Ils disent: nous avons mis à mort le Messie, Jésus fils de Marie, l’apôtre de dieu. Non ils ne l’ont point tué, ils ne l’ont point crucifié, un autre individu qui lui ressemblait lui fut substitué, et ceux qui disputaient à son sujet ont été eux-mêmes dans le doute, ils n’ont que des opinions, ils ne l’ont pas vraiment tué. Mais Dieu l’a haussé à lui, Dieu est le puissant, Dieu est le sage.Le Coran (Sourate IV, verset 157-158)
L’erreur qui est commise aujourd’hui, c’est de penser que l’islam, c’est la religion de Mahomet. Non : c’est celle de Jésus, de Moïse et celle de Mahomet, le dernier des prophètes. Croire en Dieu, ses anges, ses prophètes, c’est ça l’islam. Jésus n’a pas été envoyé à l’Europe, mais aux fils d’Israël, pour corriger la loi de Moïse. Ils ont essayé de tuer Jésus, mais comme le dit le Coran, ce n’est pas Jésus, c’est un autre qui a été crucifié. La croix que vous portez n’a aucun sens, comme vos prières n’ont aucun sens.Khadafi (Paris, décembre 2007)
Convertissez-vous à l’Islam, Jésus a été envoyé pour les Hébreux, pas pour vous, en revanche Mahomet a été envoyé pour tous les humains. Vous croyez que Jésus a été crucifié mais ce n’est pas vrai, c’est Dieu qui l’a emmené au ciel. Ils ont crucifié quelqu’un qui lui ressemblait. Les juifs ont essayé de tuer Jésus parce qu’il voulait remettre la religion de Moïse sur le juste chemin.Khadafi (Rome, novembre 2009)
Affranchir le musulman de sa religion est le plus grand service qu’on puisse lui rendre. Renan
Au nom de Dieu tout puissant. Il n’y a qu’un Dieu à qui nous retournerons tous. Je veux informer tous les musulmans que l’auteur du livre intitulé Les Versets sataniques, qui a été écrit, imprimé et publié en opposition à l’Islam, au prophète et au Coran, aussi bien que ceux qui l’ont publié ou connaissent son contenu, ont été condamnés à mort. J’appelle tous les musulmans zélés à les exécuter rapidement, où qu’ils les trouvent, afin que personne n’insulte les saintetés islamiques. Celui qui sera tué sur son chemin sera considéré comme un martyr. C’est la volonté de Dieu. De plus, quiconque approchera l’auteur du livre, sans avoir le pouvoir de l’exécuter, devra le traduire devant le peuple afin qu’il soit puni pour ses actions. Que Dieu vous bénisse tous. Rouhollah Musavi Khomeini (Radio téhéran, 14 février 1989)
Je suis offensé par des sujets dans le journal chaque jour: traductions des discours de Osama bin Laden, photos de Abu Ghraib, de personnes qui insistent pour qu’Israël soit effacé de la surface de la terre, de gens qui prétendent que l’Holocauste n’a pas existé. Mais cela ne signifie pas que j’hésiterai à publier ces sujets. (…) Des voix furieuses prétendent que la caricature dit que le prophète est un terroriste ou que tous les musulmans sont des terroristes. Je lis cette caricature différemment: certains individus ont pris la religion musulmane en otage en commettant des actes terroristes au nom du prophète. Ce sont ceux-ci qui ont donné une mauvaise image à cette religion. Flemming Rose
Nous montons sur nos grands chevaux mais souvenons-nous que pendant les croisades et l’inquisition, des actes terribles ont été commis au nom du Christ. Dans notre pays, nous avons eu l’esclavage, trop souvent justifié par le Christ. Barack Hussein Obama
Il est tout à fait légitime pour le peuple américain d’être profondément préoccupé quand vous avez un tas de fanatiques vicieux et violents qui décapitent les gens ou qui tirent au hasard dans un tas de gens dans une épicerie à Paris.Barack Hussein Obama
La publication de caricatures du Prophète de l’Islam par le quotidien danois « Jyllands Posten » relayé par un quotidien parisien est un acte exécrable mettant une nouvelle fois en exergue l’Islamophobie ambiante, raciste et méprisante, envers plus d’un milliard de musulmans. (…) Il n’y a plus dans ce cas de liberté de la presse mais détournement de cette liberté. Hier les musulmans du monde étaient incapables de réagir à leurs détracteurs qui des siècles durant n’ont pas cessés de déverser des tombereaux de calomnies sur leur religion, leurs livres sacrés, leur Prophète. La modernité d’aujourd’hui leur permet d’exprimer leur profonde désapprobation de cette atteinte profanatoire et diffamatoire portés à leur religion caricaturant et affublant leur Prophète d’une image de terroriste accréditant une fois de trop l’Islam à la violence et au terrorisme. Comme dit le proverbe « Qui sème le vent récolte la tempête ». Docteur Dalil Boubakeur (Recteur de l’Institut Musulman de la Mosquée de Paris, 1er février 2006)
[Les musulmans de France] ne sentent pas que c’est au nom de l’Islam, ils sentent que c’est un coup porté à l’ensemble des musulmans. Dalil Boubakeur
Je suis effondré, c’est un acte de guerre. Je pense d’abord aux victimes et à leurs familles. Je ressens aussi un coup dur pour l’islam et les musulmans de France. Le travail d’intégration, de dialogue que nous effectuons depuis des années s’effondre brutalement, en quelques secondes. Les tueurs disent qu’ils ont vengé le Prophète. Mais c’est là une profanation de sa mémoire. En son époque, le Prophète a été caricaturé. Mais il a pardonné à ses adversaires, ses ennemis ! (…) Les musulmans doivent sortir dans les rues, manifester publiquement leur colère, leur dégoût, leur ras-le-bol. Trop, c’est trop ! Cette mobilisation doit aller au-delà de la communauté musulmane. Tout le monde doit défiler. On a atteint un tel niveau de haine. (…) Ils sont déjà stigmatisés, ils risquent de l’être encore plus, malheureusement. Ils n’avaient pas besoin de ça ! Je fais confiance au bon sens de nos concitoyens qui savent faire la différence entre un musulman normal et un psychopathe. Car ces crimes inqualifiables relèvent de la psychiatrie. Il est impossible que les tueurs soient nourris d’une quelconque spiritualité. Je n’imagine pas que la foi ait un jour caressé leur cœur. (…) J’étais contre les condamnations et les manifestations. Moi, cela ne m’avait pas choqué. Je suis pour la liberté d’expression tant qu’il n’y a pas d’insulte. Dans ces caricatures, je ne voyais pas d’insulte. La liberté en général, c’est ce qu’il y a de plus cher.Tareq Oubrou (imam de Bordeaux)
Le prophète n’a pas été vengé, mais notre religion, nos valeurs et les principes de l’islam ont été trahis. Tariq Ramadan
La condition préalable à tout dialogue est que chacun soit honnête avec sa tradition. (…) les chrétiens ont repris tel quel le corpus de la Bible hébraïque. Saint Paul parle de ” greffe” du christianisme sur le judaïsme, ce qui est une façon de ne pas nier celui-ci . (…) Dans l’islam, le corpus biblique est, au contraire, totalement remanié pour lui faire dire tout autre chose que son sens initial (…) La récupération sous forme de torsion ne respecte pas le texte originel sur lequel, malgré tout, le Coran s’appuie.René Girard
Dans la foi musulmane, il y a un aspect simple, brut, pratique qui a facilité sa diffusion et transformé la vie d’un grand nombre de peuples à l’état tribal en les ouvrant au monothéisme juif modifié par le christianisme. Mais il lui manque l’essentiel du christianisme : la croix. Comme le christianisme, l’islam réhabilite la victime innocente, mais il le fait de manière guerrière. La croix, c’est le contraire, c’est la fin des mythes violents et archaïques.René Girard
Ce passage du Coran concentre toute la mimétogonie de l’islam vis-à-vis du christianisme, parce que celui qu’il appelle Jésus – Issa pour les musulmans – est l’opposé du Jésus des Evangiles. Issa est la négation absolue du Christ, c’est son double monstrueux. Allah sauve Issa de la mort grâce au sacrifice d’un inconnu, tandis que Jésus se sacrifie pour sauver de la mort les inconnus qui croiront en lui. Le sacrifice christique détruit le mécanisme sacrificiel, alors que l’islam réhabilite le sacrifice archaïque, en sauvant Issa par un sacrifice archaïque. A l’endroit même où Jésus révèle le diabolique de la vision archaïque de la divinité, le Coran rétablit l’archaïsme avec les moyens de l’archaïque, à savoir la violence. Radu Stoenescu
Ils disent: nous avons mis à mort le Messie, Jésus fils de Marie, l’apôtre de dieu. Non ils ne l’ont point tué, ils ne l’ont point crucifié, un autre individu qui lui ressemblait lui fut substitué, et ceux qui disputaient à son sujet ont été eux-mêmes dans le doute, ils n’ont que des opinions, ils ne l’ont pas vraiment tué. Mais Dieu l’a haussé à lui, Dieu est le puissant, Dieu est le sage.Le Coran (Sourate IV, verset 157-158)
Si le fanatisme fut la maladie du catholicisme, si le nazisme fut la maladie de l’Allemagne, il est sûr que l’intégrisme est la maladie de l’islam. (…) Au lieu de distinguer le bon islam du mauvais, il vaut mieux que l’islam retrouve le débat et la discussion, qu’il redécouvre la pluralité des opinions, qu’il aménage une place au désaccord et à la différence. Abdelwahab Meddeb
Ce que nous devons interroger prioritairement, c’est la brèche qui a libéré dans l’aire d’islam une telle volonté de détruire et de s’autodétruire. Ce que nous devons penser et obtenir, c’est une délivrance sans concession avec les germes qui ont produit cette dévastation. Un devoir d’insoumission nous incombe, à l’intérieur de nous-mêmes et à l’encontre des formes de servitude qui ont conduit à cet accablement. Fethi Benslama
Les hommes qui ont commis les attentats « n’ont rien à voir avec la religion musulmane », a affirmé François Hollande, le 9 janvier. Ces tueurs n’ont « rien à voir avec l’islam », a insisté Laurent Fabius, trois jours plus tard. Les paroles du président de la République et du ministre des affaires étrangères, amplifiées par beaucoup d’autres voix, relèvent évidemment d’une intention louable. Elles traduisent la nécessité, bien réelle, de prévenir l’amalgame mortifère entre islam et terrorisme. A bien y réfléchir, pourtant, ces déclarations pourraient être à double tranchant. Car affirmer que les djihadistes n’ont rien à voir avec l’islam, c’est considérer que le monde musulman n’est aucunement concerné par les fanatiques qui se réclament du Coran. C’est donc prendre à revers tous les intellectuels musulmans qui se battent, à l’intérieur même de l’islam, pour opposer l’islam spirituel à l’islam politique, l’espérance à l’idéologie. Loin d’affirmer que l’islamisme n’a rien à voir avec la religion musulmane, ces « nouveaux penseurs de l’islam », ainsi que les a nommés Rachid Benzine dans un livre précieux (Albin Michel, 2008), luttent pour dissocier l’islam de sa perversion islamiste. Comme les réformateurs juifs et chrétiens ayant travaillé à soustraire leur foi à l’emprise de ceux qui la défigurent, ils s’efforcent de fonder un islam accordé au monde moderne, à une société ouverte, où le théologique et le politique se trouveraient enfin séparés. Ces penseurs sont conscients que certains djihadistes ont fréquenté les mosquées et les écoles coraniques de grandes villes arabes, où l’islam se trouve souvent pris en otage par des doctrinaires qui ont tout autre chose en tête que l’élan spirituel et l’exégèse symbolique. (…) Ces jours-ci, bien au-delà de la France, des intellectuels musulmans ont lancé des appels à la réforme, à la fondation d’un islam qui renouerait avec la tradition critique et le travail philologique pour se relancer autrement (voir Le Monde du 20 janvier). Face aux intégristes qui voudraient faire main basse sur le Coran, ces penseurs mettent en avant la pluralité des lectures et des interprétations possibles. Face aux dogmatiques qui exigent une obéissance aveugle à la loi, ils réaffirment que la foi est d’abord une quête de sens, une aventure de la liberté. La meilleure façon de lutter contre l’islamisme, c’est d’admettre que l’islam est en guerre avec lui-même. Qu’il se trouve déchiré, depuis des siècles maintenant, entre crispation dogmatique et vocation spirituelle, entre carcan politique et quête de sagesse. Ainsi, pour les réformateurs, l’urgence n’est pas de nier l’influence de l’islamisme sur une large partie du monde musulman, mais plutôt de prêter main-forte à toutes les voix discordantes, souvent isolées, voire menacées, qui luttent pour redonner sa chance à l’islam spirituel. A l’islam des poètes et des mystiques, celui de Rumi, Ibn’Arabi ou Molla Sadra, ce grand philosophe iranien qui écrivait, au XVIIe siècle, que « la religion est une chose intérieure » et que Dieu ne doit pas être « enchaîné ». A l’islam des simples croyants, surtout, dont la fidélité relève non pas de la soumission à un ensemble de prescriptions toujours plus délirantes, mais d’une espérance vécue, d’un pèlerinage intérieur. Prévenir les amalgames, c’est une nécessité. Eviter les raccourcis haineux, dynamiter les préjugés, c’est une urgence absolue. Mais pour atteindre cet objectif, plutôt que de marteler l’idée selon laquelle l’islam n’a « rien à voir » avec ses avatars monstrueux, comme le font les plus hautes autorités de l’Etat, mieux vaut aider et conforter tous les musulmans qui luttent au jour le jour pour se réapproprier leur religion, et libérer enfin l’islam de ses chaînes islamistes.Jean Birnbaum (Le Monde)
Vous (…) avez tenté de disculper l’islam de ce qui est arrivé. Vous avez même pleuré sur les musulmans au lieu de pleurer sur les victimes, en affirmant que ce qui s’est passé est un coup porté à l’ensemble des musulmans et que l’Islam sanctifie la vie. (…) puisque vous êtes médecin de profession. Vous savez qu’un diagnostic erroné peut entraîner la mort du patient. Si vous considérez un cancer comme un simple mal passager, vous donnez l’occasion au cancer de croître et de détruire la vie du patient. Je pense que vous êtes d’accord avec moi sur ce point. Et il va de soi que le médecin, après le diagnostic, doit suggérer le médicament adéquat au patient afin de le guérir. (…) Ce qui est arrivé à Paris est entièrement conforme à l’enseignement de l’Islam tel qu’il ressort du Coran, de la Sunna de Mahomet et de tous les ouvrages reconnus de droit musulman. Est-il nécessaire de vous rappeler comment Mahomet s’est vengé de ceux qui l’ont critiqué? Ne savez-vous pas ce que Mahomet a fait à Um Qarfa? Ne savez-vous pas comment le Coran stigmatise les poètes dans le chapitre qui leur est consacré et qui porte le titre «Les poètes»? Jamais Mahomet n’a admis la moindre critique à son égard; il n’acceptait que ceux qui chantaient ses louanges, comme le font les rois et les chefs des pays arabes et musulmans aujourd’hui. Ne savez-vous pas que les ouvrages de droit musulman prescrivent de tuer ceux qui critiquent Mahomet? Pouvez-vous m’indiquer un seul pays arabe ou musulman qui permet de toucher à Mahomet? Bien sûr que non. Où donc est la sanctification de la vie dont vous parlez? La liberté d’expression et la vie des humains n’ont aucune valeur dès qu’on touche à l’Islam, au Coran ou à Mahomet. (…) À moins que vous n’indiquiez les critiques contre Mahomet dans la période mecquoise, quand il n’avait pas d’épée. Mais après avoir joint le pouvoir à la prophétie, il n’a toléré aucune critique contre lui ou le Coran. Et cela vaut encore aujourd’hui.(…) lorsque les terroristes ont assassiné les journalistes, ils criaient «Dieu est grand, le prophète Mahomet a été vengé». Ils se considéraient comme les exécutants de la loi islamique contre ceux qui critiquent Mahomet. Et ce qu’ils ont fait est conforme aux dispositions de la loi islamique. La question se pose: où l’ont-ils appris? Ne serait-ce pas dans des livres dont regorgent les bibliothèques des mosquées en France? Ne serait-ce pas dans les prêches des imams de ces mosquées? En France, tout le monde a le droit de critiquer le judaïsme, le christianisme, le communisme, ainsi que leurs symboles et leurs ouvrages. Et les journalistes qui ont été assassinés ne s’en sont pas privés, sans tenir compte des susceptibilités des juifs, des chrétiens ou des communistes. Ce droit est garanti par la loi française. En refusant toute critique de l’islam, de Mahomet et du Coran même en France, les musulmans voudraient tout simplement y appliquer la loi islamique et brider la liberté d’expression. Tant que de telles idées dominent la mentalité des musulmans, ce qui est arrivé à Paris avec Charlie Hebdo se répétera, avec le même magazine et d’autres. Ainsi, sous la menace de mort, les musulmans veulent faire taire des intellectuels, des journalistes, des universitaires, des politiciens et toutes autres personnes qui seraient tentées de critiquer l’islam et ses symboles. Ils veulent tout simplement établir en France une dictature islamique brutale, interdisant la liberté de pensée et d’expression. (…) Comment pouvez-vous imaginer la cohabitation entre musulmans et non-musulmans en France avec de telles idées? Ne voyez-vous pas que la société française est menacée par la guerre civile dont les musulmans seront les premiers perdants? Soyons honnêtes. Ne pensez-vous pas que de nombreux adeptes de votre religion en France, ou certains d’entre eux au moins, ont applaudi l’assassinat des journalistes de Charlie Hebdo comme ils ont applaudi les crimes de Mohamed Merah? (…) Aucune personne saine d’esprit ne peut nier que ce qui est arrivé à Paris avec les journalistes de Charlie Hebdo provient des enseignements islamiques. (…) Ceci étant, il faut en déduire la nécessité de revoir l’ensemble des enseignements islamiques. On doit lever la sainteté du Coran, de Mahomet et de l’islam et permettre leur critique comme on le fait avec le judaïsme, le christianisme et le communisme. Les imams de mosquées en France doivent reconnaître la liberté d’expression prévue par la loi française et demander aux musulmans qui ne l’acceptent pas de quitter la France pour retourner dans leur pays d’origine. (…) D’autre part, il faut revoir intégralement l’enseignement islamique et (…) impérativement laisser de côté le Coran médinois, qui viole les droits de l’homme, et ne retenir que le Coran mecquois. Cela nécessite l’interdiction en France du Coran sous sa forme actuelle. Il faut exiger que tous les exemplaires du Coran, y compris ceux qui se trouvent dans les mosquées, soient dans l’ordre chronologique, en indiquant clairement que le Coran médinois est caduc en raison de ses incitations à violer les droits de l’homme. Les responsables de la religion musulmane doivent en outre reconnaître la liberté religieuse, y compris la liberté de changer de religion, de quitter l’islam. Sami Aldeeb
Attention: des larmes peuvent en cacher d’autres !
Au lendemain d’une nouvelle réplique, cette fois dans la patrie des premières caricatures de Mahomet et le jour-anniversaire de la fatwa iranienne contre Salman Rushdie, du massacre de Paris du mois dernier …
Et suite aux tombereaux de bons sentiments à la je suis Charlie et à la pas d’amalgame qui ne sont en fait que la retraduction politiquement correcte du rappel à l’ordre et à la la loi islamique que venaient de faire lesdits djihadistes …
Comment ne pas voir …
Avec l’universitaire suisse-palestinien chrétien Sami Aldeeb …
La confirmation que « ce qui est arrivé à Paris est bien « entièrement conforme à l’enseignement de l’Islam tel qu’il ressort du Coran, de la Sunna de Mahomet et de tous les ouvrages reconnus de droit musulman » ?
Et comment ne pas rappeler …
Contre les mêmes qui, oubliant ou faisant mine d’oublier que les têtes de l’écrivain britannique Salman Rushdie ou du député néerlandais Gert Wilders ou d’autres sont toujours, au nom du même islam, mises à prix …
profitant du fouillis de sourates classées au mépris de toute chronologie ou logique par leur seule longueur, nous renvoient à chaque fois aux sourates mecquoises quand le prophète n’avait pas encore l’épée …
La nécessité absolue et vitale de « revoir l’ensemble des enseignements islamiques », en « levant la sainteté du Coran, de Mahomet et de l’islam » pour en « permettre la critique comme l’ont fait depuis longtemps les textes juifs et chrétiens dont ils s’inspirent ?
Cher Dr Dalil Boubakeur, Imam de la Mosquée de Paris,
J’ai visionné plusieurs vidéos dans lesquelles vous condamnez l’attentat contre le magazine Charlie Hebdo, qui a coûté la vie à un certain nombre de journalistes. Vous y avez tenté de disculper l’islam de ce qui est arrivé. Vous avez même pleuré sur les musulmans au lieu de pleurer sur les victimes, en affirmant que ce qui s’est passé est un coup porté à l’ensemble des musulmans et que l’Islam sanctifie la vie. Vous démontrez ainsi que vous vous moquez de la vie des journalistes assassinés et que votre seule préoccupation consiste à éviter l’accusation de l’islam et des musulmans pour ce qui s’est passé. Vous vous êtes contredit et vous avez prouvé que vous manquez de la moindre sympathie pour les victimes. Vous avez perdu votre humanité par ces déclarations.
Mais soyons honnêtes, absolument honnêtes. Ne dit-on pas, en arabe, que de la franchise naît la tranquillité? Parlons en termes médicaux, puisque vous êtes médecin de profession. Vous savez qu’un diagnostic erroné peut entraîner la mort du patient. Si vous considérez un cancer comme un simple mal passager, vous donnez l’occasion au cancer de croître et de détruire la vie du patient. Je pense que vous êtes d’accord avec moi sur ce point. Et il va de soi que le médecin, après le diagnostic, doit suggérer le médicament adéquat au patient afin de le guérir.
Permettez-moi de vous dire que votre diagnostic sur les événements d’hier à Paris ne saurait convaincre que les idiots et les hypocrites. Si vous n’êtes pas conscient de votre erreur, c’est un signe de votre ignorance. Et si vous savez que votre diagnostic est erroné, cela signifie que vous êtes un malhonnête, pour ne pas dire un menteur.
Ce qui est arrivé à Paris est entièrement conforme à l’enseignement de l’Islam tel qu’il ressort du Coran, de la Sunna de Mahomet et de tous les ouvrages reconnus de droit musulman. Est-il nécessaire de vous rappeler comment Mahomet s’est vengé de ceux qui l’ont critiqué? Ne savez-vous pas ce que Mahomet a fait à Um Qarfa? Ne savez-vous pas comment le Coran stigmatise les poètes dans le chapitre qui leur est consacré et qui porte le titre «Les poètes»? Jamais Mahomet n’a admis la moindre critique à son égard; il n’acceptait que ceux qui chantaient ses louanges, comme le font les rois et les chefs des pays arabes et musulmans aujourd’hui. Ne savez-vous pas que les ouvrages de droit musulman prescrivent de tuer ceux qui critiquent Mahomet? Pouvez-vous m’indiquer un seul pays arabe ou musulman qui permet de toucher à Mahomet? Bien sûr que non. Où donc est la sanctification de la vie dont vous parlez? La liberté d’expression et la vie des humains n’ont aucune valeur dès qu’on touche à l’Islam, au Coran ou à Mahomet. Et je vous défie de me présenter la moindre preuve de l’inexactitude de mes propos. À moins que vous n’indiquiez les critiques contre Mahomet dans la période mecquoise, quand il n’avait pas d’épée. Mais après avoir joint le pouvoir à la prophétie, il n’a toléré aucune critique contre lui ou le Coran. Et cela vaut encore aujourd’hui.
Revenons sur ce qui s’est passé à Paris. Vous avez certainement appris que lorsque les terroristes ont assassiné les journalistes, ils criaient «Dieu est grand, le prophète Mahomet a été vengé». Ils se considéraient comme les exécutants de la loi islamique contre ceux qui critiquent Mahomet. Et ce qu’ils ont fait est conforme aux dispositions de la loi islamique. La question se pose: où l’ont-ils appris? Ne serait-ce pas dans des livres dont regorgent les bibliothèques des mosquées en France? Ne serait-ce pas dans les prêches des imams de ces mosquées?
En France, tout le monde a le droit de critiquer le judaïsme, le christianisme, le communisme, ainsi que leurs symboles et leurs ouvrages. Et les journalistes qui ont été assassinés ne s’en sont pas privés, sans tenir compte des susceptibilités des juifs, des chrétiens ou des communistes. Ce droit est garanti par la loi française. En refusant toute critique de l’islam, de Mahomet et du Coran même en France, les musulmans voudraient tout simplement y appliquer la loi islamique et brider la liberté d’expression. Tant que de telles idées dominent la mentalité des musulmans, ce qui est arrivé à Paris avec Charlie Hebdo se répétera, avec le même magazine et d’autres. Ainsi, sous la menace de mort, les musulmans veulent faire taire des intellectuels, des journalistes, des universitaires, des politiciens et toutes autres personnes qui seraient tentées de critiquer l’islam et ses symboles. Ils veulent tout simplement établir en France une dictature islamique brutale, interdisant la liberté de pensée et d’expression.
Je vous invite à un moment de franchise avec vous-même. Vous dites vouloir le vivre-ensemble en France. Comment pouvez-vous imaginer la cohabitation entre musulmans et non-musulmans en France avec de telles idées? Ne voyez-vous pas que la société française est menacée par la guerre civile dont les musulmans seront les premiers perdants? Soyons honnêtes. Ne pensez-vous pas que de nombreux adeptes de votre religion en France, ou certains d’entre eux au moins, ont applaudi l’assassinat des journalistes de Charlie Hebdo comme ils ont applaudi les crimes de Mohamed Merah?
Aucune personne saine d’esprit ne peut nier que ce qui est arrivé à Paris avec les journalistes de Charlie Hebdo provient des enseignements islamiques. C’est le diagnostic que personne d’informé ne saurait mettre en doute. Ceci étant, il faut en déduire la nécessité de revoir l’ensemble des enseignements islamiques. On doit lever la sainteté du Coran, de Mahomet et de l’islam et permettre leur critique comme on le fait avec le judaïsme, le christianisme et le communisme. Les imams de mosquées en France doivent reconnaître la liberté d’expression prévue par la loi française et demander aux musulmans qui ne l’acceptent pas de quitter la France pour retourner dans leur pays d’origine. Et ce pour éviter la guerre civile entre musulmans et non-musulmans en France.
En ce qui concerne les mosquées, il faut surveiller ce qui y est dit et ce qui y est enseigné afin qu’elles ne deviennent pas des nids de terrorisme et d’extrémisme. Pour cela, je suggère que les mosquées soient ouvertes à tous, que les prêches soient prononcés en français, que les imams étrangers ne soient pas autorisés à y officier, et je propose de soumettre les imams actuels à des mesures administratives et éducatives. Vous savez sans doute qu’en Egypte les prêches sont distribués aux imams par les autorités étatiques, qui contrôlent la stricte observance de leur contenu. Tous les prêches des mosquées de France doivent être soumis à l’approbation préalable des autorités françaises, ces prêches doivent être enregistrés et les contrevenants doivent être sanctionnés par le retrait de la nationalité et le renvoi dans le pays d’origine. Et ce, encore une fois, pour éviter la guerre civile entre musulmans et non-musulmans en France.
D’autre part, il faut revoir intégralement l’enseignement islamique et l’orienter vers la doctrine de Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, qui a été pendu sur instigation de l’Azhar. Ce penseur estimait qu’il fallait impérativement laisser de côté le Coran médinois, qui viole les droits de l’homme, et ne retenir que le Coran mecquois. Cela nécessite l’interdiction en France du Coran sous sa forme actuelle. Il faut exiger que tous les exemplaires du Coran, y compris ceux qui se trouvent dans les mosquées, soient dans l’ordre chronologique, en indiquant clairement que le Coran médinois est caduc en raison de ses incitations à violer les droits de l’homme. Les responsables de la religion musulmane doivent en outre reconnaître la liberté religieuse, y compris la liberté de changer de religion, de quitter l’islam. Les autorités françaises doivent imposer cette exigence sous peine de retrait de la nationalité française et de renvoi dans le pays d’origine.
Ce sont là des mesures que vous devez prendre en tant qu’imam de la Mosquée de Paris, et que doivent prendre les autorités françaises le plus rapidement possible afin de permettre le vivre-ensemble en France.
Veuillez agréer, Monsieur l’imam de la Mosquée de Paris, l’expression de ma haute considération.
Sami Aldeeb, Dr en droit, professeur des universités
Directeur du Centre de droit arabe et musulman: http://www.sami-aldeeb.com
Auteur d’une traduction française du Coran par ordre chronologique,
d’une édition arabe du Coran par ordre chronologique et d’autres ouvrages
« Si Allah ne neutralisait (repoussait) pas une partie des hommes par une autre, la terre serait certainement corrompue. » (Coran 2 : 251)
L’objet de ce texte est de présenter une hypothèse interprétative des fondements de l’islam sunnite, à partir de l’anthropologie de René Girard. N’étant ni islamologue, ni arabophone, je ne saurais polémiquer ni avec le texte coranique original, ni avec l’original de la Sîra (vie de Mahomet). Je travaillerai donc à partir de la traduction de ces textes. Il s’agit de présenter ici quelques intuitions qui nécessiteraient un travail beaucoup plus vaste pour être étayées solidement. Autant la visée de ce texte est ambitieuse, autant mes moyens sont limités, cependant j’invite le lecteur à ne jamais oublier qu’il ne s’agit que d’une hypothèse, pas d’une conclusion. Cette hypothèse prend appui sur l’idée que le modèle de Mahomet est essentiel dans l’émergence de l’islam, qui pourrait sans exagération être défini comme une « imitation de Mahomet ». Comprendre Mahomet, c’est comprendre l’islam.
Pour mettre tout de suite les pieds dans le plat, formulons l’hypothèse herméneutique : l’islam me semble être l’expression d’un désir métaphysique au sens de René Girard, c’est-à-dire d’un désir de l’être de son modèle, le judéo-christianisme. C’est aussi un désir métaphysique dans le sens où son objet est Dieu Lui-même. La démarche de Mahomet a pour but à la fois d’être pris pour le véritable juif et le véritable chrétien, et d’enlever l’objet de désir (Dieu) aux monothéistes qui le précédent. L’islam est mimétogonique par rapport au judéo-christianisme.
1. Mimétisme, rivalité et légitimité de Mahomet
La légitimité de la prédication de Mahomet tient à ce qu’il prétend refaire un geste déjà accompli par d’autres prophètes : révéler aux hommes la loi du Dieu unique et transcendant. En fait, c’est moins Mahomet qui répéterait un geste, que Dieu qui, à travers Mahomet, réitérerait un geste qu’Il aurait déjà accompli plusieurs fois, à travers Moïse et Jésus notamment. Dieu aurait envoyé dans l’Histoire des messages armés de son code de Loi, Mahomet étant le dernier envoyé, le « sceau des prophètes ».
Le Dieu transcendant connaît ainsi une temporalité toute historique, tandis que le temps historique est happé par la transcendance : le passé est aboli et le futur est fermé. Le seul événement historique dans cette perspective est l’abolition de l’Histoire, accomplie par la révélation de la Loi transcendante éternellement valable : la descente du Coran.
Ce qui m’intéresse dans la fondation de l’islam, c’est l’idée d’imitation et de répétition. C’est le mimétisme de Mahomet qui est fondateur, dans la perspective même du Coran. Si Mahomet n’avait pas de modèle, il n’aurait pas de légitimité. Mahomet dit aux autres monothéistes : « je fais comme vos prophètes », ou plutôt « Dieu fait à travers moi ce qu’il a fait à travers les autres prophètes ».
Il y a vingt-cinq prophètes cités par la Coran, qui vont d’Adam à Mahomet, Jésus le précédant directement. Un hadith mentionne que chaque peuple de l’histoire a reçu au moins un prophète et qu’il y en aurait eu 124 000 au total. Cette démultiplication légendaire doit être lue comme une tentative de fonder par analogie la légitimité du geste singulier de Mahomet : on augmente le nombre de prophètes pour rendre banale l’apparition d’un prophète. Cette généalogie des prophètes est donc absolument essentielle pour la fondation de l’islam. Elle n’est pas un simple préambule rhétorique : c’est la justification proprement mythique de la rivalité de Mahomet par rapport aux autres monothéistes.
Pour que la vision musulmane soit valide, il faut que chaque prophète ait accompli exactement le même geste que Mahomet : avoir donné aux hommes un livre divin contenant leurs devoirs envers le Créateur. Car l’islam prétend que tous les livres révélés par le Créateur contenaient exactement la même chose que le Coran. La chaîne des prophètes doit être absolument ininterrompue : c’est une chaîne de moments identiques, dont Mahomet n’est que le dernier imitateur. Ces moments sont identiques parce que Dieu est immuable, et ne fait que se répéter, par clémence pour Ses créatures qui oublient sans cesse Sa loi. Si la chaîne est brisée, la logique même de la légitimité de Mahomet est mise en défaut.
Des prophètes que le Coran mentionne, au moins deux ont encore les disciples qui prétendent connaître les textes: Moïse et Jésus. Les autres prophètes et leurs textes sont plus ou moins légendaires, et de toute manière n’ont plus de sectateurs. De la chaîne des prophètes censée aboutir à Mahomet, il subsiste deux anneaux. Pour que la vision musulmane soit légitime, Jésus doit s’être posé par rapport à Moïse de la même manière que Mahomet se pose par rapport à Jésus et à Moïse, sinon la chaîne se brise. Selon la logique divine de remplacement d’un prophète par un autre, Jésus doit être le rival prophétique de Moïse. Si Jésus n’est pas le rival heureux de Moïse, Jésus n’est pas un prophète. Or le problème, c’est que Jésus n’est justement pas le rival de Moïse et cela selon le texte des chrétiens eux-mêmes. Jésus n’abolit pas la Loi de Moïse et ne prétend jamais le faire, bien au contraire.
Si l’on prétend que les chrétiens ont altéré le message de Jésus et que « l’Evangile », comme disent les musulmans, était essentiellement identique au Coran, le christianisme historique n’aurait jamais existé et le nom même de Jésus ne serait jamais parvenu aux oreilles de Mahomet. Si les évangiles chrétiens sont authentiques, alors Jésus n’est pas un prophète au sens de Mahomet, et la chaîne des messagers divins se brise. Bref, si Jésus n’était pas le rival de Moïse, Mahomet ne pourrait pas être le rival de Jésus. Mais si Jésus était le rival de Moïse, il n’y aurait pas eu de christianisme et Mahomet ne pourrait pas le connaître. Dans les deux cas, la légitimité de Mahomet s’effondre.
Si le christianisme se comprend comme il se doit, c’est-à-dire avec et à partir de l’Ancien Testament, il n’y a pas de rivalité que Mahomet pourrait imiter. Mahomet ne peut donner sa rivalité pour légitime que si elle trouve un modèle en Jésus. Il faut à l’islam que Jésus se soit opposé radicalement au judaïsme pour que Mahomet puisse prétendre s’opposer légitimement aux deux. L’islam s’oppose en dernière analyse au judéo-christianisme, il attaque et reprend une supposée attaque de Jésus contre Moïse.
Mahomet est pris dans une escalade mimétique par rapport à Jésus. Il veut faire la même chose et mieux. D’ailleurs, il n’est pas le premier non plus à succomber à cette rivalité avec Jésus pour attaquer les monothéismes : Mani, pour ne citer qu’un autre fondateur de religion, avait fait quelque chose de semblable quatre cents ans auparavant. L’empire perse tout proche de l’Arabie avait laissé fleurir le manichéisme, et à l’époque de Mahomet, cette religion aujourd’hui éteinte, était encore très vivante. En témoigne la conversion de Bögü, troisième khan des Ouïghours, qui en 762, s’est emparé de Luoyang, la capitale de l’Empire chinois. Le manichéisme fleurira au Turkestan oriental (aujourd’hui la province chinoise de Xinjiang) jusque vers la fin du premier millénaire.
Mani avait aussi apporté un livre sacré, que ses disciples devaient apprendre par cœur, comme devront le faire plus tard les musulmans avec le Coran. Il se pourrait que l’expression « sceau des prophètes », qui désigne Mahomet, soit d’origine manichéenne. Mani s’était aussi donné pour le dernier prophète, pour une réincarnation de Jésus et Bouddha, dont il achevait et corrigeait les doctrines.
J’avance l’hypothèse que la foule de « prophètes » qui a sévi pendant le premier millénaire était en partie une sorte de réplique mimétique aux débats entre les juifs et les chrétiens. Ceux-ci se sont livrés à des joutes oratoires pendant des siècles, souvent devant un auditoire païen. Schématiquement, ce que le vulgaire devait retenir, c’est qu’il y avait un Dieu unique, que celui-ci avait d’abord révélé la Torah à Moïse, ensuite la Bonne Nouvelle à Jésus. Les deux révélations étaient enfermées dans un livre, et les juifs et les chrétiens se déchiraient sur le fait de savoir à travers quel livre prêter allégeance à Dieu.
Ce que les débats judéo-chrétiens donnaient superficiellement à voir, c’était une violence entre jumeaux : texte contre texte, révélation contre révélation, prophète contre prophète. Cette violence entre jumeaux est le germe de toute violence, qui la copie. On la reproduit alors pour la conjurer : il y a apparemment deux rivaux, et leur rivalité obscurcit le rapport à Dieu. Pourquoi ne pas créer un nouveau livre qui concilierait tout le monde ? Dieu a envoyé un autre prophète et révélé un deuxième livre, pourquoi pas un troisième ? On peut dire que toute nouvelle religion, comme celle de Mani, était une sorte de tentative d’arrêter la rivalité entre les révélations par une nouvelle révélation. La violence interconfessionnelle devait être arrêtée par une violence encore plus grande. C’est une violence qui s’exerce sur le plan symbolique, qui relègue le sacré de l’autre au statut de pseudo-sacré, voire à celui d’hérésie.
