The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has requested that the court issue an indictment against Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir for the crime of "genocide". What would be the consequences of such a move? According to Rony Brauman, a former president of the French NGO Médicins sans Frontičres, further inflation of the concept of "genocide" as applied in international law -- and quite possibly a new round of violence in Darfur.
See my translation of Rony Brauman's "The ICC's Bashir Indictment: Law Against Peace" on World Politics Review here.
Last week, Wolfram Weimer, the editor in chief of the German political monthly Cicero, published a stinging critique of Barack Obama's proposal to hold a campaign speech at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. "It shows a lack of respect to want to degrade the historical monuments of friendly countries into electoral campaign scenery," Weimer wrote, "... But [Obama] evidently does not think in terms of the long-term categories of real politics, but rather in terms of the short-term effects of political spectacle."
See my full translation of Wolfram Weimer's "Obama-Gate" on Pajamas Media here.
This is what German author Henryk Broder called the dominant form of anti-Semitism in Germany today in a statement before the Bundestag's Domestic Affairs Committee last month. The "modern" German anti-Semite, as described by Broder, "does not have a shaved head. He has good manners and often an academic title as well. He mourns for the Jews who died in the Holocaust. But at the same time he wonders why the survivors and their descendants have learned nothing from history and today treat another people as badly as they were once treated themselves.... [He] pays tribute to Jews who have been dead for 60 years, but he resents it when living Jews take measures to defend themselves."
See my full translation of Henryk Broder's "Anti-Semitism Without Anti-Semites" on Pajamas Media here.
It turns out the "youngsters" involved in last month's brutal attack on a Jewish teenager in Paris's 19th arrondissement are apparently not so young after all. The principal suspect is 25-years-old -- and a corporal in the French air force. See my follow-up report on World Politics Review here.
The Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche has much more on the subject of "international mediation" in the Colombian hostage crisis and, in particular, the role of Swiss envoy Jean-Pierre Gontard. E-mails found on confiscated FARC computers strongly suggest that the supposedly "neutral" mediator was in fact colluding with the FARC leadership and may even have served as a money courier for the "narco-guerilla" (as author Alex Baur describes the organization).
See my English translations of Alex Baur's series of articles:
Former French presidential candidate Ségolčne Royal recently unleashed a polemic by noting that the French government played "no role whatsoever" in obtaining the freedom of Ingrid Betancourt and the other 14 hostages recently liberated in Colombia. But what exactly has been the effect of French diplomacy upon the Colombian hostage crisis and, more generally, on the conflict pitting the Colombian government against the rebel FARC? I spoke with Daniel Pécaut, one of France's leading authorities on Colombian politics, about these questions. "I don't think that France has contributed much to finding a political solution," he told me, "After all, the French government and Nicolas Sarkozy played the Chávez card." See the full interview on World Politics Review here.
For the Paris District Attorney's office and certain Parisian editorial boards, it would seem that when anti-Semitic incidents occur in a series, this is supposed somehow to vitiate their anti-Semitic character. See my new article on World Politics Review here.
France’s leading Jewish organization, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), is calling for the establishment of an “independent investigative commission” on the al-Dura affair. But how "independent" would a commission be that, according to the CRIF proposal, should be co-sponsored by none other than France 2, one of the principal actors in the affair? See my new article on Pajamas Media here.
Conditions in American detention centers for illegal immigrants have been the subject of extensive media attention of late and even of a critical report by the UN's special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants. Conditions in European detention centers for illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers, by contrast, have received less attention. But as Matthias Lehnert has shown in a recent article in the Berlin weekly Jungle World, the new EU "return" directive will practically guarantee that the most draconian conditions existing in the EU -- notably those obtaing in Germany -- will not only persist, but likely spread. See my translation of the Lehnert article on Pajamas Media here.
In his speech to the Knesset on Monday, Nicolas Sarkozy pronounced himself to be a "friend of Israel" no less than fours times and described France as "Israel's Friend" another three times. But his remarks at a news conference the next day in Bethlehem hardly seemed friendly. See my new article on World Politics Review here.
