Dépenser à en mourir

Un goupe de libéraux américains a réalisé un petit film qui a le mérite de mettre en perspective les différents plans de relance et de secours aux banques.



Sommes nous plus vertueux ? A peine. Au Royaume-Uni, le gouvernement a dépensé davantage par habitant que Barack Hussein Obama (BHO). L'Europe continentale échappe aux pires excès, mais le gouvernement français poursuit un endettement chronique depuis bien plus longtemps.

La mort d'Ilan Halimi vue par le judaïsme américain

L'horrible meurtre d'Ilan Halimi entre les mains d'une bande de criminels que l'on hésite à qualifier encore d'être humains suscite relativement peu de commentaires en France. Le procès d'assises qui cherche à déterminer les différents degrés de responsabilités parmi une bande de jeunes gens issus de l'immigration afro-musulmane se déroule à huis clos, ce qui ne facilite pas le travail des journalistes.

Lois des travers des professionnels des médias français, toujours disposés à excuser un xénophobe ou un raciste dans la mesure où il est musulman ou originaire du continent africain, la journaliste américaine Pamela Geller, interrogée par Jamie Glazov de Front Page Magazine appelle un chat, un chat et enfonce les doigts où ça fait mal.

Ses propos sont souvent excessifs et injustes, mais comment rester de marbre en écoutant le détail du martyre du jeune homme, de l'indifférence de la police et de la complicité des habitants de la cité ?

France’s Private Concentration Camp


Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Pamela Geller, founder, editor and publisher of the popular and award-winning weblog Atlas Shrugs.com. She has won acclaim for her interviews with internationally renowned figures, including John Bolton, Geert Wilders, Bat Ye'or, Natan Sharansky, and many others, and has broken numerous important stories -- notably the questionable sources of some of the financing of the Obama campaign. Her op-eds have been published in The Washington Times, The American Thinker, Israel National News, Front Page Magazine, World Net Daily, and New Media Journal, among other publications.

FP: Pamela Geller, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Geller: Thank you for having me Jamie.

You’ve been following the trial of the torture and murder of a young Jewish man, Ilan Halimi, in Paris. Tell us about the case and the trial.

Geller: The death of Ilan Halimi can only be described as an unspeakable horror, and yet typical of the increasing Islamic Jew-hatred and violence against the Jews. A group calling itself the Muslim Barbarians targeted Jewish men for torture and murder. Their first attempts to kidnap a Jew were unsuccessful, despite the lure of a beautiful girl. Ilan Halimi was not so lucky. He did not escape the Islamic homemade concentration camp the Muslim Barbarians had set up.

The banality of evil lived in that apartment building. Apartment dwellers, all Muslims, heard Ilan's screams and cries of torture over a period of three weeks, and yet did not call the cops. The screams must have been loud because the torture was especially atrocious: the thugs cut bits of flesh off the young man. They cut his fingers and ears. They burned him with acid. They poured flammable liquid on him and set him on fire. Not only did those in the building not go to the police -- they did nothing at all. Worse, many took part in the tortures.

So systemic is the Jew hatred in France that it impeded rescuing Ilan or securing his release. Halimi's family said that throughout Ilan's entire captivity, the French police refused to move on any of the evidence that pointed to an anti-Semitic motive. Instead, the police conducted a routine kidnap investigation (which invariably involves ransom, not death). The police refused to pursue the anti-Semitic motivations of the kidnappers in spite of the fact that, according to newspaper accounts, "in their e-mail and telephone communications with Ilan's family, his captors repeatedly referred to his Judaism, and on at least one occasion recited verses from the Koran while Ilan was heard screaming in agony in the background".

The family begged the police to listen to torturous phone calls from the kidnappers and acknowledge that Ilan was abducted because he was Jewish. Clearly, had the police not acted in judeophobic fashion, they would have recognized that Ilan's life was in terrible danger and taken urgent action. But law enforcement was not the only guilty party. The government refused to acknowledge the anti-Semitic motives behind the torture and killing a full week after the Halimi turned up mutilated and dead.

This was not new, of course. In 2003, Sebastian Sellam, a popular disc jockey at a hot Parisian night club called Queen known as DJ Lam C (a reverse play on his surname) was on his way to work when in an underground parking lot, a Muslim neighbor slit Sellam’s throat twice. His face was completely mutilated with a carving fork. Even his eyes were gouged out.

It has taken three years to bring this case to trial and even now, they are hiding their dirty little secrets behind closed doors.

FP: How come this trial is not receiving any attention or coverage?

Geller: The French would like this ugly little business to go away. Like Al Dura. Like
their sordid national behavior when the Nazis occupied France.

