Entries Tagged 'fighting back' ↓

His method is crude and colorful and thus apt to draw attention and the NYT’s Elaine Sciolino says it betrays his “sometimes sentimental and pedagogical approach to governing”—but you have to admit that the French president knows how to use his bully pulpit to good publicity effect:

 President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust. …

Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan was to “create an identification between a child of today and one of the same age who was deported and gassed.”

As I said: crude. But he has made his point.

“It is ignorance — not knowledge — that leads to the repetition of abominable situations,” he said. “You do not traumatize children by giving them the gift of the memory of a country.”

I don’t know about you, but I find this refreshing in light of the cringe-inducing self-abasement of the British in recent weeks.

Not having been subjected to his rule—and thus to the notorious spinning that came out of his office—I have the luxury of considering Tony Blair’s comments and arguments on their merits. He hasn’t moved an inch on Iraq:

In my view if it wasn’t clear that the whole nature of the way Saddam was dealing with this [WMD] issue had changed I was in favour of military action. And, I am afraid, in one sense it is worse than people think in so far as my position is concerned. I believed in it. I believed in it then, I believe in it now.” But did he feel remorse about a war and an occupation that left 4,000 Americans dead, 150 British dead, 75,000 Iraqis dead by the most conservative estimate and more than 3 million refugees?

“There’d be something wrong with me if I didn’t, or an acute sense of responsibility which I . . . will have for the rest of my life,” Blair said. “But I can’t say what I don’t believe about this; whatever it began as, it is part of this wider struggle today and . . . if there’s anything I regret. . . it is . . . not having laid out for people in a clearer way what I saw as the profound nature of this struggle and the fact that it was going to go on for a generation.”

And for once his conclusion was, very uncharacteristically, gloomy. “The enemy that we are fighting I am afraid has learnt . . . that our stomach for this fight is limited and I believe they think they can wait us out. Our determination has got to match theirs and our will has got to be stronger than theirs and at the moment I think it is probably not.”

Read the whole thing.

She was a fixture of downtown New York, a stellar writer, and a woman with a most generous heart:

Hillel Italie writes:

In many ways, Paley wasn’t a typical American writer. Her characters did not suffer “identity crises.” Instead of living on the road, they stayed home, in Greenwich Village. They discussed politics, dared to take sides and belonged to clubs anxious to have them as members.

“People talk of alienation and so forth,” she said in a 1994 interview with The Associated Press. “I don’t feel that. I feel angry at certain things, but I don’t feel alienated from it. I feel disgusted with it, or mad, but I don’t feel I’m not in it.”

Sir Alan West, Britain’s new security minister, redefines Britishness for the 21st century:

“Britishness does not normally involve snitching or talking about someone,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph. “I’m afraid, in this situation, anyone who’s got any information should say something because the people we are talking about are trying to destroy our entire way of life.”

It will be interesting to see how a “start snitching” campaign*** cast in this light—i.e., yes we’re British, but this is war—goes over in Britain. While this is the same country whose population accepts the presence of millions of surveillance cameras for security and other law-enforcement purposes, West’s exhortation is yet another acknowledgment that Britain is on a war footing at home.

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*** I last wrote about snitching in mid-June.

Do not retreat. Do not withdraw. Speak up. And always, always, always stand up to a bully.***

That’s the lesson learned by Shaul Bakhash, who teaches Middle Eastern history at George Mason University and whose wife, the 67-year-old Persian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, was taken hostage by Iranian thugs and incarcerated at Evin prison in Iran [e.a.]:

Should you wake up one day to find your wife or child or parent in the hands of the secret police in a country that routinely violates the rule of law, you will likely choose quiet probing over publicity. You have no recourse to law or courts. You fear publicity may make things worse. You believe, almost always wrongly, that if you work quietly, use the contacts you have and wait reasonably, the nightmare will be over.

Read the whole thing, spare a thought for Esfandiari, and support political freedom and human rights for oppressed people everywhere. Pressure works.
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*** She’s no totalitarian, of course, but Rosie O’Donnell sure is one hell of a big-mouthed bully. And a righteous Rachel Sklar really let her have it today on ETP. Nice.