Ce spectacle n’est pas révolu, et les syncrétismes d’aujourd’hui tentent d’accomplir la même chose. De même beaucoup d’athées et de laïcs abhorrent la religion et les débats théologiques parce qu’ils y voient un indécidable combat de jumeaux, et qu’il ne veulent pas être happés dans la violence de ces débats. Leur position est tout aussi religieuse : si les religions qu’ils condamnent en bloc revendiquent des différences, ils font tout pour les indifférencier, en commençant généralement leurs phrases avec « toute religion… ». Ce n’est pas seulement de la paresse intellectuelle devant le travail à accomplir pour étudier chaque religion dans sa spécificité. C’est une peur sacrée de la différence ! Car si jamais les religions pouvaient être différenciées, si elles n’étaient pas de simples jumeaux pris dans un combat rivalitaire, alors on ne pourrait plus les condamner en bloc. Ce qui est tragique et comique à la fois, c’est que cette indifférenciation est faite au nom de la raison, alors qu’elle est tout sauf raisonnable, puisqu’elle se moque de l’expérience et de l’histoire de chaque religion en particulier.
Celui qui s’élève au nom de la raison contre toutes les religions, accomplit en fait un geste religieux fondateur : il condamne le « chaos ». Il a besoin de ce chaos pour que son geste soit légitime. Sans l’indifférenciation, il n’y aurait pas de chaos. Alors que les religions revendiquent leur différence, comme étant ce qui arrête la violence rivalitaire, la position athée veut annuler leurs différences, et les annuler aussi du même geste, exactement pour la même raison.
L’islam fait au fond exactement la même chose : il veut aplanir les conflits doctrinaux pas une violence symbolique encore plus grande. Pour réussir, cette violence symbolique doit indifférencier ses adversaires et trouver une légitimité plus grande. Mahomet a deux rivaux contre lesquels il ne cesse de polémiquer dans le Coran : les juifs et les chrétiens. L’objet de la rivalité, c’est Dieu lui-même. La prédication de Mahomet est centrée autour de l’affirmation d’être le véritable adorateur de Dieu, celui qui restaure la véritable religion du Dieu Unique, que les juifs et les chrétiens auraient selon lui corrompue. Mahomet ne polémique pas avec les arabes polythéistes et idolâtres. Ceux-ci n’ont pas de doctrine unie à lui opposer. Ils ne peuvent pas lui disputer son objet de désir, le Dieu Unique, et pour cause. Mahomet prend à revers les polythéistes, en leur imposant un autre objet de désir.
Mais Mahomet doit polémiquer sans cesse avec ceux qui ont historiquement connu le Dieu Unique avant les arabes, les monothéistes préislamiques. Sa tactique par rapport à eux a toutes les caractéristiques de la revendication rivalitaire : il copie le désir d’un autre, il est un suiveur, puis il emploie toutes ses forces pour montrer qu’il a été le premier à désirer cet objet, en l’occurrence Dieu.
Au tout début de sa prédication, Mahomet veut être reconnu comme un prophète par les juifs. Il imite tout d’abord leurs usages : lors de l’installation à Médine en 622, il instaure des règles alimentaires semblables à la cacheroute, il prie vers Jérusalem, il accepte le mariage des musulmans avec les femmes juives. Mais vers 624, deux ans après son arrivée à Médine, devant le refus des juifs de le reconnaître comme un des leurs, et prophète de surcroît, il change la direction de la prière (qibla), et demande aux musulmans de prier vers la Mecque. De l’imitation, on passe au désir de distinction.
Pour prouver que son « désir de Dieu » est premier, qu’il n’est pas simplement imité du désir des juifs ou des chrétiens, Mahomet s’échinera ensuite à rendre seconde leur expression du désir. Pour avoir un droit absolu sur l’objet, il doit montrer qu’il l’a désiré le premier. Donc Mahomet doit faire apparaître son désir avant celui des juifs et des chrétiens. C’est pourquoi il le déplace dans le passé le plus ancien, en disant qu’Adam lui-même était musulman, qu’Abraham était musulman, que Moïse était musulman, et que Jésus était musulman. De cette manière, le « désir de Dieu » des juifs et des chrétiens, c’est-à-dire leurs religions, se retrouvent reléguées au rang de prétentions secondes. S’ils veulent avoir accès à l’objet, c’est-à-dire à Dieu, ils doivent à présent se convertir à l’Islam.
(Khadafi, lors de son voyage controversé à Paris, a clairement rappelé cette position de l’islam : « L’erreur qui est commise aujourd’hui, c’est de penser que l’islam, c’est la religion de Mahomet. Non : c’est celle de Jésus, de Moïse et celle de Mahomet, le dernier des prophètes. Croire en Dieu, ses anges, ses prophètes, c’est ça l’islam. Jésus n’a pas été envoyé à l’Europe, mais aux fils d’Israël, pour corriger la loi de Moïse. Ils ont essayé de tuer Jésus, mais comme le dit le Coran, ce n’est pas Jésus, c’est un autre qui a été crucifié. La croix que vous portez n’a aucun sens, comme vos prières n’ont aucun sens. »[1])
Mahomet indifférencie ses adversaires et s’oppose violemment à eux d’un seul mouvement : Mahomet se présente comme un prophète qui « rappelle » une Loi. Cependant, il la créé et la déplace dans le temps, pour la placer avant la loi de ses modèles. Ce mouvement d’ancrage d’un désir suiveur avant le désir de son modèle trouve son achèvement dans la doctrine de l’Islam sunnite du « Coran incréé ». La prétention d’être premier s’exacerbe ici au point de se placer avant le temps lui-même.
Dans sa prédication, Mahomet reprend les « structures de rappel » présentes dans les textes prophétiques juifs, mais avec une différence de taille : il n’y aucune trace avant lui de ce qu’il « rappelle », sauf bien sûr, l’objet de son désir, le Dieu unique. Les prophètes de l’Ancien Testament se réfèrent sans cesse à une loi existante, la loi de Moïse, qu’ils ne donnent pas pour corrompue. De même Jésus, dans sa revendication du titre de Fils de Dieu, se réfère au Psaume 82, et respecte toujours la loi de Moïse. C’est pourquoi le « rappel » de Mahomet n’en est pas véritablement un. Rien ne le distingue d’une prétention gratuite. Parce qu’il est conscient du problème, Mahomet doit poser une deuxième affirmation gratuite : il accuse les juifs et les chrétiens d’avoir corrompu les textes réunis aujourd’hui dans la Bible, la Thora et le Nouveau Testament.
Mahomet n’avance pas de preuve. Cependant, pour asseoir son « désir de Dieu » avant le désir des autres monothéistes, il doit affirmer ces deux choses complètement gratuites et inséparables : il « rappelle » une Loi dont on n’a aucune trace, et les monothéistes d’avant lui ont corrompu leurs textes. Si la Bible n’est pas corrompue, Mahomet ne rappelle rien, il invente. Et s’il invente, il n’a pas la préséance sur les premiers monothéistes.
Plus encore, la corruption dont sont accusés les chrétiens et les juifs a trait surtout à sa personne : ils sont accusés d’avoir changé la Bible pour ne pas le reconnaître comme prophète. Toutes ces accusations gratuites ont un et un seul but : fonder la primauté de son désir de Dieu, c’est-à-dire la primauté de son culte, l’islam. Comme ces accusations sont complètement gratuites, elles pourraient être réitérées par un autre que Mahomet, après sa mort. Rien ne pourrait empêcher logiquement quelqu’un d’appliquer à l’Islam exactement la même stratégie que Mahomet a appliqué vis-à-vis des juifs et des chrétiens, et d’affirmer que les musulmans ont corrompu leur texte, et qu’il faut adorer le Dieu unique en suivant d’autres préceptes. C’est pourquoi Mahomet doit affirmer aussi être le dernier prophète. C’est le sens de l’expression « le sceau des prophètes ». Après avoir placé son désir de Dieu avant ses modèles et annexé ainsi leur passé, il anéantit par avance toute rivalité future comme étant une hérésie. C’est ainsi que les Bahaïs ont été persécutés dès leur apparition en Iran.
Mahomet accomplit l’indifférenciation de ses ennemis en réduisant le judaïsme et le christianisme à deux versions inachevées, ou corrompues de l’islam, qui doivent rester rivales entre elles. Il a besoin de leur rivalité dans l’indifférenciation, car c’est de cette rivalité qu’il tire sa propre légitimité. Si Dieu n’avait fait qu’un geste avec le judéo-christianisme, il n’y aurait pas de rivalité à imiter.
La rivalité a une place centrale dans le Coran lui-même, car certains versets sont contradictoires. C’est pourquoi les savants musulmans ont développé la théorie de l’abrogation : un verset plus tardif remplace un autre plus ancien qui lui est contraire. Cette méthode est inscrite dans le Coran lui-même : « Nous n’abrogeons un verset, ni ne le faisons passer à l’oubli sans en apporter de meilleur ou d’analogue. » (Sourate 2, verset 106). Les versets abrogeants remplacent les versets abrogés tout comme le Coran remplace les autres livres sacrés. Si même le Coran s’abroge lui-même, a fortiori la Bible est abrogée du point de vue des musulmans.
Le problème de la fondation de l’islam, c’est sa nature rivalitaire. Le christianisme n’a pas ce problème avec le judaïsme. Mahomet ne fait qu’affirmer sa légitimité, or cette prétention ne résiste pas à la confrontation avec le judéo-christianisme historique, selon les critères analogiques de Mahomet lui-même. Si Mahomet ne s’était pas placé dans la lignée des prophètes judéo-chrétiens, il n’y aurait pas eu un conflit aussi violent. Or la légitimité de Mahomet dérive de son inscription dans cette lignée, et elle n’est qu’affirmée, nullement prouvée.
Mahomet ne peut se passer de ses modèles pour être un prophète, mais il doit aussi les détruire car il ne peut démontrer sa précellence par rapport à eux. La destruction doit être totale car l’enjeu de la rivalité avec ses modèles, c’est Dieu lui-même. C’est pourquoi l’islam peut être vu comme un délire rivalitaire paranoïaque, et que l’on peut dire que l’islam est intrinsèquement violent.
2. Les doubles monstrueux : Jésus et Issa
La mimétogonie de l’islam par rapport au judéo-christianisme est mise en scène dans le Coran lui-même. Elle est explicite dans la dénégation de la crucifixion de Jésus, rappelée par Kadhafi : « Ils disent : nous avons mis à mort le Messie, Jésus fils de Marie, l’apôtre de dieu. Non ils ne l’ont point tué, ils ne l’ont point crucifié, un autre individu qui lui ressemblait lui fut substitué, et ceux qui disputaient à son sujet ont été eux-mêmes dans le doute, ils n’ont que des opinions, ils ne l’ont pas vraiment tué. Mais Dieu l’a haussé à lui, Dieu est le puissant, Dieu est le sage. » (Sourate IV, verset 157.)
Ce passage du Coran est extraordinaire à la lumière de la théorie du bouc émissaire. Le Coran parle explicitement de substitution sacrificielle. Dieu fait tuer quelqu’un d’autre pour sauver Jésus. Pendant des siècles les exégètes musulmans se sont demandés qui était cet inconnu, ce sosie de Jésus qui meurt à sa place sur la croix, et ils ont avancé plusieurs hypothèses : un compagnon de Jésus, Simon de Cyrène, Judas…
Quel que soit celui qui remplace Jésus, ce qui est essentiel dans ce passage du Coran, c’est que l’on assiste à l’apparition d’un double : le sosie de Jésus. Dans la perspective musulmane, un prophète bénéficie du soutien indéfectible de Dieu, c’est pourquoi il ne saurait être crucifié. Un messager de Dieu est un élu dans un sens aussi bien terrestre que spirituel : il peut toujours compter sur la force divine. On est ici au cœur de la vision archaïque de la divinité, en tant que violence et toute puissance effrayante. La dénégation de la réalité de la crucifixion procède de cette conception humaine, trop humaine, qui voit dans le prophète un surhomme armé de la foudre divine. Dans les moqueries de ceux qui étaient présents sur le Golgotha, c’était la même vision qui s’exprimait : « Les principaux sacrificateurs, avec les scribes et les anciens, se moquaient aussi de lui, et disaient: Il a sauvé les autres, et il ne peut se sauver lui-même! S’il est roi d’Israël, qu’il descende de la croix, et nous croirons en lui. Il s’est confié en Dieu; que Dieu le délivre maintenant, s’il l’aime. Car il a dit: Je suis Fils de Dieu. » (Matt. 27. 41-43)
Ce passage du Coran concentre toute la mimétogonie de l’islam vis-à-vis du christianisme, parce que celui qu’il appelle Jésus – Issa pour les musulmans – est l’opposé du Jésus des Evangiles. Issa est la négation absolue du Christ, c’est son double monstrueux. Allah sauve Issa de la mort grâce au sacrifice d’un inconnu, tandis que Jésus se sacrifie pour sauver de la mort les inconnus qui croiront en lui. Le sacrifice christique détruit le mécanisme sacrificiel, alors que l’islam réhabilite le sacrifice archaïque, en sauvant Issa par un sacrifice archaïque. A l’endroit même où Jésus révèle le diabolique de la vision archaïque de la divinité, le Coran rétablit l’archaïsme avec les moyens de l’archaïque, à savoir la violence.
Dans le passage du Coran niant la crucifixion, ce qui est en jeu c’est la dénégation de la violence, pas la crucifixion elle-même. Car il y a bien quelqu’un de crucifié, même dans la version musulmane, un inconnu que l’on ne mentionne même pas. C’est le silence même sur l’identité du crucifié qui indique qu’il s’agit d’un bouc émissaire, c’est-à-dire, dans une perspective chrétienne, d’une image du Christ. En fin de compte, même selon le Coran, Jésus a été crucifié. Cet inconnu substitué à Issa, c’est… Jésus !
A la lumière de la théorie du bouc émissaire, ce passage du Coran est une paradoxale confirmation de la réalité du supplice du Christ. Cependant, le message en est complètement inversé : la violence des lyncheurs est niée. En quelques lignes, le texte musulman renie par trois fois la participation des hommes à la mise à mort : « Non ils ne l’ont point tué, ils ne l’ont point crucifié, » et « ils ne l’ont pas vraiment tué. Mais Dieu l’a haussé à lui, Dieu est le puissant ». On est ici en présence de la négation mythique de l’implication humaine dans le lynchage sacré : « Dieu l’a haussé à lui. » Tout comme Iphigénie, ravie aux cieux et remplacée par une biche, Issa est enlevé au ciel et remplacé par Jésus, qui meurt véritablement à sa place. On ne pourrait pas revenir plus directement au sacrifice archaïque !
Dans le sacrifice, Dieu est violent, et la violence est sacrée. Elle n’appartient plus aux hommes. Le Coran l’affirmera explicitement dans la sourate au titre significatif Le butin : « Vous, les croyants quand vous rencontrez les incroyants en marche, ne tournez pas le dos. Quiconque tourne alors le dos, à moins que ce ne soit pour combattre ou pour rejoindre une bande, s’attire la colère de Dieu et n’aura de refuge que la géhenne. Quel mauvais avenir ! Vous ne les avez pas tués, c’est Dieu qui les a tués ! Tu n’as pas jeté (de pierre) quand tu jetais, c’est Dieu qui a jeté pour que les croyants éprouvent sa grâce. » (8 : 15-17)
La portée de la version musulmane de la crucifixion est énorme. Il s’agit là d’une adhésion assumée à la violence sacrificielle, dirigée explicitement contre la révélation de cette violence par le spectacle de la croix. L’islam se montre ainsi comme l’anti-christianisme par excellence. Le nom de Jésus est usurpé par son double monstrueux, Issa, qui le met à mort pour se sauver lui-même.
Ce qui corrobore encore le caractère sacrificiel de l’islam, c’est la règle de l’unanimité des croyants : l’ijma` (arabe : unanimité; consensus) est une des sources du droit musulman, après le Coran et la Sunna. Les écoles juridiques lui accordent une place plus ou moins grande. Le consensus est généralement compris comme celui des oulémas spécialistes du domaine dont il est question. Une règle de droit prise par ce procédé ne peut en aucun cas contredire le Coran ou la Sunna. Les écoles juridiques sunnites admettent cette règle du consensus en vertu d’un hadith disant : « Ma communauté ne se réunira pas sur une erreur. »
On sait que le mécanisme sacrificiel a besoin de l’unanimité pour être efficace. Celle-ci étant sanctifiée par Mahomet, le processus d’exclusion unanime peut être facilement mis en branle dans les communautés musulmanes, qui ne ressentent pas le besoin d’une légitimité autre que leur uniformité d’opinion. C’est ce qui s’est manifesté lors de l’affaire des caricatures danoises de Mahomet.
3. Rivalité fondamentale et interdiction des représentations en islam
Si la rivalité est centrale dans l’islam, elle doit être aussi constamment conjurée. L’enjeu du monothéisme islamique, c’est la toute puissance de Dieu, et la précellence de son prophète Mahomet. Celui-ci fonde sa légitimité sur sa rivalité réussie avec les autres monothéistes, et doit se prémunir contre toute rivalité éventuelle. C’est la raison de l’interdiction de l’art figuratif en islam. « Nulle part le Coran n’interdit de dessiner une image, une forme, mais comme ce terme est rattaché à l’œuvre de Dieu, celui qui se livre à une telle tâche est perçu comme faisant œuvre de Dieu et un concurrent redouté, surtout que l’image peut faire l’objet d’adoration, et donc promouvoir le polythéisme (association d’autres divinité à Dieu). »[2]
Je crois qu’il faut comprendre la toute puissance divine dans l’islam comme toute puissance créatrice des représentations. Dieu est le seul autorisé à représenter un être animé, et à représenter Sa parole. La non validité des traductions du Coran va de pair avec l’interdiction de sculpter des êtres vivants. On ne doit pas se représenter ce qui est, c’est-à-dire redoubler l’étant par une reproduction. Re-produire, c’est d’une part usurper le pouvoir divin, rivaliser avec Dieu dans la création, et d’autre part c’est aussi faire proliférer des réalités rivales avec la Création.
Le récit de la création d’Adam dans le Coran est explicite en ce sens : « Il (Dieu) instruisit Adam de tous les noms. » (Sourate II, verset 31). Cela est à comparer avec Genèse 2.19 : « L’Éternel Dieu forma de la terre tous les animaux des champs et tous les oiseaux du ciel, et il les fit venir vers l’homme, pour voir comment il les appellerait, et afin que tout être vivant portât le nom que lui donnerait l’homme. »
Pour l’islam, l’homme doit respecter les formes données par Dieu, il doit nommes les choses d’après Dieu, il doit réciter la parole d’Allah. Cette parole est unique en un sens théologique fort. La reproduire scinderait l’unité de la divinité même. Par contre, pour le judéo-christianisme, c’est l’homme qui nomme les êtres vivants, et c’est Dieu qui écoute. La dialectique chrétienne entre l’essence et l’apparence dépend de cet espace qui est ménagé dès le début entre la capacité de nommer donnée par Dieu à Adam et les noms effectifs que celui-ci donne aux créatures. Pour le dire avec les termes de Saussure, dans l’islam, Allah donne les signifiés avec les signifiants correspondants.
L’interdiction des représentations au sens large, que ce soit de la traduction du Coran, des œuvres littéraires, ou des films sur les prophètes, tente de conjurer de la rivalité possible qui pourrait surgir entre le modèle et sa copie, et entre l’homme-artisan et Dieu-créateur. Plus encore, Sami Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh écrit que « l’interdiction des objets animés chez les musulmans est due à la conception superstitieuse, prophylactique et apotropaïque admettant implicitement la possibilité de consubstantialité de la représentation et du représenté, et en conséquence, une substitution de l’un à l’autre. Ainsi les lions, les dragons, les chiens sont exclus du répertoire des sujets possibles de l’art, parce qu’on leur prête implicitement la faculté de quitter l’état d’image et d’agir comme des êtres vivants. »[3]
L’iconoclasme musulman peut être vu comme le pendant de la peur de la rivalité entre les doubles. L’essence tend à se confondre avec l’apparence dans une mentalité sacrificielle. Si les artistes étaient libres de créer des représentations de ce qui est, ils feraient surgir des doubles qui se disputeraient la réalité dans la pensée du croyant musulman.
4. L’attentat suicide comme manifestation exemplaire du désir métaphysique
Le désir métaphysique de Mahomet est l’héritage qu’il a laissé à tous les musulmans. Leur position psychologique par rapport aux « Gens du Livre », comme ils appellent les juifs et les chrétiens, est empreinte de cette rivalité mimétique qui doit aller jusqu’à la négation totale de l’être du modèle. Ce désir métaphysique trouve une expression particulièrement concise dans l’attentat suicide. Dans cet événement, la « montée aux extrêmes » et l’islamisme s’articulent d’une manière fulgurante.
Quand un « shahid » se fait exploser pour tuer des « infidèles », il accomplit simultanément la destruction du modèle, et l’appropriation de l’essence convoitée, car il accède au statut de martyre, le seul qui selon la doctrine de Mahomet garantisse l’accès au paradis.[4]
Une précision doit être faite ici. Une des différences essentielles entre l’islam et le judéo-christianisme est le caractère supraterrestre du paradis islamique. Le jardin d’Eden biblique est un lieu mythique, mais terrestre, alors que le Paradis musulman est décrit d’emblée comme supraterrestre : Adam et Eve « tombent » littéralement des cieux sur terre.[5]
Dans toute rivalité, il y a un objet, et la rivalité ne devient métaphysique que lorsque les frères ennemis oublient l’objet de rivalité au profit de l’essence de l’autre. La rivalité musulmano-occidentale est présentée tout d’abord comme un conflit politique ayant pour enjeu la domination d’un certain territoire, voire de la Terre entière. Cependant, dans l’attentat suicide, ce qui devient manifeste, c’est que l’objet même de la rivalité a été oublié. Le kamikaze qui brûle du désir métaphysique ultime oublie sa vie terrestre, la terre qu’il disputait à son ennemi, pour se concentrer uniquement sur la négation de l’autre. Il peut d’autant plus facilement le faire que, pour lui, le Paradis n’a jamais été de ce monde, à la différence de l’enseignement du judéo-christianisme.
Nous sommes ici en présence d’une conjonction effrayante entre un désir métaphysique et, en dernière analyse, le déni de la valeur de l’objet de la rivalité. La pente entre la rivalité d’objet et la rivalité métaphysique ne pourrait pas être plus glissante. Le judéo-christianisme affirme incessamment la valeur de la création (« Et Dieu vit que cela était bon. »). L’islam dit au contraire : « Ce pan de la création que Je viens de te révéler, Adam, n’ajoute rien à Ma grandeur, à Ma gloire ou à Mon pouvoir, rien à ce que J’ai, si ce n’est ce qu’ajoute une gouttelette d’eau tombant dans sept mers, prolongées par autres sept mers sans limites. »[6]
Si jamais un jour la possibilité d’un affrontement nucléaire entre l’Islam et le judéo-christianisme deviendrait réalité, la destruction de la terre, c’est-à-dire de la création divine, n’arrêterait pas un musulman dans sa montée aux extrêmes. Car Allah ne lui accorde pas la même importance que Dieu.
Conclusion
Cet article, j’en suis tout à fait conscient, manque de références. C’est l’ébauche d’un projet qui nécessiterait plus d’efforts que je ne peux fournir actuellement. Pour étayer cette hypothèse de l’islam comme mimétogonie violente par rapport au judéo-christianisme, il faudrait effectuer deux analyses complémentaires, et homothétiques : d’une part il faudrait analyser la vie de Mahomet et ses rapports avec ses contemporains monothéistes, d’autre part les rapports de l’Islam avec les autres communautés, en tant que ces derniers rapports reproduisent les premiers à une plus grande échelle. La première étude porterait sur le texte du Coran, en tenant compte de l’ordre de la « révélation » des sourates, mis en regard avec la vie de Mahomet telle que la tradition musulmane l’a canoniquement fixée (Al Sîra d’Ibn Isham). La seconde nécessiterait un travail beaucoup plus vaste, qui pourrait par exemple constituer une thèse de doctorat d’Histoire.
Le chantier est énorme, mais les instruments analytiques de la théorie mimétique semblent suffisamment puissants pour comprendre le caractère de la religion islamique. Ce serait un travail passionnant, dans la mesure où la religion islamique porte avec elle une négation explicite de la révélation de la croix, qui est la source de la compréhension anthropologique du fonctionnement de la violence, explicitée par René Girard. On peut dire que l’islam est l’anti-girardisme par excellence, dans la mesure où il est l’anti-christianisme par excellence.
L’enjeu est de taille : si c’est la croix qui nous révèle notre violence, et nous enjoint de la contrôler sous peine d’y succomber, toute négation de la croix, comme l’islam, favorise la méconnaissance de notre violence, la montée aux extrêmes, et la mise à mort des boucs émissaires. La critique de l’islam est donc un combat urgent, et littéralement vital.
[1] Le Monde, le 12 décembre 2007.
[2] Sami Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh, L’art figuratif en droits juif, chrétien et musulman. Licencié et docteur en droit de l’Université de Fribourg (Suisse) et diplômé en sciences politiques de l’Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales de Genève. Responsable du droit arabe et musulman à l’Institut suisse de droit comparé, Lausanne. Auteur de nombreux ouvrages et articles (voir la liste dans: http://www.sami-aldeeb.com).
[3] Idem, p.36.
[4] « Et ceux qui seront tués dans le chemin d’Allah (jihad), Il ne rendra jamais vaines leurs actions. Il les guidera et améliorera leur condition, et les fera entrer au Paradis qu’Il leur aura fait connaître. » (Sourate 47, versets 4-6)
Le Conseil français du culte musulman et les musulmans de France condamnent avec la plus grande détermination l’attaque terroriste d’une exceptionnelle violence commise contre le journal Charlie Hebdo. Cet acte barbare d’une extrême gravité est aussi une attaque contre la démocratie et la liberté de presse.
Nos premières pensées attristées vont aux victimes et à leurs familles à qui nous exprimons notre totale solidarité dans la terrible épreuve qui les touche.
Dans un contexte international politique de tensions alimenté par les délires de groupes terroristes se prévalant injustement de l’Islam, nous appelons tous ceux qui sont attachés aux valeurs de la République et de la démocratie à éviter les provocations qui ne servent qu’à jeter de l’huile sur le feu.
Face à ce drame d’ampleur nationale, nous appelons la communauté musulmane à faire preuve de la plus grande vigilance face aux éventuelles manipulations émanant de groupes aux visées extrémistes quels qu’ils soient.
Paris, mercredi 7 janvier 2015
Docteur Dalil Boubakeur
Président Conseil français
du culte musulman – CFCM
Voir encore:
« Une profanation de la mémoire du Prophète »
Tareq Oubrou, imam de Bordeaux (Gironde)
Propos recueillis par V.Md
08 Janv. 2015
Recteur de la mosquée de Bordeaux (Gironde), Tareq Oubrou est un ardent défenseur du dialogue interreligieux. A ce titre, il participait hier matin, avec d’autres imams de France, à l’audience générale du pape François au Vatican.
Attentat à Charlie Hebdo : « Ils font honte à tous les musulmans »
C’est en sortant de cette rencontre, après avoir échangé quelques mots avec le souverain pontife, qu’il a appris l’horrible nouvelle.
Comment réagissez-vous à l’attentat commis contre « Charlie Hebdo » ?
Tareq Oubrou. Je suis effondré, c’est un acte de guerre. Je pense d’abord aux victimes et à leurs familles. Je ressens aussi un coup dur pour l’islam et les musulmans de France. Le travail d’intégration, de dialogue que nous effectuons depuis des années s’effondre brutalement, en quelques secondes. Les tueurs disent qu’ils ont vengé le Prophète. Mais c’est là une profanation de sa mémoire. En son époque, le Prophète a été caricaturé. Mais il a pardonné à ses adversaires, ses ennemis !
Que faut-il faire pour lutter contre cette haine ?
Les musulmans doivent sortir dans les rues, manifester publiquement leur colère, leur dégoût, leur ras-le-bol. Trop, c’est trop ! Cette mobilisation doit aller au-delà de la communauté musulmane. Tout le monde doit défiler. On a atteint un tel niveau de haine.
Craignez-vous que les musulmans de France soient les victimes collatérales de cette barbarie ?
Ils sont déjà stigmatisés, ils risquent de l’être encore plus, malheureusement. Ils n’avaient pas besoin de ça ! Je fais confiance au bon sens de nos concitoyens qui savent faire la différence entre un musulman normal et un psychopathe. Car ces crimes inqualifiables relèvent de la psychiatrie. Il est impossible que les tueurs soient nourris d’une quelconque spiritualité. Je n’imagine pas que la foi ait un jour caressé leur cœur.
Ces dernières années, une partie de la communauté musulmane s’était élevée contre les caricatures du Prophète par « Charlie Hebdo ». Comment aviez-vous réagi ?
J’étais contre les condamnations et les manifestations. Moi, cela ne m’avait pas choqué. Je suis pour la liberté d’expression tant qu’il n’y a pas d’insulte. Dans ces caricatures, je ne voyais pas d’insulte. La liberté en général, c’est ce qu’il y a de plus cher.
Voir aussi:
Caricatures offensantes du Prophète Mohamed
Paris, le 1er février 2006
La publication de caricatures du Prophète de l’Islam par le quotidien danois « Jyllands Posten » relayé par un quotidien parisien est un acte exécrable mettant une nouvelle fois en exergue l’Islamophobie ambiante, raciste et méprisante, envers plus d’un milliard de musulmans.
La personne du Prophète Muhammad est fortement vénérée dans le monde. Il ne viendrait à l’idée d’aucun croyant de ridiculiser les fondateurs d’autres religions ou croyances tels que Jésus, Moïse, Bouddha, Confucius, etc…
De tels actes prémédités pour porter atteinte et humilier la foi musulmane sont gratuits, délibérés et pernicieux pour nuire, notamment à la paix religieuse.
Cela ne peut que raviver les tensions en Europe et dans le monde où l’on cherche plutôt à rapprocher les idées et les hommes, non à la diviser et à les opposer.
Les caricatures danoises apportent ainsi des éléments supplémentaires à tous ceux, de tous bords qui ne travaillent que pour aggraver les fractures entre l’Islam et l’Occident.
Aujourd’hui les boutefeux du révisionnisme et les négationnistes touchent à la relecture du nazisme et de ses crimes, et ne se gênent plus pour porter atteinte au sentiment du Sacré qui n’a pas à être jugé ni ridiculisé et encore moins caricaturé par ceux qui n’y croient pas.
Il n’y a plus dans ce cas de liberté de la presse mais détournement de cette liberté.
Hier les musulmans du monde étaient incapables de réagir à leurs détracteurs qui des siècles durant n’ont pas cessés de déverser des tombereaux de calomnies sur leur religion, leurs livres sacrés, leur Prophète.
La modernité d’aujourd’hui leur permet d’exprimer leur profonde désapprobation de cette atteinte profanatoire et diffamatoire portés à leur religion caricaturant et affublant leur Prophète d’une image de terroriste accréditant une fois de trop l’Islam à la violence et au terrorisme.
Comme dit le proverbe « Qui sème le vent récolte la tempête ».
La Grande Mosquée de Paris condamne fermement cette atteinte inqualifiable du respect que mérite toute croyant quelle qu’elle soit de par le monde. “
Docteur Dalil Boubakeur Recteur de l’Institut Musulman de la Mosquée de Paris.
La fondation religieuse iranienne qui avait mis à prix la tête de Salman Rushdie en février 1989, après la publication des Versets sataniques, a décidé de porter la prime pour son assassinat à 3,3 millions de dollars. Retour en arrière.
Vingt-quatre ans après la publication des Versets sataniques, Salman Rushdie est toujours la cible d’extrémistes musulmans. Dans son roman publié en 1988, deux acteurs indiens décédés dans un accident d’avion reviennent sur Terre, le premier dans la peau de l’archange Gabriel, l’autre sous les traits du diable. Ils deviennent alors les protagonistes de la lutte éternelle entre le Bien et le Mal. Peu après sa parution, le roman est accusé de ridiculiser le Coran et Mahomet, et provoque des émeutes et manifestations en Iran, au Pakistan puis dans l’ensemble du monde arabe.
1. Rushdie condamné à mort en 1989
En 1988, un député musulman du parlement de Delhi parvient à faire interdire les Versets sataniques en Inde, afin d’éviter « des heurts entre communautés religieuses ». Quelques mois plus tard, l’ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, chef de la révolution islamique iranienne, publie une fatwa (décret religieux) appelant tous les musulmans à tuer Salman Rushdie. La Fondation du 15 Khordad, proche du gouvernement, met sa tête à prix.
L’écrivain britannique d’origine indienne est alors contraint de vivre sous protection policière, changeant de domicile fréquemment. « Je doute que ceux qui me condamnent aient lu une seule ligne de mon livre », s’indigne-t-il. Au cours des dix années qui suivent, il fait l’objet d’une vingtaine de tentatives d’assassinat. Ses traducteurs japonais et italien sont poignardés et son éditeur norvégien grièvement blessé.
Afin de pacifier les relations entre Londres et Téhéran, le gouvernement iranien dirigé par Mohammad Khatami s’engage publiquement, le 24 septembre 1998, à « ne plus encourager les tentatives d’assassinat contre Rushdie » . Mais la fatwa de Khomeini est toujours d’actualité: son successeur, l’ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a réaffirmé en janvier 2005 que Salman Rushdie était un apostat pouvant être tué impunément.
2. Une autobiographie pour raconter son calvaire
Dans son autobiographie à la troisième personne intitulée Joseph Anton, qui paraîtra le 20 septembre en France, Salman Rushdie revient sur les années de cauchemar qui ont suivi sa condamnation à mort, en février 1989. Le titre de l’ouvrage fait référence au nom de substitution qu’il avait choisi afin de garantir sa sécurité. « Il écrivit, côte à côte, les prénoms de Conrad et Tchekhov. Ce nom serait le sien pendant les onze années suivantes. Joseph Anton », raconte-t-il.
3. L’auteur des Versets sataniques n’est toujours pas le bienvenu en Inde
Le 20 janvier 2012, l’écrivain britannique est forcé d’annuler sa venue au festival littéraire de Jaipur après avoir reçu des menaces de mort de militants islamistes. Le premier ministre du Rajahstan, Ashok Gehlot, affirme au Times Of India que la présence de l’auteur des Versets sataniques pourrait déclencher « des manifestations de groupes musulmans » et mettre en péril la sécurité de tous.
Quant à l’adaptation cinématographique du roman de Rushdie, Les Enfants de minuit, elle n’a toujours pas trouvé de distributeur en Inde. « Quel dommage que des politiques frileux empêchent la population indienne de se forger sa propre opinion concernant ce film », déplore sa réalisatrice, Deepa Mehta.
4. Les Versets sataniques: un livre « qui ne serait pas publié aujourd’hui »
Salman Rushdie a récemment déclaré, dans une interview accordée à la BBC, qu’il serait « difficile » de publier aujourd’hui un « livre qui critique l’islam » comme Les Versets sataniques. Pour accréditer sa position, il cite notamment la décision récente de la chaîne de télévision Channel 4 d’annuler la projection privée d’un documentaire sur l’histoire de l’islam pour des raisons de sécurité. Dans une autre interview donnée à la chaîne de télévision indienne NDTV et diffusée sur leur site internet, l’écrivain qualifie de « répugnante » la flambée de violences anti-américaines qui a éclaté mardi 11 septembre dans le monde arabe pour protester contre The Innocence of Muslims (L’Innocence des musulmans), un film « stupide », selon ses termes, qui dénigre la religion musulmane.
5. Rushdie, plus menacé que jamais?
Après les troubles suscités dans le monde musulman par la diffusion sur internet du film The Innocence of Muslims, la fondation religieuse iranienne qui a mis à prix la tête de Salman Rushdie a décidé d’augmenter de 500 000 dollars la prime pour son assassinat. Cette dernière atteint désormais 3,3 millions de dollars. « Tant que l’ordre historique de Khomeiny de tuer l’apostat Salman Rushdie […] n’aura pas été exécuté, les attaques comme celle de ce film offensant le prophète se poursuivront », a déclaré l’ayatollah Sanei. « L’ordre de tuer Rushdie avait été donné pour éradiquer les racines de la conspiration anti-islamique et il serait très approprié de l’exécuter en ce moment », a-t-il ajouté.
L’attentat à Charlie Hebdo a été revendiqué par Al-Qaida au Yémen. Le dessinateur Charb, abattu par les deux terroristes mercredi 7 janvier, figurait sur la liste des onze personnes à tuer du magazine djihadiste Inspire.
La publication, créée en 2010 par Al-Qaida dans la péninsule arabique, est distribuée sur internet, à destination des candidats au djihad anglo-saxons. Elle bénéficie d’un traitement occidental dans sa maquette et ses articles. Son contenu, lui, fait pâlir : interviews de djihadistes, recettes pour faire des bombes artisanales ou incendier des voitures et une kill-list, regroupant, selon Inspire, les ennemis de l’Islam. « Recherchés morts ou vifs pour crimes contre l’Islam. Une balle par jour pour lutter contre les infidèles » (« One bullet a day keeps the infidele away », en référence à l’adage anglais : « One apple a day keeps the doctor away »)
La liste cite des journalistes, des autorités religieuses, penseurs ou écrivains aux opinions très diverses sur l’Islam. Pêle-mêle, on retrouve des critiques constructives envers l’intégrisme, mais aussi des islamophobes notoires.