The latest outrage in the closed (more like hidden) trial of the "Muslim barbarian" ringleader Fofana and his 26 accomplices (it was more like 50) in the savage torture and murder of Ilan Halimi is suspension of the trial, with no indication of when it will begin again. Why isn't Youssouf Fofana, in a glass box like Eichmann at Nuremberg, chained like the wild animal that he is?

In a shocking display of proud Islamic Jew hatred (consistent with the most sacred teachings of the Koran), the brutal Halimi murder trial was suspended after the defendant spewed vile invectives and threw his "Arab shoes" across the courtroom at the jury. Throwing shoes at someone is a powerful insult in the Arab world.

According to a prosecution lawyer, Fofana's shoe throwing occurred during the presentation o f evidence by doctors who examined Halimi's body.

It is not clear when the hearing would be resumed. The trial is being conducted behind closed doors, with no press or public allowed, at the request of two of the defendants who were minors at the time of the killing. The trial is closed at the request of barbarians so evil, so savage that it defies the normal mind. And yet the vichy French acquiesced to the Muslim nazis and are hiding their pathetic attempt at justice behind closed doors.

The silence in the media and across the world is a crime against humanity. Imagine, if you will, the unthinkable, the impossible -- if Ilan had been a Muslim and his attackers had been Jews. Stop laughing -- I know it is impossible, but that's not my point. This is damning proof of the Jew hatred that is running wild across the world. Israel shuts a light off in Gaza and the world wants to eliminate her. Imagine if Ilan had been black and his attackers had been white. Stop and think about it.

FP: So let’s dig a bit deeper here: why did the police turn a blind eye to the evidence indicating that Islamic anti-Semitism was behind the kidnapping? Why is the French government, law enforcement and the media now covering up why this horrifying crime was committed? Better to let a Jew get tortured and killed than to point to the truth about what Islam teaches and what many Muslims believe and are ready to act upon, yes? This is Jew-Hate and a surrender to Islam simultaneously, yes?

Geller: Yes, exactly. This is a strain of anti-Semitism in Europe that has never been eradicated. There is never any discussion of Islamic anti-Semitism, and it is fundamental to Islamic teachings. This refusal to acknowledge the obvious gives tacit approval to incitement to violence. It is unsafe to walk about many European cities with any identifying Jewish apparel or accessories on. Is that what Europe learned from World War II? Is that the lesson that Europe took away from the holocaust?

The lesson that Europe had decided to avail itself of in the aftermath of Auschwitz was not that evil is bad and that they behaved like monsters, but rather that everything was caused by nationalism -- and therefore, what they really needed to do was have a European Union that would obviate their need for nationalism, so that they could become this transnational gobbletygook. They'd all get together and therefore they wouldn't have another Auschwitz.

But really the lesson should have been that they were evil and they had to be good. And that is the lesson they still have to learn. You have to be able and willing to make moral distinctions and stand up for the good and fight evil, and that is something the Europeans refuse to do.

They are constantly having memorials to dead Jews, while condemning Israel for every act of self defense, no matter how benign it is, in the defense of innocent Jewish citizens.

Ilan Halimi best demonstrates the horror of this lack of humanity. But certainly the "death to Jews" rallies that spread like a cancer across the Europe (and major US cities) during the Gaza defensive in January is certainly a gross demonstration of this evil.

FP: What are your own personal thoughts on this case?

Geller: It is an indescribable horror. Unimaginable. It demonstrates the free hand Jew hatred is given. It was not just the Muslims that reveled in the torture of this young Jewish man; it was law enforcement's response (or lack of it), and the circus-like atmosphere of the trial. It is a stunning indictment of French society. Flagrant and unabashed hatred.

FP: What can ordinary citizens do to try to bring some kind of justice to this horrifying crime and to expose the shameless, hateful and cowardly behavior of French authorities and the media etc?

Geller: Speak up! Write, call, email, fax media and elected officials. Burke was right when he said all that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing. Speak up! Evil is made possible by the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction (channeling Ayn Rand here).

FP: What do we get from the reality that this happened, as you relate, in an apartment building where myriad dwellers, all Muslims, heard Ilan's screams and cries of torture and did not only did nothing but came to participate? This wasn’t a secret between three people. Dozens and dozens of people knew about this, and supported and engaged in it. What does it tell us?

Could it possibly have something to do with the Islamic theological teaching about not only the importance of hating and killing Jews, but also that a Muslim will go to heaven if he kills a Jew?

Hmmm I wonder.

The liberal and leftist milieus cannot accept what it tells us of course, but they know there would never be a reverse situation (i.e. an apartment building full of Jews who hear a Muslim screaming from being tortured and they support it and participate in it, etc.). And if this did happen, which it wouldn’t, imagine the media being completely silent about it.

