Thursday - February 24, 2011

a proud frenchman speaks his mind honestly. a proud frenchman faces day in court on charges

OK ... I know.  My source for this one is the N.Y. Times. Dare I say this on BMEWS?  T’was a link in an interesting story that held my attention. But that link turned out to be the Times.  Which guys, does not make this article all bad. Although I think some of you with quicker tempers then mine will think the Frenchman being written about might be anti American. No. I don’t see it that way. A proud French national? Yup. Over proud? Well, aren’t we sometime?
But that is not the issue here.
The subject is free speech in the form of someone speaking about taboo subjects like - - gasp. Minorities in a less then positive light. So like Wilders in Holland, this fellow is being taken to court on a suit brought by a civil rights group. So ... no matter that he believes his country may have too many Americanisms, and in fact it’s me saying what I think he believes, the fact is that the guy is being railroaded.  And if you read it ALL, you will find as I did, or I think I did, it’s a matter of semantics as well. 

Here. Take a look and let me know how you read this guy.
Oh yeah ... make note of the last paragraph or two here. Are his critics splitting fine hairs?

“When you describe reality, you’re treated as a criminal.”
ÉRIC ZEMMOUR
By SCOTT SAYARE

PARIS
HE is perhaps France’s best-known professional provocateur, as much adored by the xenophobes of the far-right as he is reviled by immigrants, women and gays. But Éric Zemmour might also be misunderstood by his allies and enemies alike, a sort of hopeless intellectual whose nuance is lost in the sensationalist jumble of the media world he inhabits.

A slight man with a quick tongue and a fearsome intellect, Mr. Zemmour, 52, has made a career of speaking on the edge in a culture where the ideal of social harmony often takes precedence over freedom of speech. He can be heard daily on French radio, read weekly in the news media and seen all over television; he is routinely accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, fear-mongering and narcissism, or some combination thereof.

“I’m reviving the ‘French polemic’ in a world that’s on the one hand Americanized, and on the other, that people want to see sterilized by antiracism, by political correctness,” Mr. Zemmour said over coffee at the back of a dark Paris cafe. “That it is to say, where you’re not allowed to say anything bad about minorities.”

In comments that his critics have parsed and denounced and parsed again, he has spoken of a “white race” and a “black race,” decried what he sees as the feminization of society and called homosexuality a social disorder. Last month, though, his pronouncements for the first time brought him before a court, on charges of defamation and “provocation to racial discrimination.”In a televised debate last March he argued that blacks and Arabs were the targets of illegal racial profiling by the French police “because the majority of traffickers are black and Arab; that’s how it is, it’s a fact.” The same day, on another channel, he suggested that French employers “have the right” to deny employment to blacks or Arabs.

The comments surely do not rank among his most incendiary, and, however uncomfortable, the first point might well be true. Even the rights groups that brought the case acknowledge that France’s poor, immigrant populations account for a disproportionate amount of crime, if not a clear “majority,” in a country that does not keep official racial statistics.

MUCH to Mr. Zemmour’s delight, his three-day trial in January drew droves of supporters, including several prominent politicians, along with hordes of critics and a crush of reporters and photographers. His comments had already fueled months of controversy and hand-wringing; he was nearly fired from his post as an editorial writer at Le Figaro Magazine, and Canal+, the television station that broadcast his statement on traffickers, received a warning from the French audiovisual authority.

The intense reaction to Mr. Zemmour’s case — and more broadly, to Mr. Zemmour himself — seems a measure of the tensions in France around race, Islam and integration. And it speaks to the difficulty of discussing those issues in a nation that is committed constitutionally to treat every person simply as a “citizen,” with no acknowledgment of ethnicity, color or religion.

“When you describe reality,” Mr. Zemmour said at his trial, “you’re treated as a criminal.”
His critics say it is less a question of pronouncing realities than how they are pronounced.

“If he had said that there is an ‘overrepresentation of the immigrant population,’ there wouldn’t have been a trial,” said Alain Jakubowicz, a lawyer who heads one of the rights groups that brought suit. “There are the words that are said, and the words that are received, the words that are understood by listeners.”

A LOT MORE TO READ HERE

Posted by peiper     on 02/24/2011 at 04:57 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • FRANCE • Judges-Courts-Lawyers •  
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