Sooner or Later, France Has to Revolt in the Right Direction

And you thought the whole word hated us, especially the French. (Or maybe it’s only that it's the the French whose good opinion the Left really yearns for.)

Alas, France’s new Foreign Minister, (successor to the duplicitous Dominique de Villepin, whose knife is still buried in Colin Powell’s back), “made news this week by warning that a failure to resolve mounting tensions with Iran could mean war.” (“Kouchner, French foreign minister, draws antiwar protesters in Washington”),

In response, Code Pink sent its delegation to the hotel ballroom Thursday where Kouchner was speaking to leap up and unfurl “pink banners that read: ‘Bush + Kouchner = Warmongers!’ One woman tried to climb onto the stage…. Guards escorted the protesters away as they shouted, ‘No war with Iran! No war with Iran!’”

I myself am looking forward to the outburst and arrests that I’m just certain Code Pink is going to stage next week during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s teach-in at Columbia University.

Anyway, it still puzzles the Left that Kouchner has taken such a hard position towards Iran. After all, as the International Herald Tribune explains, “Kouchner is a Socialist who joined the rightist government of President Nicolas Sarkozy and is also a founder of the Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian group Médecins sans Frontières.”

It was shocking that someone totally hip to the Socialist solution and founder of one of NPR’s favorite interview subjects (actually, Kouchner broke with MSF years ago over “the right to intervene and the use of armed force for humanitarian reasons.” should come out in favor of a military option in response to a military threat. How obnoxiously linear.

So right after Kouchner made his historic (dare we say revolutionary?) remarks about Iran’s looming belligerence and nuclear ambitions leading to a possible war, he felt pressure to backpedal. After the Code Pink demonstrators were removed on Thursday, Kouchner asked that they be allowed to return.

"But they are right," he told the crowd. As the chants continued from beyond the closed doors, he offered an undiplomatic, "But I agree, stupid!" drawing laughter. He directed the guards to let the protesters return….as the surprised members of the antiwar group Code Pink filed back into the room, Kouchner said, "I'm not in favor of war with Iran, I want to prevent the war - so they were right!"

He didn’t really think they were right, naturally, otherwise he would be stupid. When one of the reprieved Code Pinkos again started yelling about Iran, “he asked, ‘What do you propose?’ ‘Dialogue without sanctions,’ she replied. He laughed. ‘That's been done,’ he said. ‘This is not, let's say, a very strong position.’”

Which means, when translated from the French means, “alors, that’s très stupide, you want to get us all incinerated?”

What Kouchner means when he says he’s not in favor of war with Iran is that, he hopes it can be resolved short of that, without France having to surrender its sovereignty to an insane Islamic nuclear terror state. In other words, his position matches the American position exactly: let’s work this out diplomatically if we can, but we aren’t going to commit suicide:

Underscoring the changed U.S.-French dynamic, Bush warned Friday that the free world was "not going to tolerate" a nuclear-armed Iran. In Paris, Sarkozy said he favored stronger UN sanctions, which were discussed Friday at multi-nation talks in Washington.

Of all the world's problems, Kouchner said Thursday, Iran posed "the crisis the most pregnant with threats."

"Without exaggeration," he said to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "I would say that our responses to this situation today will shape the world in which we live tomorrow."

A nuclear-armed Iran, he said, was "unacceptable." And repeated good-faith efforts by the West to engage with Tehran, he said, had been rebuffed.

"To those who say that we should handle Iran with kid gloves since it could destabilize the region, I say this: Look at its adventurism today and imagine what it would be like if Tehran thought itself one day protected by a nuclear umbrella."

The United States, Russia, China and their European partners need to pursue dialogue with Iran, "while keeping our heads cool, as far as we can go," Kouchner said in his speech. But "dialogue without sanctions is unfortunately tantamount to weakness."

We already know that when Kouchner says “sanctions,” he means to include “war.” His position tracks exactly with the Bush insistence that, where Iran and its nuclear programs are concerned, we can’t take the military option off the table.

Maureen Dowd once intemperately conferred on Cindy Sheehan “absolute moral authority” to pass judgment on the Iraq war because she had buried a child killed there, which makes as much sense as saying that a mother who buried a child killed in a traffic accident has the right to tell the nation to stop driving cars. (“Why No Tea and Sympathy?”).

Kouchner’s authority is not absolute, but it’s pretty strong, considering that he is reaching back, in my opinion, to the disastrous foreign policy of his childhood, when France was overrun by Germany after years of unmistakeable indicators of what Hitler’s intentions were.

According to Militant Islam Monitor Kouchner was a Communist very early on. Though he wasn’t born until 1939, he would have known all about how Hitler’s early breaches of treaties against German rearmament were met by French unwillingness to strengthen its own military to meet the threat. The Communists played an important role in that defeat, out of loyalty to Stalin, who had made the agreement with Ribbentrop to divide up Poland:

From the moment when Stalin made terms with Hitler, the Communists in France took their cue from Moscow and denounced the war as ‘an imperialist and capitalist crime against democracy.’ They did what they could to undermine morale in the Army and impede production in the workshops. The morale of France, both of her soldiers and her people, was now in May [1940] markedly lower than at the outbreak of war.”

France fell to Hitler a month later.

Pacifism played the same deadly role in Great Britain, where even Hitler’s defiant withdrawal of Germany from the League of Nations left the “pacifism of the Labour and Liberal parties” unaffected: “Both continued in the name of peace to urge British disarmament, and anyone who differed was called "warmonger" and "scaremonger."