Geller: This is the terrible truth about Islam, well documented in Dr. Andrew Bostom's encyclopedic tome, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. The Islamic dehumanization of the Jews mirrors what the Nazis did during the Hlocaust. I find it troubling in all of my research and personal dealings it is difficult to find devout Muslims (any Muslims that are not apostates) who are not hostile to Israel. It speaks volumes. And of course, none of this would be possible if the Left were not aligning itself with political Islam. But this is consistent with the modus operandi of the left. Historically they align themselves with the totalitarian ideology du jour.

FP: Pamela Geller, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and is the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. His new book is United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.

Florence Rey retrouve la liberté

Florence Rey à son procès.

Florence Rey, condamnée en 1998 à 20 ans de réclusion criminelle à la suite d’une fusillade qui avait fait cinq morts dont trois policiers, en 1994 à Paris, a été libérée en mai. Elle est donc resté environ quinze ans derrière les barreaux.

Florence Rey avait été impliquée, avec son compagnon Audrey Maupin, dans une fusillade au cours de laquelle trois policiers et un chauffeur de taxi avaient été tués le 4 octobre 1994 à Paris. (Lire le récit de cette nuit sanglante dans un article paru en 1994 dans Libération)

Audry Maupin avait également trouvé la mort dans cette action, qui avait suscité une très vive émotion en France en raison de la jeunesse et de la personnalité du couple, des étudiants en rupture de ban. Elle était âgée de 19 et lui de 23 ans au moment des faits.

Florence Rey avait été reconnue coauteur du meurtre d’un des policiers tués et complice de ceux des trois autres victimes.

Aujourd'hui âgée de 34 ans, la jeune femme, qui a passé quinze ans en prison, est «transformée», selon France Info. Grâce au soutien de sa mère, elle a poursuivi des études universitaires d'histoire-géographie et fait beaucoup de sport.

Pas un mot de condamnation dans la presse pour l'idéologie anarchiste qui a justifié a priori pour ceux marginaux le recours à la violence. Imaginons un instant que ces deux jeunes gens aient professé des idées politiques différentes, il est difficile d'imaginer des journalistes aussi indulgents. La presse, et Libération en tête, aurait réclamé des peines exemplaires et l'interdiction des mouvements politiques partageant la même idéologie du couple.

Il est frappant de constater qu'à chaque fois que des hommes et des femmes partageant l'idéologie majoritaire des journalistes sont pris la main dans le sac, empêtrés dans des turpitudes diverses, la presse se révèle d'une grande indulgence. Le dernier exemple en date étant celui de Daniel Cohn Bendit.

Florence Rey, ayant sur la conscience la mort de cinq personnes, est sortie de prison après avoir purgé une quinzaine d'années de sa peine. Je ne puis m'empêcher de penser à un autre cas dont j'ai eu connaissance par le mail d'un lecteur, celui de Michel Lajoye. Ce jeune marginal xénophobe a posé une bombe dans un café arabe de la banlieue de Rouen. Cet attentat n'a fait ni victimes, ni dégâts, ni blessés, même si l'intention de son auteur était probablement autre. Mais ce jeune homme a fait plus de vingt ans de prison.

De même, Carlos est en prison pour encore longtemps car il ne se contente pas d'afficher des opinions de gauche bien comme il faut qui le rendraient sympathique aux yeux des journalistes de Canal + et de Libération.

Quoi qu'il en soit, je me réjouis de la sortie de prison de Florence Rey. Les personnes condamnées pour avoir eu recours à la violence politique ne se comparent en rien avec les criminels de droit commun. Comme des prisonniers de guerre, ils sont parfaitement réinsérables dans la société.

A condition qu'ils acceptent que la guerre est finie pour eux.

Origines de l'insularité britannique

L'insularité britannique ne naît pas de la géographie, elle trouve son origine dans les choix personnels d'Henri VIII qui pour satisfaire un égo démesuré a choisi de rompre avec Rome. Contrairement à ce que l'histoire officielle anglaise répète depuis le XVIe siècle, le protestantisme n'étaient en rien un mouvement populaire, il a été imposé du haut en bas de la société britannique avec les tristes conséquences que l'on sait.

Ce matin, dans les colonnes de The Independent, Paul Valley répond à la question : « Que se serait-il passé si Henry VIII avait puy obtenir de Rome son divorce ? »

The Big Question: What would have happened if Henry VIII had obtained his divorce?

Why are we asking this now?

Because the Vatican has just announced that it will market 200 facsimile copies of the elaborately decorated parchment from 1530, which bore an appeal by English peers to Pope Clement VII asking for the annulment of the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon.

