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.
"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
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.
"Watercolor and Blood." Map of the Middle East's many conflicts. Photo CC: Thierry Ehrmann
The way each country’s media draws its maps of the civil war in Syria dictates how readers imagine the conflict should be ‘solved.’ And these maps, as French political scientist Lucile Housseau shows here, largely follow the political and diplomatic positions of each country’s leaders.
Maps are not impartial documents, and even less so when they depict armed conflicts. In the following discussion, we look at a number of maps depicting the conflict in Syria.
Pink Floyd, The Wall.
After the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, the French justice system rounded them up by the dozens across the country: drunkards and madmen and children, all charged with a new and strange crime, ‘justifying’ an act of terrorism.
In Saudi Arabia, they sentence bloggers to a thousand lashes and ten years in prison for “insulting Islam.” In France under the Socialists, they arrest children and throw them in jail, charging them with ‘advocating terrorism.’
Pont-de-Flandres neighborhood, Paris. France. Photo CC: Diane B.
In this powerful essay by a trio of schoolteachers from the banlieue ghettos of the Paris suburbs, the writers urge a different view of the Kouachi brothers, whose murderous rampage at Charlie Hebdo last week shocked the world. The Kouachis, born in Paris, orphaned and raised by the French state, are in a sense the true sons of modern France, and their murderous end cannot simply be blamed on foreign religious values.
We are schoolteachers in the Seine-Saint-Denis department.
Mohammed 6, king of Morocco.
A picturesque little village in France, where the residents vote for the far-right National Front while happily serving the king of Morocco. A reporter for Moroccan magazine Tel Quel asks the villagers-why all this love for the Commander of the Faithful?
“So, what do you think about the king of Morocco?”