According to Churchill, Hitler’s threatening moves after 1933 from time to time resulted in League of Nations votes and protests, but “how vain was all their voting without the readiness of any single Power or any group of Powers to contemplate the use of force, even in the last resort!....All [Hitler’s] terrible superiority had grown up because at no moment had the once victorious Allies dared to take any effective step, even when they were all-powerful, to resist repeated aggressions by Hitler and breaches of the Treaties.”

I don’t care at this point if Kouchner is a Socialist. He and Sarkozy both recognize the threat of a nuclear Iran, and a spreading Islamism in Europe. A minority of likeminded people are also waking up in Germany, in Holland, in Denmark, and in Great Britain. Spending his first years in the Third Reich may have given Kouchner insight into the kind of terms insane dictators are more than willing to impose on lovers of diplomacy and appeasement.

All I know is, France’s new found rationality is a welcome development, even if it comes late.

Brown Starts Off on the Wrong Foot--Or Is That the Right Knee?

I'm missing Tony Blair already.

In what has to be the absolute worst way to deal with the terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, Britan’s brand-new Prime Minister Gordon Brown “has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in ­connection with the terrorism crisis.”

According to the Daily Express, (“BROWN: DON'T SAY TERRORISTS ARE MUSLIMS”),

“The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase 'war on ­terror' is to be dropped.

“The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more 'consensual' tone than existed under Tony Blair…..Mr Brown’s spokesman acknowledged yesterday that ministers had been given specific guidelines to avoid inflammatory language.

“'There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,' the spokesman said. 'It is important that the country remains united.'"

Remain united? Doesn't that assume the country's Muslim and nonMuslim populations are already united, are integrating well, which is in serious doubt.

Brown’s spokesman also “confirmed that the phrase ‘war on terror’ – strongly associated with Mr Blair and US President George Bush – has been dropped.

"Officials insist that no direct links with Muslim extremists have been publicly confirmed by police investigating the latest attempted terror attacks. Mr Brown himself did not refer to Muslims or Islam once in a BBC TV interview on Sunday.”

Maybe not, but Brown already said elsewhere on Sunday that “the nature of the threat that we are dealing with is Al Qaeda and people who are related to Al Qaeda.” (“Doctor Arrested in Australia in Failed Car Bombings”).

We can still say that Al Qaeda is an Islamic terror organization, right?

Then there are the names of the arrested individuals known so far: Bilal Abdullah, Khalid Ahmed, Sabeel Ahmed, Muhammad Haneef, Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha, and Asha’s wife, (whom the Daily Mail describes as “burka-wearing”).

Khalil Ahmed, one of the men in the Glasgow attack, set himself on fire after the crash, and was shouting “Allah, Allah,” as he was being detained.

A former member of a radical Islamic group who knew another of the suspects from there, Bilal Abdullah, said Abdullah had once “berated a Muslim roommate for not being devout enough, showing him a beheading video and warning this could happen to him. He also said he had a number of videos of al-Qaida's former leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike last year.”

In an incomprehensible contradiction Brown vowed the British people will never yield to terrorism, and he “used an interview with the BBC's Sunday AM to tell Al Qaeda: 'The message that's got to come from the British people is that as one we will not yield, we will not be intimidated.

"And we will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life."

Well, Mr. Brown, is it Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism you are defying, or some other terrorist movement unrelated to Muslims?

This just isn't making sense. Amir Taheri comments in the New York Post (“’Islamophobia’ Idiocy”):

“Prime Minister Gordon Brown keeps repeating that the attacks have nothing to do with Islam - but, at the same time, keeps inviting ‘Muslim community leaders’ to Downing Street to discuss how to prevent attacks. If the attacks have nothing to do with Islam, why invite Muslim ‘leaders’ rather than Buddhist monks?”

Had the perpetrators of these bombings remained even temporarily unknown to investigators, it might have been at least imaginable for Brown and his government to take a position that prematurely blaming it on Muslims would be unfair.

But given that Brown himself immediately described this as an Al Qaeda attack, that two of the key suspects are named after Mohammed, that one was arrested in her burka, that one attempted self-immolation while calling on Allah, and that British security has all but admitted the suspects were known from terror watch lists tracking Muslim radicals, then the only possible reason for Brown banning references to Muslim terrorism is naked appeasement.

Which never works.

Watch and see if the pattern that emerged after the first London Tube bombings two years ago, as described by Melanie Phillips in her book, Londonistan, repeats itself:

"Instead of gaining a clear-eyed understanding of the ideology that so threatens it, Britain has thus been subverted by it. Instead of fighting this ideology with all the power at its command, Britain makes excuses for it, seeks to appease it--and even turns the blame that should be heaped on it on itself instead. After the [July 2005] London bombings, the main concern of the media and intelligentsia was to avoid ‘Islamophobia,’ the thought-crime that seeks to surpass legitimate criticism of Islam and demonize those who would tell the truth about Islamist aggression. Consequently, Muslim denial of any religious responsibility for the bombings was echoed and reinforced by government ministers and commentators, who sought to explain the Islamist terror in their midst by blaming, on the one hand, a few ‘unrepresentative’ extremists preachers and, on the other, Muslim poverty and discrimination--even though the bombers came from middle-class homes and had been to university."

In this case, because it is impossible to hide that the London and Glasgow terrorists were medical doctors and, undeniably, not impoverished victims of oppression or war, offical denial must come by way of an all-encompassing blanket form. No connection with Muslims here!

This is a very bad sign for the war against jihad in the UK.