The document is key, historians said, to understanding the formation of the English national character. It marks, said Professor David Starkey in Rome yesterday, the most important event in English history. "This is the moment at which England ceases to be a normal European Catholic country and goes off on this strange path," he said, "that leads it to the Atlantic, to the New World, to Protestantism, to Euro-scepticism."

Why did Henry want a divorce in the first place?

It wasn't a divorce, it was an annulment. To cement an alliance with Europe's most powerful country, Spain, Henry's father, Henry VII, had arranged a marriage between Henry's elder brother Arthur and the daughter of the Spanish monarchs, Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon. When Arthur died she was married off to Henry.

But by the end of the 1520s, Henry's wife, Catherine of Aragon, was in her forties and he was desperate for a son to secure the Tudor dynasty.

Henry applied to the Pope for an annulment of the marriage, on the grounds that it was not lawful in those days for someone to marry his brother's widow. Technically that was correct. And royal annulments had happened before: Louis XII of France had been granted one in 1499. But, by then, Catherine's nephew had become the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and he did not want to see his aunt humiliated. So the Pope dilly-dallied.

What happened?

Henry fell in love with Anne Boleyn and by 1533 she was pregnant. He married her in secret. Meanwhile he had pushed through Parliament a series of Acts cutting back papal power and influence in England. Several months after the wedding he got the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer to unilaterally declare his first marriage invalid. Anne Boleyn was crowned queen a week later. A year later the Pope declared that Henry's second marriage was invalid.

Henry declared that the Pope no longer had authority in England and in 1534, Parliament passed an act that stated that Henry VIII was now the Head of "The Church of England". The Pope responded by excommunicating Henry. The king passed the Act of Supremacy. Those who would not swear allegiance to him as head of the Church were executed for treason. Then followed the Dissolution of the Monasteries, under which all the lands and possessions of Britain's religious orders were purloined by the king and his apparatchiks.

Wouldn't the reformation have happened anyway?

That was the myth peddled by the English establishment for centuries. The propaganda was that a corrupt and decaying Catholicism was replaced by a more morally pure and progressive Protestantism. But historians now challenge that view. They are led by Cambridge University's Eamon Duffy whose scholarly masterpiece, The Stripping of the Altars, was a meticulous study of the accounts, wills, primers, memoirs, rood screens, stained glass, joke-books and graffiti of the period.

What did this book show?

It showed beyond doubt that medieval Catholicism was in fact flourishing and much loved by the ordinary English people for whom it offered social and spiritual sustenance. Luther's Protestant reformation had taken no root.

"Very few people were remotely interested in ideas from Germany," said David Starkey. But "because Protestantism won and because history is written by the winners, the Protestant account of the Reformation triumphed". The Reformation in England was imposed from the top.

How was the Reformation imposed?

By a fierce centralist onslaught by the King and a small group of brutal, greedy, self-serving henchmen out for loot. Protestantism was imposed – through coercion, spying and disenfranchisement – by a cadre of political opportunists during just three decades of Henry's and then his daughter Elizabeth's reign.

Public resistance to Elizabeth's dismantling of the Catholic parish system persisted until the 1570s. And some Catholic customs and loyalties lingered until the beginning of the 17th century. However, by then, as Professor Duffy put it, England's Catholic inheritance became for the English people "a distant world, impossible for them to look back on as their own".

Wouldn't Protestantism have flourished anyway?

Probably not. Henry had persecuted English Protestants until the row over the annulment. But once his estrangement from Rome was clear, Protestants flooded into England. There was a big influx from France after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 when a large group of wealthy and prominent Huguenots were slaughtered in Catholic Paris. There was also a steady wave of Protestant from the Low Countries after Spain began to assert its rule there. So Protestantism was a foreign import.

How did the move towards Protestantism manifest itself?

In 1536 Henry gave permission for an English translation of the Bible to be published in England, which was a very non-Catholic act for Rome was still hiding behind its Latin. Henry continued to regard himself to be a Catholic but by doing this he began to move the Church in the direction of Protestantism. From that point onward, the Church of England claimed itself to be both Catholic and Reformed (as distinct from just Protestant) a character which many proclaim to be its continuing compromising genius to this day. It was to be 100 years before the Protestants really showed their strength – by cutting off the head of the king in the Civil War.

Were it not for the annulment, as John Stuart Mill put it in his essay On Liberty, this country would almost certainly have followed the example of the majority of the Continent. "In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire," Mill wrote, "Protestantism was rooted out; and mostly likely would have been so in England, had Queen Mary [Henry VIII's first daughter] lived, or Queen Elizabeth died."

How would things have been different if England had remained Catholic?

"My offices might be in Rome and I might be writing in Latin," quipped Paul Handley, the editor of the Church Times, the leading Anglican newspaper, yesterday. "And what would have happened to the bolshy individualistic Englishman on which we base all our historical mythology?"

