Tombs, Sicily. Photo CC: Hunter 333
When Dresden journalist Heidrun Hannusch, organizer of her city’s annual peace prize, traveled to meet the mayor of the small southern Italian town receiving this year’s award for its years of welcoming and integrating refugees, she happened to meet the Gelardi family of nearby Agrigento. Here, the story of her moving encounter with a family who welcomed an African refugee into perhaps the most private place of all:
The Last Supper as a grave ornament:
Strength by Pename. Kalim shows the positions in which he was forced in prison to stand for days on end.
What do all these French pundits calling for “Israeli Methods” against terrorism really want? Reading between the lines, Sylvain Cypel in Orient XXI sees nostalgia for the good old days of the savage violence of the colonial era.
The July 14 attack in Nice that took the lives of 86 people and injured another 434 naturally raises questions about preventing such appalling events.
Karim Miske. Photo: Jean-Luc Bertini
Coming of age is a fist in the face for Karim Miske. Filmmaker, detective novelist, son of a Mauritanian diplomat and a French communist mother, Miske both inhabits and illuminates in his work a world of shifting and uncertain French identities. In this excerpt from the first chapter of his memoir, Unbelonging (N’Appartenir), the moment when the fine drapery of a middle class upbringing in Paris began to fray, exposing the rot behind:
In the beginning there is the shame. It circles around inside you, elusive and toxic.
"We are the Jedi, and they are the Sith, our enemy brotherhood": Illus. Roman Duvi, Intl Blvd
To be and to feel yourself both native French and yet irredeemably foreign and indeed feared: the life of a bearded fundamentalist on the streets of Paris.
As I write this article, I wonder if I can hope to accomplish anything by it. Can an atheist, an agnostic, even a Christian, understand what I am, comprehend my aspirations?
Crocodile Tears for Dead Refugees, by Kianoush.
A fabricated media spectacle of compassion: Daniel Schneidermann on the mixed French reaction to the refugee crisis of last week(previously on IB), and on the mixed refugee reaction to France as well. The refugees are not particularly eager to come to France, and unlike Germany and England, there have been no spontaneous French welcoming parties either. Finally, even the nice rooms being prepared for the refugees on camera this month are pure show, as should be clear from the grim refugee shantytown the French state has ordained for long-term asylum seekers at Calais.
Well, this takes the cake.
Detail from "Drifters" by Hani Abbas.
On TV news, refugees are grateful and passive recipients of the noble generosity of European countries who offer them sanctuary. This essay from Arret Sur Image is a reminder that international migrants make their own rational decisions about where they want to go:
What a welcome! What enthusiasm! In the wake of a German announcement that they would take in 800,000 refugees, France has committed to taking in…24,000.
Calais, 2014. Photo Human Rights Watch.
Can a state simply abdicate its role as regulator and protector of public welfare, when it comes to migrants?
I am one of a group of nurses and doctors from Paris who answered the call from Doctors of the World
By Roman Duvi. International Boulevard.
Hell is a place without water: In a wide-ranging investigation of Italy’s vast prison system, L’Espresso’s Arianna Giunti finds overcrowded, unhealthy and crumbling conditions, and a shocking lack of water.
No water to take a shower, to wash vegetables, to cook a plate of pasta, to quench your thirst.
Tomato harvest. Photo: CC Libero Guerra.
Exploited, underpaid and mistreated, the field laborers who harvest southern Italy’s crops have little official help. But the country’s labor unions are working from the bottom up to stop the practice of caporalato, illegal piecework labor gangs ruled in near slavery conditions by a foreman who answers to the mafia, writes Fabrizio Patti in Linkiesta:
This August at dawn we would go out to see the field workers.
Emmanuel Todd. Photo: Wiki Commons.
The Greek leftists have apparently capitulated once again to German economic demands, including a nearly unprecedented surrender of sovereignty over billions of dollars in public assets. For a time, the crisis of the Eurozone has perhaps been papered over. In this interview, Emmanuel Todd says that Europe is however slowly committing collective suicide under German supervision.
For me, the striking thing is how the Europe we are dealing with today is no longer the Europe of yesterday.
