Straw takes war to the French in vitriolic United Nations tirade

So often the grey man of British diplomacy, Jack Straw last night let rip at the French foreign minister in front of a shocked UN Security Council, calling on the international community to enforce the disarmament of Iraq "on its own terms".

In what one admiring American delegate referred to as a "diplomatic call to arms", Mr Straw spelled out in the clearest terms that time had effectively run out for Saddam Hussein, his lies and his prevarications.

He launched an impassioned tirade at Dominique de Villepin and France's policy on Iraq in an outburst that marked a new extreme of rhetoric in the row over how to deal with Saddam.

Staring M de Villepin in the eye and packing his speech with liberal references to "Dominique", Mr Straw directed what turned into an ad hominem assault on his French counterpart.

Mr Straw heaped scorn on the logic of countries - especially France - that are set on giving Iraq more time. "Dominique, you said that the choice before us was disarmament by peace or disarmament by war," Mr Straw said. "Dominique, that's a false choice."

M de Villepin, by far the most charismatic spokesman for the anti-war camp, had no option but to sit through his reprimand. But the expression on his face - and its colour - betrayed rage at his treatment.

The ambush - the French, like everyone else in the room, had no idea what was coming - was the most heated public spat between a senior British and French official in recent times.

It was all the more unexpected because, as Foreign Secretary, Mr Straw has earned a reputation as one of the most colourless, if solid, performers on the world stage.

Whether by accident or design, Mr Straw deployed two English borrowings from French to tear into his opponent. He attacked the concept of "automaticité", the notion that voting for UN resolutions against Iraq automatically triggered war, which was a "canard", he thundered.

Giving the UN chamber a taste of the invective and emotion normally confined to the Dispatch Box in the Commons, Mr Straw also laid into M de Villepin over his underplaying of the role of US and British troops in the Gulf.

The presence of "young men willing to put their lives on the line for this body, the UN", was the key factor in compelling Saddam to make concessions, not diplomacy, he said.

The passion of his argument over the impact of the military threat as opposed to diplomatic pressure appeared to put Mr Straw off his stride. "Dominique, with respect to you, my good friend, I think it's the other way round. I really do.

"The strong outside pressure is, and let's be blunt about this, the presence of over 200,000 US and UK young men and young women willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of this body the United Nations."

Mr Straw continued: "There is only one possible, sensible conclusion that we can draw. We have to increase the pressure on Saddam Hussein. We have to put this man to the test.

"The Iraqis have the answer already - it may take time to fabricate further falsehoods, but the truth takes only seconds to tell."

He said Britain, the United States and Spain were tabling an amended resolution giving Saddam 10 more days to disarm peacefully and warned fellow foreign ministers on the council that if Iraq did not comply, action must follow.

"The council must send Iraq a clear message that we will resolve this crisis on the United Nations' terms, the terms which the council established a month ago when we unanimously adopted resolution 1441."

Gesticulating to emphasise his points and straining to keep the reading of his notes to a minimum while making eye contact with those seated around him, Mr Straw demanded that the council must not retreat from its demands set out in 1441.

"What we need is an irreversible and strategic decision by Iraq to disarm, to yield to the inspectors all of its weapons of mass destruction and all relevant information which it could and should have provided at any time in the last 12 years."

The international community had a duty to remember that the only reason that Saddam had changed in recent weeks and furnished inspectors with more information "was for one thing only - the pressure on the regime. Strong outside pressure."

The only way to achieve disarmament "is by backing our diplomacy with a credible display of force".

"We have to increase the pressure and put this man to the test," he said of Saddam in a pointed attempt to heighten the impact of his words by demonstrating that Britain felt it was dealing with a recognisable figure rather than a faceless regime.

"He can act with astonishing speed when he wants", by handing over thousands of pages of documents within days when the pressure builds on him.

Then how come French Jews have left or are leaving France?

Arf. The number of french jews leaving France is quite small compared to the size of its community, and actually proportionally smaller than with most other western countries. Now, of course, some french jews are leaving for Israel, just like american jews, russian jews, of british jews? So what?