It would have been a unique Catholicism though, not fervent like the Mediterranean kind, but not separatist like the Catholism of France which is the product of a guillotine-crazed Revolution and a secularising Enlightenment. We might just be irreligious Catholics instead of irreligious Protestants. But the world may have lost something rather special.

Quand un historien s'amuse

Fabrice D'Almeida est un historien français qu'il faut surveiller du coin de l'oeil : toujours prêt à étonner par une audace ou une originalité où pétille le talent et l'humour. Il s'est livré dans les colonnes de Libération à un exercice convenu, se soumettre aux conditions du bac et rédiger un sujet d'histoire.

Et si on refaisait la conférence de Brioni ?

L'historien Fabrice D'Almeida a planché sur l'un des sujets d'histoire-géo proposés ce mercredi matin aux candidats au bac. Exercice de style totalement libre. Voici sa copie.

Fabrice D'Almeida, historien enseignant à Paris II Assas et co-auteur, avec Anthony Rowley, du livre Et si on refaisait l’histoire, s'est prêté au jeu proposé par Libération.fr: plancher sur l'un des sujets de l'épreuve d'histoire-géo du bac. Avec en ligne de mire: se faire plaisir, laisser libre cours à l'imagination. L'idée n'est pas de proposer un corrigé du bac mais un exercice de style, sans aucune contrainte.

Sujet choisi: L'étude de texte sur l'extrait de communiqué de Brioni, publié à l'issue de la rencontre entre Nasser, Nehru et Tito le 19 juillet 1956. (Lire le texte en version pdf ici)

Que trois dirigeants d’horizons aussi différents que Nehru, Tito et Nasser décident de se retrouver dans une jolie petite île au large de l’Istrie, voilà qui pouvait étonner les journalistes en cette année 1956. Certes, à Bandoung l’année précédente, un rapprochement s’était esquissé afin de fédérer les pays qui refusaient l’alternative géopolitique entre communisme du Bloc de l’Est et capitalisme du monde occidental. Mais le rassemblement paraissait fragile.

Or, le 19 juillet 1956, au terme de la discussion, un idéal politique a émergé, celui du non-alignement. Et de fait, les trois figures qui ont produit le texte final du communiqué s’inscrivent toutes en rupture. Tito, l’hôte de la réunion sur cette île où il apprécie de prendre ses vacances, tout le premier.

Dirigeant de la résistance communiste contre l’occupation nazie pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le maître de la Yougoslavie a abandonné le stalinisme et créé son propre modèle de développement. Il rejette les fantasmes soviétiques sur l’industrie lourde, fier de défendre la ruralité de son pays. Nehru, le disciple de Gandhi, a, lui, effectué une double rupture : avec l’empire britannique en menant le combat pour l’indépendance, et avec le pacifisme ensuite en assumant le conflit avec le Pakistan, depuis 1947. Nasser, enfin, vient de prendre la tête de l’Egypte en brisant une monarchie complice des Britanniques et des Français et cherche à imposer une république panarabe.

Un projet pour la planète
Or, la portée du message que les trois hommes lancent au monde va bien au-delà de leurs conflits et intérêts particuliers. Leur proposition de non-alignement est un projet pour la planète. Il se définit autour de trois «dé» qui structurent le communiqué : désarmement, développement et, surtout, décolonisation (aujourd'hui nous ajouterions décroissance). En les appliquant, les relations internationales prendraient un nouvel essor, propice à l’établissement d’une véritable communauté de nations sous l’égide de l’ONU. Sans un tel programme, les pires catastrophes sont envisageables.

Le désarmement? Voilà une première solution pour sauver l’humanité. La glaciation nucléaire est entrée dans la conscience historique des hommes des années 1950. Le souvenir d’Hiroshima est présent dans les esprits. Les actualités filmées ont, dès 1945, montré la violence des impacts des bombes atomiques. Les Etats-Unis et l’Union soviétique sont susceptibles dans leur affrontement d’user de cette arme effrayante. Leur course aux armements entraîne mécaniquement une prolifération nucléaire dont nul ne sait quand elle s’arrêtera. L’Inde, surtout, avec son puissant potentiel scientifique, est lucide sur l’avance que donne un tel arsenal. La peur caractérise aussi les peuples qui cherchent à échapper à l’emprise coloniale.

De fait, la décolonisation est rarement pacifique. Si Nehru et la péninsule indienne ont pu marcher sans que l’occupant britannique ne déclenche une guerre totale, il n’en a pas été de même ailleurs. En Indochine, il a fallu des centaines de milliers de morts et plus de sept ans de batailles pour que naisse le Vietnam. L’Indonésie a vu l’occupant néerlandais conduire de féroces combats avant d’échapper à son emprise. Le Kenya, lui, connaît la rébellion Mau-mau contre les Britanniques.