Selon le New York Mag, ils ont « tous commis au moins une action considérée par les djihadistes comme méritant la mort ». Ces 11 personnes ont déjà reçu des menaces de mort, mais jusqu’à mercredi 7 janvier, aucun d’eux ne les avait vues mises à exécution.
Il en reste 10 :
Ayaan Hirsi Ali : Activiste d’origine somalienne, citoyenne néerlandaise, elle s’est fait connaître pour ses positions contre l’excision puis sur l’incompatibilité, selon elle, entre l’Islam et les valeurs occidentales. Elle était une proche de Theo van Gogh, cinéaste assassiné en 2004. Elle s’est exilée aux États-Unis.
Terry Jones : Ce pasteur américain s’est fait connaître pour ses sorties contre l’islam. En 2010, c’est lui qui a brûlé 3000 exemplaires du Coran, un pour « chaque personne tuée par l’Islam le 11-Septembre ».
Molly Norris : Journaliste au Seattle Weekly, elle mène profil bas depuis 2010, quand Inspire l’a ajoutée à sa liste, après avoir voulu créer « le jour de la caricature de Mahomet ». Selon l’association qui se bat pour elle, elle a changé d’identité et de métier.
Carsten Juste : Journaliste danois, ancien rédacteur en chef du Jyllands-Posten, qui a publié, en 2005, les caricatures de Mahomet, reprises ensuite par Charlie Hebdo. Il s’est excusé depuis, mais a fait l’objet de nombreuses menaces de mort.
Flemming Rose : Rédacteur en chef du service culture du Jyllands-Posten, il n’a pas cédé aux pressions et exerce toujours son métier de journaliste dans le journal danois, collaborant aussi au New York Times.
Kurt Westergaard : Le dessinateur danois qui a caricaturé Mohamet dans le Jyllands-Posten en 2005. Contrairement à son journal qui a présenté des excuses, Westergaard n’a pas montré de regret et a été l’objet de plusieurs tentatives d’assassinat.
Salman Rushdie : L’écrivain britannique d’origine indienne est le plus connu de la liste. Auteur des Versets sataniques, il est toujours l’objet d’une fatwa lancée par l’ayatollah Khomeini, en 1989.
Morris Sadek : Chrétien copte américain d’origine égyptienne, cet avocat a fait la promotion de L’Innocence des musulmans, le film qui a mis le feu aux poudres du Moyen-Orient en 2012.
Lars Vilks : Le dessinateur suédois s’est fait connaître en publiant plusieurs caricatures de Mahomet en 2007, le représentant sous la forme d’un chien. Il a fait l’objet de plusieurs tentatives d’assassinat, dont une fomentée par des citoyens américains et irlandais. Il vit sous protection policière.
Geert Wilders : Homme politique, il est le leader de l’extrême droite néerlandaise, qui a basé une partie de son argumentaire sur l’islamophobie, proposant de bannir le Coran des Pays-Bas, le comparant à Mein Kampf. Son parti a bénéficié d’un regain de sympathie après l’attaque contre Charlie Hebdo.
Les hommes qui ont commis les attentats « n’ont rien à voir avec la religion musulmane », a affirmé François Hollande, le 9 janvier. Ces tueurs n’ont « rien à voir avec l’islam », a insisté Laurent Fabius, trois jours plus tard. Les paroles du président de la République et du ministre des affaires étrangères, amplifiées par beaucoup d’autres voix, relèvent évidemment d’une intention louable. Elles traduisent la nécessité, bien réelle, de prévenir l’amalgame mortifère entre islam et terrorisme.
A bien y réfléchir, pourtant, ces déclarations pourraient être à double tranchant. Car affirmer que les djihadistes n’ont rien à voir avec l’islam, c’est considérer que le monde musulman n’est aucunement concerné par les fanatiques qui se réclament du Coran. C’est donc prendre à revers tous les intellectuels musulmans qui se battent, à l’intérieur même de l’islam, pour opposer l’islam spirituel à l’islam politique, l’espérance à l’idéologie.
Provoquer un sursaut
Loin d’affirmer que l’islamisme n’a rien à voir avec la religion musulmane, ces « nouveaux penseurs de l’islam », ainsi que les a nommés Rachid Benzine dans un livre précieux (Albin Michel, 2008), luttent pour dissocier l’islam de sa perversion islamiste. Comme les réformateurs juifs et chrétiens ayant travaillé à soustraire leur foi à l’emprise de ceux qui la défigurent, ils s’efforcent de fonder un islam accordé au monde moderne, à une société ouverte, où le théologique et le politique se trouveraient enfin séparés. Ces penseurs sont conscients que certains djihadistes ont fréquenté les mosquées et les écoles coraniques de grandes villes arabes, où l’islam se trouve souvent pris en otage par des doctrinaires qui ont tout autre chose en tête que l’élan spirituel et l’exégèse symbolique.
« Constater la misère de l’islam sous les effets de l’islamisme devrait apporter sursaut, éveil, vigilance », écrivait Abdelwahab Meddeb, récemment disparu, dans un livre intitulé Face à l’islam (Textuel, 2004), où il affirmait que « la tâche de l’heure est de séparer l’islam de ses démons islamistes ». Deux ans plus tôt, Meddeb signait un essai au titre emblématique, La Maladie de l’islam (Seuil), où il allait jusqu’à écrire : « Si le fanatisme fut la maladie du catholicisme, si le nazisme fut la maladie de l’Allemagne, il est sûr que l’intégrisme est la maladie de l’islam », avant d’ajouter, quelques lignes plus loin : « Au lieu de distinguer le bon islam du mauvais, il vaut mieux que l’islam retrouve le débat et la discussion, qu’il redécouvre la pluralité des opinions, qu’il aménage une place au désaccord et à la différence. »
Une volonté de destruction et d’autodestruction
Outre Abdelwahab Meddeb, il faut citer, si l’on s’en tient aux livres écrits en français, le nom de Mohammed Arkoun, lui aussi disparu (Humanisme et Islam, Vrin, 2005), et encore ceux de penseurs bien vivants, eux, comme Rachid Benzine, donc, Hichem Djaït (La Crise de la culture islamique, Fayard, 2003), Malek Chebel (Manifeste pour un islam des Lumières, Hachette littérature, 2004), Abdennour Bidar (L’Islam sans soumission, Albin Michel, 2012) ou Fethi Benslama.
Ce dernier, qui est psychanalyste, note dans sa Déclaration d’insoumission à l’usage des musulmans et de ceux qui ne le sont pas (Flammarion, 2005) : « Ce que nous devons interroger prioritairement, c’est la brèche qui a libéré dans l’aire d’islam une telle volonté de détruire et de s’autodétruire. Ce que nous devons penser et obtenir, c’est une délivrance sans concession avec les germes qui ont produit cette dévastation. Un devoir d’insoumission nous incombe, à l’intérieur de nous-mêmes et à l’encontre des formes de servitude qui ont conduit à cet accablement. »
Pluralité des lectures du coran
Ces jours-ci, bien au-delà de la France, des intellectuels musulmans ont lancé des appels à la réforme, à la fondation d’un islam qui renouerait avec la tradition critique et le travail philologique pour se relancer autrement (voir Le Monde du 20 janvier). Face aux intégristes qui voudraient faire main basse sur le Coran, ces penseurs mettent en avant la pluralité des lectures et des interprétations possibles. Face aux dogmatiques qui exigent une obéissance aveugle à la loi, ils réaffirment que la foi est d’abord une quête de sens, une aventure de la liberté.
La meilleure façon de lutter contre l’islamisme, c’est d’admettre que l’islam est en guerre avec lui-même. Qu’il se trouve déchiré, depuis des siècles maintenant, entre crispation dogmatique et vocation spirituelle, entre carcan politique et quête de sagesse. Ainsi, pour les réformateurs, l’urgence n’est pas de nier l’influence de l’islamisme sur une large partie du monde musulman, mais plutôt de prêter main-forte à toutes les voix discordantes, souvent isolées, voire menacées, qui luttent pour redonner sa chance à l’islam spirituel. A l’islam des poètes et des mystiques, celui de Rumi, Ibn’Arabi ou Molla Sadra, ce grand philosophe iranien qui écrivait, au XVIIe siècle, que « la religion est une chose intérieure » et que Dieu ne doit pas être « enchaîné ». A l’islam des simples croyants, surtout, dont la fidélité relève non pas de la soumission à un ensemble de prescriptions toujours plus délirantes, mais d’une espérance vécue, d’un pèlerinage intérieur.
Prévenir les amalgames, c’est une nécessité. Eviter les raccourcis haineux, dynamiter les préjugés, c’est une urgence absolue. Mais pour atteindre cet objectif, plutôt que de marteler l’idée selon laquelle l’islam n’a « rien à voir » avec ses avatars monstrueux, comme le font les plus hautes autorités de l’Etat, mieux vaut aider et conforter tous les musulmans qui luttent au jour le jour pour se réapproprier leur religion, et libérer enfin l’islam de ses chaînes islamistes.
LE POINT La fusillade contre les participants à une conférence a fait un mort et trois blessés. Un suspect est toujours en fuite.
L’attentat de Copenhague samedi a été un assaut bref et violent d’un homme armé d’un pistolet-mitrailleur contre les participants à un débat sur l’islamisme et la liberté d’expression, dont un artiste qui a caricaturé Mahomet.
Sur le même sujetLe fil de la journéeCopenhague: un mort dans un «acte terroriste», un suspect recherché
Programmé à 15 heures au centre culturel Krudttønden, dans un quartier aisé du nord de la capitale danoise, le débat s’intitule «Art, blasphème et liberté». Des dizaines de personnes y assistent.
Il se tient sous protection policière puisque l’un des principaux participants est Lars Vilks, artiste suédois auteur en 2007 d’une caricature de Mahomet qui a lui valu une tentative d’assassinat.
Au bout d’une demi-heure, l’assaillant arrive armé d’un pistolet-mitrailleur. Sur un enregistrement diffusé par la BBC, on entend une intervenante interrompue par des dizaines de coups de feu qui claquent sans répit, plusieurs par seconde.
L’ambassadeur de France au Danemark François Zimeray, invité un peu plus d’un mois après l’attaque contre les locaux à Paris du journal satirique Charlie Hebdo, qui a fait 12 morts début janvier, raconte que toutes les personnes se jettent à terre dès qu’elles entendent les balles.
«Intuitivement je dirais qu’il y a eu au moins 50 coups de feu, et les policiers ici nous disent 200. Des balles sont passées à travers les portes», dira-t-il.
Dans la fusillade, un homme de l’assistance est tué, et trois policiers blessés. Plusieurs participants au débat, dont l’ambassadeur et le caricaturiste, se replient dans une autre salle où ils resteront pendant de longues minutes.
L’assaillant quitte rapidement les lieux dans une Volkswagen Polo. La police, qui n’a pu déterminer s’il ciblait quelqu’un en particulier, part à sa recherche.
Dans un premier temps, l’impression des enquêteurs est qu’il y avait deux hommes, dont l’un aurait aidé l’autre dans sa fuite. Mais après avoir recueilli une multitude de témoignages, la police conclut qu’il n’y avait qu’un homme.
L’homme ne garde pas sa voiture longtemps: il l’abandonne à deux kilomètres au nord du lieu de l’attentat, près d’une gare.
Il est filmé par des caméras de vidéosurveillance, vêtu d’une doudoune foncée, un bonnet ou une cagoule bordeaux, et un grand sac noir.
A 17h07, la police rend publique l’immatriculation de cette voiture, et demande aux habitants de Copenhague de ne surtout pas tenter d’appréhender de suspect. Elle annonce à 17h54 que la voiture a été retrouvée.
A partir des éléments recueillis, les enquêteurs diffusent à 19h23 cette description de l’assaillant: un homme «entre 25 et 30 ans, d’environ 1,85 m, athlétique, d’apparence arabe, (…) les cheveux lisses».
A 20h06, la police publie une photo tirée de la bande d’une caméra de vidéosurveillance. L’homme était introuvable samedi soir, et aucun élément n’a filtré sur son identité.
C’est ça, l’Ouest, monsieur le sénateur: quand la légende devient réalité, c’est la légende qu’il faut publier. Maxwell Scott (journaliste dans ‘L’Homme qui tua Liberty Valance’, John Ford, 1962)
Le grand ennemi de la vérité n’est très souvent pas le mensonge – délibéré, artificiel et malhonnête – mais le mythe – persistant, persuasif et irréaliste. John Kennedy
If your whole candidacy is about words, they should be your words. Hillary Clinton
To avoid being mistaken as a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. (…) I watched Marcus as he spoke, lean and dark and straight-backed, his long legs braced apart, comfortable in a white T-shirt and blue denim overalls. Marcus was the most conscious of brothers. He could tell you about his grandfather the Garveyite; about his mother in St. Louis who had raised her kids alone while working as a nurse; about his older sister who had been a founding member of the local Panther party; about his friends in the joint. His lineage was pure, his loyalties clear, and for that reason he always made me feel a little off-balance, like a younger brother who, no matter what he does, will always be one step behind. Barry Obama
BARACK OBAMA is the junior Democratic senator from Illinois and was the dynamic keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago. His first book, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER: A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE, has been a long time New York Times bestseller. Dystel & Goderich
You’re undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time. There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more. Miriam Goderich
I think the President’s speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful…But what I liked about the President’s speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility…The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world. Chris Matthews
I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.(…) : « He’s going to bring all different sides together…Obama is trying to sort of tamper everything down. He doesn’t even use the word terror. He uses extremism. He’s all about let us reason together…He’s the teacher. He is going to say, ‘now, children, stop fighting and quarreling with each other.’ And he has a kind of a moral authority that he – he can – he can do that.Evan Thomas
Pour moi, la morale consiste à faire ce qui est le mieux pour le maximum de gens. Saul Alinsky
Un problème plus sérieux pour notre nation aujourd’hui est que nous avons un président dont la bénigne – et donc désirable – couleur l’a exempté du processus politique d’individuation qui produit des dirigeants forts et lucides. Il n’a pas eu à risquer sa popularité pour ses principes, expérience sans laquelle nul ne peut connaître ses véritables convictions. A l’avenir il peut lui arriver à l’occasion de prendre la bonne décision, mais il n’y a aucun centre durement gagné en lui à partir duquel il pourrait se montrer un réel leader.Shelby Steele
Pourquoi cette apparence anticipée de triomphe pour le candidat dont le bilan des votes au Sénat est le plus à gauche de tout le parti Démocrate? L´électorat américain a-t-il vraiment basculé? Comment expliquer la marge énorme de différence entre les instituts de sondage à 3% et ceux à 12%? L´explication, me semble-t-il, réside dans la détermination sans faille du «peuple médiatique»; comme Mitterrand parlait du «peuple de gauche», les uns, français, habitaient la Gauche, les autres, américains, habitent les media, comme les souris le fromage. Le peuple médiatique, l´élite politico-intellectuelle, le «paysage audiovisuel», comme on dit avec complaisance, ont décidé que rien n´empêcherait l´apothéose de leur candidat. Tout ce qui pouvait nuire à Obama serait donc omis et caché; tout ce qui pouvait nuire à McCain serait monté en épingle et martelé à la tambourinade. On censurerait ce qui gênerait l´un, on amplifierait ce qui affaiblirait l´autre. Le bombardement serait intense, les haut-parleurs répandraient sans répit le faux, le biaisé, le trompeur et l´insidieux. C´est ainsi que toute assertion émise par Obama serait tenue pour parole d´Evangile. Le terroriste mal blanchi Bill Ayers? – «Un type qui vit dans ma rue», avait menti impudemment Obama, qui lui devait le lancement de sa carrière politique, et le côtoyait à la direction d´une fondation importante. Il semble même qu´Ayers ait été, si l´on ose oser, le nègre du best-seller autobiographique (!) d´Obama. Qu´importe! Nulle enquête, nulle révélation, nulle curiosité. «Je ne l´ai jamais entendu parler ainsi » -, mentait Obama, parlant de son pasteur de vingt ans, Jeremiah Wright, fasciste noir, raciste à rebours, mégalomane délirant des théories conspirationnistes – en vingt ans de prêches et de sermons. Circulez, vous dis-je, y´a rien à voir – et les media, pieusement, de n´aller rien chercher. ACORN, organisation d´activistes d´extrême-gauche, aujourd´hui accusée d´une énorme fraude électorale, dont Obama fut l´avocat – et qui se mobilise pour lui, et avec laquelle il travaillait à Chicago? Oh, ils ne font pas partie de la campagne Obama, expliquent benoîtement les media. Et, ajoute-t-on, sans crainte du ridicule, «la fraude aux inscriptions électorales ne se traduit pas forcément en votes frauduleux».Laurent Murawiec
Nous étions en formation avec plusieurs hélicoptères. Deux ont été abattus par des tirs, dont celui à bord duquel je me trouvais. Brian Williams (NBC, 2015)
J’étais dans un appareil qui suivait. J’ai fait une erreur en rapportant cet événement intervenu il y a douze ans.Brian Williams (NBC, 2015)
Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. All the other stuff, the talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse, was incidental to that program, I decided, religious baggage that Malcolm himself seemed to have safely abandoned toward the end of his life. And yet, even as I imagined myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed me. He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish that the white blood that tan through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged. I knew that, for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental. I knew as well that traveling down the road to self-respect my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction. I was left to wonder what else I would be severing if and when I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border. Barack Hussein Obama (Dreams of my father)
Il est tout à fait légitime pour le peuple américain d’être profondément préoccupé quand vous avez un tas de fanatiques vicieux et violents qui décapitent les gens ou qui tirent au hasard dans un tas de gens dans une épicerie à Paris.Barack Hussein Obama
Nous sommes devant toi des étrangers et des habitants, comme tous nos pères … I Chroniques 29: 15 (exorde de Rêves de mon père, 1995)
Même si ce livre repose principalement sur des journaux intimes ou sur des histoires orales de ma famille, les dialogues sont forcément approximatifs. Pour éviter les longueurs, certains personnages sont des condensés de personnes que j’ai connues et certains événements sont sans contexte chronologique précis. A l’exception de ma famille et certains personnages publics, les noms des protagonistes ont été changés par souci de respecter leur vie privée.Barack Hussein Obama jr. (préface des Rêves de mon père, 1995)
Je connais, je les ai vus, le désespoir et le désordre qui sont le quotidien des laissés-pour-compte, avec leurs conséquences désastreuses sur les enfants de Djakarta ou de Nairobi, comparables en bien des points à celles qui affectent les enfants du South Side de Chicago. Je sais combien est ténue pour eux la frontière entre humiliation et la fureur dévastatrice, je sais avec quelle facilité ils glissent dans la violence et le désespoir. Barack Hussein Obama jr. (préface de Rêves de mon père, l’histoire d’un héritage en noir et blanc, 2004)
He told the story in brilliant, painful detail in his first book, Dreams from My Father, which may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician. Joe Klein (Time, October 23, 2006)
Given what I do for a living, I suppose it’s only natural that I have a high degree of respect for those who write well. Good writing very often signals a strong intellect and in many cases a deep vision. It also shows its author to be a person of some discipline, in that even those who are born with a great deal of talent in this area still usually have to work hard and make sacrifices to develop their abilities. All of which is making me giddy at the prospect of Barack Obama’s coming presidency. Like many politicians Barack Obama is also an author. What makes him different is he’s also a good writer. Most books by today’s policies are glossy, self-serving, sometimes ghost-written puffery, which are designed to be sold as throwaway literature. Obama has written a couple of these books, and the best that can be said about them is that they’re a cut above the usual tripe politicians slap between two covers. Earlier, however, way back in 1995, Barack Obama penned another book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which is easily the most honest, daring, and ambitious volume put out by a major US politician in the last 50 years. Rob Woodard (The Guardian)
Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world. Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others — as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame. He recalls that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, during an ascetic phase in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times)
I was interested really in him because of his book, « Song of Solomon. » It was quite extraordinary. I mean, he’s a real writer type. (…) Yeah, well, we said a few little things about « Song of Solomon, » and I sort of acknowledged that he was a writer, also, in my high esteem. (…) He’s very different. I mean, his ability to reflect on this extraordinary mesh of experiences that he has had, some familiar and some not, and to really meditate on that the way he does and to set up scenes in a narrative structure type of conversation, all of these things that you don’t often see, obviously, in the routine political memoir biography. But I think this was when he was much younger, like in his 30s or something. So that was impressive to me. But it’s unique. It’s his. There are no other ones like that.Toni Morrison
That’s a good book. Dreams of My Father, is that what it’s called? I read it with great interest, in part because it’d been written by this guy who was running for president, but I found it well done and very persuasive and memorable too.Philip Roth
Qu’est-ce que cela fait d’avoir un nouveau président des Etats-Unis qui sait lire ? Du bien. Cela fait du bien d’apprendre qu’il a toujours un livre à portée de la main. On a tellement flatté ses qualités d’orateur et ses dons de communicant qu’on a oublié l’essentiel de ce qui fait la richesse de son verbe : son côté lecteur compulsif. A croire que lorsqu’il sera las de lire des livres, il dirigera l’Amérique pour se détendre. Michiko Kakutani, la redoutée critique du New York Times, d’ordinaire si dure avec la majorité des écrivains, est tout miel avec ce non-écrivain auteur de trois livres : deux textes autobiographiques et un discours sur la race en Amérique. Elle vient de dresser l’inventaire de sa « bibliothèque idéale », autrement dit les livres qui ont fait ce qu’il est devenu, si l’on croise ce qu’il en dit dans ses Mémoires, ce qu’il en confesse dans les interviews et ce qu’on en sait. Adolescent, il lut avidement les grands auteurs noirs James Baldwin, Langston Hugues, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, W.E.B. Du Bois avant de s’immerger dans Nietzsche et Saint-Augustin en marge de ses études de droit, puis d’avaler la biographie de Martin Luther King en plusieurs volumes par Taylor Branch. Autant de livres dans lesquels il a piqué idées, pistes et intuitions susceptibles de nourrir sa vision du monde. Ce qui ne l’a pas empêché de se nourrir en permanence des tragédies de Shakespeare, de Moby Dick, des écrits de Lincoln, des essais du transcendantaliste Ralph Waldo Emerson, du Chant de Salomon de la nobélisée Toni Morrison, du Carnet d’or de Doris Lessing, des poèmes d’un autre nobélisé Derek Walcott, des mémoires de Gandhi, des textes du théologien protestant Reinhold Niebuhr qui exercèrent une forte influence sur Martin Luther King, et, plus récemment de Gilead (2004) le roman à succès de Marylinne Robinson ou de Team of rivals que l’historienne Doris Kearns Goodwin a consacré au génie politique d’Abraham Lincoln, « la » référence du nouveau président. Pardon, on allait oublier, le principal, le livre des livres : la Bible, of course.Pierre Assouline
Apart from other unprecedented aspects of his rise, it is a geographical truth that no politician in American history has traveled farther than Barack Obama to be within reach of the White House. He was born and spent most of his formative years on Oahu, in distance the most removed population center on the planet, some 2,390 miles from California, farther from a major landmass than anywhere but Easter Island. In the westward impulse of American settlement, his birthplace was the last frontier, an outpost with its own time zone, the 50th of the United States, admitted to the union only two years before Obama came along. Those who come from islands are inevitably shaped by the experience. For Obama, the experience was all contradiction and contrast. As the son of a white woman and a black man, he grew up as a multiracial kid, a « hapa, » « half-and-half » in the local lexicon, in one of the most multiracial places in the world, with no majority group. There were native Hawaiians, Japanese, Filipinos, Samoans, Okinawans, Chinese and Portuguese, along with Anglos, commonly known as haole (pronounced howl-lee), and a smaller population of blacks, traditionally centered at the U.S. military installations. But diversity does not automatically translate into social comfort: Hawaii has its own difficult history of racial and cultural stratification, and young Obama struggled to find his place even in that many-hued milieu. He had to leave the island to find himself as a black man, eventually rooting in Chicago, the antipode of remote Honolulu, deep in the fold of the mainland, and there setting out on the path that led toward politics. Yet life circles back in strange ways, and in essence it is the promise of the place he left behind — the notion if not the reality of Hawaii, what some call the spirit of aloha, the transracial if not post-racial message — that has made his rise possible. Hawaii and Chicago are the two main threads weaving through the cloth of Barack Obama’s life. Each involves more than geography. Hawaii is about the forces that shaped him, and Chicago is about how he reshaped himself. Chicago is about the critical choices he made as an adult: how he learned to survive in the rough-and-tumble of law and politics, how he figured out the secrets of power in a world defined by it, and how he resolved his inner conflicts and refined the subtle, coolly ambitious persona now on view in the presidential election. Hawaii comes first. It is what lies beneath, what makes Chicago possible and understandable. (…) « Dreams From My Father » is as imprecise as it is insightful about Obama’s early life. Obama offers unusually perceptive and subtle observations of himself and the people around him. Yet, as he readily acknowledged, he rearranged the chronology for his literary purposes and presented a cast of characters made up of composites and pseudonyms. This was to protect people’s privacy, he said. Only a select few were not granted that protection, for the obvious reason that he could not blur their identities — his relatives. (…) Keith and Tony Peterson (…) wondered why Obama focused so much on a friend he called Ray, who in fact was Keith Kukagawa. Kukagawa was black and Japanese, and the Petersons did not even think of him as black. Yet in the book, Obama used him as the voice of black anger and angst, the provocateur of hip, vulgar, get-real dialogues. (…) Sixteen years later, Barry was no more, replaced by Barack, who had not only left the island but had gone to two Ivy League schools, Columbia undergrad and Harvard Law, and written a book about his life. He was into his Chicago phase, reshaping himself for his political future … David Maraniss
Dans sa biographie du président, le journaliste David Maraniss décrit lui aussi un jeune homme qui se cherche, et qui, lorsqu’il devient politicien, cisèle sa biographie, Dreams from my Father, pour la rendre plus signifiante politiquement et romanesque littérairement qu’elle ne l’est en réalité. Non, son gran-père kenyan Hussein Onyango Obama n’a pas été torturé et emprisonné par les Britanniques; non, le père de son beau-père indonésien n’a pas été tué dans la lutte contre le colonisateur hollandais; non, il ne semble pas avoir sérieusement consommé de drogues lorsqu’il était au lycée puis à Occidental College avant de trouver la rédemption; non, l’assurance santé de sa mère n’a pas refusé de lui payer le traitement de base de son cancer. Tous ces détails ne sont pas des inventions ou des mensonges: ce sont des embellissements, souvent repris de mythes familiaux, qui donnent du sens à son parcours. Justin Vaïsse
It has recently been discovered by Washington Post editor and Obama biographer David Maraniss that Obama’s memoir likely went much farther than just the character « compression » and chronology rearrangement that Obama admitted to in his memoir’s introduction. Maraniss reveals in his new book that, much like Frey’s memoir, Dreams contains fabrications of material aspects of Obama’s life narrative. (…) Ultimately, what Maraniss did discover is that Obama’s actual upbringing was simply too comfortable and boring to lend itself to a compelling memoir. So he did what Frey did and turned an otherwise mundane life story into a more meaningful and interesting one. Mendy Finkel
Not only did he grow up in Indonesia and Hawaii, but he also grew up amid diversity in both places, which brought him into casual, daily contact with Africans, Asians, Natives and Caucasians, people of all kinds of ethnic variations and political and social differences. What he did not experience in his early life is mainland, American-style racism. Growing up in places that were diverse, he never had to confront his identity as a black man until his college years. There are no slaves in the Obama family tree, and he missed most of the tumultuous civil rights struggle because of his youth and the physical distance from the mainland. There is an amusing section on the future president’s more than casual acquaintance with marijuana as a high school student in Hawaii. I won’t ruin the fun, but if you get the e-book, search for « Choom Gang, » « Total Absorption » (the opposite of not inhaling) and « Roof Hits. » Enough said. Even when Barry, which is how he was known, finally made it to the mainland as a college freshman, he chose elite Occidental College in Los Angeles, a diverse environment in a sheltered section of the city that gave him virtually no taste of the typical experience of blacks in America. In fact, one of his Oxy college friends said that Barry, who was starting to refer to himself as Barack in part to reconnect to his black roots, decided to transfer after his sophomore year to Columbia in New York so that he could « discover blackness in America. » What hits home in Maraniss’ book is how race was, for Barack Obama, primarily an intellectual journey of study and self-discovery. He had to discover his blackness. This sets him apart from the dominant African American experience, and it accounts for some of the reluctance on the part of veteran civil rights advocates like Jesse Jackson to embrace his candidacy early on. Dave Cieslewicz
It almost seemed too good to be true. When President Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, « Dreams From My Father, » was re-published soon after the young politican catapulted onto the national stage with a charismatic speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, his amazing life story captured the hearts and minds of millions of Americans. But like many memoirs, which tend to be self-serving, it now appears that Obama shaped the book less as a factual history of his life than as a great story. A new biography, « Barack Obama: The Story, » by David Maraniss, raises questions about the accuracy of the president’s account and delivers fresh revelations about his pot-smoking in high school and college and his girlfriends in New York City. In his memoir, Obama describes how his grandfather, Hussein Onyango, was imprisoned and tortured by British troops during the fight for Kenyan independence. But that did not happen, according to five associates of Onyango interviewed by Maraniss. Another heroic tale from the memoir about Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, being killed by Dutch soldiers during Indonesia’s fight for independence also is inaccurate, according to Maraniss. The president explains in his memoir that some of the characters in his book have been combined or compressed. Maraniss provides more details about the extent of that alteration. One of Obama’s « African American » classmates was based on Caroline Boss, a white student whose Swiss grandmother was named Regina, according to Maraniss, a Washington Post editor and author who has won a Pulitzer Prize. The president also described breaking up with a white girlfriend due to a « racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman, » writes Maraniss. But Obama’s next girlfriend in Chicago, an anthropologist, also was white. The young Obama’s lack of playing time on the high school basketball team was due more to his ability than the coach’s preference for white players, Maraniss writes. And Obama’s mother likely left his father — not the other way around — after domestic abuse, note reviews of the book in the Los Angeles Times and Buzzfeed. The Huffington Post
In his 1995 memoir, [Mr. Obama] mentioned smoking “reefer” in “the dorm room of some brother” and talked about “getting high.” Before Occidental, he indulged in marijuana, alcohol and sometimes cocaine as a high school student in Hawaii, according to the book. He made “some bad decisions” as a teenager involving drugs and drinking, Senator Obama, now a presidential candidate, told high school students in New Hampshire last November. Mr. Obama’s admissions are rare for a politician (his book, “Dreams From My Father,” was written before he ran for office.) They briefly became a campaign issue in December when an adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s chief Democratic rival, suggested that his history with drugs would make him vulnerable to Republican attacks if he became his party’s nominee. Mr. Obama, of Illinois, has never quantified his illicit drug use or provided many details. He wrote about his two years at Occidental, a predominantly white liberal arts college, as a gradual but profound awakening from a slumber of indifference that gave rise to his activism there and his fears that drugs could lead him to addiction or apathy, as they had for many other black men. Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic. In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana. Serge F. Kovaleski
Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story punctures two sets of falsehoods: The family tales Obama passed on, unknowing; and the stories Obama made up. The 672-page book closes before Obama enters law school, and Maraniss has promised another volume, but by its conclusion I counted 38 instances in which the biographer convincingly disputes significant elements of Obama’s own story of his life and his family history. The two strands of falsehood run together, in that they often serve the same narrative goal: To tell a familiar, simple, and ultimately optimistic story about race and identity in the 20th Century. The false notes in Obama’s family lore include his mother’s claimed experience of racism in Kansas, and incidents of colonial brutality toward his Kenyan grandfather and Indonesian step-grandfather. Obama’s deliberate distortions more clearly serve a single narrative: Race. Obama presents himself through the book as “blacker and more disaffected” than he really was, Maraniss writes, and the narrative “accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought, while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be white.” (…) Maraniss’s deep and entertaining biography will serve as a corrective both to Obama’s mythmaking and his enemies’. Maraniss finds that Obama’s young life was basically conventional, his personal struggles prosaic and later exaggerated. He finds that race, central to Obama’s later thought and included in the subtitle of his memoir, wasn’t a central factor in his Hawaii youth or the existential struggles of his young adulthood. And he concludes that attempts, which Obama encouraged in his memoir, to view him through the prism of race “can lead to a misinterpretation” of the sense of “outsiderness” that Maraniss puts at the core of Obama’s identity and ambition. (…) In Dreams, for instance, Obama writes of a friend named “Regina,” a symbol of the authentic African-American experience that Obama hungers for (and which he would later find in Michelle Robinson). Maraniss discovers, however, that Regina was based on a student leader at Occidental College, Caroline Boss, who was white. Regina was the name of her working-class Swiss grandmother, who also seems to make a cameo in Dreams. Maraniss also notices that Obama also entirely cut two white roommates, in Los Angeles and New York, from the narrative, and projected a racial incident onto a New York girlfriend that he later told Maraniss had happened in Chicago. (…) Across the ocean, the family story that Hussein Onyango, Obama’s paternal grandfather, had been whipped and tortured by the British is “unlikely”: “five people who had close connections to Hussein Onyango said they doubted the story or were certain that it did not happen,” Maraniss writes. The memory that the father of his Indonesian stepfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, was killed by Dutch soldiers in the fight for independence is “a concocted myth in almost all respects.” In fact, Martodihardjo “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes, presumably suffering a heart attack.” (…) Maraniss corrects a central element of Obama’s own biography, debunking a story that Obama’s mother may well have invented: That she and her son were abandoned in Hawaii in 1963. “It was his mother who left Hawaii first, a year earlier than his father,” Maraniss writes, confirming a story that had first surfaced in the conservative blogosphere. He suggests that “spousal abuse” prompted her flight back to Seattle. Obama’s own fairy-tales, meanwhile, run toward Amercan racial cliché. “Ray,” who is in the book “a symbol of young blackness,” is based on a character whose complex racial identity — half Japanese, part native American, and part black — was more like Obama’s, and who wasn’t a close friend. “In the memoir Barry and Ray, could be heard complaining about how rich white haole girls would never date them,” Maraniss writes, referring to Hawaii’s upper class, and to a composite character whose blackness is. “In fact, neither had much trouble in that regard.”Ben Smith
Ce qui rendait Obama unique, c’est qu’il était le politicien charismatique par excellence – le plus total inconnu à jamais accéder à la présidence aux Etats-Unis. Personne ne savait qui il était, il sortait de nulle part, il avait cette figure incroyable qui l’a catapulté au-dessus de la mêlée, il a annihilé Hillary, pris le contrôle du parti Démocrate et est devenu président. C’est vraiment sans précédent : un jeune inconnu sans histoire, dossiers, associés bien connus, auto-créé. Il y avait une bonne volonté énorme, même moi j’étais aux anges le jour de l’élection, quoique j’aie voté contre lui et me sois opposé à son élection. C’était rédempteur pour un pays qui a commencé dans le péché de l’esclavage de voir le jour, je ne croyais pas personnellement le voir jamais de mon vivant, quand un président noir serait élu. Certes, il n’était pas mon candidat. J’aurais préféré que le premier président noir soit quelqu’un d’idéologiquement plus à mon goût, comme par exemple Colin Powell (que j’ai encouragé à se présenter en 2000) ou Condoleezza Rice. Mais j’étais vraiment fier d’être Américain à la prestation de serment. Je reste fier de ce succès historique. (…) il s’avère qu’il est de gauche, non du centre-droit à la manière de Bill Clinton. L’analogie que je donne est qu’en Amérique nous jouons le jeu entre les lignes des 40 yards, en Europe vous jouez tout le terrain d’une ligne de but à l’autre. Vous avez les partis communistes, vous avez les partis fascistes, nous, on n’a pas ça, on a des partis très centristes. Alors qu’ Obama veut nous pousser aux 30 yards, ce qui pour l’Amérique est vraiment loin. Juste après son élection, il s’est adressé au Congrès et a promis en gros de refaire les piliers de la société américaine — éducation, énergie et soins de santé. Tout ceci déplacerait l’Amérique vers un Etat de type social-démocrate européen, ce qui est en dehors de la norme pour l’Amérique. (…) Obama a mal interprété son mandat. Il a été élu six semaines après un effondrement financier comme il n’y en avait jamais eu en 60 ans ; après huit ans d’une présidence qui avait fatigué le pays; au milieu de deux guerres qui ont fait que le pays s’est opposé au gouvernement républicain qui nous avait lancé dans ces guerres; et contre un adversaire complètement inepte, John McCain. Et pourtant, Obama n’a gagné que par 7 points. Mais il a cru que c’était un grand mandat général et qu’il pourrait mettre en application son ordre du jour social-démocrate. (…) sa vision du monde me semble si naïve que je ne suis même pas sûr qu’il est capable de développer une doctrine. Il a la vision d’un monde régulé par des normes internationales auto-suffisantes, où la paix est gardée par un certain genre de consensus international vague, quelque chose appelé la communauté internationale, qui pour moi est une fiction, via des agences internationales évidemment insatisfaisantes et sans valeur. Je n’éleverais pas ce genre de pensée au niveau d’ une doctrine parce que j’ai trop de respect pour le mot de doctrine. (…) Peut-être que quand il aboutira à rien sur l’Iran, rien sur la Corée du Nord, quand il n’obtiendra rien des Russes en échange de ce qu’il a fait aux Polonais et aux Tchèques, rien dans les négociations de paix au Moyen-Orient – peut-être qu’à ce moment-là, il commencera à se demander si le monde fonctionne vraiment selon des normes internationales, le consensus et la douceur et la lumière ou s’il repose sur la base de la puissance américaine et occidentale qui, au bout du compte, garantit la paix. (…) Henry Kissinger a dit une fois que la paix peut être réalisée seulement de deux manières : l’hégémonie ou l’équilibre des forces. Ca, c’est du vrai réalisme. Ce que l’administration Obama prétend être du réalisme est du non-sens naïf. Charles Krauthammer (oct. 2009)
The errant Obama biography in the Acton & Dystel booklet does not contradict the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate. Moreover, several contemporaneous accounts of Obama’s background describe Obama as having been born in Hawaii. The biography does, however, fit a pattern in which Obama–or the people representing and supporting him–manipulate his public persona. David Maraniss’s forthcoming biography of Obama has reportedly confirmed, for example, that a girlfriend Obama described in Dreams from My Father was, in fact, an amalgam of several separate individuals. In addition, Obama and his handlers have a history of redefining his identity when expedient. In March 2008, for example, he famously declared: “I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” Several weeks later, Obama left Wright’s church–and, according to Edward Klein’s new biography, The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House, allegedly attempted to persuade Wright not to “do any more public speaking until after the November [2008] election” (51). Obama has been known frequently to fictionalize aspects of his own life. During his 2008 campaign, for instance, Obama claimed that his dying mother had fought with insurance companies over coverage for her cancer treatments. That turned out to be untrue, but Obama has repeated the story–which even the Washington Post called “misleading”–in a campaign video for the 2012 election. The Acton & Dystel biography could also reflect how Obama was seen by his associates, or transitions in his own identity. He is said, for instance, to have cultivated an “international” identity until well into his adulthood, according to Maraniss. Regardless of the reason for Obama’s odd biography, the Acton & Dystel booklet raises new questions as part of ongoing efforts to understand Barack Obama–who, despite four years in office remains a mystery to many Americans, thanks to the mainstream media. Joel B. Pollak
The Obama memoir is revealed not really to be a memoir at all. Most of his intimate friends and past dalliances that we read about in Dreams From My Father were, we learn, just made up (“composites”); the problem, we also discover, with the president’s autobiography is not what is actually false, but whether anything much at all is really true in it. If a writer will fabricate the details about his own mother’s terminal illness and quest for insurance, then he will probably fudge on anything. For months the president fought the Birthers who insist that he was born in Kenya, only to have it revealed that he himself for over a decade wrote just that fact in his own literary biography. Is Barack Obama then a birther? Has any major public figure (57 states, Austrian language, corpse-men, Maldives for Falklands, private sector “doing fine,” etc.) been a more underwhelming advertisement for the quality of a Harvard education or a Chicago Law School part-time billet? Has any presidential candidate or president set a partisan crowd to laughing by rubbing his chin with his middle finger as he derides an opponent, or made a joke about killing potential suitors of his daughters with deadly Predator drones, or recited a double entendre “go-down” joke about a sex act?Victor Davis Hanson
NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams frequently fabricated a dramatic story that he was under enemy attack while reporting from Iraq. NBC is now investigating whether Williams also embellished events in New Orleans during his reporting on Hurricane Katrina. (…) Former CBS anchorman Dan Rather tried to pass off fake memos as authentic evidence about former President George W. Bush’s supposedly checkered National Guard record. CNN news host Fareed Zakaria, who recently interviewed President Obama, was caught using the written work of others as if it were his own. He joins a distinguished array of accused plagiarists, from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to columnist Maureen Dowd. Usually, plagiarism is excused. Research assistants are blamed or clerical slips are cited — and little happens. In lieu of admitting deliberate dishonesty, our celebrities when caught prefer using the wishy-washy prefix “mis-” to downplay a supposed accident — as in misremembering, misstating, or misconstruing. Politicians are often the worst offenders. Vice President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race of 1988 once it was revealed that he had been caught plagiarizing in law school. In that campaign, he gave a speech lifted from British Labor party candidate Neil Kinnock. Hillary Clinton fantasized when she melodramatically claimed she had been under sniper fire when landing in Bosnia. Her husband, former president Bill Clinton, was more overt in lying under oath in the Monica Lewinsky debacle. Former senator John Walsh (D., Mont.) was caught plagiarizing elements of his master’s thesis. President Obama has explained that some of the characters in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, were “composites” or “compressed,” which suggests that in some instances what he described did not exactly happen. What are the consequences of lying about or exaggerating one’s past or stealing the written work of others? It depends. Punishment is calibrated by the stature of the perpetrator. If the offender is powerful, then misremembering, misstating, and misconstruing are considered minor and aberrant transgressions. If not, the sins are called lying and plagiarizing, and deemed a window into a bad soul. Thus a career can be derailed. Young, upcoming lying reporters like onetime New York Times fabulist Jayson Blair and The New Republic’s past stable of fantasy writers — Stephen Glass, Scott Beauchamp, and Ruth Shalit — had their work finally disowned by their publications. Former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke got her Pulitzer Prize revoked for fabricating a story. Obscure senator Walsh was forced out of his re-election race. Biden, on the other hand, became vice president. It did not matter much that the Obama biography by Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Maraniss contradicted many of the details from Obama’s autobiography. Hillary Clinton may well follow her husband’s trajectory and become president. The Reverend Al Sharpton helped perpetuate the Tawana Brawley hoax; he is now a frequent guest at the White House. Why do so many of our elites cut corners and embellish their past or steal the work of others? For them, such deception may be a small gamble worth taking, with mild consequences if caught. Plagiarism is a shortcut to publishing without all the work of creating new ideas or doing laborious research. Padding a resume or mixing truth with half-truths and composites creates more dramatic personal histories that enhance careers. Our culture itself has redefined the truth into a relative idea without fault. Some academics suggested that Brian Williams may have lied because of “memory distortion” rather than a character defect. Contemporary postmodern thought sees the “truth” as a construct. The social aim of these fantasy narratives is what counts. If they serve progressive race, class, and gender issues, then why follow the quaint rules of evidence that were established by an ossified and reactionary establishment? (…) Our lies become accepted as true, but only depending on how powerful and influential we are — or how supposedly noble the cause for which we lie.Victor Davis Hanson
Attention: un mensonge peut en cacher un autre !
