging the French people to hold protests to persuade their government to retract the headscarf law or they might be killed.
The kidnappers gave the French government one more day to overturn the ban after a previous 48-hour deadline expired on Monday, Al Jazeera said, quoting a written statement.
France has scrambled to save Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, both of whom spoke on the video tape.
"I call on President (Jacques) Chirac to ... retract the veil ban immediately and I call on French people to protest the veil ban. It is a wrong and unjust law and we may die at any time," Chesnot said, according to Al Jazeera's translation into Arabic.
Thousands of people took to France's streets to demonstrate on Monday and Foreign Minister Michel Barnier visited Egypt as part of a mission to rally support in Iraq and the region.
He made an impassioned plea to the Islamic Army in Iraq to free the journalists.
The militant group, which last week said it had killed Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni, on Saturday gave the French government 48 hours to rescind the headscarf ban, without saying what would happen to the two Frenchmen if it failed to comply.
"We will continue, come what may, to follow all contacts ... with civil and religious personalities to explain the reality of the French republic ... and obtain the release of these people," Barnier said in Cairo.
Iraqi Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim groups and Islamic groups outside Iraq urged the kidnappers to release the two, noting France's opposition to the U.S.-led Iraq war and saying journalists were not combatants.
The crisis stunned France, which campaigned against the 2003 invasion of Iraq and so had considered itself relatively safe from militant attack. France also opposed the 1990-2003 economic sanctions on Iraq.
Chesnot, of Radio France Internationale, and Malbrunot, who writes for the dailies Le Figaro and Ouest France, disappeared on August 20 on their way from Baghdad to Najaf, the day after Baldoni was seized.
PARIS PROTESTS
Protests were held across Paris against the kidnappings while French diplomats explored possible solutions.
"Their kidnapping is incomprehensible to all those who know that France ... is a land of tolerance and of respect for others," Barnier said, before meeting Arab League chief Amr Moussa and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit.
"I urge everyone who has power, or has the capabilities, to set the journalists free as soon as possible so that the situation does not become more complicated," Moussa said.
Aboul Gheit also called for the hostages to be released.
Many Muslim women in headscarves joined French protests for their freedom. Some 200 people took to the streets of eastern Strasbourg and about 3,000 demonstrated in Paris.
"The hostage-taking risks making public opinion in France turn against women and girls who wear headscarves," one of the veiled protesters in Paris said in front of the headquarters of Radio France Internationale, Chesnot's employer.
Barnier said Foreign Ministry Secretary-General Hubert Colin de Verdiere arrived in Baghdad on Monday for crisis talks. Barnier is expected to visit Amman and Qatar, but not Iraq.
Islamic groups in Iraq sympathised with the French.
"France's position toward Iraq is good. But we also are against kidnapping all journalists," said Sheikh Abdel Sattar Abdel Jabbar, a top official in the Muslim Clerics Association. "We call on the kidnappers to release them immediately."
SYMPATHY FOR THE FRENCH
Outside Iraq, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world's largest Islamist organisation, and the Federation of Arab Journalists spoke out against the kidnapping.
Cairo's prestigious Sunni seat of learning, al-Azhar, and Lebanon's top Shi'ite cleric Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah also condemned the action.
Al Jazeera, which has regularly broadcast similar tapes of hostages, said all kidnapped journalists should be released.
"This clearly means a call for the immediate release of the French journalists held hostage," Al Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ballout said.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder offered a word of caution about efforts to free them, saying: "The more it's dealt with in public, the less chance there will be to resolve the crisis."
French critics and defenders of the ban on headscarves in schools united in support of the law on Monday, pledging to stand firm against the kidnappers. France passed the law in March in reaction to the growing influence of Islamist activists and tensions between Muslim and Jewish youths in schools. The law also bans Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses.
Leaders of France's five-million strong Muslim community have denied any link with the militant Islamic Army in Iraq.
Fouad Alaoui, secretary-general of an Islamic group that had previously urged schoolgirls to defy the ban, recommended on Monday they refrain from flouting the law. The French government said there was no question of the ban being revoked.
There's no negotiating with monsters.
In this the camel jockeys misunderstand French motivations. The French will burn in hell before *anyone* tells them what to do. The more likely result of the Islamofascists beheading the Frenchies is France pirouetting and joing the Iraq coalition.
Seems the chickens have most definitely come home to roost for the French.
Oh the irony - all that effort opposing the war in Iraq - then the islamists go ahead and kidnap their citizens anyway (over internal political political issue).
You play with fire....
Don't worry, guys, Islam forbids this. You will be fine, believe me. Or, maybe they'll behead you.
I think if the French made an effort to understand the terrorists more, stuff like this wouldn't happen anymore.
And close further immigration to the herd.
They won't.
why don't i think we'll be seeing these frogs pull off their hoods and proclaim "I'll show you how a frenchman dies!!!" like that Italian guy did???
Yep. The Islamofascists will have to go about it the old-fashioned way and invade France like everyone else. Then and only then will the French capitulate.
America can support the arguement of lifting the veil. If GWB calls Chirac and tells him to do just that, you can be sure that the french will never ever lift the ban!
The Frenchies could be more "sensitive" about this issue...
I want waffles for breakfast. Somebody ask Kerry what he thinks France should do.
Sacre Bleu!!
REG: We're giving Pilate two days to dismantle the entire apparatus of the Roman Imperialist State, and if he doesn't agree immediately, we execute her.
MATTHIAS: Cut her head off?
FRANCIS: Cut all her bits off. Send 'em back on the hour every hour. Show them we're not to be trifled with.
REG: And of course, we point out that they bear full responsibility when we chop her up, and that we shall not submit to blackmail!
COMMANDOS: No blackmail!
REG: They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.
LORETTA: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers.
REG: Yeah.
LORETTA: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers.
REG: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?!
XERXES: The aqueduct?
REG: What?
XERXES: The aqueduct.
REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.
COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation.
LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?
REG: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.
MATTHIAS: And the roads.
REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads--
COMMANDO: Irrigation.
XERXES: Medicine.
COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh...
COMMANDO #2: Education.
COMMANDOS: Ohh...
REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
COMMANDO #1: And the wine.
COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah...
FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh.
COMMANDO: Public baths.
LORETTA: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.
FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this.
COMMANDOS: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.
REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
XERXES: Brought peace.
REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!
The French will cave. They always cave.
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