Mais surtout, l’ONU et l’opinion internationale regardent avec horreur le développement de la répression en Algérie depuis le soulèvement de 1954. L’armée française combat le FLN de toute sa violence, en appelant au contingent et aux auxiliaires recrutés sur place. Elle regarde l’Egypte de Nasser, ami du combat algérien, avec une haine sourde. Il faudrait briser cette base arrière. Cela servirait de leçon à la Tunisie et au Maroc, auxquels il a fallu concéder l’indépendance, sous le vocable pudique d’autonomie.

Brioni, ce petit lieu de paradis
Le développement, enfin, apparaît comme une nécessité absolue. La pauvreté est visible partout dans le monde. Les pays occidentaux, malgré leurs indigents, découvrent sidérés les effets massifs de la malnutrition. Les spécialistes de la toute jeune discipline démographique lancent les premières alertes sur les risques de surpopulation et produisent des rapports sur les ressources inégales. L’opulence, depuis peu retrouvée en Europe de l’Ouest, est un modèle que l’on croit alors exportable. Coopération disent les non-alignés qui sont conscients des carences de leurs pays. Car ils manquent encore de cadres capables d’alimenter une industrie ou d’inventer des solutions inédites. Cela viendra, malgré les résistances des grandes puissances, qui, tard, comprendront que, pour commercer, il ne faut pas être seul.

Plus de cinquante ans sont passés et Brioni, ce petit lieu de paradis, n’a plus l’heur d’être la résidence d’un dictateur. Tito est enterré et avec lui a disparu la Yougoslavie. Nasser s’est éteint laissant un monde arabe déchiré et brutal. Le parti du congrès de Nehru a, lui, connu l’alternance et les assassinats successifs de ses héritiers. Leur hypocrisie sur les inégalités sociales (castes), politiques (clientélisme) et ethniques a été fatal au rêve pacifique qu’ils tissaient. Pourtant, de cette lointaine époque, émerge encore un message de solidarité et d’attention aux autres qui conserve une étonnante vigueur. Les hyper puissances comme la Chine et les Etats-Unis ont pu remplacer les superblocs, elles devront un jour renoncer à leur supériorité et ployer devant le droit international afin qu’émerge une paix juste pour chacun.

Par Fabrice d’Almeida, professeur à l’Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris 2), Institut français de Presse. Dernier ouvrage paru, avec Anthony Rowley, Et si on refaisait l’histoire, Odile Jacob, 2009.

Guerre atomique

L'abri antinucléaire de Kelvedon Hatch dans l'Essex.

Que se serait-il passé en cas de crise nucléaire grave ? C'est un secret encore bien gardé en France ou en Russie. En revanche, l'historien Peter Hennessy a obtenu la publication des rapports britanniques qui organisent en détail la survie du pays en cas de conflagration.

Le journaliste Stephen Bates publie une intéressante recension de cet ouvrage dans les colonnes du Guardian de ce matin.

War Book reveals how Britain planned to cope with nuclear attack

Historian Peter Hennessy persuaded officials to release document kept ready for use from 1960s to 1990s

New details of how Britain would have been governed in the event of a nuclear war from the 1960s into the 1990s have been disclosed with the publication of the secret War Book.

The document, over 16 chapters, gives precise plans and instructions for what would have been done by officialdom during the build-up to an international confrontation and after the bombs started falling.

There are indications that aspects of the arrangements have been adapted for use during other, domestic, emergencies since the cold war, including the fuel protests in 2000.

Although some of the plans have been revealed before – including earlier this year the scripts that would have been broadcast by the BBC in the event of a nuclear war, instructing the public not to panic – governments of the period left nothing to chance, including the censoring of private mail.

The country would have been divided into 12 regions, each governed by cabinet ministers with wide powers, aided by senior military officers, chief constables and judges and based in bunkers. Other senior figures would have retreated to a central government shelter under the Cotswolds.

The plans all assumed that the confrontation would be with the Soviet Union. Among the possible scenarios spelled out in the autumn of 1968 was escalating tension following a Soviet moon landing and troop movements in eastern Europe.

The historian and Whitehall specialist Peter Hennessy, who persuaded officials to release the document, said that the book spelled out what would have happened in detail.

Capable d'abriter 600 personnes, l'abri antinucléaire de Kelvedon Hatch était un des éélments clef du réseau de défense antiaérienne britannique ROTOR.

Hennessy, professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary University of London, told the BBC's Today programme: "The surprise really is the width and magnitude of it – 16 chapters to get the nation from a peacetime footing to a total war footing. It is a remarkable enterprise.