Emprisonnement et torture de son grand-père kenyan par les Britanniques, assassinat du père de son beau-père indonésien par les colons hollandais, exagération de son expérience du racisme ou de la drogue, passage sous silence ou colorisation de ses amis blancs, racialisation – entre deux relations avec des étudiantes blanches – d’une rupture sentimentale avec une autre copine blanche ou de son évincement de l’équipe de basket-ball de son lycée, rupture de sa mère avec un père violent présentée comme abandon dudit père, refus de traitement du cancer de sa mère …
Alors qu’après son abandon de l’Irak et bientôt de l’Afghanistan comme sa lâcheté face à l’Iran …
Et suite à ses absences tant à Paris qu’à Auschwitz, avoir contre toute évidence mis en doute les mobiles antisémites du massacre de l’Hyper cacher …
Comment s’étonner qu’après nos Dan Rather et nos Charles Enderlin et concernant ses états de service en Irak ou l’ouragan Katrina, un journaliste-vedette de la chaine NBC ait à son tour enjolivé la réalité ?
Brian Williams’s Truth Problem, and Ours
The NBC anchor’s lies are symptomatic of a culture in which truth has become relativized.
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
February 12, 2015
NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams frequently fabricated a dramatic story that he was under enemy attack while reporting from Iraq. NBC is now investigating whether Williams also embellished events in New Orleans during his reporting on Hurricane Katrina.
Williams always plays the hero in his yarns, braving natural and hostile human enemies to deliver us the truth on the evening news.
Former CBS anchorman Dan Rather tried to pass off fake memos as authentic evidence about former President George W. Bush’s supposedly checkered National Guard record.
CNN news host Fareed Zakaria, who recently interviewed President Obama, was caught using the written work of others as if it were his own. He joins a distinguished array of accused plagiarists, from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to columnist Maureen Dowd.
Usually, plagiarism is excused. Research assistants are blamed or clerical slips are cited — and little happens. In lieu of admitting deliberate dishonesty, our celebrities when caught prefer using the wishy-washy prefix “mis-” to downplay a supposed accident — as in misremembering, misstating, or misconstruing.
Politicians are often the worst offenders. Vice President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race of 1988 once it was revealed that he had been caught plagiarizing in law school. In that campaign, he gave a speech lifted from British Labor party candidate Neil Kinnock.
Hillary Clinton fantasized when she melodramatically claimed she had been under sniper fire when landing in Bosnia. Her husband, former president Bill Clinton, was more overt in lying under oath in the Monica Lewinsky debacle. Former senator John Walsh (D., Mont.) was caught plagiarizing elements of his master’s thesis.
President Obama has explained that some of the characters in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, were “composites” or “compressed,” which suggests that in some instances what he described did not exactly happen.
What are the consequences of lying about or exaggerating one’s past or stealing the written work of others?
It depends.
Punishment is calibrated by the stature of the perpetrator. If the offender is powerful, then misremembering, misstating, and misconstruing are considered minor and aberrant transgressions. If not, the sins are called lying and plagiarizing, and deemed a window into a bad soul. Thus a career can be derailed.
Young, upcoming lying reporters like onetime New York Times fabulist Jayson Blair and The New Republic’s past stable of fantasy writers — Stephen Glass, Scott Beauchamp, and Ruth Shalit — had their work finally disowned by their publications. Former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke got her Pulitzer Prize revoked for fabricating a story.
Obscure senator Walsh was forced out of his re-election race. Biden, on the other hand, became vice president. It did not matter much that the Obama biography by Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Maraniss contradicted many of the details from Obama’s autobiography.
Hillary Clinton may well follow her husband’s trajectory and become president. The Reverend Al Sharpton helped perpetuate the Tawana Brawley hoax; he is now a frequent guest at the White House.
Why do so many of our elites cut corners and embellish their past or steal the work of others?
For them, such deception may be a small gamble worth taking, with mild consequences if caught. Plagiarism is a shortcut to publishing without all the work of creating new ideas or doing laborious research. Padding a resume or mixing truth with half-truths and composites creates more dramatic personal histories that enhance careers.
Our culture itself has redefined the truth into a relative idea without fault. Some academics suggested that Brian Williams may have lied because of “memory distortion” rather than a character defect.
Contemporary postmodern thought sees the “truth” as a construct. The social aim of these fantasy narratives is what counts. If they serve progressive race, class, and gender issues, then why follow the quaint rules of evidence that were established by an ossified and reactionary establishment?
Feminist actress and screenwriter Lena Dunham in her memoir described her alleged rapist as a campus conservative named Barry. After suspicion was cast on one particular man fitting Dunham’s book description, Dunham clarified that she meant to refer to someone else as the perpetrator.
Surely the exonerated Duke University men’s lacrosse players who were accused of sexual assault or the University of Virginia frat boys accused of rape in a magazine article in theory could have been guilty — even if they were proven not to be.
Michael Brown was suspected of committing a strong-arm robbery right before his death. He then walked down the middle of a street, blocking traffic, and rushed a policeman. Autopsy and toxicology reports of gunpowder residuals and the presence of THC suggest that Brown had marijuana in his system and was in close contact to the officer who fired. Do those details matter, if a “gentle giant” can become emblematic of an alleged epidemic of racist, trigger-happy cops who recklessly shoot unarmed youth?
The Greek word for truth was aletheia – literally “not forgetting.” Yet that ancient idea of eternal differences between truth and myth is now lost in the modern age.
Our lies become accepted as true, but only depending on how powerful and influential we are — or how supposedly noble the cause for which we lie.
Can there be good news in this era of Obama’s managed decline?
Victor Davis Hanson
PJ Media
June 25, 2012
TheThrill Is Gone
The last thirty days have made it clear that Barack Obama is not going to win the 2012 election by a substantial margin. The polls still show the race near dead even with over five months, and all sorts of unforeseen events, to come. But after the Obama meltdown of April and May, I don’t think he in any way resembles the mysterious Pied Piper figure of 2008, who mesmerized and then marched the American people over the cliff. Polls change daily; gaffes and wars may come aplenty. But Barack Obama has lost the American center and now he is reduced to the argument that Mitt Romney would be even worse than he has been, as he tries to cobble together an us-versus-them 51% majority from identity groups through cancelling the Keystone Pipeline, granting blanket amnesty, ginning up the “war on women,” and flipping on gay marriage.
Mythographer in Chief
The Obama memoir is revealed not really to be a memoir at all. Most of his intimate friends and past dalliances that we read about in Dreams From My Father were, we learn, just made up (“composites”); the problem, we also discover, with the president’s autobiography is not what is actually false, but whether anything much at all is really true in it. If a writer will fabricate the details about his own mother’s terminal illness and quest for insurance, then he will probably fudge on anything. For months the president fought the Birthers who insist that he was born in Kenya, only to have it revealed that he himself for over a decade wrote just that fact in his own literary biography. Is Barack Obama then a birther?
Has any major public figure (57 states, Austrian language, corpse-men, Maldives for Falklands, private sector “doing fine,” etc.) been a more underwhelming advertisement for the quality of a Harvard education or a Chicago Law School part-time billet? Has any presidential candidate or president set a partisan crowd to laughing by rubbing his chin with his middle finger as he derides an opponent, or made a joke about killing potential suitors of his daughters with deadly Predator drones, or recited a double entendre “go-down” joke about a sex act?
From Recession to Recovery to Stasis
As we see in New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin, the cure for the present economic malaise is not rocket science — a curbing of the size of government, a revision of the tax code, a modest rollback of regulation, reform of public employment, and holding the line on new taxes. Do that and public confidence returns, businesses start hiring, and finances settle down. Do the opposite — as we see in Mediterranean Europe, California, or Illinois over the last decade — and chaos ensues.
Obama took a budding recovery in June 2009, and through massive borrowing, the federal takeover of health care, new expansions of food stamps and unemployment insurance, the curtailing of oil and gas leasing on public lands, new regulations, and non-stop demagoguery of the private sector slowed the economy to a crawl. His goal seems not to restore economic growth per se but to seek an equality of result, even if that means higher unemployment and less net wealth for the poor and middle classes. Obama hinted at that in 2008 when he said he would raise capital gains taxes even if it meant less revenue, given the need for “fairness.” Indeed, equality is best achieved by bringing the top down rather than the bottom up. Nowhere is the Obama model of massive borrowing, vast increases in the size of the state, more regulations, and class warfare successful — not in California or Illinois, not in Greece, Spain, or Italy, not anywhere.
To Be or Not to Be a Fat Cat?
Culturally, Obama might at least have played the Jimmy Carter populist and eschewed the elite world that had so mesmerized Bill Clinton. Instead, Obama proved a counterfeit populist and became enthralled with the high life of rich friends, celebrities, high-priced fundraisers, and family getaways to Martha’s Vineyard or Costa del Sol. He somehow has set records both in the number of meet-and-greet campaign fundraisers and the number of golf rounds played. As Obama damned the fat cats and corporate jet owners, he courted them in preparation to joining them post-officium. It simply is unsustainable for a Hawaii prep-schooled president to talk down to black audiences in a fake black patois in warning about “them,” only to put on his polo shirt, shades and golf garb to court “them” on the links.
The Great Divide
Race? We live in a world where either the president or the attorney general will too often weigh in, and clumsily and in polarizing fashion, on any high-profile white/black legal matter. By now we got the message that we are all cowards, are not nice to Mr. Holder’s “people,” are racists in wanting audits of his performance, and are the sort of enemies the president wants punished.
We live in an age of a daily dose of the provocateur Al Sharpton and the nearly daily shrill accusations of the Black Caucus. No president ever entered office with more racial goodwill and no president has so racially polarized the country. Anyone who read the racially obsessed Dreams From My Father or reviewed the race-baiting sermons of the demented Rev. Wright could have predicted the ongoing deterioration in racial relations. We live in an age in which criticism of the president is alleged racism, creating an impossible situation: the country is redeemed only if it elects Obama, and stays redeemed only if he is reelected. How strange to read columnists one week alleging racism, and on the next warning us about the Mormon Church.
The most recent de facto amnesty is not just politically cynical, but unworkable. Consider that Obama himself warned on two earlier occasions that it would be legally impossible to do what he just did, and so he did not do it — even when he had Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress — until he was at 50/50 in the polls in a reelection fight. If we are to extend to roughly one million illegal aliens blanket amnesty on the premise that they are in or have graduated from high school and have not been convicted of a crime, then are we to deport now those who dropped out of high school (the Hispanic drop out rate in general in California is over 50%) or who have been arrested and convicted? Will this loud and public effort by the Hispanic elite to achieve amnesty for over 11 million illegal aliens moderate the MEChA/La Raza university writ that the United States is a culpable place — for how can they desire so what they so criticize? Given that Asians are now the largest immigrant group (almost all arriving legally, with either education, skills, or capital), will yet another group adopt lobbying efforts as well to increase the numbers of kindred arrivals, given that immigration policy is now predicated on ethnic and identity politics?
The Age of Transparency?
Solyndra, the reversals of the Chrysler creditors, the GSA mess, the Secret Service embarrassments, and Fast and Furious were not the new transparency. But Securitygate proved a scandal like none other in recent memory, trumping both Watergate and Iran-Contra — albeit ignored by the press. Usually administrations fight leaks from self-proclaimed whistleblowers, but do not themselves aid and abet violators of government confidentiality to promote a pathetic (reading Thomas Aquinas while selecting drone targets?) narrative of heroic wartime leadership.
Usually liberal reporters convince themselves into thinking they publish leaks as a way of speaking “truth to power,” not as near accomplices in promoting a partisan agenda. Usually leaks happen after events, not in the middle of an ongoing war against terrorists. How odd that the Obama administration has done more harm to the country than did Wikileaks. Why would the president not release subpoenaed documents to the U.S. Congress while he leaked national security secrets to the world?
Appointments? Where does one find the like of an Anita Dunn (her hero was Mao), the truther Van Jones, or Al “Crucify” Armendariz? Do we remember guests to the Bush White House being photographed flipping off portraits of Bill Clinton? Usually Treasury secretaries are models of tax probity, not tax violators themselves. Why is the secretary of Labor issuing videos inviting illegal aliens to contact her office when lodging complaints against employers? Even John Mitchell did not violate so many ethical standards as has Eric Holder, who sees nothing wrong in appointing an Obama appointee and Obama campaign donor to investigate possible Obama administration legal violations. Why was grilling Alberto Gonzalez not racism, but doing the same to Eric Holder supposedly is? From where did “Shut the f— up” National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon appear? Fannie Mae and K Street? Do Commerce secretaries usually drive Lexuses as they promote U.S. industry?
A Patch of Blue
Can there be good news in this era of Obama’s managed decline? In fact, we have two good reasons to rejoice. One, never has the hard Left had such an ideal megaphone as Barack Hussein Obama: his identity was constructed as multicultural to the core. He put liberals at ease through his comportment and chameleon voice (ask either Harry Reid or Joe Biden). He ran hard left of Hillary Clinton and promised everything from shutting down Guantanamo to ending renditions, bringing aboard the likes of a Harold Koh from Yale and Cass Sunstein from Chicago. He was young, hip, self-described as cool, and was hailed as the best emissary of the radical liberal vision of any in decades. Historians hailed Obama as the smartest president who ever held office, disagreeing only whether he was JFK or FDR reincarnate.
And what happened? In less than 40 months, Obama destroyed the greatest bipartisan good will that any recent president has enjoyed, and has done more to discredit Keynesian neo-socialist politics than have all of talk radio, Fox News, and the internet combined. In just two years, he took a Democratic Congress and lost the House in the largest midterm setback since 1938. In other words, the people — fifty percent of whom either do not pay federal income taxes or receive some sort of state or federal entitlement or both — saw the best face of modern neo-socialism imaginable, and they were not quite sold on it.
Second, it is hard to screw up America in just four years. Look at it this way: gas and oil production has soared despite, not because of, the federal government. The rest of the world — the unraveling European Union, the Arab Spring, Putin’s Russia, aging Japan, authoritarian China, the recrudescent Marxism in Latin America — reminds us of American exceptionalism. The verdict from Wisconsin is that the statist model is over. The public union, big pension, non-fireable employee model is left only with an “après nous, le déluge“ sigh. The private sector is not doing fine, but shortly will be when it is assured taxes won’t soar, energy will be cheaper, and Obamacare will cease. The irony is that the last four years have reminded us of what we still can be, and how we differ from most other places in the world.
Voir également:
The Real Story Of Barack Obama
A new biography finally challenges Obama’s famous memoir. And the truth might not be quite as interesting as the president, and his enemies, have imagined.
Ben Smith
BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief
June 17, 2012
David Maraniss’s new biography of Barack Obama is the first sustained challenge to Obama’s control over his own story, a firm and occasionally brutal debunking of Obama’s bestselling 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.
Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story punctures two sets of falsehoods: The family tales Obama passed on, unknowing; and the stories Obama made up. The 672-page book closes before Obama enters law school, and Maraniss has promised another volume, but by its conclusion I counted 38 instances in which the biographer convincingly disputes significant elements of Obama’s own story of his life and his family history.
The two strands of falsehood run together, in that they often serve the same narrative goal: To tell a familiar, simple, and ultimately optimistic story about race and identity in the 20th Century. The false notes in Obama’s family lore include his mother’s claimed experience of racism in Kansas, and incidents of colonial brutality toward his Kenyan grandfather and Indonesian step-grandfather. Obama’s deliberate distortions more clearly serve a single narrative: Race. Obama presents himself through the book as “blacker and more disaffected” than he really was, Maraniss writes, and the narrative “accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought, while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be white.”
That the core narrative of Dreams could have survived this long into Obama’s public life is the product in part of an inadvertent conspiracy between the president and his enemies. His memoir evokes an angry, misspent youth; a deep and lifelong obsession with race; foreign and strongly Muslim heritage; and roots in the 20th Century’s self-consciously leftist anti-colonial struggle. Obama’s conservative critics have, since the beginnings of his time on the national scene, taken the self-portrait at face value, and sought to deepen it to portray him as a leftist and a foreigner.
Reporters who have sought to chase some of the memoir’s tantalizing yarns have, however, long suspected that Obama might not be as interesting as his fictional doppelganger. “Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs…significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use,” the New York Times’s Serge Kovaleski reported dryly in February of 2008, speculating that Obama had “added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.” (In one of the stranger entries in the annals of political spin, Obama’s spokesman defended his boss’s claim to have sampled cocaine, calling the book “candid.”)
Maraniss’s deep and entertaining biography will serve as a corrective both to Obama’s mythmaking and his enemies’. Maraniss finds that Obama’s young life was basically conventional, his personal struggles prosaic and later exaggerated. He finds that race, central to Obama’s later thought and included in the subtitle of his memoir, wasn’t a central factor in his Hawaii youth or the existential struggles of his young adulthood. And he concludes that attempts, which Obama encouraged in his memoir, to view him through the prism of race “can lead to a misinterpretation” of the sense of “outsiderness” that Maraniss puts at the core of Obama’s identity and ambition.
Maraniss opens with a warning: Among the falsehoods in Dreams is the caveat in the preface that “for the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.”
“The character creations and rearrangements of the book are not merely a matter of style, devices of compression, but are also substantive,” Maraniss responds in his own introduction. The book belongs in the category of “literature and memoir, not history and autobiography,” he writes, and “the themes of the book control character and chronology.”
Maraniss, a veteran Washington Post reporter whose biography of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, helped explain one complicated president to America, dove deep and missed deadlines for this biography. And the book’s many fact-checks are rich and, at times, comical.
In Dreams, for instance, Obama writes of a friend named “Regina,” a symbol of the authentic African-American experience that Obama hungers for (and which he would later find in Michelle Robinson). Maraniss discovers, however, that Regina was based on a student leader at Occidental College, Caroline Boss, who was white. Regina was the name of her working-class Swiss grandmother, who also seems to make a cameo in Dreams.
Maraniss also notices that Obama also entirely cut two white roommates, in Los Angeles and New York, from the narrative, and projected a racial incident onto a New York girlfriend that he later told Maraniss had happened in Chicago.
Some of Maraniss’s most surprising debunking, though, comes in the area of family lore, where he disputes a long string of stories on three continents, though perhaps no more than most of us have picked up from garrulous grandparents and great uncles. And his corrections are, at times, a bit harsh.
Obama grandfather “Stanley [Dunham]’s two defining stories were that he found his mother after her suicide and that he punched his principal and got expelled from El Dorado High. That second story seems to be in the same fictitious realm as the first,” Maraniss writes. As for Dunham’s tale of a 1935 car ride with Herbert Hoover, it’s a “preposterous…fabrication.”
As for a legacy of racism in his mother’s Kansas childhood, “Stanley was a teller of tales, and it appears that his grandson got these stories mostly from him,” Maraniss writes.
Across the ocean, the family story that Hussein Onyango, Obama’s paternal grandfather, had been whipped and tortured by the British is “unlikely”: “five people who had close connections to Hussein Onyango said they doubted the story or were certain that it did not happen,” Maraniss writes. The memory that the father of his Indonesian stepfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, was killed by Dutch soldiers in the fight for independence is “a concocted myth in almost all respects.” In fact, Martodihardjo “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes, presumably suffering a heart attack.”
Most families exaggerate ancestors’ deeds. A more difficult category of correction comes in Maraniss’s treatment of Obama’s father and namesake. Barack Obama Sr., in this telling, quickly sheds whatever sympathy his intelligence and squandered promise should carry. He’s the son of a man, one relative told Maraniss, who is required to pay an extra dowry for one wife “because he was a bad person.”
He was also a domestic abuser.
“His father Hussein Onyango, was a man who hit women, and it turned out that Obama was no different,” Maraniss writes. “I thought he would kill me,” one ex-wife tells him; he also gave her sexually-transmitted diseases from extramarital relationships.
It’s in that context that Maraniss corrects a central element of Obama’s own biography, debunking a story that Obama’s mother may well have invented: That she and her son were abandoned in Hawaii in 1963.
“It was his mother who left Hawaii first, a year earlier than his father,” Maraniss writes, confirming a story that had first surfaced in the conservative blogosphere. He suggests that “spousal abuse” prompted her flight back to Seattle.
Obama’s own fairy-tales, meanwhile, run toward Amercan racial cliché. “Ray,” who is in the book “a symbol of young blackness,” is based on a character whose complex racial identity — half Japanese, part native American, and part black — was more like Obama’s, and who wasn’t a close friend.
“In the memoir Barry and Ray, could be heard complaining about how rich white haole girls would never date them,” Maraniss writes, referring to Hawaii’s upper class, and to a composite character whose blackness is. “In fact, neither had much trouble in that regard.”
As Obama’s Chicago mentor Jerry Kellman tells Maraniss in a different context, “Everything didn’t revolve around race.”
Those are just a few examples in biography whose insistence on accuracy will not be mistaken for pedantry. Maraniss is a master storyteller, and his interest in revising Obama’s history is in part an interest in why and how stories are told, a theme that recurs in the memoir. Obama himself, he notes, saw affectionately through his grandfather Stanley’s fabulizing,” describing the older man’s tendency to rewrite “history to conform with the image he wished for himself.” Indeed, Obama comes from a long line of storytellers, and at times fabulists, on both sides.
Dick Opar, a distant Obama relative who served as a senior Kenyan police official, and who was among the sources dismissing legends of anti-colonial heroism, put it more bluntly.
It almost seemed too good to be true. When President Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, « Dreams From My Father, » was re-published soon after the young politican catapulted onto the national stage with a charismatic speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, his amazing life story captured the hearts and minds of millions of Americans.
But like many memoirs, which tend to be self-serving, it now appears that Obama shaped the book less as a factual history of his life than as a great story. A new biography, « Barack Obama: The Story, » by David Maraniss, raises questions about the accuracy of the president’s account and delivers fresh revelations about his pot-smoking in high school and college and his girlfriends in New York City.
In his memoir, Obama describes how his grandfather, Hussein Onyango, was imprisoned and tortured by British troops during the fight for Kenyan independence. But that did not happen, according to five associates of Onyango interviewed by Maraniss. Another heroic tale from the memoir about Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, being killed by Dutch soldiers during Indonesia’s fight for independence also is inaccurate, according to Maraniss.
The president explains in his memoir that some of the characters in his book have been combined or compressed. Maraniss provides more details about the extent of that alteration. One of Obama’s « African American » classmates was based on Caroline Boss, a white student whose Swiss grandmother was named Regina, according to Maraniss, a Washington Post editor and author who has won a Pulitzer Prize. The president also described breaking up with a white girlfriend due to a « racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman, » writes Maraniss. But Obama’s next girlfriend in Chicago, an anthropologist, also was white.
The young Obama’s lack of playing time on the high school basketball team was due more to his ability than the coach’s preference for white players, Maraniss writes. And Obama’s mother likely left his father — not the other way around — after domestic abuse, note reviews of the book in the Los Angeles Times and Buzzfeed.
Here is a slideshow of the new biography’s major revelations:
On weekday mornings as a teenager, Barry Obama left his grandparents’ apartment on the 10th floor of the 12-story high-rise at 1617 South Beretania, a mile and half above Waikiki Beach, and walked up Punahou Street in the shadows of capacious banyan trees and date palms. Before crossing the overpass above the H1 freeway, where traffic zoomed east to body-surfing beaches or west to the airport and Pearl Harbor, he passed Kapiolani Medical Center, walking below the hospital room where he was born on Aug. 4, 1961. Two blocks further along, at the intersection with Wilder, he could look left toward the small apartment on Poki where he had spent a few years with his little sister, Maya, and his mother, Ann, back when she was getting her master’s degree at the University of Hawaii before she left again for Indonesia. Soon enough he was at the lower edge of Punahou School, the gracefully sloping private campus where he studied some and played basketball more.
An adolescent life told in five Honolulu blocks, confined and compact, but far, far away. Apart from other unprecedented aspects of his rise, it is a geographical truth that no politician in American history has traveled farther than Barack Obama to be within reach of the White House. He was born and spent most of his formative years on Oahu, in distance the most removed population center on the planet, some 2,390 miles from California, farther from a major landmass than anywhere but Easter Island. In the westward impulse of American settlement, his birthplace was the last frontier, an outpost with its own time zone, the 50th of the United States, admitted to the union only two years before Obama came along.
Those who come from islands are inevitably shaped by the experience. For Obama, the experience was all contradiction and contrast.
As the son of a white woman and a black man, he grew up as a multiracial kid, a « hapa, » « half-and-half » in the local lexicon, in one of the most multiracial places in the world, with no majority group. There were native Hawaiians, Japanese, Filipinos, Samoans, Okinawans, Chinese and Portuguese, along with Anglos, commonly known as haole (pronounced howl-lee), and a smaller population of blacks, traditionally centered at the U.S. military installations. But diversity does not automatically translate into social comfort: Hawaii has its own difficult history of racial and cultural stratification, and young Obama struggled to find his place even in that many-hued milieu.
He had to leave the island to find himself as a black man, eventually rooting in Chicago, the antipode of remote Honolulu, deep in the fold of the mainland, and there setting out on the path that led toward politics. Yet life circles back in strange ways, and in essence it is the promise of the place he left behind — the notion if not the reality of Hawaii, what some call the spirit of aloha, the transracial if not post-racial message — that has made his rise possible. Hawaii and Chicago are the two main threads weaving through the cloth of Barack Obama’s life. Each involves more than geography.
Hawaii is about the forces that shaped him, and Chicago is about how he reshaped himself. Chicago is about the critical choices he made as an adult: how he learned to survive in the rough-and-tumble of law and politics, how he figured out the secrets of power in a world defined by it, and how he resolved his inner conflicts and refined the subtle, coolly ambitious persona now on view in the presidential election. Hawaii comes first. It is what lies beneath, what makes Chicago possible and understandable.
Hawaii involves the struggles of a teenage hapa at Punahou School who wanted nothing more than to be a professional basketball player. It is about his extraordinary mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, deeply loving if frequently absent. While politicians burnish their histories by laying claim to early years of community work and lives of public service, she was the real deal, devoting her career, unsung and underpaid, to helping poor women make their way in the modern world.
It is about his mysterious father, Barack Hussein Obama, an imperious if alluring voice gone distant and then missing. It is about his grandparents, Madelyn and Stan Dunham, Toot and Gramps, the white couple with whom he lived for most of his teenage years, she practical and determined, he impulsive, hokey, well-intentioned and, by his grandson’s account, burdened with the desperate lost hopes of a Willy Loman-style salesman. It is about their family’s incessant migration away from the heartland, from the Great Plains to the West Coast to Hawaii.
And that was not far enough for their daughter, who followed the Pacific farther to Indonesia and traveled the world until, at the too-early age of 52, she made her way back to Honolulu, taking an apartment next to her parents’ in the high-rise on the corner of Beretania and Punahou, to die there of cancer. It was the same year, 1995, that her son made his debut on the national stage with a book about himself that searched for the missing, the void — his dad, Kenya, Africa — and paid less attention to the people and things that had shaped his life, especially his mother.
The simple fact is that he would not exist as a human being, let alone as a politician, without his mother’s sensibility, naive or adventurous or both. Of all the relationships in Obama’s life, none has been deeper, more complex or more important. They lived under the same roof for only perhaps 12 years and were frequently apart during his adolescence, but her lessons and judgments were always with him. In some sense, because they were just 18 years apart, they grew up together, each following a singular path toward maturity.
Like many presidential aspirants before him, and perhaps most like Bill Clinton, Obama grew up surrounded by strong women, the male figures either weak or absent. Once, during the heat of the primary race between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, a claim came from Bill Clinton that he « understood » Obama. As different as their backgrounds and families were, it was no doubt this strong-female-weak-male similarity that he had in mind.
* * *
Who was Obama’s mother? The shorthand version of the story has a woman from Kansas marrying a man from Kenya, but while Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Wichita in the fall of 1942, it is a stretch to call her a Jayhawk. After leaving Kansas when she was a youngster, she and her parents lived in Berkeley, Calif., for two years, Ponca City, Okla., for two years, and Wichita Falls, Tex., for three years before they ventured to the Seattle area.
They arrived in time for her to enter ninth grade at the new high school on Mercer Island, a hilly slab of land in Lake Washington that was popping with tract developments during the western boom of the postwar 1950s. The island is not much more isolated than Staten Island on the other side of the country. Just east of Seattle, it is connected to the city by what was then called the floating bridge.
The population explosion, along with a nomadic propensity, brought the Dunhams to Mercer Island. Stan was in the furniture trade, a salesman always looking for the next best deal, and the middle-class suburbs of Seattle offered fertile territory: All the new houses going up would need new living room and dining room sets. He took a job in a furniture store in Seattle.
Madelyn, who brought home a paycheck most of her life, found a job in a banking real estate escrow office, and the family settled into a two-bedroom place in a quiet corner of the Shorewood Apartments, nestled near the lakeshore in view of the Cascade Mountains. Many islanders lived there temporarily as they waited for new houses to be finished nearby. But the Dunhams never looked for another home, and they filled their high-ceilinged apartment with the Danish modern furniture of that era.
Stanley Ann was an only child, and in those days she dealt head-on with her uncommon first name. No sense trying to hide it, even though she hated it. « My name is Stanley, » she would say. « My father wanted a boy, and that’s that. » Her mother softened it, calling her Stanny or Stanny Ann, but at school she was Stanley, straight up. « She owned the name, » recalled Susan Botkin, one of her first pals on Mercer Island. « Only once or twice was she teased. She had a sharp tongue, a deep wit, and she could kill. We all called her Stanley. »
In a high school culture of brawn and beauty, Stanley was one of the brains. Often struggling with her weight, and wearing braces her junior year, she had the normal teenage anxieties, according to her friends, though she seemed less concerned with superficial appearances than many of her peers. Her protective armor included a prolific vocabulary, free from the trite and cliched; a quick take on people and events; and biting sarcasm.
John W. Hunt said those traits allowed Stanley to become accepted by the predominantly male intellectual crowd, even though she had a soft voice. « She wasn’t a shouter, but sat and thought awhile before she put forth her ideas. She was one of the most intelligent girls in our class, but unusual in that she thought things through more than anyone else, » Hunt said.
Stanley would not use her wit to bully people, her classmates recalled, but rather to slice up prejudice or pomposity. Her signature expression of disdain was an exaggerated rolling of her big brown eyes.
Susan Botkin thought back to late afternoons when she and Stanley would go downtown to the Seattle library and then hitch a ride home with Stan and Madelyn. « We would climb into the car, and immediately he would start into his routine, » she recalled. In the back seat, the daughter would be rolling her eyes, while in the front, Madelyn — « a porcelain doll kind of woman, with pale, wonderful skin, red hair, carefully coiffed, and lacquered nails » — would try to temper her husband with occasional interjections of « Now, Stan . . . »
Another high school friend, Maxine Box, remembered that they enjoyed getting rides in the old man’s white convertible and that he was always ready and willing to drive them anywhere, wanting to be the life of the party. « Stanley would gladly take the transportation from him, » Box said, but would « just as soon that he go away. They had locked horns a lot of times. » The mother, she sensed, was « a buffer between Stan and Stanley. »
Stanley and her friends would escape across the bridge into Seattle, where they hung out at a small espresso cafe near the University of Washington. Anything, Hunt said, to « get away from the suburban view. We would go to this cafe and talk and talk and talk » — about world events, French cinema, the meaning of life, the existence of God.
Their curiosity was encouraged by the teachers at Mercer Island High, especially Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert, who taught advanced humanities courses open to the top 25 students. The assigned reading included not only Plato and Aristotle, Kierkegaard and Sartre, but also late-1950s critiques of societal conventions, such as « The Organization Man » by William H. Whyte, « The Lonely Crowd » by David Riesman and « The Hidden Persuaders » by Vance Packard, as well as the political theories of Hegel and Mill and Marx. « The Communist Manifesto » was also on the reading list, and it drew protests from some parents, prompting what Wichterman later called « Mothers Marches » on the school — a phrase that conjures up a larger backlash than really occurred but conveys some of the tension of the times. « They would come up in ones and twos and threes and berate the teacher or complain to the principal, » Hunt recalled.
