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Once upon a time there was a smart fellow in this country who would say:I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall nonetheless defend your right to say it.But that was a long time ago. Now he's dead and buried.
And forgotten.
One may even find hard to believe that this smart fellow was French, living, thinking and writing in France.
Particularly when we learn from one of our readers that during the week-end, the following sites suddenly vanished into the limbo of cyberspace:
http://www.aipj.net/
http://francarabia.liberty-web.net/
http://oumma.org/
http://sos-racaille.org/
http://sos-musik.org/
http://photochoc.org/
http://usenet-censure.org/
http://mrav.org/
http://5eme-colonne.org/
http://tribune-libre.org/
http://elysee-2007.org/
http://islam-verite.org/
http://rance-info.org/
http://www.paixjusteauproche-orient.com/
I don't know what happened exactly, all I can tell is that these site are, indeed, closed. For some of them, the domain name is even for sale.
Moreover, I must admit that I never visited all of those sites.
All I know so far is that http://www.aipj.net/ was a radical pro-Israel site and that http://sos-racaille.org/ and http://5eme-colonne.org/ were both mainly radical anti-Islam sites.
By "radical" I mean "extreme" of course (Whatever the side. You name it.). Sos-racaille.org, for instance, was dangerously close (to say the least) to Jean Marie Le Pen's National Front.
The feeling I had from a brief visit on these three sites was, simply put, that they were on the wrong side of that line I traced in the sand between the totalitarians and myself. They shared the same space with the Fundamentalist Muslims, Palestinian terrorists, Socialists/Communists despots-waiting-to-happen they were so eager to fight. Mostly because to reach their goals, they shared the same rhetoric, mental processes and political means with those they were opposing to.
So to put on the coat of Voltaire, I'd say that, yes, I disagreed with what these people had to say.
But what's really disturbing here is not only that these sites were apparently shutdown in what seems to be a targeted sweeping operation (14 sites in the week end in certainly not coincidental) but also that there are, in France alone, several equaly violent anti-Semite, anti-American and anti-Occidental sites online and available at the very moment I'm writing these lines.
And yes, I do mean radical and extreme. Yes, I do mean hate speech.
Unless you have another name for a rudimentary photo editing of two naked males with the heads of George W. Bush and Usama Bin Laden, engaged in sexual activities, next to some... written expression (sorry, I can't exactly call that articles, or even writings) from authors whose IQs and culture are obviously proportionately inverse to the number of grammatical, spelling, syntactic and stylistics errors their prose contains (in their native language of course).
And that's just the form. The essence is as low as the human spirit can go.
Unless you have another name for people who can openly rejoice over the blood shed in a Marines barrack in Beirut, a market of Mogadishu, a tower in New York or a bus in Jerusalem.
And please, keep in mind that I'm talking about your average French idiots here. Not some Hamas zealot or indoctrinated Al Qaeda twit.
So what should I assume from this week-end's events? Hating the Jews, hating the American is OK in France, but hate Islamism and you'll be muzzled?
What's more, considering that those sites (at least for those I knew about) were radicals against radical Islam, when their counterparts are preaching hate for everything Jewish, American and more generally Occidental, I'd say there is something extremely wrong here.
Something that justifies the "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall nonetheless defend your right to say it."
Or else...
Those who took the decision and enforced it just crossed the aforementioned line in the sand.
They're ruling my country, proposing, voting or applying its law.
And burying Voltaire deeper down under.
Terrified Iraqi soldiers have crossed the Kuwait border and tried to surrender to British forces - because they thought the war had already started.I just can't find this laughable at all. These poor fellows aren't Saddam's die-hard Republican Guard, the members of his
The motley band of a dozen troops waved the white flag as British paratroopers tested their weapons during a routine exercise.
The stunned Paras from 16 Air Assault Brigade were forced to tell the Iraqis they were not firing at them, and ordered them back to their home country telling them it was too early to surrender.
(...)"The Paras are a tough, battle-hardened lot but were moved by the plight of the Iraqis. There was nothing they could do other than send them back."
"They were a motley bunch and you could barely describe them as soldiers - they were poorly equipped and didn't even have proper boots. Their physical condition was dreadful and they had obviously not had a square meal for ages. No one has ever known a group of so-called soldiers surrender before a shot has been fired in anger."
Most likely, they're the modern counterparts of those Russians thrown by thousands into the Stalingrad blood pit with one rifle for two men and no other choice than being shot in the front by the Nazis or in the back by Stalin's political commissars.
However, unlike the Red Army's cannon fodders, and fortunately for them, they're not facing Nazi Germany.
This is precisely why they took the chance to surrender rather than waiting for Saddam's commissars to aim and shoot.
As far as I'm informed, the mainstream media didn't see fit to report on Nazif Mamik Tofik's martyrdom last week.
Nazif Mamik Tofik an Iraqi Kurd mother of eight children is just a bit older than me. Last week she approached the border post, hoping to cross to the Kurdish controlled side and sell the two canisters of fuel she was carrying:
As she stepped up to the Iraqi checkpoint, a military policeman suddenly pulled a knife, slashed open the flimsy plastic containers and splashed petrol all over her.Is this the situation France wants to preserve?
Then the head of the Iraqi border guard casually walked up to her, pulled a lighter from his pocket and set her ablaze. Soaked in fuel, she began to burn like a torch. That was on Monday afternoon. Yesterday Nazif lay in Sulaimania emergency hospital, on the Iraqi side, whimpering with pain. She had third degree burns and doctors said she was lucky to be alive.
(...) In a faltering voice, she said: "They said absolutely nothing, just looked at me with hatred. Then they set me alight. My whole body was in flames. I can't describe the pain.
"If it wasn't for an old man who smothered me with his coat I would have burnt alive.
"The border guards just stood and watched. Even after the flames were out they refused to let me return to the hospital in Kirkuk."
I don't care about Chirac, de Villepin and the rest of the corrupted French nomenklatura's osprey cries on their old "American imperialism" phantasm.
All I know is that those "shortsighted Cow Boys" and their "British Puppets" will go in there and make this stop. And they will most probably pay it with their own blood.
But I guess France won't care more for the liberators of Iraq's wounds and deaths than she already does for the Iraqis cannon fodder's distress or for Nazif's burns.
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