"It was done by people who had to do it. It must have been one of the most terrible jobs in Whitehall during the cold war. It literally was requiring people in immense security to peer into the abyss."

The book apparently formed the basis for regular exercises every two years by senior civil servants, with daily internal briefings, the organisation of national preparedness schemes including the stockpiling of food and building materials for shelters and, as the threat grew more imminent, the removal of art treasures from London to Scotland and the emptying of hospitals of all but the most acutely ill.

David Young, a former Ministry of Defence civil servant who took part in the mock exercises, told the programme: "R-hour would be the final release of nuclear weapons. There may have been an earlier tactical use … but R-hour was [when] everything that's left goes. That's not an easy decision to participate in. Even though you know it is just an exercise, it makes you think."

Young said ministers were not encouraged to take part in the exercises: "They would be disinclined to play by the rules. Some of them quite liked talking, so you'd get behind time and there would be a fear that if they showed a reluctance to do what the military believed was necessary, that this would weaken deterrence."

Another former civil servant, Sir David Ormand, who became permanent secretary at the Home Office, said he took part in exercises into the 1990s.

"My favourite measure, the one which always aroused a lot of debate … was the introduction of censorship for private correspondence. You can imagine that was something that ministers would only agree to right at the very end when it was clear that war was inevitable."

He said that some of the contingency plans had been adapted and brought into use during the 2000 fuel protests, which threatened to cut off petrol supplies: "We took over the bunker and installed a chief constable and representatives of the oil companies and some civil servants and we built from scratch a crisis management machine. That's exactly what you don't want to have to do in a crisis, because a lot of time's spent just organising who's going to talk to who and how it's going to work."

Young told the programme: "I participated in one R-hour in the early hours of the morning and I remember reporting on it afterwards through the newly installed closed circuit TV and foolishly saying, because of the day of the week, 'There we are, R-hour, sic transit gloria Thursday'.

"The exercise was taken very seriously and jokes were frowned on, even if they were elegant puns on Latin phrases - 'so passes the world's glory'. I subsequently learned the foreign secretary, Alec Douglas Home, said: 'Who is that very foolish young man?'"

Visiter également : www.secretnuclearbunker.com

Un journaliste vend la mèche

Sorious Samura, un journaliste courageux.

Sorious Samura, un journaliste africain travaillant pour la presse britannique s'est intéressé au phénomène des viols en bande organisée après avoir appris que sur 92 violeurs interpellés entre 2006 et 2009, 87 étaient non-blancs. En revanche, il ne donne pas l'appartenance raciale des victimes, mais il semble probable qu'elles soient elles aussi majoritairement noires.

Pour quelles raisons ce crime qui en Afrique n'est associé qu'à des situations extrêmes de guerre se répand-il au Royaume-Uni et pour quelles raisons se concentre-t-il parmi les jeunes noirs, mineurs et jeunes adultes ?

Dans son enquête pour The Independent, le journaliste s'est entretenu avec de nombreux jeunes noirs et a découvert consterné qu'ils entretiennent à l'égard des femmes et de la sexualité une attitude très dévalorisante, aux antipodes de ce que les médias diffusent comme idéologie, faite de féminisme et d'homophilie.

Un des problèmes mis en lumière par le journaliste est l'impossibilité de prendre des mesures spécifiques car elles vont à l'encontre de l'idéologie égalitaire en vigueur dans les services sociaux et dans la presse.

Je vous invite à regarder ce reportage sur Channel 4 demain lundi 22 juin à 20 H. Remarquons que sur le site de Channel 4, il n'est à aucun moment question du problème spécifique posé à la communauté noirs par ces viols. La chaîne ne parle que de « jeunes ».

On peut lire ici, ici et ici des articles concernant des cas de viols collectifs. A l'inverse de la presse de gauche, les journaux populaires publient la photo des violeurs.

Gang rape: Is it a race issue?

A high proportion of such attacks appears to be carried out by young black men, according to Metropolitan Police statistics. Sorious Samura investigates this horrendous crime – and what it says about Britain today


In 1999 I witnessed a gang rape in Sierra Leone. I was forced to watch a group of rebel soldiers taking it in turns to rape a young girl in front of an audience of jeering men. It was the height of the civil conflict and rape had become a devastating weapon of war. When I moved to Britain I believed I had escaped such horrific sexual violence. As my Dispatches investigation tomorrow night shows, I was mistaken. Gang rape is happening here – and what I have found most disturbing as an African is that a disproportionate number of these attacks are being carried out by black or mixed-race young men.

Towards the end of last year, police and child welfare experts working on Channel 4's Street Weapons Commission told us of their concerns about gang rape. Then two big cases hit the headlines.