Wichterman and Foubert, noted Chip Wall, were « instrumental in getting us to think, and anybody who tries to do that, particularly in high school, has trouble. ‘Make my kid a thinker, but make sure he thinks like I do.’ » In tracking the Obama story this year, some conservative Web sites have seized on the high school curriculum of his mother as evidence of an early leftist indoctrination. Wall, who has spent his life challenging dogma from any ideology, and whose take on the world often veers from the politically correct, answered this interpretation with a two-word dismissal: « Oh, crap. »
Stanley was decidedly liberal. She challenged the existence of God and championed Adlai Stevenson. But while some of her friends turned toward cynicism, she did not. « She was intrigued by what was happening in the world and embraced change, » Susan Botkin recalled. « During our senior year, the Doomsday Clock seemed as close as it had ever been to boom. And the thought affected people in our class. There was a sense of malaise that permeated the group: Why bother? The boom is going to happen. But Stanley was better able to laugh it off, to look beyond it. Come out of that bomb shelter and do something. »
Their senior class graduated in June 1960, at the dawn of the new decade. A few days after commencement, Stanley left for Honolulu with her parents. Decades later she told her son that she had wanted to go to the University of Chicago, where she had been accepted, but that her father would not let her be that far from them, since she was barely 17. Her friends from Mercer Island recalled that, like many of them, she intended to stay in Seattle and go to « U-Dub, » the University of Washington, but that again her father insisted that she was too young even for that and had to accompany them to Hawaii.
That was nearly a half-century ago. Time compresses, and the high school classmates of Stanley Ann Dunham now have an unusual vantage point from which to witness the presidential campaign of her son. « You see so much of her in his face, » Maxine Box said. « And he has his grandfather’s long chin. » In watching Obama speak and answer questions, Chip Wall could « instantly go back and recognize the person » he knew decades ago. Stanley is there, he said, in the workings of the son’s mind, « especially in his wry sense of speech pattern. » The fact that her son is black was surprising but not out of character; she was attracted to the different and untouched by racial prejudice.
The hardest thing for them to grasp was that Barack Obama Jr. came into being only a little more than a year after Stanley left Mercer Island. She seemed like such an unlikely candidate for teenage motherhood, not just because of her scholarly ways and lack of boyfriends, but because she appeared to have zero interest in babies. Botkin had two little brothers and was always babysitting, she recalled, but « Stanley never even babysat. She would come over to the house and just stand back, and her eyes would blink and her head would spin like, ‘Oh, my God, what’s going on here?’ «
In the fall of 1960, as Botkin worried about whether she had the proper clothes to go through sorority rush at U-Dub, where they pinched the young women to make sure they were wearing girdles and where nylons were part of the uniform, she received her first letter from her friend in Hawaii. Stanley was enjoying newfound freedoms. She had ditched her first name and was now going by Ann. And no more nylons and perfect outfits, either. « I’m wearing shorts and muu muus to class, » she wrote.
In the next letter, she said she was dating an African student she had met in Russian class. Botkin was more interested in the fact that her friend was studying Russian than in whom she was dating. But soon enough came a card revealing that Ann was in love, and then another that said she was married and expecting a baby in the summer.
* * *
The first African student at the University of Hawaii, Barack Hussein Obama, reached Honolulu 11 months before Stanley Ann Dunham and her parents got there from Seattle. He was on the first airlift of Kenyan students brought to study at U.S. universities as part of a program organized by Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya and funded primarily by hundreds of American supporters. At the time, there were no colleges in Kenya, which was in the last throes of British colonialism. His arrival in Honolulu was announced in an article in a local newspaper, the Star-Bulletin, under the headline: « Young Men from Kenya, Jordan and Iran Here to Study at U.H. »
Obama told the journalist, Shurei Hirozawa, that he grew up on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, in east Africa, and was a member of the Luo tribe. He said he had worked as an office clerk in Nairobi for several years to save money for college and settled on the University of Hawaii « when he read in an American magazine about its racial tolerance. »
Other accounts have said he went to Hawaii because it was the only U.S. university to offer him a scholarship, but that appears unlikely, based on this contemporaneous report. Obama told Hirozawa that he had enough money to stay in Hawaii only for two semesters unless he applied for a scholarship. He said he would study business administration and wanted to return to Kenya to help with its transition from tribal customs to a modern economy. He was concerned, he said, about his generation’s disorientation as Kenyans rejected old ways yet struggled with westernization.
Taking a room at the Charles H. Atherton branch of the YMCA, not far from campus, Obama quickly adapted to the rhythms of student life. One of his frequent hangouts was the snack bar in an old Army barracks-style building near his business classes. It was there that he met the Abercrombie brothers, first Neil and then Hal, who had escaped the darkness of Buffalo to attend graduate school in Honolulu, and their friends Peter Gilpin, Chet Gorman and Pake Zane. They were antiestablishment intellectuals, experimenters, outsiders, somewhere between beatniks and hippies, and they loved to talk and drink coffee and beer. They were immediately taken by the one and only African student in their midst.
« He was very black, probably the blackest person I’ve ever met, » recalled Zane, a Chinese Hawaiian, who now runs an antiques shop a few miles from the university. « Handsome in his own way. But the most impressive thing was his voice. His voice and his inflection — he had this Oxford accent. You heard a little Kenyan English, but more this British accent with this really deep, mellow voice that just resounded. If he said something in the room and the room was not real noisy, everybody stopped and turned around. I mean he just had this wonderful, wonderful voice. He was charismatic as a speaker. »
It was not just the voice, said Neil Abercrombie, who went on to become a congressman from Honolulu, but Obama’s entire outsize persona — the lanky 6-foot-1 frame, the horn-rimmed glasses, the booming laugh, the pipe and an « incredibly vital personality. He was brilliant and opinionated and avuncular and opinionated. Always opinionated. If you didn’t know him, you might be put off by him. He never hesitated to tell you what he thought, whether the moment was politic or not. Even to the point sometimes where he might seem a bit discourteous. But his view was, well, if you’re not smart enough to know what you’re talking about and you’re talking about it, then you don’t deserve much in the way of mercy. He enjoyed the company of people who were equally as opinionated as he was. »
An interesting note about the snack bar crowd is that, even decades later, they all pronounce the first name of their Kenyan friend « Bear-ick » — with the accent on the first syllable. That is how he referred to himself, they said. In Hawaii at least, they never heard him call himself « Buh-rock, » with the accent on the second syllable, the pronunciation his son would adopt in his adult life. Perhaps it was a minor accommodation to westernization.
In late November, a few months into Obama’s first semester, the Honolulu paper wrote another story about him, this time focusing on his positive conclusions about racial attitudes on the island. « No one seems to be conscious of color, » he said. But there were stereotypes to shatter on both sides — his of Hawaii and Hawaii’s of Africa. « When I first came here, I expected to find a lot of Hawaiians all dressed in native clothing and I expected native dancing and that sort of thing, but I was surprised to find such a mixture of races, » he acknowledged.
When asked if people questioned him about Kenya, he laughed and said: « Oh, yes. People are very interested in the Mau Mau rebellion [a long-standing uprising against the British] and they ask about race relations in Kenya. I tell them they’ve improved since the rebellion but are not perfect. They also ask if Kenya is ready for self-government. Some others ask me such questions as how many wives each man has back home, what we eat, how I dress at home, how we live, whether we have cars. »
He did not answer those questions in the story. Nor, on one matter, was he forthcoming with his friends at the university. Neither newspaper readers nor his fellow students knew that he had left a son and a pregnant wife back in Kenya.
The events in Africa intrigued Obama’s fellow students and were inevitably part of the movable discussion, which often went from the university snack bar over to the Stardust Lounge or George’s Inn, where beer pitchers cost two bucks, and then on to Peter Gilpin’s apartment nearby. As they listened to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on the hi-fi, Obama pontificated on Kenya and nationalism and colonialism and his fears about what might happen. « He was very concerned that tribalism would trump nationalism, » Neil Abercrombie said. « And that people like himself would not be properly recognized, would not be fully utilized, and there would be discrimination and prejudice. Jomo Kenyatta [Kenya’s first postcolonial leader] was a Kikuyu, and Barack and Mboya were Luo, and Kikuyu were going to run things. We’d get into it that deeply. »
Late in the summer of 1960, at the start of his second year and the beginning of her first, Obama and Stanley Ann Dunham met in a beginning Russian class. He was 25; she was not yet 18. She called him « Bear-ick, » too. He called her Anna. Decades later, Ann would tell her son a story about their first date that he then depicted in his memoir, « Dreams From My Father. » « He asked me to meet him in front of the university library at one. I got there and he hadn’t arrived, but I figured I’d give him a few minutes. It was a nice day, so I laid out on one of the benches, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep. An hour later he showed up with a couple of friends. I woke up and three of them were standing over me and I heard him saying, serious as can be . . . ‘You see gentlemen, I told you she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.’ «
Recounting the scene long after the fact, knowing how the relationship would end, the son was at his most lyrical. « My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father’s attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents’ lives. The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs, but it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that’s how any love begins. »
This was the prelude to the beginning of the second Barack Obama, the hapa, and in the narrative he creates about his mother, here, as always after, he writes with the sensibility not so much of a son as of an acute if sympathetic psychologist, approaching condescension but not quite crossing that line.
During his time in Hawaii, the elder Obama seemed adept at walling off various aspects of his life. He eventually told Ann about a former marriage in Kenya but said he was divorced, which she would discover years later was a lie. While the scene in the book includes two friends who were with him when he arrived late for a first date with Ann, few members of the snack bar crowd remember the Obama-Dunham relationship. Hal Abercrombie said he never saw them together. Pake Zane, who left the island for a spell in 1961, could not recall Ann from those days but had precise memories of Obama.
Neil Abercrombie did remember her appearing at some of the weekend gatherings. Obama was such a strong personality, he said, that he could see how the young woman was awed and overwhelmed by him. « She was a girl, and what I mean by that is she was only 17 and 18, just out of high school. And he brought her at different times. She mostly observed because she was a kid. Everybody there was pretty high-powered grad-student types. »
Before the end of her first semester, Ann learned she was pregnant. The jolt that most parents might feel at such news from a teenage daughter was intensified for the Dunhams by the fact that the father was Obama. Madelyn Dunham has steadfastly declined requests for interviews this year, but a few years ago she talked to the Chicago Tribune’s David Mendell, who was researching his biography, « Obama: From Promise to Power. » Dunham, known for her practicality and skepticism in a family of dreamers, told Mendell that Stanley Ann had always been stubborn and nonconformist, and often did startling things, but none were more stubborn or surprising than her relationship with Obama.
When Mendell pressed her about Obama, she said she did not trust the stories the Kenyan told. Prodding further, the interviewer noted that Obama had « a great deal of charm » and that his father had been a medicine man. « She raised her eyebrows and nodded to herself, » Mendell wrote of Madelyn. » ‘He was . . .’ she said with a long pause, ‘strange.’ She lingered on the a to emphasize ‘straaaaaange.’ «
On Feb. 2, 1961, against Madelyn’s hopes, and against the desires of Obama’s father back in Kenya, Ann and Obama hopped a plane to Maui and got married. No guests, not even family members, were there. Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was born six months later in Honolulu.
Ann, the earnest student, dropped out of school to take care of him. Her husband finished his degree, graduating in June 1962, after three years in Hawaii, as a Phi Beta Kappa straight-A student. Then, before the month was out, he took off, leaving behind his still-teenage wife and namesake child. He did not return for 10 years, and then only briefly. A story in the Star-Bulletin on the day he left, June 22, said Obama planned a several-weeks grand tour of mainland universities before he arrived at Harvard to study economics on a graduate faculty fellowship. The story did not mention that he had a wife and an infant son.
Many years later, Barack Jr., then in high school, found a clipping of the article in a family stash of birth certificates and old vaccination forms. Why wasn’t his name there, or his mother’s? He wondered, he later wrote, « whether the omission caused a fight between my parents. »
On his way east, Obama stopped in San Francisco and went to dinner at the Blue Fox in the financial district with Hal Abercrombie, who had moved to the city with his wife, Shirley. Abercrombie would never forget that dinner; he thought it showed the worst side of his old friend, a combination of anger and arrogance that frightened him. Shirley was a blonde with a high bouffant hairdo, and when she showed up at the side of Hal and Barack, the maitre d’ took them to the most obscure table in the restaurant. Obama interpreted this as a racial slight. When the waiter arrived, Obama tore into him, shouting that he was an important person on his way to Harvard and would not tolerate such treatment, Abercrombie recalled. « He was berating the guy and condescending every time the waiter came to our table. There was a superiority and an arrogance about it that I didn’t like. »
In the family lore, Obama was accepted into graduate school at the New School in New York and at Harvard, and if he had chosen the New School there would have been enough scholarship money for his wife and son to come along. However, the story goes, he opted for Harvard because of the world-class academic credentials a Crimson degree would bring. But there is an unresolved part of the story: Did Ann try to follow him to Cambridge? Her friends from Mercer Island were left with that impression. Susan Botkin, Maxine Box and John W. Hunt all remember Ann showing up in Seattle late that summer with little Barry, as her son was called.
« She was on her way from her mother’s house to Boston to be with her husband, » Botkin recalled. « [She said] he had transferred to grad school and she was going to join him. And I was intrigued with who she was and what she was doing. Stanley was an intense person . . . but I remember that afternoon, sitting in my mother’s living room, drinking iced tea and eating sugar cookies. She had her baby and was talking about her husband, and what life held in store for her. She seemed so confident and self-assured and relaxed. She was leaving the next day to fly on to Boston. »
But as Botkin and others later remembered it, something happened in Cambridge, and Stanley Ann returned to Seattle. They saw her a few more times, and they thought she even tried to enroll in classes at the University of Washington, before she packed up and returned to Hawaii.
* * *
By the time he was 6, Barry Obama was a hyper-aware boy with much to think about. His mother had returned to school at the University of Hawaii and had received a degree in what her family considered an unlikely major — math. She had divorced Barack Obama Sr., who had finished his graduate work at Harvard and was back in Kenya, now living with a third woman. Ann had moved on and was soon to wed another international student, Lolo Soetoro, and follow him back to his home country, Indonesia, bringing Barry along. Her brief first marriage was in the past, Seattle in the remote distance, and Kansas farther still.
It was at this point that Barry developed a way of looking at his mother that essentially would last until her death three decades later. His take on her — both the ways he wanted to be like her and how he reacted against her — shaped him permanently and is central to understanding his political persona today, the contrast of an embracing, inclusive sensibility accompanied by an inner toughness and wariness. Starting at an early age, he noticed how his mother was curious and open, eager to find the best in people and situations, intent on softening the edges of the difficult world for her hapa son. There were many times when this made him think that she was naive, sometimes heartbreakingly so, and that he had to be the realist in the family. To some degree, especially as he tried to explain himself later in « Dreams From My Father, » he seemed to use his mother as a foil, setting her up as the quintessential well-intentioned white liberal idealist as a contrast to his own coming of age as a modern black man.
Whether this perception reflected objective reality is open to question. In her dealings later as a community worker and anthropologist in Indonesia and around the world, Ann showed a keen appreciation of the power structure and how to work with it or around it, and her doctoral thesis and other writings reveal a complex understanding of people and their motivations, free of dreamy idealism and wishful thinking. But she certainly tried to present the world in the most hopeful, unthreatening light to her children, first Barry and then his little sister, Maya, the daughter she bore with Soetoro.
As Maya explained recently, looking back on the way she and her brother were raised: « [She wanted to] make sure that nothing ever became acrimonious and that everything was pretty and everything was sacred and everything was properly maintained and respected — all the cultural artifacts and ways of being and living and thinking. We didn’t need to make choices. We didn’t need to discard anything. We could just have it all and keep it all. It was this sense of bounty and beauty. »
The son’s notion of his loving mother’s naivete began in Indonesia, when they arrived in the capital city, Jakarta, in 1967, joining Soetoro, who had returned to his home country several months earlier. The place was a fantasia of the unfamiliar and grotesque to young Barry, with the exotic scent of danger. Monkeys, chickens and even crocodiles in the back yard. A land of floods, exorcisms, cockfights. Lolo was off working for Union Oil, Ann taught English at the U.S. Embassy, and Barry was overwhelmed in this strange new world. He recalled those days in his memoir with more acuity than he possibly could have had as a 6-year-old, but the words reflect his perceptions nonetheless.
His mother taught him history, math, reading and social studies, waking him at 4 each morning to give him special tutoring, pouring her knowledge into his agile brain. But it was left to his stepfather to orient him in the cruel ways of the world. Soetoro taught him how to fight and defend himself, how not to give money to beggars, how to deal strictly with servants, how to interact with the world on its own unforgiving terms, not defining everything as good or bad but merely as it is. » ‘Your mother has a soft heart,’ he told me after she tried to take the blame for knocking a radio off the dresser, » Obama quoted Soetoro in his memoir. » ‘That’s good in a woman, but you will be a man someday, and a man needs to have more sense.’ » Men, Soetoro explained, take advantage of weakness in other men. » ‘They’re like countries that way.’ «
All of this, as Obama later interpreted it, related to the exercise of power, hidden and real. It was power that forced Soetoro to return to Indonesia in the first place. He had been summoned back to his country from Hawaii in 1966 and sent to work in New Guinea for a year because the ruling regime, after a widespread, bloody purge of communists and leftists, was leery of students who had gone abroad and wanted them back and under control. To his mother, power was ugly, Obama determined: « It fixed in her mind like a curse. » But to his stepfather, power was reality — and he « made his peace » with it.
Which response to the world had a deeper effect on the person Barry Obama would become? Without doubt it was his mother’s. Soetoro, described later by his daughter Maya as a sweet and quiet man, resigned himself to his situation and did not grow or change. He became a nondescript oilman, befriending slick operators from Texas and Louisiana who probably regarded him with racial condescension. He went to their parties and played golf at the country club and became western and anonymous, slipping as far away as possible from the dangers of the purge and the freedom of his student days.
Ann certainly had more options, but the one she eventually chose was unusual. She decided to deepen her connection to this alien land and to confront power in her own way, by devoting herself to understanding the people at the core of Indonesian culture, artisans and craftsmen, and working to help them survive.
Here was an early paradox that helped shape Obama’s life, one he would confront again and again as he matured and remade himself: A certain strain of realism can lead to inaction. A certain form of naivete can lead to action.
By the time Maya was born in 1970, Ann’s second marriage was coming apart. This time, there was no sudden and jarring disappearance. The relationship lingered off and on for another 10 years, and Lolo remained part of Maya’s life in a way that Barack Obama did not for Barry.
As Maya analyzed her parents’ relationship decades later, she concluded that she came along just as her mother was starting to find herself. « She started feeling competent, perhaps. She acquired numerous languages after that. Not just Indonesian, but her professional language and her feminist language. And I think she really got a voice. So it’s perfectly natural that she started to demand more of those who were near her, including my father. And suddenly his sweetness wasn’t enough to satisfy her needs. »
* * *
« Dreams From My Father » is as imprecise as it is insightful about Obama’s early life. Obama offers unusually perceptive and subtle observations of himself and the people around him. Yet, as he readily acknowledged, he rearranged the chronology for his literary purposes and presented a cast of characters made up of composites and pseudonyms. This was to protect people’s privacy, he said. Only a select few were not granted that protection, for the obvious reason that he could not blur their identities — his relatives. And so it is that of all the people in the book, the one who takes it on the chin the most is his maternal grandfather, Stan Dunham.
It is obvious from the memoir, and from interviews with many people who knew the family in Hawaii, that Dunham loved his grandson and did everything he could to support him physically and emotionally. But in the memoir, Gramps comes straight out of the plays of Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill, a once-proud soul lost in self-delusion, struggling against the days.
When Barry was 10, his mother made the difficult decision to send him back to Honolulu to live with her parents so he could get better schooling. He had been accepted into the prestigious Punahou School, and Madelyn and Stan had moved from a large house on Kamehameha Avenue to the apartment on Beretania, only five blocks from the campus.
Gramps now seemed as colorful and odd as those monkeys in the back yard in Jakarta. He cleaned his teeth with the red cellophane string from his cigarette packs. He told off-color jokes to waitresses. A copy of Dale Carnegie’s « How to Win Friends and Influence People » was always near at hand — and only those who lived with him knew the vast distance between his public bonhomie and his private despair. The most powerful scene in the memoir, as devastating as it is lovingly rendered, described how Stan, by then out of the furniture business and trying his hand as a John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance salesman, prepared on Sunday night for the week ahead.
« Sometimes I would tiptoe into the kitchen for a soda, and I could hear the desperation creeping out of his voice, the stretch of silence that followed when the people on the other end explained why Thursday wasn’t good and Tuesday not much better, and then Gramps’s heavy sigh after he had hung up the phone, his hands fumbling through the files in his lap like those of a card player who’s deep in the hole. »
By the time Barry returned to Hawaii, Toot had become the stable financial source in the family, well known in the local lending community. In the library of the Honolulu Advertiser, no clippings mention Stan Dunham, but Madelyn Dunham crops up frequently in the business pages. A few months before Barry arrived from Indonesia, his grandmother had been promoted to vice president at the Bank of Hawaii along with Dorothy K. Yamamoto — the first two female vice presidents in the bank’s history.
It was during Barry’s first year at Punahou School that his long-lost father stepped briefly into his life, and just as quickly disappeared again. He came for the month of December, and his mother returned from Indonesia beforehand to prepare Barry for the visit. She taught him more about Kenya and stories of the Luo people, but all of that knowledge dissolved at the first sight of the old man. He seemed far skinnier than Barry had imagined him, and more fragile, with his spectacles and blue blazer and ascot and yellowish eyes.
It was not an easy month, and what stuck in the boy’s memory were the basketball that his dad gave him as a present and two dramatic events: when his father ordered him, in front of his mother and grandparents, to turn off the TV and study instead of watching « How the Grinch Stole Christmas, » and when his father came to Miss Mabel Hefty’s fifth-grade class at Punahou’s Castle Hall to talk about Kenya. The first moment angered Barry; the second made him proud. But nothing much lingered after his father was gone.
That visit to Honolulu was bracketed by two trips that Obama’s old snack bar friends from the University of Hawaii made to see him in Kenya. Late in 1968, Neil Abercrombie and Pake Zane traveled through Nairobi on a year-long backpacking trip around the world and stayed with Obama for several days before they made their way on to the port city of Mombasa and to India. No mention was made of Ann or the boy, but it was clear to Abercrombie that his old friend’s life was not turning out as he had planned. « He seemed very frustrated, and his worst fears in his mind were coming true — that he was being underutilized, » Abercrombie said. « Everybody’s virtue is his vice, and his brilliance and his assertiveness was obviously working against him as well. »
Five years later, in 1973, Zane returned during another trip around the world.
« This time when I met Barack [Bear-ick, he said], he was a shell of what he was prior to that, » Zane recalled. « Even from what he was in 1968. . . . He was drinking very heavily, and he was very depressed and as you might imagine had an amount of rage. He felt totally vulnerable. »
Meanwhile, Barry’s circumstances had changed somewhat. His mother, separated from Lolo, was back in Hawaii with little Maya. Barry joined them in an apartment at Poki and Wilder, even closer to Punahou School. Ann was now fully engaged in the artisan culture of Indonesia and was beginning her master’s degree work in anthropology. They had no money beyond her graduate school grants.
Maya’s earliest memories go back to those years. Thirty-five years later, she can remember a filing cabinet and a rocking chair, and how she and her big brother would sit in the chair and keep rocking harder until it flipped over, which is what they wanted it to do. There was a television across from the rocker, and she would purposely stand in front of it during basketball games to irritate him. There were picnics at Puu Ualakaa State Park with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Madelyn’s homemade baked beans and coleslaw and potato salad with the skins still on. And there was Big Sandwich Night, when Gramps would haul out all the meats and cheeses and vegetables.
After three years in Hawaii, Ann had to go back to Indonesia to conduct her fieldwork. Barry had absolutely no interest in returning to that strange place, so he stayed behind with his grandparents.
* * *
Keith and Tony Peterson were rummaging through the discount bin at a bookstore in Boulder, Colo., one afternoon and came across a copy of « Dreams From My Father » several years after it was first published. « We’ve got to buy this, » Keith said to his brother. « Look who wrote it. » Barry Obama. Their friend from Punahou School. They both bought copies and raced through the memoir, absorbed by the story and especially by the sections on their high school years. They did not recognize any of the names, since they were all pseudonyms, but they recognized the smells and sounds and sensibility of the chapters and the feelings Obama expressed as he came of age as a black teenager.
This was their story, too. They wondered why Obama focused so much on a friend he called Ray, who in fact was Keith Kukagawa. Kukagawa was black and Japanese, and the Petersons did not even think of him as black. Yet in the book, Obama used him as the voice of black anger and angst, the provocateur of hip, vulgar, get-real dialogues.
But what interested the Petersons more was Obama’s interior dialogue with himself, his sense of dislocation at the private school, a feeling that no matter what he did, he was defined and confined by the expectations and definitions of white people. Keith Peterson had felt the same way, without being fully able to articulate his unease. « Now keep in mind I am reading this before [Obama] came on the national scene, » he said later. « So I am reading this still person to person, not person to candidate, and it meant a lot more for that reason. It was a connection. It was amazing as I read this book, so many decades later, at last I was feeling a certain amount of closure, having felt so isolated for so long. I wasn’t alone. I spent a good portion of my life thinking I had experienced something few others had. It was surprisingly satisfying to know I wasn’t crazy. I was not the only one struggling with some of these issues. »
But his brother Tony, who reached Punahou first, said he had regular discussions with Obama about many issues, including race. Tony was a senior when Obama was a freshman. The Petersons lived miles away, out in Pearl City, having grown up in a military family that was first based at Schofield Barracks. While Obama walked only five blocks to school, Tony had to ride city buses for an hour and a half each morning to get there.
As he remembered it, he was one of a handful of black students at Punahou then, a group that included Obama, Lewis Anthony, Rik Smith and Angie Jones. Peterson, Smith and Obama would meet on the steps outside Cooke Hall for what, with tongue in cheek, they called the Ethnic Corner. Obama and Smith were biracial, one black and white, the other black and Indian. Both of Peterson’s parents were black, but he felt uneasy because he was an academically inclined young man whom people thought « sounded white. »
« Barry had no personal reference for his blackness. All three of us were dealing with it in different ways, » Peterson recalled. « How do we explore these things? That is one thing we talked about. We talked about time. We talked about our classes. We talked about girls. We talked specifically about whether girls would date us because we were black. We talked about social issues. . . . But our little chats were not agonizing. They were just sort of fun. We were helping each other find out who we were. We talked about what we were going to be. I was going to be a lawyer. Rick was going to be a lawyer. And Barry was going to be a basketball player. »
Obama’s interest in basketball had come a long way since his absent father showed up and gave him his first ball. Now it was his obsession. He was always dribbling, always playing, either on the outdoor courts at Punahou or down at the playground on King Street across from the Baskin-Robbins where he worked part-time. He was a flashy passer with good moves to the basket but an uneven and unorthodox jump shot, pulling the ball back behind his head so far that it almost disappeared behind him. Basketball dominated his time so much that his mother worried about him. In ninth grade, at least, he was the naive one, believing he could make a life in the game.
In Tony Peterson’s senior yearbook, Obama wrote: « Tony, man, I sure am glad I got to know you before you left. All those Ethnic Corner trips to the snack bar and playing ball made the year a lot more enjoyable, even though the snack bar trips cost me a fortune. Anyway, great knowing you and I hope we keep in touch. Good luck in everything you do, and get that law degree. Some day when I am a pro basketballer, and I want to sue my team for more money, I’ll call on you. »
Barry’s mother, who had a wry sense of humor, once joked to friends that she was a pale-skinned Kansan who married a Kenyan and an Indonesian so she could have brown children who would not have to worry about sunburn. Her understanding of race was far deeper than that joke; she was always sensitive to issues of identity and made a point of inculcating her children in the cultures of their fathers. Still, there were some problems she could not resolve for them. Maya later said that her mother’s overriding desire that her children not suffer perhaps got in the way.
« She didn’t want us to suffer with respect to identity. She wanted us to think of it as a gift that we were multilayered and multidimensional and multiracial. This meant that she was perhaps unprepared when we did struggle with issues of identity. She was not really able to help us grapple with that in any nuanced way. Maybe it would make her feel like she hadn’t succeeded in surrounding us with enough love. I remember Mom wanting it not to be an issue. »
In an apparent effort to show a lifelong plot to power, some opponents last year pushed a story about Obama in which he predicted in kindergarten that one day he would be president. The conspiracy certainly seemed to go off the rails by the time he reached high school. Unlike Bill Clinton, who was the most political animal at Hot Springs High in Arkansas — organizing the marching band as though it was his own political machine, giving speeches at the local Rotary, maneuvering his way into a Senate seat at the American Legion-sponsored Boys Nation — Obama stayed away from student leadership roles at Punahou and gave his friends no clues that a few decades later he would emerge as a national political figure.
« When I look back, one of the things that stood out was that he didn’t stand out, » said Keith Peterson, who was a year younger than Obama. « There was absolutely nothing that made me think this is the road he would take. » His friends remember him as being kind and protective, a prolific reader, keenly aware of the world around him, able to talk about foreign affairs in a way that none of the rest of them could, and yet they did not think of him as politically or academically ambitious. In a school of high achievers, he coasted as a B student. He dabbled a little in the arts, singing in the chorus for a few years and writing poetry for the literary magazine, Ka Wai Ola.
The group he ran with was white, black, brown and not identified with any of the traditional social sets at the school: the rich girls from the Outrigger Canoe Club, the football players, the math guys, the drama crew, the volleyball guys. Among Obama’s friends, « there were some basketball players in there, but it was kind of eclectic, » recalled Mike Ramos, also a hapa, his mother Anglo and his father Filipino. « Was there a leader? Did we defer to Barry? I don’t think so. It was a very egalitarian kind of thing, also come as you are. »
They body-surfed at Sandy Beach Park on the south shore, played basketball day and night, went camping in the hills above the school, sneaked into parties at the university and out at Schofield Barracks, and listened to Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, Miles Davis and Grover Washington at Greg and Mike Ramos’s place across from the school or in Barry’s room at his grandparents’ apartment. (« You listen to Grover? I listen to Grover, » Mike Ramos still remembers Barry saying as a means of introducing himself during a conversation at a party.)
And they smoked dope. Obama’s drug use is right there in the memoir, with no attempt to make him look better than he was. He acknowledged smoking marijuana and using cocaine but said he stopped short of heroin. Some have suggested that he exaggerated his drug use in the book to hype the idea that he was on the brink of becoming a junkie; dysfunction and dissolution always sell in memoirs.
But his friends quickly dismissed that notion. « I wouldn’t call it an exaggeration, » Greg Ramos said. Keith Peterson said: « Did I ever party with Barack? Yes, I did. Do I remember specifically? If I did, then I didn’t party with him. Part of the nature of getting high is you don’t remember it 30 minutes later. Punahou was a wealthy school with a lot of kids with disposable income. The drinking age in Hawaii then was 18, so a lot of seniors could buy it legally, which means the parent dynamic was not big. And the other partying materials were prevalent, being in Hawaii. There was a lot of partying that went on. And Barack has been very open about that. Coming from Hawaii, that would have been so easy to expose. If he hadn’t written about it, it would have been a disaster. »
If basketball was Obama’s obsession during those years, it also served as a means for him to work out some of his frustrations about race. In the book and elsewhere, he has emphasized that he played a « black » brand of ball, freelancing his way on the court, looking to drive to the hoop rather than wait around for a pick and an open shot. His signature move was a double-pump in the lane. This did not serve him well on the Punahou varsity team. His coach, Chris McLachlin, was a stickler for precisely where each player was supposed to be on the court and once at practice ordered his team to pass the ball at least five times before anyone took a shot. This was not Obama’s style, and he had several disagreements with the coach. He never won the arguments, and the team did well enough anyway. Adhering to McLachlin’s deliberate offense, the Buffanblu won the state championship, defeating Moanalua 60-28. Obama came off the bench to score two points. So much for the dream of becoming a rich NBA star.
His senior year, his mother was back home from Indonesia and concerned that her son had not sent in his college applications. In their tensest confrontation in the memoir, he eggs her on by saying it that was no big deal, that he might goof off and stay in Hawaii and go to school part-time, because life was just one big crapshoot anyway.
Ann exploded. She had rebelled herself once, at his very age, reacting against her own parents — and perhaps against luck and fate — by ignoring their advice and getting pregnant and marrying a man she did not know the way she thought she did. Now she was telling her son to shape up, that he could do anything he wanted if he put in the effort. « Remember what that’s like? Effort? Damn it, Bar, you can’t just sit around like some good-time Charlie, waiting for luck to see you through. »
* * *
Sixteen years later, Barry was no more, replaced by Barack, who had not only left the island but had gone to two Ivy League schools, Columbia undergrad and Harvard Law, and written a book about his life. He was into his Chicago phase, reshaping himself for his political future, but now was drawn back to Hawaii to say goodbye to his mother. Too late, as it turned out. She died on Nov. 7, 1995, before he could get there.
Ann had returned to Honolulu early that year, a few months before « Dreams From My Father » was published. She was weakened from a cancer that had been misdiagnosed in Indonesia as indigestion. American doctors first thought it was ovarian cancer, but an examination at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York determined that it was uterine cancer that had spread to her ovaries. Stan had died a few years earlier, and Madelyn still lived in the apartment on Beretania. Ann took an apartment on the same floor, and underwent chemotherapy treatments while keeping up with her work as best she could. « She took it in stride, » said Alice Dewey, chair of the University of Hawaii anthropology department, where Ann did her doctoral dissertation. « She never complained. Never said, ‘Why me?’ «
Ann’s career had reached full bloom. Her dissertation, published in 1992, was a masterwork of anthropological insight, delineating in 1,000 pages the intricate world of peasant metalworking industries in Indonesia, especially traditional blacksmithing, tracing the evolution of the crafts from Dutch colonialism through the regime of General Suharto, the Indonesian military strongman. Her deepest work was done in Kajar, a blacksmithing village near Yogyakarta. In clear, precise language, she described the geography, sociology, architecture, agriculture, diet, class structure, politics, business and craftsmanship of the village, rendering an arcane subject in vivid, human terms.
It was a long time coming, the product of work that had begun in 1979, but Dewey said it was worth the wait: Each chapter as she turned it in was a polished jewel.
Her anthropology in Indonesia was only part of Ann’s focus. She had also worked in Lahore, Pakistan; New Delhi; and New York, helping to develop microfinancing networks that provided credit to female artisans in rural communities around the world. This was something she had begun in Jakarta for the Ford Foundation in the early 1980s, when she helped refine Bank Rakyat, set up to provide loans to farmers and other rural entrepreneurs in textiles and metalwork, the fields she knew best. David McCauley, who worked with her then, said she had earned a worldwide reputation in the development community. She had a global perspective from the ground up, he said, and she passed it along to her children, Barack and Maya.
Maya was in New York, about to start graduate school at New York University, when her mother got sick. She and her brother were equally slow to realize that the disease was advancing so rapidly. Maya had seen Ann during that visit to Sloan-Kettering, and « she didn’t look well. She was in a wheelchair . . . but I guess I thought that was the treatment. I knew that someday she would die, but it never occurred to me that it would be in November. I think children are capable of stretching out the boundaries of denial. » School always came first with Ann, and she had urged Maya to stay at NYU until the December break.
But by November her condition had worsened. She was put on morphine to ease the pain and moved from her apartment to the Straub Clinic. One night she called Maya and said she was scared. « And my last words to her, where she was able to respond, were that I was coming. I arrived on the seventh. My grandmother was there and had been there for some time, so I sent her home and talked to Mom and touched her and hugged her, and she was not able to respond. I read her a story — a book of Creole folk tales that I had with me about renewal and rebirth — and I said it was okay with me if she decided to go ahead, that I couldn’t really bear to see her like that. And she died. It was about 11 that night. »
Barack came the next day. He had just finished a book about his missing father, but now it was more clear to him than ever that his mother had been the most significant force in shaping his life. Even when they were apart, she constantly wrote him letters, softly urging him to believe in himself and to see the best in everyone else.
A small memorial service was held in the Japanese Garden behind the East-West Center conference building on the University of Hawaii campus. Photographs from her life were mounted on a board: Stanley Ann in Kansas and Seattle, Ann in Hawaii and Indonesia. Barack and Maya « talked story, » a Hawaiian phrase that means exactly what it sounds like, remembering their uncommon mother. They recalled her spirit, her exuberance and her generosity, a worldliness that was somehow very fresh and naive, maybe deliberately naive, sweet and unadulterated. And her deep laugh, her Midwestern sayings, the way she loved to collect batiks and wear vibrant colors and talk and talk and talk.
About 20 people made it to the service. When it was over, they formed a caravan and drove to the south shore, past Hanauma Bay, stopping just before they reached Sandy Beach, Barry’s favorite old haunt for body surfing. They gathered at a lookout point with a parking lot, and down below, past the rail and at the water’s edge, a stone outcropping jutting over the ocean in the shape of a massive ironing board. This was where Ann wanted them to toss her ashes. She felt connected to Hawaii, its geography, its sense of aloha, the fact that it made her two children possible — but the woman who also loved to travel wanted her ashes to float across the ocean. Barack and Maya stood together, scattering the remains. The others tossed flower petals into the water.
