Over the last several months, the German citizen of Lebanese origins, Khaled Al-Masri, has become a sort of poster-boy for the media campaign against the American practice of "extraordinary rendition" in the war on Islamic terrorism. Virtually all the English-language reports on the Al-Masri case have assumed or even underscored Al-Masri's "innocence" – an assumption that in this context should presumably imply that he had no connections with Islamic terrorism. Medienkritik provides a representative sample of such reports.

 

The European militant group "Campo Antiimperialista" first came to broad public attention in the US in June of last year when it was reported that it was raising money for the terrorist "resistance" in Iraq. The "Campo's" public fund-raising campaign "10 Euro for the Iraqi Resistance" had already been common knowledge in Europe since late 2003. (See, for instance, this December 2003 post from Medienkritik, which includes images of publicity materials for the campaign.) Now it has come to light that the "Campo's" German-language website features numerous contributions from one Ludwig Watzal, an important official of Germany's Federal Bureau for Political Education (BpB). (Regular Trans-Int readers will recall the BpB from its glossy 24-page broschure shilling for Hany Abu-Assad's suicide-bomber movie "Paradise Now", which Matthias Küntzel discussed in his "Suicide Bombing 'for a Higher ideal'".)

 
As I put it in a new article on TCSDaily, taken together Watzal's contributions to the "Antiimperialista" site "provide a veritable phantasmagoria of the idées fixes of the contemporary anti-American, anti-Zionist -- supposedly 'anti-Globalization' -- 'Left'." To read more, click here.

Many observers were surprised and others scandalized when almost immediately upon her release from Iraqi captivity last December, former German hostage Susanne Osthoff was quoted saying she intended to return to Iraq. Osthoff would later claim she had been misunderstood and that she had not in fact said this.

 
The following from a report in Friday's (17 February) edition of the Neue Züricher Zeitung:

Le Figaro published an interview in its Wednesday (15 February) edition with Brigitte Girardin, The French Minister for Cooperation, Development and so-called "francophonie" or, roughly, "French-speaking culture". The notion of "la francophonie" has hitherto been associated with the promotion of the French language, notably under the auspices of the International Organization for "la Francophonie" (OIF). But the French government is evidently now interested in instrumentalizing the latter for other purposes. Consider the following exchange:

The following from Reuters today.

Oscar organizers said on Tuesday they have not yet decided how to designate a film about suicide bombers in the West Bank but denied they were being pressed by Israel to say the movie came from the Palestinian Authority rather than Palestine. John Pavlik, a spokesman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said no decision has yet been made on how to designate the film "Paradise Now" even though the March 5 Oscars were only about three weeks away.

 

Professing understanding for the outraged reactions in the Arab world and among some Muslims in the West, numerous commentators have compared the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons to anti-Semitic cartoons from Nazi-era Germany. As I discussed in my "Freedom, But…", even the US State Department described the Jyllands-Posten cartoons as "unacceptable incitation to hatred", and both Presidents Bush and Chirac, in surprising harmony, have advised that the press should not publish materials that "hurt the sensibilities of others".

 

Below are twelve sets of three cartoons: each set comprising, firstly, one of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons; then, a Nazi-era cartoon from Julius Streicher’s infamous anti-Semitic publication Der Stürmer; and, finally, for good measure, a recent cartoon from France’s newspaper of reference, Le Monde. (The latter are by one or the other of Le Monde’s star cartoonists "Plantu" or "Serguei". The signatures are visible. Incidentally, the creator of the Stürmer cartoons also went by a single pen-name: "Fips".)

   

Two links that require no comment.

 

First, the AP, under the heading "US Praises Indonesia, Malaysia Handling of Controversial Caricatures", citing Eric John, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs:

At a briefing with reporters, John said Indonesia and Malaysia, which have Muslim majorities, were voices of moderation and that their democracies proved that Muslims can "flourish" in such a political system.

 
"The controversy has shown that democracy and Islam are compatible," he said.

Many American observers were surprised last Friday when the US State Department appeared to issue a condemnation of the Danish Muhammad cartoons - referring to them as "unacceptable incitation of religious and ethnic hatred" - and then confused when, barely a couple of hours after this statement first appeared, State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack provided a vigorous defense of freedom of the press. For an exploration of how this discrepancy may have arisen and for details on the background in French law of the, for American ears, decidedly odd expression "incitation of religious and ethnic hatred", see my new article "Freedom, But..." on TCS Daily.

 

Note that the State Department, by way of an unnamed official cited in the Washington Post, seems to have responded today to the question that I pose in my article and that I posed directly to a State Department press officer on Tuesday: namely, does it stand behind its condemnation of the cartoons as "incitation"? Note too that the official does not provide any convincing response - merely remarking lamely that "there is not entire uniformity in the U.S. government about how we feel about these things" - to the question, which I also posed to the officer with whom I spoke, as to how the initial condemnation, with the specific language used, came to pass in the first place. As I say in my article, we will probably never know the answer to this question. I suggest a couple of hypotheses, however, and neither is flattering for State.

American government officials continue to sound surprisingly like their French colleagues in their responses to the Muhammad cartoons controversy. (See my earlier post "Freedom, But…" for some prior examples.) And now this astonishing resemblance concerns not only low-level press officers of the State Department, but the President himself. President Bush's comments at his press conference this morning with Jordan's King Abdullah are virtually indistinguishable from the line supposed to have been laid down by his French counterpart during a meeting also today with the members of the French government.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I translated a passage of Jacques Chirac's recent speech on French nuclear policy as evidence that it constituted not only an implict threat to Iran - as had been widely reported - but also a not so subtle threat toward one of France's NATO allies: namely, the United States. For a more detailed treatment of Chirac's speech and the "old" American media's obtuseness to its message, see my new article on TCS Daily "Chirac's Nuclear Option".