In December, nine schoolboys, some as young as 13 at the time of the attack, were convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl. She was dragged between tower blocks in Hackney where she was threatened with a knife, hit and raped during an ordeal that lasted an hour and a half – some of which was filmed on mobile phones. In January, three men were convicted of gang raping a 16-year-old with learning disabilities for two hours before dousing her with caustic soda in an effort to get rid of the evidence.

How prevalent is this crime and why it is happening in Britain? Despite the seriousness of the crime, I was amazed to discover that no national statistics exist: gang rape is simply not recorded as a separate crime category. So over a period of several months we set about collating our own.

We approached the Crown Prosecution Service, the Association of Chief Police Officers, all 50 police forces, crown courts, barristers and rape referral centres to try to establish the numbers.

One of the few police forces to have begun recording the figures of reported gang rape is the Metropolitan Police. In 2008 alone, they received reports of 85 gang rapes. Using the Met's definition of gang rape – those involving three or more perpetrators – we began to look at the number of convictions. We tracked down 29 cases, from January 2006 to March 2009, in which a total of 92 young people were convicted of involvement in gang rape.

One fact stood out. Of those convicted, 66 were black or mixed race, 13 were white and the remainder were from other countries including Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

Clearly this is not a crime exclusive to black communities, but I found it impossible to ignore the fact that such a high proportion were committed by black and mixed-race young men. As a black man as well as a journalist, I wanted to understand what lay behind such attacks. So I spoke to victims, groups of black and mixed-race teenagers, youth and social workers and community leaders.

The groups of young men I met in London expressed some profoundly disturbing attitudes towards girls and sex. The boys explained how they make arrangements for "line-ups" in which one girl has oral sex with up to six or seven of them at one time. These arrangements might be made at school or on mobile phones.

Sometimes these girls initially consent because they want to be popular. But these events can spiral into rape because the boys consider that any girl who is prepared to agree to a line-up can be considered fair game. One boy told me: "If she wants to go and meet a bag of boys then she's probably a jezzie [slut], and if she's going to a house it's over – she's going to get beaten [have sex]."

In other instances, as some of the victims in our film describe, girls can unwittingly walk into a trap, innocently visiting someone's house to listen to music or watch a film only to discover that a group of boys are lying in wait. Or they might be hanging out with friends in a park and suddenly realise they have become surrounded by a group of boys intent on sex.

For both boys and girls, the line between this sort of group sex and rape seems to be blurred. A girl might agree to have oral sex with two or three boys but then be ordered to have sex with six or seven. The teenage girls I met told me that boys simply don't understand what rape is. And yet this is a crime that can ruin lives and is punishable by life imprisonment.

Occasionally gang rape is used to punish a girl for minor transgressions against gang members. In one of my most shocking interviews, I met a girl who admitted she had helped to set up girls for gang rape. As the girlfriend of a gang member, she organised these rapes, partly out of fear and partly to fit in.

She admitted she was terrified of being raped herself and had walked away when witnessing a girl being gang-raped at a party because she feared she might be next: "There was just loads of boys and the girl's tights were ripped up, like, she was bleeding as well, because I think she was a virgin, and they were just taking turns on her basically, and she was crying, and I didn't get involved because I thought if I get involved they're gonna turn on me."

The victims' descriptions of their attacks are horrific. One young victim likened her attack to being "pulled and pushed around like a rag doll", while another 14-year-old girl described her ordeal when she was gang raped by a total of nine boys who told her that she was not the only girl they had attacked. In that case, nine boys were subsequently convicted of raping her. The youngest perpetrator was just 12 years old.

I found there was concern among black communities about this violence. The Rev Joyce Daley, from the Black Parents Forum in Hackney, told me that gang rape is not a rare or one-off phenomenon. It is happening on a regular basis. She said: "It could actually explode on our very streets." Steve Griffith, a youth worker in King's Cross, said: "I see too much abuse of young women on the streets."

Gang rape, while constituting only a tiny percentage of all rapes in the UK, is a horrible reality in this country. The nature of the crime is so appalling that much more research needs to be carried out into its causes. But what seems evident from my investigation is that the key to preventing it will be changing the way young men view women and the kind of group sexual activity they are engaging in at such a young age.

Sheldon Thomas, a youth worker in Brixton, said: "We've got a generation that looks at sex as if it's nothing, and treats disrespecting women as if it's nothing. These guys are like 13, 14 and 15, and their actual attitudes towards young girls – towards sex – is mind-blowing. It's actually leaving you asking: where are their morals, where are their values?"

Sorious Samura presents 'Dispatches: Rape in the City' on Channel 4 tomorrow night at 8pm