Suddenly, a massive wave broke over the ironing board and engulfed them all. A sign at the parking lot had warned visitors of the dangers of being washed to sea. « But we felt steady, » Maya said. « And it was this very slippery place, and the wave came out of nowhere, and it was as though she was saying goodbye. »
Barack Obama left Hawaii soon after and returned to his Chicago life.
Self-Made Man
Barack Obama’s autobiographical fictions
Andrew Ferguson
June 18, 2012
There’s a DVD that’s been sitting in its jewel box on my desk for a few years (I’ve been busy—no time to tidy up), and the other day, after reading through two brand-new books about Barack Obama, one admiring, the other ferociously disapproving, I snapped the cellophane at last and slid the disk into my computer drive.
I bought the video on a visit to Occidental College in Los Angeles, not long after Obama took office. He attended Oxy from 1979 to 1981, then lit out after his sophomore year and never returned. It must be a tricky business for a college publicist, marketing your school as the place that one of the world’s most famous men couldn’t wait to get away from, but these are highly competitive times in the liberal arts college racket, and a flack will work with what he’s got. During my visit the campus was transforming itself into a three-dimensional tribute to its most famous dropout.
In the common room of the library a shrine of sorts had been set up in a glass display case, under the famous Shepard Fairey Hope poster. The display promised to document “Barack Obama’s Occidental College Days,” but the pickings were slim. Every item on display was derivative and indirect in its relation to the man being honored. There were photos of three of his professors, a copy each of his two memoirs, an invitation that someone had received to his inauguration, and an issue of Time magazine showing a recently discovered cache of posed pictures taken of Obama by a classmate in 1980. Obama’s Occidental years have the same waterbug quality that so many periods of his life seem to have in retrospect: You see a figure traveling lightly and swiftly over the surface of things, darting away before he could leave an impression that might last. Archivists have combed college records and come up empty, mostly. Barry Obama, as he then was known, published two poems in the campus literary magazine his sophomore year. The testimony of the handful of professors who remembered him, four by my count, is hazy. He was never mentioned in the student newspaper, never wrote a letter to the editor or appeared in a photo; he failed to have his picture taken for the yearbook, so his likeness isn’t there either. A photo from 1981 celebrating Oxy’s 94th anniversary was in the display case, labeled, with eager insouciance: “An all-campus photo . . . included students, faculty, staff, and administrators. Perhaps Obama is included?” We can hope.
I found my DVD, called “Barack Obama’s Occidental College Days,” in the student bookstore, where shelves groaned under stacks of Obama merchandise—paperweights, caps, pennants, T-shirts, pencils, shot glasses—in which the “O” from Obama was graphically entwined with the “O” from Occidental. (You work with what you’ve got.) The film, with a cover showing a rare photo of Obama on campus, lasts no more than 15 minutes and seems padded even so. Our host is a large and enthusiastic man named Huell Howser. He sports a Hawaiian shirt and a crewcut. With an Oxy flack as guide and a cameraman in tow, he strides the sun-drenched campus and pauses here and there as if simply overwhelmed.
“This place is full of history,” he says.
“There’s a lot of history to be marked here,” the flack agrees.
On the steps of the school administration building they are almost struck dumb. Almost.
“On this spot,” our host says, Obama may have given his first political speech—a two-minute blast at the college for investing in South Africa’s apartheid regime. But we can’t be sure.
“There are no photographs,” says Howser, “but then there are very few photographs of Barack Obama at Occidental.”
“That’s right,” the flack says glumly.
Howser’s passion burns undiminished. His every glance, this way and that, says, Isn’t this something? He finds a professor who taught Obama political science. The professor says he remembers Obama, but only because of his Afro hairstyle and his improbable name. A chinwag with a former dorm-mate from freshman year—Obama moved to an apartment several miles off campus his second year, removing himself even further from the school’s day-to-day life—isn’t much help either. Howser’s imperturbable smile shows no sign of desperation even when he collars the head of alumni affairs, who boasts that his alumni association is one of only 25 in the world that could claim attachment to a U.S. president.
The host is beside himself.
“Is that right? How involved has he been in the alumni association?”
“Well, I have to admit he hasn’t been to any alumni events . . . ”
“Has he been a big contributor?”
The man gives one of those nods that are more headshake than nod. “He—he is on our mailing list.”
“Uh huh!”
“We have big plans to ask Mr. Obama back to campus to speak.”
Howser beams. History has that effect on people.
And there we are. You can’t help but sympathize with our host, with the flack, with the curators at the college library. They faced a challenge known to anyone who tries to account for Barack Obama: How do you turn him into a man as interesting and significant as the world-historical figure that so many people, admirers and detractors alike, presume him to be? There’s not a lot of material here. Obama had an unusual though hardly Dickensian childhood complicated by divorce, and at age 33 he wrote an extremely good book about it, the memoir Dreams from My Father. He followed it with an uneventful and weirdly passive career in politics, and he wrote an extremely not-very-good book about it, The Audacity of Hope. Then, lacking any original ideas or platform to speak of, he ran as the first half-black, half-white candidate for president and, miraculously, won. It’s a boffo finish without any wind-up—teeth-shattering climax, but no foreplay.
There are two ways to aggrandize Obama, to inflate the reality so that it meets the expectation: through derogation or reverence. The facts warrant neither approach, but they don’t deter the Obama fabulists, two of whom have just published those brand-new books I mentioned.
The Amateur, by a former New York Times magazine editor named Edward Klein, takes the first approach. Pure Obama-hatred was enough to shoot the book to the top of the Times bestseller list for the first three weeks after its release. Klein is best known as a Kennedy-watcher, author of such panting chronicles as All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy and Farewell, Jackie: A Portrait of Her Final Days; among the many info-bits he has tossed onto the sprawling slagheap of Kennedy lore is the news that Jackie lost her virginity in an elevator (the elevator was in Paris, where else). More recently Klein has honed his hatchet with books on Hillary Clinton and Katie Couric. Now The Amateur proves that he has mastered the techniques of such anti-Obama pioneers as Dinesh (The Roots of Obama’s Rage) D’Souza and David (The Great Destroyer) Limbaugh. He knows how to swing the sledgehammer prose, combine a leap of logic with a baseless inference, pad the paragraphs with secondary material plucked from magazine articles you’ve already read, and render the most mundane details in the most scandalized tones.
Sure, “Michelle now likes to pretend that she plays no part in personnel decisions or in formulating policy.” We’ve all heard that. And you believe it? “The facts tell quite a different story.” Facts are stubborn things! In truth, “Michelle’s aides meet regularly with the president’s senior communications team and select public events that will maximize and reinforce the Obamas’ joint message.” Wait. It gets worse. Klein has made a source of “one of Barack’s closest confidants.” And here’s what this confidant reveals: “Barack has always listened to what she has to say.” A direct quote, from source’s mouth to author’s ear. I wonder if they met in a darkened garage.
Klein has a problem with his sources—or rather, the reader should have a problem with Klein’s use of his sources, whoever they are. Blind quotes appear on nearly every page; there are blind quotes within blind quotes. The book cost him a year to research and write, he says proudly—“an exhilarating experience that took me to more than a half-dozen cities, either in person or by telephone or email.” (I visited several cities by email just this morning.) And it’s clear that all this dialing, emailing, dialing, emailing, bore little fruit. “I was at a dinner where Valerie [Jarrett] sat at our table for nearly 10 minutes,” another anonymous source divulges. “And I wasn’t particularly impressed.” Now it can be told. The book’s big revelation comes from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He claims, in an on-the-record interview with Klein, that in 2008 an unnamed friend of an unnamed friend of Obama sent Wright an email offering him $150,000 “not to preach at all until the November presidential election.” Republicans may seethe, but it’s odd that they would suddenly take the word of Jeremiah Wright, a publicity-seeking narcissist who says AIDS was invented by the government.
With such thin material, the only way to keep a book like The Amateur chugging along is with gallons of high-octane contempt. Yet because Klein provides so little to provoke fresh outrage—or to support the theme that Obama is “something new in American politics,” a historically unprecedented threat to the Republic—readers will have to come to the book well-stocked with outrage of their own. They will be satisfied with sentences that begin with an appeal to phony-baloney authority (“According to those who know him best”) and continue with assertions that no Obama intimate would make to Edward Klein, on or off the record: “inept in the arts of management . . . make[s] our economy less robust and our nation less safe . . .” and so on. And they’ll admire his ability to fit his theme of Obama’s villainy to any set of facts. After his election, for example, Obama didn’t take a wise man’s advice to disregard his old Chicago friends—a sign of Obama’s weakness and amateurism, Klein says. A few pages later Obama and Valerie Jarrett are accused of ignoring their old Chicago friends—a sign of coldness and amateurism. Klein gets him coming and going.
If Klein makes Obama something he’s not by hating him more than he should, David Maraniss, a reporter for the Washington Post and a biographer of Bill Clinton and Vince Lombardi, takes the opposite approach. Klein is an Obama despiser, Maraniss is a big fan—big fan. Klein assumes the worst of his subject at every turn, Maraniss gives Obama every benefit of the doubt, sometimes with heroic effort. Klein writes hastily and crudely, Maraniss writes with great care, veering now and then into those pastures of purple prose that Obama frequently trod in his own memoir. Klein’s book aims for a limited but sizable audience of readers who already despise Obama as much as he does, and therefore don’t require footnotes or any other apparatus of verification; Maraniss, with 30 pages of notes, has grander ambitions to satisfy anyone curious about Obama’s upbringing and family life. Klein’s book is a squalid little thing, Maraniss’s is not.
It is not, however, the book that Obama lovers will hope for—maybe not the book that Maraniss thinks it is. Prepublication, his splashiest piece of news has been the extent of the future president’s love for, and consumption of, marijuana. Through high school—he apparently lost the taste for pot sometime in college—Obama’s ardor reached Cheech and Chong levels. His circle of dopers called themselves the “Choom Gang,” after a Hawaiian word for inhaling pot, and the phrase is already threatening to enter the common language, ironically or otherwise. (I Googled it today and got 560,000 hits, pardon the expression.)
Obama politically indemnified himself against charges of youthful drug use by admitting them in his memoir, though he was smart enough to avoid the words “Choom Gang.” Even at 33, when he wrote his book, he had his eye on a political landscape that would require acknowledgment if not full disclosure of youthful “experimentation,” as the charming euphemism went. In Dreams, he treats the drug use as another symptom of his singular youthful confusion. Maraniss’s explanation is less complicated: Obama really, really liked to get high. Maraniss offers similarly unblinkered portraits of Obama’s appalling father, a vain, wife-beating bigamist and drunk, and of Obama’s maternal grandfather, who comes off in Dreams as a latter-day Micawber, innocent and luckless. Maraniss hints at a darker, even slightly menacing figure. And he discovers some sharp edges beneath the flowing muumuu of Obama’s mother, more often depicted as an idealistic flower-child-turned-scholar (or, in the Klein-reading camp, a Communist agitator).
Maraniss’s book is most interesting for the light it casts on Obama’s self-invention, which is of course the theme of Dreams from My Father: a sensitive and self-aware young man’s zig-zagging search for a personal identity in a world barely held together by fraying family ties, without a cultural inheritance, confused and tormented by the subject of race. Dreams is a cascade of epiphanies, touched off one by one in high school, at Oxy, in New York and Chicago, and, at book’s end, before his father’s grave in Africa. Years before Obama haters could inflate him into an America-destroying devil or Obama worshippers spied those rolling swells of greatness that have yet to surface, Barack Obama was carefully fashioning from his own life something grander than what was there. He was the first Obama fabulist.
Obama himself drops hints of this in Dreams. He writes in his introduction that the dialogue in the book is only an “approximation” of real conversations. Some of the characters, “for the sake of compression,” are “composites”; the names of others have been changed. All of this is offered to the reader as acceptable literary license, and it is, certainly by the standards of the early 1990s, back in the day when publishers flooded bookstores with memoirs of angst-ridden youth and there were still bookstores to flood. Yet the epiphany-per-page ratio in Obama’s memoir is very high. The book derives its power from the reader’s understanding that the events described were factual at least in the essentials. Maraniss demonstrates something else: The writer who would later use the power of his life story to become a plausible public man was making it up, to an alarming extent.
At least it should be alarming to admirers of Dreams. Early on Obama signals that his book will be more self-aware, more detached and ironical, than most youthful memoirs, especially those involving the humid subject of race. Thus we meet Ray, a classmate at Punahou School in Hawaii. Ray is black and radicalized, and given to racially charged rants about “white folks,” a term the narrator comes to despise.
“Sometimes, after one of his performances,” Obama writes, “I would question his judgment, if not his sincerity. We weren’t living in the Jim Crow South, I would remind him. We weren’t consigned to some heatless housing project in Harlem or the Bronx. We were in goddamned Hawaii.”
Still Ray’s rants continue, and Obama continues to listen. Ray complains the football coach won’t start him, despite his superior skill, because he’s black; Obama is clearly being passed up by the basketball coach on account of his race, too. The white girls refuse to go out with them—for the same reason.
“Tell me we wouldn’t be treated different if we was white. Or Japanese.”
Racial resentment is the key to Ray. In Maraniss’s words, he’s “a symbol of young blackness, a mix of hot anger and cool detachment,” racially authentic in a way none of Obama’s other friends were. He provides a crucial example of the resentment that Obama is tempted by but at last outgrows.
But Ray wasn’t really there—didn’t exist, in fact. Ray is a “reinvention” of one of Obama’s friends, Maraniss tells us. His mother was half-black and half-American Indian; his father was . . . Japanese. His name was Keith Kakugawa, and he had no trouble dating white girls; his girlfriend at the time was the base admiral’s daughter. Maraniss discovered that Obama’s luck with girls, whatever their melanin count, was just as robust as Keith’s. With a Japanese name, Kakugawa would have trouble—more trouble than half-black Barry Obama—identifying himself as an African American and speaking as one. If Kakugawa was Ray, then the rants and the attitudes they represent are in this instance made up, and the story line of Dreams—the story of Obama’s life as we have learned it—loses an essential foil.
“Somewhere between pseudonymous and fictitious,” Maraniss writes, gently as always, “Ray was the first of several distorted or composite characters employed in Dreams for similar purposes.” But it’s the purposes themselves that are worrisome. Maraniss cuts Obama much more slack than he would, say, if he were an editor at the Washington Post magazine fact-checking a memoir he hoped to publish. He’s right to accept some invention from a memoirist who insists on telling his story through precise rendering of scenes and dialogue. But a memoir is just realist fiction unless the “composite” says and does things that were done and said by someone. In Dreams many of the crucial epiphanies, the moments that advance the narrator’s life and understanding to its closing semi-resolution, didn’t happen.
That first year at Oxy, Obama writes, he was “living one long lie,” crippled by self-consciousness and insecurity. (Many freshmen have known the feeling.) But then Barry Obama meets Regina.
“Regina . . . made me feel like I didn’t have to lie,” he writes. The two are introduced by a mutual friend, Marcus, in the campus coffee shop. She asks him about the name Barry—and becomes, in a liberating moment, one of the first to call him by his given name, Barack. More important, “she told me about her childhood in Chicago.” It was an authentic black American experience, he learns: “the absent father and struggling mother,” the rundown six-flat on the South Side, along with the compensations of an extended family—“uncles and cousins and grandparents, the stew of voices bubbling up in laughter.”
“Her voice evoked a vision of black life in all its possibility, a vision that filled me with longing—a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history.”
The afternoon with Regina transforms Barack. “Strange how a single conversation can change you,” he writes, setting up the ol’ epiphany.
“I had felt my voice returning to me that afternoon with Regina . . . [and] entering sophomore year I could feel it growing stronger, sturdier, that constant, honest portion of myself, a bridge between my future and my past.”
And the rest is history.
Except . . . there is layer upon layer of confusion here. When Maraniss inquired, Obama’s closest black friend at Occidental couldn’t recognize any real-life counterparts to the characters of Regina and Marcus, and in fact neither of them existed. Regina, Maraniss thinks, was the combination of a wealthy white girl (there were lots of them at Oxy, then and now, none overly familiar with the authentic black American experience) and a female black upperclassman who grew up middle class. Which part of Regina belonged to which real person isn’t mentioned and probably not discoverable. But that crucial background that Regina recounts to the narrator—the upbringing that inspired Obama to discover his voice and set in motion a train of events that led him to leave Occidental and the West for New York City and Columbia University—belonged to neither of Obama’s friends. The background, Maraniss says, may have been drawn from Michelle Robinson (later Obama), whom Obama would not meet for another 10 years. It’s like an epiphany in a time warp. And even then the facts are obscured: Michelle’s father never left his family, as Regina’s did.
Going back to Dreams after several years, and after reading Maraniss’s impressive book, you can get a bad case of the jumps. Take this spat between Regina and Barry, occurring the evening after his big antiapartheid speech, given on those steps that years later would wow Huell Howser:
Regina came up to me and offered her congratulations. I asked her what for.
“For that wonderful speech you gave.”
. . . “It was short anyway.”
Regina continues:
“That’s what made it so effective. . . . You spoke from the heart, Barack. It made people want to hear more. . . .”
“Listen, Regina,” I said, cutting her off, “you are a very sweet lady. And I’m happy you enjoyed my little performance today. But that’s the last time you will ever hear another speech out of me. . . . I’m going to leave the preaching to you.” . . .
“And why is that?”
I sipped my beer, my eyes wandering over the dancers in front of us.
“Because I’ve got nothing to say, Regina . . .”
Knowing what we know now—that this intelligent, socially aware, fatherless girl from the South Side didn’t exist, by whatever name—we can only hope that there was some “very sweet lady” at Occidental who actually did flatter Barack Obama in this way, at that moment. If it’s pure invention it reads like a testy exchange between Norman Bates and his mother.
What’s dispiriting is that throughout Dreams, the moments that Obama has invented are precisely the occasions of his epiphanies—precisely those periodic aha! moments that carry the book and bring its author closer to self-discovery. Without them not much is left: a lot of lovely writing, some unoriginal social observations, a handful of precocious literary turns. Obama wasn’t just inventing himself; he was inventing himself inventing himself. It made for a story, anyway.
We can see the dilemma he faced. Obama signed a contract to write a racial memoir. They were all the rage in those days, but in fact their moment had passed. Even with the distant father and absent mother, the schooling in Indonesia and the remote stepfather, Obama lived a life of relative ease. He moved, however uncomfortably, into one elite institution after another, protected by civil rights laws, surrounded by a popular culture in which the African-American experience has embedded itself ineradicably. As Obama’s best biographer, David Remnick, observed, this wasn’t the stuff of Manchild in the Promised Land; you couldn’t use it to make the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or the Auto-biography of Malcolm X. So Obama moved the drama inside himself, and said he’d found there an experience both singular and universal, and he brought nonexistent friends like Regina and Ray to goose the story along.
He did in effect what so many of us have done with him. He created a fable about an Obama far bigger and more consequential than the unremarkable man at its center. He joins us, haters and idolaters, as we join Huell Howser, looking this way and that, desperately trying to see what isn’t there. Isn’t that something?
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. A graduate of Occidental College, he reviewed Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope in our February 12, 2007, issue.
David Maraniss’ Barack Obama: The Story (Simon & Schuster, $33) might have been better titled Stanley Ann Dunham: Her Story.
Stanley Ann Dunham was the president’s mother, and she is the central character in Madison native Maraniss’ 600-page epic, which ends long before her son enters politics, much less the Oval Office.
If you’re disappointed by this, don’t be. Read the book. Stanley Ann Dunham’s unlikely, uneven, unconventional weaving together of a life is fascinating in itself. But it is significant in history because along for much of that weaving was a little boy and young man who was shaped by following her through her world, and now that man shapes our world as the leader of its most powerful nation.
Barack Obama’s namesake, his father, appears, but relatively briefly, probably playing more of a role in the book than he did in his son’s life. The senior Obama is portrayed as brilliant (stopping just short of earning a doctorate in economics from Harvard in three years), driven, charismatic, but also arrogant and abusive both psychologically and physically. And, as he grew older, all of his less endearing traits were magnified by a deepening relationship with alcohol. Maraniss suggests it was lucky for his son that Barack Obama Sr. stayed out his life.
The real story is Stanley Ann, named, some say, after her father Stanley Dunham, though Maraniss advances a more or less convincing theory that it was really her mother, Madelyn, who named her after a character in a B movie played by Bette Davis. Madelyn Payne Dunham of small-town Kansas longed for sophistication. Bette Davis personified it, and the film in which Davis played a woman named Stanley seemed to embody the bold breaking loose of convention that Madelyn wanted and that was passed along to her daughter.
Parenthetically, Madelyn Payne Dunham played a small role in Madison’s connection to the historic 2008 campaign of her grandson. Near the end of the campaign, Barack Obama canceled what would have been a massive Madison rally so he could return to Hawaii and be at her side in her final days.
In Maraniss’ book, Madelyn’s grandson does not even make an appearance until chapter six, and then he’s mostly tagging along as his mother marries and divorces his father, moves from Seattle to Hawaii and back to Seattle, and then goes to Jakarta, where she marries an Indonesian man and has with him a daughter, Barack’s half-sister. Along the way, Dunham acquires a college degree and works a series of academic odd jobs on her way to a Ph.D. in anthropology.
The senior Barack Obama is eventually killed in a car accident fueled by alcohol, but by that point it hardly matters. His contribution to history is his genes, all nature, no nurture. The nurturing role belonged mostly to Stanley Ann.
Maraniss shows us in intricate detail how the personality of the president was shaped. How a young boy of high intelligence and good humor adapted to his constantly changing and sometimes odd surroundings, learning, absorbing, finding a way to get along and to blend in, but also staying apart, since he never knew what was around the next corner with his footloose mom.
He acquired a lifelong habit of holding some of himself back, watching what played out in front of him and, to use Maraniss’ central theme, « avoiding the traps » of life.
Barack Obama may be one of the least qualified men ever to occupy his office. His experience on the national stage amounts to four years as a junior U.S. senator. And yet, thanks to his mother, there were few who understood the world better.
His face is a map of the world. Maraniss reports that Obama’s heritage is 50% Lou (an African tribe), 37.4% English, 4.4% German, 3.125% Irish, 3.125% Scottish, 1.56% Welsh, 0.195% Swiss, and 0.097% French. Maraniss proves conclusively that the president is not a Muslim, but reveals he is French. For Rush Limbaugh conservatives, which is worse?
More important than Obama’s genetic makeup is his life experience. Not only did he grow up in Indonesia and Hawaii, but he also grew up amid diversity in both places, which brought him into casual, daily contact with Africans, Asians, Natives and Caucasians, people of all kinds of ethnic variations and political and social differences.
What he did not experience in his early life is mainland, American-style racism. Growing up in places that were diverse, he never had to confront his identity as a black man until his college years. There are no slaves in the Obama family tree, and he missed most of the tumultuous civil rights struggle because of his youth and the physical distance from the mainland.
There is an amusing section on the future president’s more than casual acquaintance with marijuana as a high school student in Hawaii. I won’t ruin the fun, but if you get the e-book, search for « Choom Gang, » « Total Absorption » (the opposite of not inhaling) and « Roof Hits. » Enough said.
Even when Barry, which is how he was known, finally made it to the mainland as a college freshman, he chose elite Occidental College in Los Angeles, a diverse environment in a sheltered section of the city that gave him virtually no taste of the typical experience of blacks in America.
In fact, one of his Oxy college friends said that Barry, who was starting to refer to himself as Barack in part to reconnect to his black roots, decided to transfer after his sophomore year to Columbia in New York so that he could « discover blackness in America. »
What hits home in Maraniss’ book is how race was, for Barack Obama, primarily an intellectual journey of study and self-discovery. He had to discover his blackness.
This sets him apart from the dominant African American experience, and it accounts for some of the reluctance on the part of veteran civil rights advocates like Jesse Jackson to embrace his candidacy early on. The feeling was apparently mutual. As a student at Columbia, Obama saw Jackson speak at a rally and came back unimpressed.
The argument can be made that Barack Obama, raised by a white mother and white grandparents, is half white genetically and more than that culturally. But the reality of race in America is that skin color trumps everything. It is not, still and sadly, the content of your character that shapes how you are perceived, at least initially.
This is a central theme of Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father, which Maraniss dissects in his own book. In what is probably the memoir’s most memorable scene, one Obama referred to often in the 2008 campaign, his white, Kansas-bred grandmother expresses fear of a black man she encounters at a bus stop simply because he is black.
That incident happened while the most important person in his life, his mother, was off doing her graduate research in Indonesia. During this period and for the rest of Obama’s life, Stanley Ann Dunham makes only cameo appearances in Maraniss’ book, but he leaves little doubt that the choices she made in her life, and for her son, set him on a trajectory that made him the man he became.
And even in death in 1995, at the age of 52, she had an impact on her son. Her struggle with cancer was a theme he used often as he argued for a health care overhaul.
Most of the press about Maraniss’ book has focused on the discrepancies between what he found and what Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father, or on the revelations of college girlfriends. Neither strikes me as all that important compared to the narrative surrounding Stanley Ann. Maraniss forgives most of the discrepancies as poetic license that Obama admits to at the start of his memoir. He was trying to write literature as much as a factual account of his life, and he didn’t try to deceive.
As for the girlfriends’ accounts of a charismatic but ultimately distant lover, they make for interesting reading. But his character had already been shaped by his experiences with his mother and grandparents. By the time we meet the girlfriends, they are reporting on what we already know.
If the book has a flaw, it’s that there is too much of it. For example, did I really need to learn that Obama’s grandmother’s high school Latin class met on the second floor of the southeast corner of the school? Or what Obama’s phone number was when he was a student at Columbia in 1981? (It was 401-2857.)
The book also wanders into countless narrative cul de sacs, detailing the lives, and sometimes the deaths, of people who have only a tangential relationship to Obama. We get pages of detail on the funeral of Tom Mboya, a Kenyan political operative and an important figure in Obama’s father’s life, but a man the younger Obama never met.
But in the end, when a reader is in the hands of a skilled writer it’s a small complaint to say that there’s too much good writing.
Maraniss is a reporter and editor for The Washington Post. He grew up in Madison and spends his summers here, where he wrote much of the book.
Whatever else you’ve got going this summer, it’s worth your time to read Barack Obama: The Story, if only to marvel at the twists and spellbinding turns in the life of the girl named Stanley who shaped – almost entirely for the better – the personality of the most powerful human being on the planet.
As Obama wrote, « It was my mother’s fundamental faith – in the goodness of people and in the ultimate value of this brief life we’ve been given – that channeled [my] ambitions. »
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at TheDailyPage.com.
Back in 2006, Oprah Winfrey admitted to feeling embarrassed after learning that James Frey, whose memoir she had praised and promoted, fabricated many of his life stories. And as we would expect from a woman who rose from poverty to build a powerful media empire, Oprah did not take this sitting down. She invited Frey back on her show to confront him face-to-face.
The interview, for anyone who missed it, was not for the faint of heart. Throughout the interview, Oprah supplied a healthy serving of indignation and anger to a hapless Mr. Frey. In describing the interview, TIME magazine noted that a « public flogging » would have been civil in comparison. Indeed, Oprah told Frey that her feelings of disgust towards him were so strong that it was « difficult for her to talk to [him]. »
Most of the media applauded Oprah’s performance. The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen labeled Oprah the « Mensch of the year. » And Maureen Dowd thought « [i]t was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into Swift boating and swift bucks, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying. » In other words, many members of the media agreed with Oprah that fabricating stories in a memoir is no small matter.
So if Oprah and much of the media had this strong a reaction to misrepresentations made by a previously unknown man who was just trying to make his life story sound a little exciting, one can only imagine how strong her reaction would be to a politician who was misrepresenting his life story to further his political career.
Which brings us to our president. After watching Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Oprah became Obama’s most prominent supporter. And much as with Frey, Oprah’s initial support for Obama was based largely on his life story. Not only did she invite Obama on her show to discuss his memoir, Dreams from My Father, but in 2006, even before he officially entered the presidential race, Oprah publicly endorsed Obama for president. Oprah’s endorsement received tremendous media attention, prompting TIME magazine to put Obama on the cover with the caption « Why Barack Obama could be the next president. »
According to a CBS poll, more than a third of all American’s said that most people they knew were more inclined to vote for Obama as a result of Oprah’s endorsement. It would no exaggeration to say that Oprah’s endorsement played a significant role in Obama becoming president.
So what could possibly undermine Oprah’s admiration of our president? Well, it has recently been discovered by Washington Post editor and Obama biographer David Maraniss that Obama’s memoir likely went much farther than just the character « compression » and chronology rearrangement that Obama admitted to in his memoir’s introduction. Maraniss reveals in his new book that, much like Frey’s memoir, Dreams contains fabrications of material aspects of Obama’s life narrative.
In his review of Maraniss’ book, Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard details the extent to which Obama’s memoirs depart from Obama’s actual life story. Ferguson writes:
[W]hat’s dispiriting is that throughout Dreams, the moments that Obama has invented are precisely the occasions of his epiphanies- — precisely those periodic aha! moments that carry the book and bring its author closer to self-discovery. Without them not much is left[.]
He explains that all the episodes in Dreams where Obama faced any character defining struggle were simply made up; the conversations never happened, and the characters never existed. This wasn’t a case of Obama combining several events, which together lead him to the same place anyway; it’s Obama inventing events that perfectly suited the narrative he was trying create for himself.
To be sure, Maraniss is not the first person to discover fabrications in Obama’s memoir. In fact, conservative writers and bloggers have been noting many of these inconsistencies and misstatements for the past couple of years. The only difference is that as an editor of the Washington Post, Maraniss is too prominent a liberal for the media to ignore. Indeed, many of these fabrications have been covered by news media outlets such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Buzzfeed since his book was published.
Ultimately, what Maraniss did discover is that Obama’s actual upbringing was simply too comfortable and boring to lend itself to a compelling memoir. So he did what Frey did and turned an otherwise mundane life story into a more meaningful and interesting one.
At this point, it would hardly be surprising if Oprah felt embarrassed, having endorsed Obama’s presidency and praised his memoir. Ever since she did so, her career has been in a steep decline. With enough encouragement from the media, perhaps she’ll even try to arrange another interview to confront Obama on these charges. That is, if she could even stand to talk to him at this point.
In the best tradition of Bill Clinton’s famous declaration that the answer to the question of whether or not he was having an affair with Monica depended on « what the definition of ‘is’ is, » Barack Obama was clearly splitting hairs and concealing the truth when he said that William Ayers was « just a guy who lives in my neighborhood. »
The records of the administration of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), released last week by the University of Illinois, show that the Ayers-Obama connection was, in fact, an intimate collaboration and that it led to the only executive or administrative experience in Obama’s life.
After Walter Annenberg’s foundation offered several hundred million dollars to American public schools in the mid-’90s, William Ayers applied for $50 million for Chicago. The purpose of his application was to secure funds to « raise political consciousness » in Chicago’s public schools. After he won the grant, Ayers’s group chose Barack Obama to distribute the money. Between 1995 and 1999, Obama distributed the $50 million and raised another $60 million from other civic groups to augment it. In doing so, he was following Ayers’s admonition to grant the funds to « external » organizations, like American Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to pair with schools and conduct programs to radicalize the students and politicize them.
Reading, math and science achievement tests counted for little in the CAC grants, but the school’s success in preaching a radical political agenda determined how much money they got.
Barack Obama should have run screaming at the sight of William Ayers and his wife, Bernadette Dohrn. Ayers has admitted bombing the U.S. Capitol building and the Pentagon, and his wife was sent to prison for failing to cooperate in solving the robbery of a Brink’s armored car in which two police officers were killed. Far from remorse, Ayers told The New York Times in September 2001 that he « wished he could have done more. »
Ayers only avoided conviction when the evidence against him turned out to be contained in illegally obtained wiretaps by the FBI. He was, in fact, guilty as sin.
That Obama should ally himself with Ayers is almost beyond understanding. The former terrorist had not repented of his views and the education grants he got were expressly designed to further them.
So let’s sum up Obama’s Chicago connections. His chief financial supporter was Tony Rezko, now on his way to federal prison. His spiritual adviser and mentor was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of « God damn America » fame. And the guy who got him his only administrative job and put him in charge of doling out $50 million is William Ayers, a terrorist who was a domestic Osama bin Laden in his youth.
Even apart from the details of the Obama/Ayers connection, two key points emerge:
a) Obama lied and misled the American people in his description of his relationship with Ayers as casual and arm’s-length; and
b) Obama was consciously guided by Ayers’s radical philosophy, rooted in the teachings of leftist Saul Alinksy, in his distribution of CAC grant funds.
Since Obama is asking us to let him direct education spending by the federal government and wants us to trust his veracity, these are difficulties he will have to explain in order to get the votes to win.
Now that Obama is comfortably ahead in the polls, attention will understandably shift to him. We will want to know what kind of president he would make. The fact that, within the past 10 years, he participated in a radical program of political education conceptualized by an admitted radical terrorist offers no reassurance.
Why did Obama put up with Ayers? Because he got a big job and $50 million of patronage to distribute to his friends and supporters in Chicago. Why did he hang out with Jeremiah Wright? Because he was new in town, having grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia and having been educated at Columbia and Harvard, and needed all the local introductions he could get to jump-start his political career. Why was he so close to Rezko?
Because he funded Obama’s campaigns and helped him buy a house for $300,000 less than he otherwise would have had to pay.
Not a good recommendation for a president.
//Morris, a former political adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of « Outrage. » To get all of Dick Morris’s and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by email, go to http://www.dickmorris.com.
As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama disavowed any connection with former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground radical who was one of Obama’s early backers and his colleague on the board of the Woods Fund in Chicago. We now have proof that Obama’s association with Ayers continued even after Obama had been elected to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate–in the form of a now-scrubbed blog post placing Obama at the home of Ayers and his wife, fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn, on July 4, 2005.
Dr. Tom Perrin, Assistant Professor of English at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, was a graduate student at the University of Chicago at the time, and maintained a blog called “Rambling Thomas.” He lived next door to Ayers and Dohrn in Hyde Park. He wrote at 8:44 a.m. on July 6, 2005:
Guess what? I spent the 4th of July evening with star Democrat Barack Obama! Actually, that’s a lie. Obama was at a barbecue at the house next door (given by a law professor who is a former member of the Weather Underground) and we saw him over the fence at our barbecue. Well, the others did. It had started raining and he had gone inside be the time I got there. Nevertheless.
Dohrn is a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University, and Chicago did, in fact, record rainfall on the Fourth of July holiday in 2005.
Breitbart News attempted to contact Dr. Perrin for further comment:
Dear Dr. Perrin,
My name is Joel Pollak, and I am the Editor-in-Chief of Breitbart News.
We came across your blog entry from July 2005 in which you mentioned that then-Senator Obama had been a guest at the Ayers/Dohrn house next door.
Joel Pollak
Dr. Perrin did not respond. He did, however, delete his entire blog from the Internet.
Of course, Breitbart News had saved a screen grab of the blog beforehand:
Obama’s presence–as a U.S. Senator–at the Ayers barbecue has been confirmed by another source, who told Breitbart News: “I too saw Obama at a picnic table in the Ayers/Dohrn backyard, munching away–on the 4th of July.”
The fact that Obama socialized with Ayers and Dorn contradicts the statement that Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt gave the New York Times in 2008:
Mr. LaBolt said the men first met in 1995 through the education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood. He said they have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they bumped into each other on the street in Hyde Park.
That statement now appears to be “Clintonian” in its dance around the truth. Obama and Ayers may not have emailed or spoken by phone, but they had, we now know, spoken face to face–at least on July 4, 2005, and perhaps at other times as well.
The continued connection between Obama and his radical, domestic terrorist associates until mere months before he launched his presidential campaign is sharply at odds with the way Obama minimized the relationship, as well as the way the media largely sought to portray it as an insignificant part of Obama’s past.
Whatever differences may have emerged between Obama and Ayers–and other far-left fellow travelers–since Obama took office and grappled with the realities of governing, Obama’s migration towards the mainstream of American politics is very recent, and likely opportunistic. His intellectual and political roots remain extreme.
Obama’s Third-Party History
New documents shed new light on his ties to a leftist party in the 1990s.
Stanley Kurtz
National Review
June 7, 2012
On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s goal.
In late October 2008, when I wrote here at National Review Online that Obama had been a member of the New Party, his campaign sharply denied it, calling my claim a “crackpot smear.” Fight the Smears, an official Obama-campaign website, staunchly maintained that “Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party.” I rebutted this, but the debate was never taken up by the mainstream press.
Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office.
Minutes of the meeting on January 11, 1996, of the New Party’s Chicago chapter read as follows:
Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party “Candidate Contract” and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party.
Consistent with this, a roster of the Chicago chapter of the New Party from early 1997 lists Obama as a member, with January 11, 1996, indicated as the date he joined.
Knowing that Obama disguised his New Party membership helps make sense of his questionable handling of the 2008 controversy over his ties to ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). During his third debate with John McCain, Obama said that the “only” involvement he’d had with ACORN was to represent the group in a lawsuit seeking to compel Illinois to implement the National Voter Registration Act, or motor-voter law. The records of Illinois ACORN and its associated union clearly contradict that assertion, as I show in my political biography of the president, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.
Why did Obama deny his ties to ACORN? The group was notorious in 2008 for thug tactics, fraudulent voter registrations, and its role in popularizing risky subprime lending. Admitting that he had helped to fund ACORN’s voter-registration efforts and train some of their organizers would doubtless have been an embarrassment but not likely a crippling blow to his campaign. So why not simply confess the tie and make light of it? The problem for Obama was ACORN’s political arm, the New Party.
The revelation in 2008 that Obama had joined an ACORN-controlled, leftist third party could have been damaging indeed, and coming clean about his broader work with ACORN might easily have exposed these New Party ties. Because the work of ACORN and the New Party often intersected with Obama’s other alliances, honesty about his ties to either could have laid bare the entire network of his leftist political partnerships.