Your country is openly hostile towards Jews

Bull. Problems with our large muslim community don't make my country "openly hostile to jews".

you're driving Jews out of France--at least the ones that didn't die when the French turned thousands of Jews over to the Nazis in WWII.

France has by far the largest jewish community in Europe, which is something you will hear very often on french news, because we're proud of it.

And I'm still waiting for you to source the list of "30 years of US vetoes at UN," most of which are for Israel. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/859716/posts

I told you they came from an European news forum. I don't have a URL. Why are you aking this? Are you pretending this post is false?

This is a problem you dare not deny. For you to say it's merely "over" is an absolute lie.

Well, actually, you should have picked something else, because the stabbing of the rabbi is something quite, say, curious.

Here is an article from Haaretz on this. I don't want to take sides because I really don't know the final word of it.

"French Jewry Stunned By Allegations That Rabbi Faked Stabbing", in Haaretz, January 23, 2003.

The French Jewish community is in an uproar over allegations that Reform Rabbi Gabriel Farhi, who was stabbed on January 3, may in fact have faked the stabbing. The allegations surfaced in a report this week by the right-wing weekly Marianne, which was then picked up by Le Figaro. The journal reported that police officers investigating the stabbing said it is not clear whether Farhi was actually stabbed by an unknown assailant, and they are not ruling out the possibility that Farhi in fact stabbed himself. The report stunned French Jewry, which for the past two years has been hysterically protesting law enforcement agencies' failure to take effective action against the hundreds of anti-Semitic attacks the community has suffered.

One Zionist activist noted: "You can imagine what a destructive effect this affair could have on the Jewish community. For two years we have been screaming about the attacks against us and the rise of anti-Semitism in France. If, God forbid, it turns out that the stabbing was staged, not just Rabbi Farhi is in trouble, all the Jews are in trouble. Who will take us seriously? And that is without even mentioning the enormous shame caused by the thought that four former prime ministers took the trouble to support the rabbi and the Jewish community. What will we do now? Apologize to them? Unthinkable!"

The rumors that the rabbi was lying about the attack began to surface immediately after the attack, when police came to investigate. "I've seen assaults and stabbings as part of my job, but I must say that this was a rather strange stabbing," Marianne quoted the officer who led the investigating team as saying. A few days later, the doctor who examined Farhi submitted a report to the police in which he wrote that "the wound does not match the rabbi's version of the assault" and noted that the stabbing seems to be self-inflicted. On Wednesday, Farhi and his lawyer, Michel Zaoui, held a press conference to refute the allegations and accused the police of deliberately trying to frame the rabbi because they are all anti-semites. Zaoui, for instance, charged that it was not the doctor's job to draw conclusions about the attack, and doing so was an act of anti-semitism.

Francis Lentschner, newly elected president of the Reform Jewish lobbying group, also cast doubt on the police's motives: "The very day after the attack, rumors circulated in Paris that the rabbi was responsible for his own injury. The rabbi himself told me that during his interrogation, the police treated him as a suspect rather than as a victim. It is enough to look at what has happened in France and other countries in the world over the last two years to understand how we reached this pass." Lentschner notes that the cause of this new anti-semitic outrage by the French police is the wave of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic feeling that has swept Europe since the outbreak of the intifada.

Something else to chew on:

Anti-Semitism: France’s National Shame
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 10, 2002
DANIEL BERNARD, the French ambassador to Britain, recently uttered an ugly anti-Semitic remark at a party hosted by newspaper publisher Conrad Black. He called Israel a "shitty little country" and then asked, "Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?"
Those people.
The key here is that Bernard’s remark is not a reflection of one individual’s racist mindset; it is a manifestation of an entire nation’s social pathology.
Anti-Semitism is a disease from which France has long suffered. The hatred of Jews experienced a drastic rise in that country in the 19th century, particularly during the reign of Napoleon III in the 1850-1870 period, which was known as the "Second French Empire."
France was the first nation to emancipate the Jews. During the Second French Empire, a period in which France underwent rapid modernization, Jews enjoyed civil rights and liberty. They were permitted to enter the state structure and the highest levels of administration and politics. French Jews became one of the most assimilated and the best-integrated communities anywhere in the world.
Modernization became synonymous, in the eyes of the French, with Jewry, since many Jews headed the finance capitalism that modernized France. French Jews were associated with leading banking institutions and they were prominent exponents of economic growth and modernity.
French anti-Semitism, therefore, became an expression of the hatred of modernity. This hatred was primarily expressed by two camps. The first camp was the socialist Left, which confused its hatred of capitalism with hatred of Jews. The second camp was the Catholic Right, which hated Jews because they weren’t Christians. Catholic anti-Semitism was also the voice of an angry religious community that resented its loss of direction of, and status in, French society. Thus, many rightwing Catholic theorists insinuated that Jews could only be French -- and human -- if they converted to Catholicism.
Paradoxically, therefore, the freedom that enabled Jews to achieve success and "equality" in France led to their demonization. Yes, they enjoyed "official" acceptance and they excelled in upward social and economic mobility. It was for this very reason, however, that anti-Semitism skyrocketed in France.
The French Revolution of 1789 had fertilized the soil in which this phenomenon grew. The French Revolutionaries granted Jews full emancipation. Jews were given the rights that were accorded to other Frenchmen, including religious freedom. Yet this apparent kindness to Jews was a camouflage of darker motives. Historian Arthur Hertzberg has demonstrated that the granting of full equality to Jews was rooted in the hope that through emancipation the Jews would disappear as a separate and distinct group.
This explains why Napoleon Bonaparte allowed Jews religious freedom but simultaneously initiated a determined effort, like many French liberals, to culturally assimilate Jews into French life.
Thus, Jews achieved "official" equality in French society, and they were able, by the mid-1840s, to utilize French liberty to gain prominence and entry into French economic and political life. Yet they were vilified for doing so. Those Jews who did not assimilate, meanwhile, and who remained orthodox and poor, were also subjected to prejudice.
The French Jew, therefore, was always in a no-win situation: he was hated if he successfully assimilated, and he was hated if he did not.
It is clear that there was a basic contradiction in French liberty: while it gave equality and rights to Jews, it did so while fuelling anti-Semitism. The rights of the Jew were protected as long as the Jew rejected his Jewry.
It becomes understandable, therefore, why, in Vichy France during World War II, the French did much more than just cooperate with the Nazis. French security forces took it upon themselves to round up and hand over 61,000 Jews to the Nazis -- without even a request from the Nazis to do so. Those Jews ended up in Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka.
In the 1970s, France could not suppress its anti-Semitic appetite. With few Nazis around, the French reached out to Arabs for a rendezvous with anti-Semitism. France distinguished itself by promising the PLO that it would not arrest its terrorists who used French territory as a base for attacks on Israel. All France required was that the PLO did not inflict its violence on French soil.
Charming.
In this historical context, we begin to understand that Daniel Bernard’s recent ugly outburst is not the reflection of a singular distorted mind; it is part of a larger pathological national illness. It is France’s illness -– and pathetic shame.

And you say it's "no longer a problem". Liar.

Ivan

Ridicule. Now you're quoting frontpage. The magazine with a list of ten most dishonorable americans, where you'll find Michael Moore side to side with the taleban John Lindh, and which sells tee-shirts "peace through superior firepower".

Oh really, rather than attack Frontpage, would you care to deny any of the substance of the article with something besides your arrogance?

To wit:

Did the French ambassador not say that Israel was a "s****y little country"?

Is the historical analysis presented in the article incorrect, and if so where are its factual errors (cite sources)?

Is the deal that France struck with the PLO incorrect? And if so, how do you explain France's support for other enemies of the West, such as providing refuge and transportation for the Ayatollah Khomeni?

Bluster will not do in response to these questions.

Ivan

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