Although Obama is ultimately responsible for deceiving the American people in 2008 about his political background, he got help from his old associates. Each of the two former political allies who helped him to deny his New Party membership during campaign ’08 was in a position to know better.
The Fight the Smears website quoted Carol Harwell, who managed Obama’s 1996 campaign for the Illinois senate: “Barack did not solicit or seek the New Party endorsement for state senator in 1995.” Drawing on her testimony, Fight the Smears conceded that the New Party did support Obama in 1996 but denied that Obama had ever joined, adding that “he was the only candidate on the ballot in his race and never solicited the endorsement.”
We’ve seen that this is false. Obama formally requested New Party endorsement, signed the candidate contract, and joined the party. Is it conceivable that Obama’s own campaign manager could have been unaware of this? The notion is implausible. And the documents make Harwell’s assertion more remarkable still.
Nearly three decades ago, Barack Obama stood out on the small campus of Occidental College in Los Angeles for his eloquence, intellect and activism against apartheid in South Africa. But Mr. Obama, then known as Barry, also joined in the party scene.
Years later in his 1995 memoir, he mentioned smoking “reefer” in “the dorm room of some brother” and talked about “getting high.” Before Occidental, he indulged in marijuana, alcohol and sometimes cocaine as a high school student in Hawaii, according to the book. He made “some bad decisions” as a teenager involving drugs and drinking, Senator Obama, now a presidential candidate, told high school students in New Hampshire last November.
Mr. Obama’s admissions are rare for a politician (his book, “Dreams From My Father,” was written before he ran for office.) They briefly became a campaign issue in December when an adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s chief Democratic rival, suggested that his history with drugs would make him vulnerable to Republican attacks if he became his party’s nominee.
Mr. Obama, of Illinois, has never quantified his illicit drug use or provided many details. He wrote about his two years at Occidental, a predominantly white liberal arts college, as a gradual but profound awakening from a slumber of indifference that gave rise to his activism there and his fears that drugs could lead him to addiction or apathy, as they had for many other black men.
Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.
In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.
Vinai Thummalapally, a former California State University student who became friendly with Mr. Obama in college, remembered him as a model of moderation — jogging in the morning, playing pickup basketball at the gym, hitting the books and socializing.
“If someone passed him a joint, he would take a drag. We’d smoke or have one extra beer, but he would not even do as much as other people on campus,” recounted Mr. Thummalapally, an Obama fund-raiser. “He was not even close to being a party animal.”
Mr. Obama declined to be interviewed for this article. A campaign spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said in an e-mail message that the memoir “is a candid and personal account of what Senator Obama was experiencing and thinking at the time.”
“It’s not surprising that his friends from high school and college wouldn’t recall personal experiences and struggles that happened more than twenty years ago in the same way, and to the same extent, that he does,” he wrote.
What seems clear is that Mr. Obama’s time at Occidental from 1979 to 1981 — where he describes himself arriving as “alienated” — would ultimately set him on a course to public service. He developed a sturdier sense of self and came to life politically, particularly in his sophomore year, growing increasingly aware of harsh inequities like apartheid and poverty in the third world.
He also discovered that he wanted to be in a larger arena; one professor described Occidental back then as feeling small and provincial. Mr. Obama wrote in his memoir that he needed “a community that cut deeper than the common despair that black friends and I shared when reading the latest crime statistics, or the high fives I might exchange on a basketball court. A place where I could put down stakes and test my commitments.”
Mr. Obama wrote that he learned of a transfer program that Occidental had with Columbia and applied. “He was so bright and wanted a wider urban experience,” recalled Anne Howells, a former English professor at Occidental who taught Mr. Obama and wrote him a recommendation for Columbia.
Mr. Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, said her brother focused more on his future at Occidental. “I think he felt it was time to do some heavy thinking and assessing and time to start making a more meaningful contribution,” Ms. Soetoro-Ng said. “He felt New York was an interesting place to be in terms of the exchange of ideas, overlapping cultures and rigorous academics.”
As for Mr. Obama’s use of marijuana and, occasionally, cocaine, she said, “He wasn’t a drug addict or dealer. He was a kid searching for answers and a place who had made some mistakes.” After arriving in New York, Mr. Obama wrote in his memoir, he stopped getting high.
In the 442-page book, published when he was 33, Mr. Obama’s references to drug use are limited to the equivalent of about a page and a half. He got the book contract after becoming the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. At first, he considered writing a more scholarly book about the law, race and society, but scrapped that in favor of writing about his search for identity.
The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Mr. Obama wrote that he would get high to help numb the confusion he felt about himself. “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man,” he penned in the memoir. “Except the highs hadn’t been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was.”
“I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind.”
At Punahou, a preparatory school that had few black students, Keith Kakugawa and Mr. Obama were close friends. They met when Mr. Obama was a freshman and Mr. Kakugawa, who is Japanese-Hawaiian, was a junior.
Mr. Kakugawa remembered that the two often discussed wealth and class and that their disaffection would surface. He said race would come up in the conversations, usually when talking about white girls they thought about dating.
“We were dealing with acceptance and adaptation, and both had to do with the fact that we were not part of the moneyed elite,” Mr. Kakugawa said.
Mr. Kakugawa, who spent seven years in and out of prison for drug offenses beginning in 1996, said he pressured Mr. Obama into drinking beer.
But Mr. Obama did not smoke marijuana during the two years they spent time together even though it was readily available, Mr. Kakugawa said, adding that he never knew Mr. Obama to have done cocaine. “As far as pot, booze or coke being a prevalent part of his life, I doubt it,” Mr. Kakugawa said. He had graduated, however, by the time Mr. Obama was in his junior and senior years, when he wrote that he most frequently used marijuana and cocaine “when you could afford it.”
Mr. Obama describes a scene in that period where, in the meat freezer of a deli, he watched someone named Micky — “my potential initiator” — pull out “the needle and the tubing,” apparently to shoot up heroin. Alarmed, Mr. Obama wrote that he imagined how an air bubble could kill him. Neither Mr. Kakugawa or the others interviewed for this article who knew Mr. Obama at Punahou recalled hearing that story from him.
In his freshman year at Occidental, Mr. Obama and his dormitory mates would gather around a couch in the hallway of their floor while stereos blasted songs by bands like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the B-52’s and the Flying Lizards. The conversations revolved around topics like the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter’s proposed revival of draft registration and the energy crisis.
Mr. Obama displayed a deft but unobtrusive manner of debating.“When he talked, it was an E. F. Hutton moment: people listened,” said John Boyer, who lived across the hall from Mr. Obama. “He would point out the negatives of a policy and its consequences and illuminate the complexities of an issue the way others could not.” He added, “He has a great sense of humor and could defuse an argument.”
Mr. Obama seemed interested in thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he studied in a political thought class in his sophomore year.
The professor, Roger Boesche, has memories of him at a popular burger joint on campus.
“He was always sitting there with students who were some of the most articulate and those concerned with issues like violence in Central America and having businesses divest from South Africa,” he said. “These were the kids most concerned with issues of social justice and who took classes and books seriously.”
Mr. Obama was involved in the Black Students’ Association and in the divestment campaign to pressure the college to pull its money out of companies doing business in South Africa. To make a point, students camped out in makeshift shantytowns on campus.
In his book, Mr. Obama said that his role in the divestment push started as kind of a lark, “part of the radical pose my friends and I sought to maintain.” But then he became more engaged, contacting members of the African National Congress to have them speak at the college and writing letters to the faculty.
He was one of a few students who spoke at a campus divestment rally. Rebecca Rivera, then a member of a similar Hispanic students’ group, said: “He clearly understood our social responsibility and the way the college’s money was impacting the lives of black people in South Africa and preventing the country from progressing.” She added, “There was passion, absolutely, but not incoherent fieriness.”
While he would sometimes attend parties held by black students and Latinos, Amiekoleh Usafi, a classmate who also spoke at the rally, recalled seeing him at parties put together by the political and artistic set.
Ms. Usafi, whose name at Occidental was Kim Kimbrew, said the most she saw Mr. Obama indulging in were cigarettes and beer.
“I would never say that he was a druggie, and there were plenty there,” she said. “He was too cool for all that.”
Qu’est-ce que cela fait d’avoir un nouveau président des Etats-Unis qui sait lire ? Du bien. Cela fait du bien d’apprendre qu’il a toujours un livre à portée de la main. On a tellement flatté ses qualités d’orateur et ses dons de communicant qu’on a oublié l’essentiel de ce qui fait la richesse de son verbe : son côté lecteur compulsif. A croire que lorsqu’il sera las de lire des livres, il dirigera l’Amérique pour se détendre. Michiko Kakutani, la redoutée critique du New York Times, d’ordinaire si dure avec la majorité des écrivains, est tout miel avec ce non-écrivain auteur de trois livres : deux textes autobiographiques et un discours sur la race en Amérique. Elle vient de dresser l’inventaire de sa « bibliothèque idéale », autrement dit les livres qui ont fait ce qu’il est devenu, si l’on croise ce qu’il en dit dans ses Mémoires, ce qu’il en confesse dans les interviews et ce qu’on en sait.
Adolescent, il lut avidement les grands auteurs noirs James Baldwin, Langston Hugues, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, W.E.B. Du Bois avant de s’immerger dans Nietzsche et Saint-Augustin en marge de ses études de droit, puis d’avaler la biographie de Martin Luther King en plusieurs volumes par Taylor Branch. Autant de livres dans lesquels il a piqué idées, pistes et intuitions susceptibles de nourrir sa vision du monde. Ce qui ne l’a pas empêché de se nourrir en permanence des tragédies de Shakespeare, de Moby Dick, des écrits de Lincoln, des essais du transcendantaliste Ralph Waldo Emerson, du Chant de Salomon de la nobélisée Toni Morrison, du Carnet d’or de Doris Lessing, des poèmes d’un autre nobélisé Derek Walcott, des mémoires de Gandhi, des textes du théologien protestant Reinhold Niebuhr qui exercèrent une forte influence sur Martin Luther King, et, plus récemment de Gilead (2004) le roman à succès de Marylinne Robinson ou de Team of rivals que l’historienne Doris Kearns Goodwin a consacré au génie politique d’Abraham Lincoln, « la » référence du nouveau président.
Pardon, on allait oublier, le principal, le livre des livres : la Bible, of course.
Voir aussi:
La star de NBC, Brian Williams est suspendu pour six mois
Accusé d’avoir menti lors de reportages en Irak, Brian Williams, l’un des présentateurs les plus célèbres des Etats-Unis, est suspendu pour six mois sans salaire
Brian Williams (AFP)
Nebia Bendjebbour
Le Nouvel Obs
09-02-2015
C’est un énorme scandale aux Etats-Unis. Brian Williams, 55 ans, présentateur vedette du journal de NBC, depuis 2004, quitte l’antenne après avoir été pris en flagrant délit de mensonges sur ses souvenirs de reportage en Irak en 2003. Il vient d’être suspendu pour six mois sans salaire.
« Brian a déformé des événements qui s’étaient produits lorsqu’il couvrait la guerre en Irak en 2003. Il est ensuite devenu clair que, dans d’autres occasions, Brian avait fait la même chose en racontant cette histoire. Il a eu tort, c’était complètement inapproprié pour quelqu’un dans la position de Brian », a écrit Deborah Turness, la présidente de NBC News.
Alors qu’il couvrait la guerre pour la chaîne, comme reporter de guerre, il avait toujours affirmé que l’hélicoptère à bord duquel il était embarqué avec des militaires avait été attaqué au lance-roquettes. En fait, l’hélicoptère attaqué est celui qui se trouvait devant lui. Ses mensonges ont fini par en agacer plus d’un, en particulier les soldats qui ont réagi en reprochant au journaliste de s’attribuer un acte de courage qu’il ne méritait pas.
Sur le site Stars and Stripes, spécialisé dans les forces armées, ils donnent leur version. Selon Joe Summerlin, le pilote de l’hélicoptère qui transportait Brian Williams et son équipe se trouvait à plus d’une demi-heure de l’attaque. Cité par le New York Times Summerlin fait donc voler en éclat la thèse du journaliste héroïque, car non seulement son appareil n’a pas été visé mais n’était pas proche. Il avait dû en revanche se poser en raison d’une tempête de sable et ne s’est pas fait tirer dessus.
J’ai commis une erreur en rapportant cet événement datant d’il y a douze ans».
Pris dans la tourmente, Brian Williams, a présenté ses regrets lors de son journal de mercredi soir. Il a confessé avoir fait une « erreur » sur ses déclarations « Je veux m’excuser. J’ai dit que je me trouvais à bord d’un hélicoptère qui a essuyé des tirs, alors que j’étais dans un appareil qui suivait. J’ai commis une erreur en rapportant cet événement datant d’il y a douze ans».
Ses excuses n’ont pas suffi à redorer son blason. Son image en a été écornée. D’autres affirmations qu’il a faites sont mises en doute. Lors de l’ouragan Katrina, il avait ainsi dit avoir vu flotter un cadavre depuis sa chambre d’hôtel à la Nouvelle Orléans. L’ancien directeur des services de santé de la ville, le Dr Lutz a déclaré que le quartier français n’avait pas subi les mêmes dégâts que le reste de la ville.
Brian Williams se retire provisoirement de l’antenne
Samedi, Brian Williams a déclaré dans un communiqué de NBC « J’ai décidé de me retirer de la présentation quotidienne pour les prochains jours. Dans une carrière passée à couvrir et consommer l’information, j’ai compris avec douleur que je suis actuellement trop devenu une partie de cette information, en raison de mes actions », a-il ajouté.
Il est remplacé provisoirement par Lester Holt, présentateur des journaux du week-end.
La chaîne a lancé une enquête en interne, pour étudier les suites à donner aux déclarations de son présentateur vedette, qui en décembre avait renouvelé son contrat pour cinq ans, d’un montant de 10 millions de dollars par an. NBC va-t-elle céder aux critiques très virulentes des médias et d’Internet pour se séparer de sa vedette regardée par 9 millions d’américains ?
Le Figaro publie en avant-première les meilleurs extraits des Mémoires du candidat à l’investiture démocrate. Dans Les Rêves de mon père (éditions Presse de la Cité), qui paraît jeudi 20 mars en France, Barack Obama raconte l’histoire de sa famille et celle de son ascension. Jusqu’à la Maison-Blanche ?
La promesse du rêve américain
J’appris que mon père était africain, kényan, de la tribu des Luos, né sur les rives du lac Victoria dans une localité appelée Alego. Il gardait les chèvres de son père et fréquentait l’école construite par l’administration coloniale britannique, où il se révéla très doué. Il obtint une bourse pour aller étudier à Nairobi. C’est là que, à la veille de l’indépendance du Kenya, il fut sélectionné par des chefs kényans et des sponsors américains pour aller étudier dans une université américaine, rejoignant la première grande vague d’Africains envoyés à l’étranger pour y apprendre la technologie occidentale et la rapporter dans leur pays afin de forger une nouvelle Afrique moderne.
En 1959, à l’âge de vingt-trois ans, il arriva à l’université de Hawaii. C’était le premier étudiant africain accueilli dans cette institution. […] À un cours de russe, il rencontra une jeune Américaine timide, modeste, âgée seulement de dix-huit ans, et ils tombèrent amoureux. Les deux jeunes gens se marièrent et eurent un fils, auquel Barack transmit son prénom. Il obtint une nouvelle bourse, cette fois pour poursuivre son Ph.D., son doctorat, à Harvard, mais non les fonds nécessaires pour emmener sa nouvelle famille avec lui. Il y eut donc séparation, à la suite de laquelle il retourna en Afrique pour tenir sa promesse vis-à-vis du continent. Il laissa derrière lui sa femme et son enfant, mais le lien d’amour perdura malgré la distance… […]
Mon père ne ressemblait en rien aux gens qui m’entouraient, il était noir comme le goudron alors que ma mère était blanche comme le lait, mais cela me traversait à peine l’esprit.
De fait, je ne me souviens que d’une seule histoire traitant explicitement du problème racial. Cette histoire racontait qu’un soir, après avoir passé de longues heures à travailler, mon père avait rejoint mon grand-père et plusieurs autres amis dans un bar de Waikiki. L’ambiance était joyeuse, on mangeait et on buvait au son d’une guitare hawaïenne, lorsqu’un Blanc, à haute et intelligible voix, se plaignit tout à coup au propriétaire d’être obligé de boire du bon alcool «à côté d’un nègre». Le silence s’installa dans la salle et les gens se tournèrent vers mon père, en s’attendant à une bagarre. Mais mon père se leva, se dirigea vers l’homme, lui sourit et entreprit de lui administrer un sermon sur la folie de l’intolérance, sur la promesse du rêve américain et sur la déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme.
«Quand Barack s’est tu, le gars s’est senti tellement mal à l’aise qu’il lui a filé aussi sec un billet de cent dollars, racontait Gramps. Ça nous a payé toutes nos consommations pour le reste de la soirée… et le loyer de ton père jusqu’à la fin du mois !»
Il s’était fait passer pour un Blanc
Ma mère m’installa dans la bibliothèque pendant qu’elle retournait à son travail. Je finis mes bandes dessinées et les devoirs qu’elle m’avait fait apporter, puis je me levai pour aller flâner à travers les rayons. Dans un coin, je découvris une collection de Life, tous soigneusement présentés dans des classeurs de plastique clair. Je parcourus les publicités accrocheuses et me sentis vaguement rassuré. Plus loin, je tombai sur une photo qui illustrait un article, et j’essayai de deviner le sujet avant de lire la légende. Une photo de petits Français qui couraient dans des rues pavées : c’était une scène joyeuse, un jeu de cache-cache après une journée de classe et de corvées, et leurs rires évoquaient la liberté. La photo d’une Japonaise tenant délicatement une petite fille nue dans une baignoire à peine remplie : ça, c’était triste. La petite fille était malade, ses jambes étaient tordues, sa tête tombait en arrière contre la poitrine de sa mère, la figure de la mère était crispée de chagrin, peut-être se faisait-elle des reproches…
Puis j’en arrivai à la photo d’un homme âgé qui portait des lunettes noires et un imperméable. Il marchait le long d’une route déserte. Je ne parvins pas à deviner de quoi parlait cette photo ; le sujet n’avait rien d’extraordinaire. Sur la page suivante, il y en avait une autre : c’était un gros plan sur les mains du même homme. Elles montraient une étrange pâleur, une pâleur qui n’était pas naturelle, comme si la peau avait été vidée de son sang. Je retournai à la première photo, et je remarquai les cheveux crépus de l’homme, ses lèvres épaisses et larges, son nez charnu, et le tout avait cette même teinte irrégulière, spectrale.
Il est sans doute gravement malade, me dis-je. Victime d’une irradiation, peut-être, ou albinos. J’avais vu un albinos dans la rue quelques jours auparavant, et ma mère m’avait donné des explications. Mais lorsque je lus les mots qui accompagnaient la photo, je vis que ce n’était pas cela du tout. L’homme avait reçu un traitement chimique pour éclaircir sa peau, disait l’article. Il l’avait payé de ses propres deniers. Il disait regretter d’avoir essayé de se faire passer pour un Blanc, se désolait de la manière catastrophique dont l’expérience avait tourné. Mais les résultats étaient irréversibles. Il existait des milliers de gens comme lui en Amérique, des Noirs, hommes et femmes, qui s’étaient soumis au même traitement à la suite de publicités qui leur avaient promis le bonheur, une fois devenus blancs.
Je sentis la chaleur envahir mon visage et mon cou. Mon estomac se serra ; les caractères devinrent flous. Ma mère était-elle au courant ? Et son patron ? Pourquoi était-il si calme, à lire ses rapports, quelques mètres plus loin, au bout du couloir ? Je ressentis le besoin urgent de sauter à bas de mon siège, de leur montrer ce que je venais d’apprendre, de leur demander de m’expliquer, ou de me rassurer. Mais quelque chose me retint. Comme dans les rêves, j’étais privé de voix, incapable d’articuler les mots traduisant cette peur nouvelle pour moi.
Lorsque ma mère vint me chercher pour me ramener à la maison, mon visage était souriant, et les magazines avaient retrouvé leur place. La pièce, l’atmosphère étaient aussi tranquilles qu’avant.
Si tu veux devenir un être humain
Ma mère avait toujours favorisé mon intégration rapide dans la culture indonésienne (Sa mère et son second mari se sont installés à Djakarta en 1968, NDLR). Cela m’avait appris à devenir relativement autonome, à ne pas me montrer exigeant quand le budget était serré. J’étais extrêmement bien élevé comparé aux autres enfants américains, et grâce à son éducation je considérais avec dédain le mélange d’ignorance et d’arrogance qui caractérise trop souvent les Américains à l’étranger. Dès le début, elle avait concentré ses efforts sur mon instruction. N’ayant pas les revenus nécessaires pour m’envoyer à l’école internationale que fréquentait la majorité des enfants étrangers de Djakarta, elle s’était arrangée dès notre arrivée pour compléter ma scolarité par des cours par correspondance envoyés des États-Unis.
Désormais, elle redoublait d’efforts. Cinq jours par semaine, elle venait dans ma chambre à quatre heures du matin, me forçait à prendre un petit déjeuner copieux, puis me faisait travailler mon anglais pendant trois heures, avant mon départ pour l’école et le sien pour son travail. J’opposais une rude résistance à ce régime, mais à toutes mes stratégies, les moins convaincantes («J’ai mal à l’estomac») comme les plus véridiques (mes yeux se fermaient toutes les cinq minutes), elle exposait patiemment sa défense :
«Et moi, mon petit gars, tu crois que ça m’amuse ?
»[…] Si tu veux devenir un être humain, me disait-elle, il te faudra avoir certaines valeurs. L’honnêteté : Lolo n’aurait pas dû cacher le réfrigérateur dans la remise quand les inspecteurs des impôts sont venus, même si tout le monde, les inspecteurs y compris, s’attendait à cela. La justice : les parents des élèves plus riches ne devraient pas offrir des postes de télévision aux professeurs pendant le ramadan, et leurs enfants n’ont pas à être fiers des bonnes notes qu’ils reçoivent en remerciement. La franchise : si la chemise que je t’ai offerte pour ton anniversaire ne t’a pas plu, tu aurais dû le dire au lieu de la garder roulée en boule au fond de ton placard. L’indépendance de jugement : ce n’est pas parce que les autres enfants se moquent d’un pauvre garçon à cause de sa coupe de cheveux que tu dois faire la même chose.
Elle n’avait qu’un seul allié en tout cela, c’était l’autorité lointaine de mon père. De plus en plus souvent, elle me rappelait son histoire, son enfance pauvre, dans un pays pauvre, dans un continent pauvre ; la dureté de sa vie. J’allais suivre son exemple, ainsi en décida ma mère. Je n’avais pas le choix. C’était dans les gènes.
Vous devez être en colère quelque part
En 1983, je décidai de devenir organisateur de communautés.
Quand mes amis, à l’université, me demandaient quel était le rôle d’un organisateur de communautés, je n’étais pas capable de leur répondre directement : je discourais sur la nécessité du changement. Du changement à la Maison-Blanche, où Reagan et ses sous-fifres se livraient à leur sale besogne. Du changement au Congrès, qui était complaisant et corrompu. Du changement dans l’état d’esprit du pays, obsessionnel et centré sur lui-même. Le changement ne viendra pas d’en haut, disais-je. Le changement ne viendra que de la base, c’est pourquoi il faut la mobiliser.
Voilà ce que je vais faire. Je vais travailler à organiser les Noirs. La base. Pour le changement.
Et mes amis, blancs et noirs, me félicitaient chaudement de mon idéal, avant de mettre le cap sur le bureau de poste pour envoyer leurs demandes d’admission dans les grandes écoles. […]
Finalement, une société de conseil financier pour multinationales accepta de m’embaucher comme assistant de recherche. J’arrivais tous les jours dans mon bureau au cœur de Manhattan. J’étais le seul homme noir de la société. Ike, l’agent de sécurité noir bourru qui officiait dans le hall, n’y alla pas par quatre chemins et me dit tout net que je commettais une erreur.
«Organisateur ? C’est un genre de politique, c’est ça ? Pourquoi vous voulez faire un truc comme ça ?
» J’essayai de lui expliquer mes idées politiques, combien il était important de mobiliser les pauvres et de redistribuer les richesses à la communauté. Ike secoua la tête.
«Monsieur Barack, me dit-il, j’espère que vous ne le prendrez pas mal si je vous donne un petit conseil. Oubliez ces histoires d’organisation et faites quelque chose qui pourra vous rapporter du blé.» […]
J’avais pratiquement renoncé à devenir organisateur lorsque je reçus un appel d’un certain Marty Kaufman. Celui-ci m’expliqua qu’il avait monté une organisation à Chicago et qu’il souhaitait engager un stagiaire. Son aspect ne m’inspira pas grande confiance. Un Blanc grassouillet, de taille moyenne, portant un costume fripé. Son visage était mangé par une barbe de trois jours ; derrière d’épaisses lunettes cerclées de fer, ses yeux restaient plissés en permanence. Quand il se leva pour me serrer la main, il renversa un peu de thé sur sa chemise.
«Eh bien, dit-il en épongeant la tache avec une serviette en papier, pourquoi veut-on devenir organisateur quand on vient de Hawaii?»
Je m’assis et lui parlai un peu de moi.
«Hum, fit-il en hochant la tête, tout en prenant quelques notes sur un calepin. Vous devez être en colère, quelque part.
Que voulez-vous dire ?
Il haussa les épaules.
Je ne sais pas exactement. Mais il y a sûrement quelque chose. Ne le prenez pas mal : la colère, c’est obligatoire pour faire ce boulot. C’est la seule raison qui pousse quelqu’un à s’engager là-dedans. Les gens bien dans leur peau trouvent un boulot plus calme.»
La meilleure part de notre histoire
J’entrai à la Harvard Law School, où je passai la plus grande partie de mon temps, durant trois années, dans des bibliothèques faiblement éclairées, plongé dans les études de cas et les textes de lois. Les études de droit peuvent être parfois décevantes, car il s’agit d’apprendre à appliquer des règles rigides et des procédures obscures à une réalité qui n’est pas. Mais le droit n’est pas que cela. Le droit est aussi la mémoire ; le droit note aussi le déroulement d’une longue conversation, celle d’une nation qui discute avec sa conscience.
«Nous tenons ces vérités pour évidentes par elles-mêmes…»
Dans ces mots, j’entends l’esprit de Douglass et de Delany, celui de Jefferson et de Lincoln, les luttes de Martin et de Malcolm et de ceux qui manifestèrent pour que ces mots deviennent réalité. J’entends les voix des familles japonaises enfermées derrière des barbelés, des jeunes Juifs russes exploités dans les fabriques de confection du Lower East Side de Chicago, des fermiers anéantis par la sécheresse qui chargent sur leurs camions ce qui reste de leurs vies brisées. J’entends les voix des habitants des Altgeld Gardens, et les voix de ceux qui restent de l’autre côté des frontières de ce pays, les cohortes affaiblies, affamées, qui traversent le Rio Grande. J’entends toutes ces voix réclamer la reconnaissance, et toutes elles posent exactement les questions qui en sont venues à déterminer ma vie, les questions que parfois, tard dans la nuit, je me surprends à poser au Vieil Homme. Quelle est notre communauté, et comment cette communauté peut-elle être conciliée avec notre liberté ? Jusqu’où vont nos obligations ? Comment transformons-nous un pur pouvoir en justice, un simple sentiment en amour ? À mon retour à Chicago, je découvris une accélération des signes de détérioration dans tout le South Side : les quartiers étaient devenus plus délabrés, les enfants plus agressifs, les familles moyennes déménageaient de plus en plus dans les banlieues, les prisons étaient remplies à craquer de jeunes à l’œil sombre, mes frères sans perspectives.
J’essaie d’apporter ma modeste participation au renversement de cette tendance. Dans mon cabinet d’avocat, je travaille principalement avec des églises et des groupes communautaires, des hommes et des femmes qui construisent tranquillement des épiceries et des cliniques dans les quartiers déshérités, et des logements pour les pauvres. De temps en temps, je travaille sur une affaire de discrimination, pour défendre des clients qui viennent dans mon cabinet avec des histoires dont nous aimons nous dire qu’elles ne devraient plus exister. La plupart de ces clients sont un peu embarrassés de ce qui leur arrive, tout comme les collègues blancs qui acceptent de témoigner en leur faveur ; car personne n’a envie de passer pour quelqu’un qui sème la zizanie. Et pourtant, il arrive un moment où les plaignants aussi bien que les témoins se disent que c’est une question de principe, que malgré tout ce qui s’est passé, ces mots posés sur le papier il y a deux cents ans ont sûrement une importance. Noirs et Blancs, ils se réclament de cette communauté que nous appelons l’Amérique. Ils choisissent la meilleure partie de notre histoire.
A senior official in the State Department admitted on Wednesday that the Obama administration’s goal during negotiations with Iran is delaying the regime’s development of nuclear weapons rather than shutting down the Islamic Republic’s contested nuclear program.
Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken acknowledged during a tense exchange with senators on Capitol Hill a deal being sought by the Obama administration that would constrain its nuclear breakout capability without eliminating its nuclear program.
Blinken also floated the possibility of extending nuclear talks past the June deadline should additional time be needed to finalize details of a possible deal with Iran.
Leading senators on both sides of the aisle grilled Blinken and other officials in the administration over Iran’s nuclear program, which has continued despite restrictions imposed under an interim nuclear agreement made in November 2013.
Many believe that the interim deal has done little to halt the program and allows the regime to continue some of its most controversial nuclear operations, including the construction of new reactors and work on ballistic missiles.
“Let me ask you this, isn’t it true that even the deal that you are striving towards is not to eliminate any Iranian [nuclear] breakout capability, but to constrain the time in which you’ll get the notice of such breakout capability?” Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), a vocal critic of the White House’s dealings with Iran, asked Blinken during Wednesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. “Is that a fair statement, yes or no?”
“Yes, it is,” Blinken responded.
This admission appeared to frustrate and anger Menendez, who accused the administration of issuing “talking points that come straight out of Tehran.”
“We’re not eliminating Iran’s ability to break out,” Menendez said. “We’re just getting alarm bells, and the question is how long are we going to get those alarm bells for?”
Asked at a later point in the hearing if the administration would consider prolonging talks yet again, Blinken said that this is a possibility.
“We might want a little more time,” he said. “That’s possible. I wouldn’t want to rule it out.”
Under the terms of the interim agreement, which the administration claims has “halted” Iran’s progress, Tehran can still enrich uranium up to a point, pursue unlimited construction of plutonium light water reactors, and advance its ballistic missile program.
Iran has enriched enough uranium to fuel two nuclear bombs in the past year, according to experts.
Menendez expressed particular frustration with the administration’s attempts to appease Iran, even as it blatantly continues nuclear work during the talks.
“The bottom line is, they get to cheat in a series of ways—and I’ll call it ‘cheat,’ you won’t—but they get to cheat in a series of ways and we get to worry about their perceptions,” Menendez said.
Despite the pressure from Menendez and others, Blinken was adamant that the administration opposes any new sanctions on Iran, even if they were scheduled to take effect only if negotiations fail.
Bliken also made clear his opposition to Congress holding an up or down vote on any possible deal that the administration may agree to.
“Why would you oppose Congress weighing in on an issue of this importance?” asked Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), the committee’s chairman, who has championed legislation that would give Congress a final say over the deal.
Corker described a White House that “continues to stiff arm every effort” and “push away Congress, who represents more fully this nation than the negotiators.”
Blinken said that the administration is apprehensive about a possible congressional role in the process.
“In terms of the negotiations themselves, the knowledge that there would be very early on this kind of vote, in our judgment, could actually undermine the credibility of the commitments we would make [to Iran] in the context of negotiations,” Blinken said.
“There’s a concern that if a judgment is reached immediately [by Congress], yea or nay on this, it may be too soon to see if Iran has complied with its agreements,” Blinken added.
Corker seemed to find these explanations wanting.
“I’m very disappointed that in essence what the administration is saying is, ‘We really don’t want, even though Congress put us in this place, we really don’t want Congress to play a role in one of the most important geopolitical agreements that may take place during this administration,’” he said.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Vir.) expressed fear during the hearing that the United States is ignoring Iran’s pattern of deception on the nuclear front.
“Iran has made it plain in the course of this negotiation [that] this is not a negotiation about Iran dismantling a nuclear weapons program,” Kaine said. “It’s a negotiation about trying to buy a year of time to have an alarm bell ring and act.”
The administration is giving up too much, particularly on the issue of uranium-enriching centrifuges, he said.
“The kinds of things I’ve been hearing about the number of centrifuges contemplated in this deal, this is not consistent with a purely civilian program,” Kaine said.
Barack Obama is mainstreaming anti-Semitism in America.
Last week (2/09), apropos of seemingly nothing, in an interview with Mathew Yglesias from the Vox.com website, Obama was asked about terrorism. In his answer the president said the terrorism threat is overrated. And that was far from the most disturbing statement he made.
Moving from the general to the specific, Obama referred to the jihadists who committed last month’s massacres in Paris as « a bunch of violent vicious zealots, » who « randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris. »
In other words, Ahmedy Coulibaly, the Moslem terrorist at Hyper Cacher, the kosher supermarket he targeted, was just some zealot. The Jews he murdered while they were shopping for Shabbat were just « a bunch of folks in a deli, » presumably shot down while ordering their turkey and cheese sandwiches.
No matter that Coulibaly called a French TV station from the kosher supermarket and said he was an al-Qaida terrorist and that he chose the kosher supermarket because he wanted to kill Jews.
As far as the leader of the free world is concerned, his massacre of four Jews at the market can teach us nothing about anything other than that some random people are mean and some random people are unlucky.
And anyway, Obama explained, we’re only talking about this random act of senseless violence because as he said, « If it bleeds, it leads. » The media, desperate for an audience, inflates the significance of these acts of random violence, for ratings.
Obama’s statement about the massacre of Jews in Paris is notable first and foremost for what it reveals about his comfort level with anti-Semitism.
By de-judaizing the victims, who were targets only because they were Jews, Obama denied the uniqueness of the threat jihadist Islam and its adherents pose to Jews. By pretending that Jews are not specifically targeted for murder simply because they are Jews, he dismissed the legitimate concerns Jews harbor for their safety, whether in Diaspora communities or in Israel.
If nothing distinguished Coulibaly’s massacre at Hyper Cacher from a mugging or an armed robbery gone bad, then Jews have no right to receive unique consideration – whether for their community’s security in London or Paris, or San Francisco – or for Israel’s security.
As subsequent statements from administration spokespeople made clear, Obama’s statement was not a gaffe. When questioned about his remarks, both White House spokesman Josh Earnest and State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki doubled down on Obama’s denial of the anti-Semitic nature of the massacre at Hyper Cacher. Earnest said that the Jews who were murdered were people who just « randomly happened to be » at the supermarket.
Psaki said that the victims didn’t share a common background or nationality, pretending away the bothersome fact that they were all Jews.
Just as bad as their denials of the anti-Jewish nature of the attack on Hyper Cacher, were Psaki’s and Earnest’s belated revisions of their remarks. After coming under a storm of criticism from American Jews and from the conservative media, both Psaki and Earnest turned to their Twitter accounts to walk back their remarks and admit that indeed, the massacre at Hyper Cacher was an anti-Semitic assault.
Their walk back was no better than their initial denial of the anti-Jewish nature of the Islamist attack, because it amplified the very anti-Semitism they previously promoted.
As many Obama supporters no doubt interpreted their behavior, first Obama and his flaks stood strong in their conviction that Jews are not specifically targeted. Then after they were excoriated for their statements by Jews and conservatives, they changed their tune.
The subtext is clear. The same Jews who are targeted no more than anyone else, are so powerful and all controlling that they forced the poor Obama administration to bow to their will and parrot their false and self-serving narrative of victimization.
The administration’s denial of the unique threat Jews face from jihadists is not limited to its anti-Semitic characterizations of the attack at Hyper Cacher.
It runs as well through Obama’s treatment of Israel and its actions to defend itself against its jihadist enemies from Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran.
Today, the most outstanding example of Obama’s exploitation of anti-Semitic tropes to diminish US support for Israel is his campaign to delegitimize Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ahead of his scheduled speech before the joint houses of Congress on March 3.
As we belatedly learned from a small correction at the bottom of a New York Times article on January 30, contrary to the White House’s claim, Netanyahu did not blindside Obama when he accepted Speaker of the House John Boehner’s invitation to address the Congress. He informed the White House of his intention to accept Boehner’s offer before he accepted it.
Netanyahu did not breach White House protocol.
He did not behave rudely or disrespectfully toward Obama.
The only one that behaved disrespectfully and rudely was Obama in his shabby and slanderous treatment of Netanyahu.
It was Obama who peddled the lie that Netanyahu was using the speech not to legitimately present Israel’s concerns regarding the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran, but to selfishly advance his political fortunes on the back of America’s national security interests and the independence of its foreign policy.
It was Obama and Vice President Joe Biden who spearheaded efforts to coerce Democrat lawmakers to boycott Netanyahu’s speech by announcing that they would refuse to meet with the leader of the US’s closest ally in the Middle East during his stay in Washington.
So far only 15 members of the House and three Senators have announced their intention to boycott Netanyahu’s speech. But even if all the other Democrats do attend his speech, the impact of Obama’s campaign to defame Netanyahu will long be felt.
First of all, if all goes as he hopes, the media and his party members will use his demonization of Netanyahu’s character as a means to dismiss the warnings that Netanyahu will clearly sound in his address.
Second, by boycotting Netanyahu and encouraging Democrats to do the same, Obama is mainstreaming the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment and sanctions movement to isolate Israel.
Moreover, he is mobilizing Democrat pressure groups like J Street and MoveOn.org to make it costly for Democrat politicians to continue to support Israel.
There is another aspect of the Hyper Cacher massacre, which was similarly ignored by the White House and that bears a direct relationship to Obama’s attempt to destroy the credibility of Netanyahu’s warnings about his Iran policy.
Whereas the journalists murdered at Charlie Hebdo magazine were killed because their illustrations of Mohammed offended Moslem fascists, the Jews murdered at Hyper Cacher were targeted for murder because they were Jews. In other words, the Islamist hatred of Jews is inherently genocidal, not situational.
If Islamists have the capacity to annihilate the Jews, they will do so. And this brings us back to Obama’s statement to Vox.com. As is his habit, Obama refused to use the term Islamic to describe the « violent, vicious zealots » who randomly targeted Jews at the Hyper Cacher.
Since the outset of his presidency, Obama has vigilantly denied the connection between Islamism and terrorism and has mischaracterized jihad as peaceful self-reflection, along the lines of psychotherapy.
His denial of the Islamist nature of jihadist assaults worldwide rose to new heights when in his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast he compared today’s jihadists to the Crusaders from a thousand years ago. And whereas he identified the Crusaders as Christians, he refused to acknowledge that today’s mass murdering zealots act in the name of Islam.
Obama’s stubborn, absurd and dangerous refusal to mention the word Islam in connection with the war being waged worldwide by millions in its name, coupled with his eagerness to always compare this unnamed scourge to the past evils of Western societies, indicates that his defense of Islamic supremacism is not merely a policy preference but rather reflects a deeper ideological commitment.
The perception that Obama either does not oppose or embraces Islamic extremism is strengthened when coupled with his appalling attempts to ignore the fact of Islamic Jew-hatred and its genocidal nature and his moves to demonize Netanyahu for daring to oppose his policy toward Iran.
It is in this policy and in Obama’s wider Middle East strategy that we find the real world consequences of Obama’s denial of the unique victimization and targeting of Jews and the Jewish state by Islamic terrorists and Islamist regimes.
Loopholes in Obama’s interim nuclear framework deal with Iran from November 2013 have allowed Iran to make significant advances in its nuclear weapons program while still formally abiding by its commitments under the agreement.
Iran has stopped enriching uranium to 20 percent purity levels, and sufficed with enriching uranium to 3.5% purity. But at the same time it has developed and begun using advanced centrifuges that enrich so quickly that the distinction between 3.5% and 20% enrichment levels becomes irrelevant.
Iran has made significant advances in its ballistic missile program, including in its development of intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads. It has continued its development of nuclear bombs, and it has enriched sufficient quantities of uranium to produce one to two nuclear bombs.
According to leaked reports, the permanent nuclear deal that Obama seeks to convince Iran to sign would further facilitate Iran’s ascension to the nuclear club. Among other things, the deal will place a time limit on the already ineffective inspections regime, thus blinding the world entirely to Iran’s nuclear activities.
At the same time that Obama is facilitating Iran’s emergence as a nuclear power, he is doing nothing to stop its regional empowerment.
Today Iran controls Syria, Iraq and Yemen and holds sway over Lebanon and Gaza. It threatens Saudi Arabia, and its Moslem Brotherhood allies threaten Egypt and Jordan.
As for Obama’s allied campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the largest beneficiary to date of the US-led campaign has been Iran. Since the US-led campaign began last fall, Iran has achieved all but public US support for its control over the Iraqi military and for the survival of the Assad regime in Syria.
The trajectory of Obama’s policies is obvious. He is clearing the path for a nuclear armed Iran that controls large swathes of the Arab world through its proxies.
It is also clear that Iran intends to use its nuclear arsenal in the same way that Coulibaly used his Kalashnikov – to kill Jews, as many Jews as possible.
Perhaps Obama is acting out of anti-Semitism, perhaps he acts out of sympathy for Islamic fascism. Or both.
Whatever the case may be, what is required from Israel, and from Netanyahu, is clear. Speaking to Congress may be a necessary precondition for that action, but it is not the action itself.
Caroline Glick is Deputy Managing Editor of the Jerusalem Post. She is the author of The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.
Andrew Breitbart was never a “Birther,” and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of “Birtherism.” In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.
Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama’s ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him.
It is for that reason that we launched “The Vetting,” an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other presidential candidates)–not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.
It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below–one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review.
It is evidence–not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.
***
Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”
The booklet, which was distributed to “business colleagues” in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel.
It also promotes Obama’s anticipated first book, Journeys in Black and White–which Obama abandoned, later publishing Dreams from My Father instead.
Obama’s biography in the booklet is as follows (image and text below):
Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.
The booklet, which is thirty-six pages long, is printed in blue ink (and, on the cover, silver/grey ink), using offset lithography. It purports to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Acton & Dystel, which was founded in 1976.
Front cover (outside) – note Barack Obama listed in alphabetical order
Front cover (inside)
Jay Acton no longer represents Obama. However, Jane Dystel still lists Obama as a client on her agency’s website.
According to the booklet itself, the text was edited by Miriam Goderich, who has since become Dystel’s partner at Dystel & Goderich, an agency founded in 1994. Breitbart News attempted to reach Goderich by telephone several times over several days. Her calls are screened by an automated service that requires callers to state their name and company, which we did. She never answered.
The design of the booklet was undertaken by Richard Bellsey, who has since closed his business. Bellsey, reached by telephone, could not recall the exact details of the booklet, but told Breitbart News that it “sounds like one of our jobs, like I did for [Acton & Dystel] twenty years ago or more.”
The parade of authors alongside Obama in the booklet includes politicians, such as former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill; sports legends, such as Joe Montana and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; and numerous Hollywood celebrities.
The reverse side of the page that features Barack Obama includes former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader and early-1990s “boy band” pop sensation New Kids On the Block.
Acton, who spoke to Breitbart News by telephone, confirmed precise details of the booklet and said that it cost the agency tens of thousands of dollars to produce.
He indicated that while “almost nobody” wrote his or her own biography, the non-athletes in the booklet, whom “the agents deal[t] with on a daily basis,” were “probably” approached to approve the text as presented.
Dystel did not respond to numerous requests for comment, via email and telephone. Her assistant told Breitbart News that Dystel “does not answer questions about Obama.”
The errant Obama biography in the Acton & Dystel booklet does not contradict the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate. Moreover, several contemporaneous accounts of Obama’s background describe Obama as having been born in Hawaii.
The biography does, however, fit a pattern in which Obama–or the people representing and supporting him–manipulate his public persona.
David Maraniss’s forthcoming biography of Obama has reportedly confirmed, for example, that a girlfriend Obama described in Dreams from My Father was, in fact, an amalgam of several separate individuals.
In addition, Obama and his handlers have a history of redefining his identity when expedient. In March 2008, for example, he famously declared: “I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.”
Several weeks later, Obama left Wright’s church–and, according to Edward Klein’s new biography, The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House, allegedly attempted to persuade Wright not to “do any more public speaking until after the November [2008] election” (51).
Obama has been known frequently to fictionalize aspects of his own life. During his 2008 campaign, for instance, Obama claimed that his dying mother had fought with insurance companies over coverage for her cancer treatments.
That turned out to be untrue, but Obama has repeated the story–which even the Washington Post called “misleading”–in a campaign video for the 2012 election.
The Acton & Dystel biography could also reflect how Obama was seen by his associates, or transitions in his own identity. He is said, for instance, to have cultivated an “international” identity until well into his adulthood, according to Maraniss.
Regardless of the reason for Obama’s odd biography, the Acton & Dystel booklet raises new questions as part of ongoing efforts to understand Barack Obama–who, despite four years in office remains a mystery to many Americans, thanks to the mainstream media.
Larry O’Connor contributed to this report.
Voir encore:
The Gospel According To Wright
How much of Pastor Jeremiah Wright’s race-based « theology » does Barack Obama really share?
The American Spectator
Charles C. Johnson
December 2011 – January 2012
In 2008 America elected a president whose pastor for 20 years preached anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, advocated bizarre pseudo-scientific racial ideas, opposed interracial marriage, praised communist dictatorships, denounced black « assimilation, » and taught Afrocentric feel-good nonsense to schoolchildren. When Americans discovered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s views during the 2008 campaign, they rightly wondered if Barack Obama, like his pastor, really believed that HIV/AIDS was created by the American government to kill black people. Even to this day, no one knows for sure whether Obama shares the views of Wright, whom the Chicago Sun-Times once described as Obama’s « close confidant. »
Candidate Obama tried to dismiss his support for Wright, telling Charlie Gibson of ABC News, « It’s as if we took the five dumbest things that I ever said or you ever said…in our lives and compressed them, and put them out there, you know, I think that people’s reaction, would be understandably upset. » And rightly so. In sermon after sermon, Wright’s radical black nationalist ideas were clearly and emphatically stated. They were not an aberration, but the focal point of Pastor Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where Obama was an active member for 20 years.
Nor has Wright renounced any of his anti-Americanism. In a sermon last September 16 marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11 entitled, « The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall, » Wright seemed to celebrate white America’s comeuppance. « We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki. And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon–and we never batted an eye! » Wright preached. « We supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black south Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. » He closed, invoking Malcolm X’s statement about the assassination of J.F.K, « America’s chickens! Coming home! To roost! » White America, he was saying, had gotten its just deserts.
Candidate Obama tried to distance himself from Wright’s more damning comments. But, crucially, he didn’t disown the pastor himself. In fact, in his rise to political fame, he had made Wright’s sermons his own, drawing on Wright’s « Audacity to Hope » sermon and appropriating its theme for his political coming-out speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004. He even borrowed the sermon’s title for his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, in a bid to get Wright and other black churches to support his candidacy.
The question is why Barack Obama, raised without any faith at all, chose one of the most incendiary preachers in Black America to preach the word of God to him. Wright became, in Obama’s words, « like family to me. [Wright] strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. » Obama told a group of ministers in June 2007 that Wright helped « introduce me to my Christian faith. » But what, exactly, is Barack Obama’s faith? Just as important, what is Jeremiah Wright’s?
JEREMIAH WRIGHT WAS BORN on September 22, 1941, in Germantown, a racially mixed, middle-class Philadelphia suburb. His father, Jeremiah Wright, Sr., became the minister of the local Grace Baptist Church in 1938 and served there for 42 years. His mother, Mary Elizabeth Henderson Wright, was a schoolteacher who eventually became the first black vice-principal at the Philadelphia High School for Girls, one of the city’s top-performing magnet schools.
Education mattered deeply to the Wrights. They helped their son with his homework while they bettered themselves with part-time courses. They enrolled him at Central High School, an all-male magnet establishment considered among the nation’s best public schools at the time. It was 90 percent white. The class yearbook announced, « Always ready with a kind word, Jerry is one of the most congenial members [of his class]. » But Wright himself dismissed that period of congeniality in a later sermon. « I used to let my behavior be determined by the white world’s expectations, » he recalled ruefully.
The young Jeremiah was off to a promising start, but at age 15 was arrested for grand larceny auto theft. His parents sent him to the all-black Virginia Union University. But Wright quit after two years and joined the Marines. Wright later said he hated being educated at « black schools founded by white missionaries. » Still, during his short time at VUU he met fellow students who made a lasting impression: a young PhD student named John Kinney who had studied under both Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Cone, the founder of black liberation theology; and Samuel DeWitt Proctor, a longtime friend and mentor of King.
After quitting the Marines, Wright joined the Navy, where he served for four years. He was stationed mostly in Washington D.C., and was there to help operate on President Lyndon B. Johnson as a cardiopulmonary technician before enrolling in college again at Howard University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1968 and a master’s in English in 1969. At Howard, Wright heard firebrand Stokely Carmichael, a.k.a. Kwame Ture, lecture on black power. He was further influenced by Cheikh Anta Diop’s racialist tomes advancing Afrocentrism, the theory that Africa was the cradle of modern civilization. After that, it was off to the University of Chicago Divinity School for six years. Then Wright, 31, joined Trinity United Church of Christ as pastor on March 1, 1972. In his provocative words, « the fun began. »
Trinity, on its last legs when Wright joined it, was an odd choice. After all, as Bill Moyers of PBS recalls in his new book, Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, Wright « could have had his pick of large, prosperous congregations, but instead chose one with only 87 members in a largely black neighborhood » of Chicago. Wright often compared Chicago to apartheid-era South Africa: « Just as Blacks could not be caught inside the city of Johannesburg after dark…the same held true for Blacks on the Southside of Chicago. » Breaking with his parents’ Baptist denomination, Wright recognized that at Trinity he could have complete authority to implement his vision.
There were, of course, impediments to that goal, not least his white colleagues. Many couldn’t understand his love of black-style worship or emphasis on the role of Africans in biblical history. Wright recalls nearly coming to blows in 1978 with a white associate minister who called his church a « cult » and derided him for having a « big ego. »
TWENTY-TWO BLACK church members who did not like the direction in which Wright was taking Trinity lodged a complaint with the UCC, then left the church. Wright attacked them as Uncle Toms « running to ‘massa’ to tell a white man what they thought was happening to their Negro church. » He had nothing but contempt for these middle-class blacks. They were, he noted, « bourgeois Negroes who wanted to be white. » Wright considered himself a « new Black who is not ashamed of his Blackness. »
Wright had come under the sway of the writings of James Cone, a professor of divinity, father of the black theology movement and author of the seminal Black Theology and Black Power (1969). Cone taught that Christianity needed to be freed from « whiteness. » He and Wright conceived of a Christianity in which black rage and the black power ideology fused with Marxist thought. According to Cone, « black people must find ways of affirming black dignity which do not include relating to whites on white terms. » Integration was impossible because it was brought about by « black naïveté » and « white guilt. » Cone approvingly quoted Malcolm X: « The worst crime the white man has committed has been to teach us to hate ourselves. » Freeing blacks would require getting them to love their inner African and Wright would do just that–Trinity’s longtime parishioners be damned.
Trinity gave Wright a chance to introduce ordinary blacks to these writings. During the initial media dustup over Wright’s views in 2007, the media couldn’t understand Wright’s, or Obama’s, Christianity because they couldn’t understand the underlying phenomenon of black liberation theology.
It didn’t help that the mainstream media had decided to take the issue of Obama’s faith off the table. The New York Times ludicrously editorialized in 2008 that Obama’s « religious connection » with Wright « should be none of the voters’ business. » Unlike George W. Bush, Obama wouldn’t « carry religion into government, » the Times promised. In fact, Obama often invokes religion in areas–health care and economics–where it isn’t normally mentioned. An analysis by Politico found that Obama invoked Jesus far more than George W. Bush did, and cited the Sermon on the Mount to make the case for his economic policies.
Wright was Obama’s missionary in a sense, so it is worth looking at how he educated his parishioners. « I had as my goal in starting a weekly Bible class the idea of connecting the study of God’s Word to where it is we lived as Black people in Chicago in 1972, » he recalled. It would be the Gospel according to Wright. Trinity’s slogan would be « Unapologetically Black and Unapologetically Christian. » It was to be black first and Christian second. Preaching black theology, Wright made his dashiki-wearing flock the largest–and blackest–church in the largely white UCC.
In his church-associated Kwame Nkrumah Academy, the congregation’s children learned such canards as the claim that « [h]istorically, Europeans tried to build themselves up by tearing down all that Africans had done. » Obama biographer David Remnick notes that Obama approved of this « African-centered » grade school, where Wright’s God loves all people, but black people especially. And why shouldn’t he? Jesus, Wright taught, was « an African Jew, » as were most of the figures of the Bible. As Wright said in Africans Who Shaped Our Faith (1995), « evidence exists within and outside of the Bible to support the notion that the people of Israel…were of African descent! »
It is in this context that Wright’s comments on Zionism should be seen. Attacking Israel’s right to exist, Wright held that « [t]he Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for more than 40 years now. » America, by defending Zionism and its apartheid-like regime, had too long practiced « unquestioning » support of Zionism. Given his hostility to Zionism and non-« African » Jews, it wasn’t surprising that Wright’s anti-Semitism reared its ugly head in June 2009. « Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me, » he told the Daily Press of Hampton Roads, Virginia. They were « controlling » Obama and therefore preventing the United States from sending a delegation to an anti-racism United Nations conference. (America boycotted it on the grounds that it would descend into an anti-Jew hate fest as it had in previous years.)
Wright remained loyal to Malcolm X (Trinity United Church celebrates his birthday) and to Louis Farrakhan.
Wright even joined Farrakhan on a trip to meet with the latter’s benefactor, Muammar Gaddafi, in 1984. (Wright has also routinely bragged about his trips to Castro’s Cuba and Ortega’s Nicaragua. He predicted that his trip to Libya would cause trouble for Obama in 2008: « When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli to visit [Gaddafi] with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell, » he said.)
To further his claim that the white man was an active enemy of the black man, Wright has often recommended a favorite book of the Nation of Islam, Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola: Nature, Accident, or Intentional? (1996), a self-published screed by Leonard G. Horowitz, a conspiracy theorist and former dentist, who argues that HIV began as a biological weapons project. « Based on this Tuskegee syphilis experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything. » As white people were responsible for the makeup of its government, white America bore a collective guilt, Wright said. It could not accept a black man as president of « this racist United States of America, » « the United States of White America, » and « the U.S. of KKK-A. »
WRIGHT GOT ON OBAMA’S BUS early, in the mid-1980s, when he supported Obama’s efforts to organize blacks for « social change » (i.e., to increase government welfare), and only left in 2008 when there was an increasingly serious chance of his winning the Democratic nomination and becoming president. It was, after all, Hillary Clinton–not John McCain–who used Wright as a campaign issue against Obama.
Wright had remained on the bus for so long because his friendship gave Obama an authenticity on the South Side that he otherwise lacked as a highly educated black man who grew up in white and multiracial environments. Had Obama not successfully defined himself as an ordinary African American, had he not worked the streets on poverty wages, his political career probably would have gone nowhere.
Obama came to join Wright’s church in a roundabout way, as Stanley Kurtz argues in his well-researched Radical-in-Chief (2010). We don’t know if he encountered Wright before he moved to Chicago, but it seems safe to assume he had. David Remnick recounts a significant meeting between the young Obama and Pastor Alvin Love of Lilydale First Baptist Church in Chicago. Obama and Love had organized blacks through the churches starting in 1985, so « [Obama] knew it was inconsistent to be a church-based organizer without being a member of any church, and he was feeling that pressure, » according to Love. « He said, ‘I believe, but…I want to be serious and be comfortable wherever I join.' » A pastor whom Love recommended–Pastor L. K. Curry–suggested that Obama meet Jeremiah Wright. Obama apparently liked what he saw at their meeting and he began to attend Trinity in 1988.
Obama’s decision to join Trinity was very much one of convenience. Even though he plotted his every move, we’re supposed to believe that he just happened to join the largest black church in America, whose pastor had a record for getting blacks elected to higher office. (In 1983, Wright led a coalition of black churches to help elect Harold Washington as the first black mayor of Chicago.) Obama liked to try out his ideas on Wright. « What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice, » he told the Chicago Tribune in January 2007. « He’s much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I’m not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that’s involved in national politics. » Wright was a means to an end.
Steeped in Marxist thought and the community organizing tactics of the radical Saul Alinsky, Obama was probably comfortable with the view that religion was the opiate of the masses and black liberation theology the opiate of blacks. Trinity Church is a place where black movers and shakers congregate. « My commitment is to the church, not to a pastor, » Obama said in May 2008. But left unsaid was just what the members of that church believed.
According to Wright, leading members have included Jawanza Kunjufu (author of Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys, which blames, among other things, interracial marriage), Iva Carruthers (who coined the term « Afrocentric » and whose work at the Jew-hating Durban Conference on Racism Wright enthusiastically endorses), and Bobby Wright, psychologist and author of The Psychopathic Racial Personality, which argues that white attitudes toward blacks are psychopathic. Other influential members include the black entertainment elite, like the rapper Common and Oprah Winfrey.
Winfrey, who joined the church in the mid-’80s, eventually left in the early ’90s. An article entitled « Something Wasn’t Wright » in the May 12, 2008, issue of Newsweek explains that she knew Wright’s rants were too radical for her fans. Interestingly, though Oprah endorsed Obama and helped catapult his books to the top of the bestseller lists, she has declined to endorse him for 2012.
Common frequented Wright’s pews, occasionally rapping for its congregants. With Wright’s approval, Common even « free-styled sermons » against interracial marriage in 2005 when the Obamas were attending Trinity nearly every Sunday. (Perhaps that’s why Michelle Obama invited Common to perform at the White House in May 2011.)
Growing up in a heavily « segregated » Chicago, Common noted, you had to « enforce » black culture.
Ironically, Wright’s Afrocentrism, implicit segregationism, and explicit reverse racism didn’t prevent him from retiring to a $1.6 million home his church built for him in the lily-white Tinley Park neighborhood in 2008. The luxurious four-bedroom house features an elevator, a butler’s pantry, exercise room, four-car garage, master bedroom with a whirlpool, and spare room for a future theater or swimming pool. It abuts the Odyssey Country Club and golf course. (Its mortgage was paid for by the corrupt ShoreBank, with which Wright, along with most of the Chicago black elite, always had a cozy relationship before it went bust in 2010.)
WHERE DID OBAMA FIT in all of this? It seems he too rejected assimilation in favor of Wright’s separate-but-equal-yet-superior status for black Americans. A December 1995 article, « What Makes Obama Run, » by Hank De Zutter in the Chicago Reader, a local black newspaper, suggests as much in its profile of Obama’s first bid for the Illinois Senate. Obama, thanks to Reverend Wright’s Trinity Church, « learned that integration was a one-way street, with blacks expected to assimilate into a white world that never gave ground. » Obama bristled at the « unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation which helps a few upwardly mobile blacks ‘move up, get rich, and move out.' »
Obama was merely following the teachings of Wright when he railed at Trinity against corporations that, Wright explains in his history of Trinity, « discriminated against women, corporations that discriminated against Blacks and Browns, corporations that supported sweatshops in Third World countries and corporations which stood in direct opposition to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. » Capitalism was part of what led to slavery, Wright had argued. He often mentioned the black sociologist Chancellor Williams’s jeremiad, The Destruction of Black Civilization, which argues that African civilization was destroyed by the acquisitiveness–the capitalist nature–of white European civilization.
But when Wright became too embarrassing, it was time for Obama to distance himself from him. That was the not so subtle message behind Obama’s « More Perfect Union » speech in March 2008 in which he rejected Wright, not because he disagreed with him, but he had to protect himself from the charge that Wright and Trinity disliked white people. « Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect, » Obama improbably claimed. The speech, much celebrated and quickly forgotten, did what it had to do: it derailed the whiteness issue as a campaign issue.
And yet Obama never explicitly rejected the black power, anti-capitalist core of Wright’s teachings. That includes beliefs like Wright’s credo that « White folks’ greed runs the world in need. » For all Obama’s talk, he can’t claim to never have heard Wright say it. Obama titled his second book, The Audacity of Hope, after the very sermon where that line appears. Candidate Obama’s declared intention to « spread the wealth around » echoed what he had absorbed at those Trinity sermons. Now President Obama’s thinking clearly shows the same imprint, as when he preaches that « at a certain point you’ve made enough money. »
« Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., took me on another journey, » Obama once said. He merrily went along, every step of the way.
Voir enfin:
Becoming Obama
When Barack Obama met Genevieve Cook in 1983 at a Christmas party in New York’s East Village, it was the start of his most serious romance yet. But as the 22-year-old Columbia grad began to shape his future, he was also struggling with his identity: American or international? Black or white? Drawing on conversations with both Cook and the president, David Maraniss, in an adaptation from his new Obama biography, has the untold story of the couple’s time together.
Barack Obama transferred from Occidental College to Columbia University in 1981, his junior year. Although he left Los Angeles with enough ambitious propulsion to carry him into a more active period, he instead receded into the most existentialist stretch of his life. As he put it himself decades later during an interview in the Oval Office, “I was leading a very ascetic existence, way too serious for my own good.” In most outward ways, compared with what had come before, his life in New York was a minimalist one, without the sprawling cast of characters that had surrounded him at Oxy and in Hawaii and Indonesia. He felt no attachment to Columbia or to the first jobs he landed after graduation. But it would be a misreading to say that he was tamping down his ambitions during that period. Just the opposite, in fact. If anything, his sense of destiny deepened. He was conducting an intense debate with himself over his past, present, and future, an internal struggle that he shared with only a few close friends, including his girlfriends, Alex McNear and Genevieve Cook, who kept a lasting record, one in letters, the other in her journal.
“Where Am I Going?”
It is exponentially easier to look back at a life than to live it forward. In retrospect it becomes apparent that New York was crucial to Obama. If he had not quite found his place yet, he was learning in which directions not to go and how to avoid turns that would lead him off the path and into traps from which it would be hard to escape. Even when he was uncertain about much else, Obama seemed hyper-alert to avoiding a future he did not want.
At age 20, Obama was a man of the world. He had never been to south-central Kansas or western Kenya, the homelands of his ancestors, yet his divided heritage from Africa and the American heartland had defined him from the beginning. He could not be of one place, rooted and provincial. From his years living in Indonesia, where he was fully immersed in Javanese schools and culture; from his adolescence in Hawaii, where he was in the polyglot sea of hapa and haole, Asians and islanders; from his mother’s long-term commitment to development work overseas; from his friendship with Pakistani students at Occidental and his extended visit to their country—from all of these he had experienced far more global diversity than the average college junior. He knew the ways of different cultures better than he knew himself.
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Obama’s first apartment in New York, which he shared with Phil Boerner, a friend from Oxy, was at 142 West 109th Street. Heat and hot water were scarce commodities. When the nights turned colder, the roommates took to sleeping bags for warmth and spent as little waking time in the apartment as possible, holing up in Butler Library, at 114th, parts of which were open all night. Some mornings, eager to flee their quarters, they walked to the corner of Broadway and 112th to eat at Tom’s Restaurant, the place immortalized later as the fictional Monk’s, a familiar meeting place for the characters on Seinfeld. A full breakfast went for $1.99.
The loneliness of Obama’s New York existence emerged in his letters to Alex McNear, a young woman from Occidental who had enchanted Obama when she was co-editing the literary magazine Feast, and with whom he reconnected when she spent the summer of 1982 in New York. Alex had always been fond of Barry, as she called him, and “thought he was interesting in a very particular way. He really worked his way through an idea or question, turned it over, looked at it from all sides, and then he came to a precise and elegant conclusion.” When Alex came to New York, she gave Obama a call. They met at an Italian restaurant on Lexington Avenue, and, as she remembered the night, “we sat and talked and ate and drank wine. Or at least I drank wine. I think he drank something stronger. It was one of those dark, old Italian restaurants that don’t exist in New York anymore. It was the kind of place where they leave you alone. I remember thinking how happy I felt just talking to him, that I could talk to him for hours. We walked slowly back to my apartment, on 90th, and said good-bye. After that we started spending much more time together.”
Alex remembered it as a summer of walking miles through the city, lingering over meals at restaurants, hanging out at their apartments, visiting art museums, and talking about life. She recalled one intense conversation in particular as they stood outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Obama was obsessed with the concept of choice, she said. Did he have real choices in his life? Did he have free will? How much were his choices circumscribed by his background, his childhood, his socio-economic situation, the color of his skin, the expectations that others had of him? How did choice influence his present and future? Later, referring back to that discussion, he told Alex in a letter that he had used the word “choice” “as a convenient shorthand for the way my past resolves itself. Not just my past, but the past of my ancestors, the planet, the universe.” His obsession with the concept of choice, he said in a later interview at the White House, “was a deliberate effort on my part to press the pause button, essentially, and try to orient myself and say, ‘Okay, which way, where am I going?’ ”
The long-distance relationship with Alex McNear after that summer—they would drift apart as time wore on—was conducted mostly through a series of passionate letters sent between his apartment (he was then living at 339 East 94th, in Manhattan) and hers, at 2210 Ridgeview Avenue, in Eagle Rock, California. By her account, the passion was as much about ideas and words as about their romance—what she later called “that dance of closeness through language.” Alex was interested in postmodern literary criticism, and her arguments brimmed with the deconstructionist ideas of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher. In one letter she told Obama that she was writing a paper in her modern-poetry class at Occidental about T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” His reply wove its way through literature, politics, and personal philosophy:
I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
He was trying to find his place in the whirl of humanity, while at the same time refining the literary riffs that filled up page after page of his journals. Here’s a passage from another section of that same letter:
Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.
Obama was the central character in his letters, in a self-conscious way, with variations on the theme of his search for purpose and self-identity. In one letter, he told Alex that it seemed as if many of his Pakistani friends were headed toward the business world, and his old high-school buddies were “moving toward the mainstream.” Where did that leave him? “I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups,” he wrote. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”
Here, when he was 22, emerged an idea that would become a key to understanding Obama the politician and public figure. “Without a class” meant that he was entering his adult life without financial security. Without a “structure” meant he had grown up lacking a solid family foundation, his father gone from the start, his mother often elsewhere, his grandparents doing the best they could, but all leading to a sense of being a rootless outsider. Without a “tradition” was a reference to his lack of religious grounding and his hapa status, white and black, feeling completely at home in neither race. Eventually, he would make a few essential choices in terms of how he would live out his personal life, moving inexorably toward the black world. But in a larger sense, in terms of his ambitions beyond family, he did not want to be constricted by narrow choices. The different path he saw for himself was to rise above the divisions of culture and society, politics and economics, and embrace something larger—embrace it all. To make a particular choice would be to limit him, he wrote in the letter to Alex, because “taken separately, they are unacceptable and untenable.”
Looking back on that period from the distance of the White House, Obama recalled that he was then “deep inside my own head … in a way that in retrospect I don’t think was real healthy.” But the realization that he had to “absorb all the traditions” would become the rationale for everything that followed. “There is no doubt that what I retained in my politics is a sense that the only way I could have a sturdy sense of identity of who I was depended on digging beneath the surface differences of people,” Obama said during an interview. “The only way my life makes sense is if, regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is this commonality, these essential human truths and passions and hopes and moral precepts that are universal. And that we can reach out beyond our differences. If that is not the case, then it is pretty hard for me to make sense of my life. So that is at the core of who I am.”
Enthralled
December 1983. A Christmas party down in the East Village, at 240 East 13th Street. It was B.Y.O.B., and Genevieve Cook brought a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. The host was a young man employed as a typist at Chanticleer Press, a small Manhattan publishing company that specialized in coffee-table books. Genevieve had worked there briefly but had left to attend graduate school at Bank Street College, up near Columbia, and was now an assistant teacher for second and third graders at Brooklyn Friends School. She was living temporarily at her mother and stepfather’s place on the Upper East Side.
The party in the sixth-floor apartment was well under way when Genevieve arrived: lights dim, Ella Fitzgerald playing on the stereo, chattering people, arty types, recent college grads, some in the publishing world, none of whom she knew except the host. She went into the kitchen, to the right of the front entrance corridor, looking for a glass, then decided it would be less fussy to drink straight from the bottle. That was her style. She fancied smoking non-filter Camels and Lucky Strikes. She liked drinking Baileys and Punt e Mes, an Italian vermouth. Standing in the kitchen was a guy named Barack, wearing blue jeans, T-shirt, dark leather jacket. They spoke briefly, then moved on. Hours later, after midnight, she was about to leave when Barack Obama approached and asked her to wait. They plopped down on an orange beanbag chair at the end of the hall, and this time the conversation clicked.
He noticed her accent. Australian, she said. He knew many Aussies, friends of his mother’s, because he had lived in Indonesia when he was a boy. So had she, before her parents divorced, and again briefly in high school. As it turned out, their stays in Jakarta had overlapped for a few years, starting in 1967. They talked nonstop, moving from one subject to another, sharing an intense and immediate affinity, enthralled by the randomness of their meeting and how much they had in common. They had lived many places but never felt at home.
At night’s end, as Genevieve recalled that first encounter when I spoke with her decades later, they exchanged phone numbers on scraps of paper. “I’m pretty sure we had dinner maybe the Wednesday after. I think maybe he cooked me dinner. Then we went and talked in his bedroom. And then I spent the night. It all felt very inevitable.”
Obama was six months out of Columbia when Genevieve Cook came along and engaged him in the deepest romantic relationship of his young life. She called him Bahr-ruck, with the accent on the first syllable, and a trill of the r’s. Not Bear-ick, as the Anglophile Kenyans pronounced it, and not Buh-rock, as he would later be called, but Bahr-ruck. She said that is how he pronounced it himself, at least when talking to her. He was living on the Upper West Side and working in Midtown, at a job that paid the rent but did not inspire him. He was still in a cocoon phase, wondering about his place, keeping mostly to himself, occasionally hanging out with his Pakistani friends, who partied too much and too hard, he thought, but were warm and generous and buoyant intellectual company. Genevieve offered something more. She was 25, three years older than he was, born in 1958. She kept a journal, as he did, and thought of herself as an observer, as he did, and brooded about her identity, as he did, and had an energetic, independent, and at times exasperating mother, as he did, and burned with an idealism to right the wrongs of the world, as he did.
A few weeks into January 1984 they were seeing each other regularly on Thursday nights (when she would be up in his neighborhood, finishing one of her Bank Street classes) and on weekends. He was living then as a boarder in a fourth-floor walkup at 622 West 114th Street. It was a rent-controlled three-bedroom apartment. She remembered how on Sundays Obama would lounge around, drinking coffee and solving the New York Times crossword puzzle, bare-chested, wearing a blue and white sarong. His bedroom was closest to the front door, offering a sense of privacy and coziness. Genevieve described it in her journal this way: “I open the door, that Barack keeps closed, to his room, and enter into a warm, private space pervaded by a mixture of smells that so strongly speak of his presence, his liveliness, his habits—running sweat, Brut spray deodorant, smoking, eating raisins, sleeping, breathing.”
Genevieve’s journal-keeping started in 1975 during her final year at Emma Willard School, an academically rigorous prep school for young women in Troy, New York, and continued through her undergraduate years at Swarthmore and on into adulthood. As the relationship began, Genevieve was taken by Barack’s mind and the vibrancy of their discussions. Day by day, week by week, her perceptions of him became more complicated.
Sunday, January 22, 1984
What a startling person Barack is—so strange to voice intimations of my own perceptions—have them heard, responded to so on the sleeve. A sadness, in a way, that we are both so questioning that original bliss is dissipated—but feels really good not to be faltering behind some façade—to not feel that doubt must be silenced and transmuted into distance. Thursday, January 26
How is he so old already, at the age of 22? I have to recognize (despite play of wry and mocking smile on lips) that I find his thereness very threatening…. Distance, distance, distance, and wariness. Sunday, February 19
Despite Barack’s having talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him—protecting the ability to feel innocence and springborn—I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me. I really like him more and more—he may worry about posturing and void inside but he is a brimming and integrated character.
Today, for the first time, Barack sat on the edge of the bed—dressed—blue jeans and luscious ladies on his chest [a comfy T-shirt depicting buxom women], the end of the front section of the Sunday Times in his hand, looking out the window, and the quality of light reflected from his eyes, windows of the soul, heart, and mind, was so clear, so unmasked, his eyes narrower than he usually holds them looking out the window, usually too aware of me.
Saturday, February 25
The sexual warmth is definitely there—but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all. I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness—and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.
Blueblood
Much later, after the publication of his book Dreams from My Father, and after Barack Obama became famous, a curiosity arose about the mystery woman of his New York years. “There was a woman in New York that I loved,” he wrote. “She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. That’s how it was.”
Obama did not name this old girlfriend even with a pseudonym—she was just “a woman” or “my friend.” That she remained publicly unidentified throughout his rise to national prominence became part of the intrigue of his New York period’s “dark years” narrative. His physical description was imprecise but close. Genevieve is five-seven, lithe and graceful, with auburn-tinged brown hair and flecks of brown, not green, in her hazel eyes. Her voice was confident and soothing. Like many characters in the memoir, he introduced her to advance a theme, another thread of thought in his musings about race. To that end, he distorted her attitudes and some of their experiences, emphasizing his sense that they came from different worlds. Decades later, during an interview in the Oval Office, Obama acknowledged that, while Genevieve was his New York girlfriend, the description in his memoir was a “compression” of girlfriends, including one who followed Genevieve when he lived in Chicago.
Genevieve Cook came from not one but several distinguished families. Her father, Michael J. Cook, was a prominent Australian diplomat. Genevieve’s mother, born Helen Ibbitson, came from a banking family in Melbourne and was an art historian. Michael and Helen divorced when Genevieve was 10. Helen soon remarried into a well-known American family, the Jessups. With homes in Georgetown and on Park Avenue at various times, Philip C. Jessup Jr. served as general counsel for the National Gallery of Art, in Washington. The Jessups were establishment Democrats. Philip’s father had been a major figure in American postwar diplomacy.
In Genevieve’s conversations with Barack, her family was seldom a topic. Barack provided an escape from all that, a sanctuary. She felt that she had far more in common with him than with her relatives. “That wasn’t my world,” she said of the social circles of her mother and stepfather and father. “I was through and through infused with the sense of being an outsider, like Barack was.”
In Barack Obama she had found a kindred soul, dislocated, caught in between. But she could see that this also led to distance and caution, a sensibility in Barack that she described with a particular metaphor: the veil.
Friday, March 9, 1984
It’s not a question of my wanting to probe ancient pools of emotional trauma … but more a sense of you [Barack] biding your time and drawing others’ cards out of their hands for careful inspection—without giving too much of your own away—played with a good poker face. And as you say, it’s not a question of intent on your part—or deliberate withholding—you feel accessible, and you are, in disarming ways. But I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart—legitimate, admirable, really—a strength, a necessity in terms of some kind of integrity. But there’s something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness … but I’m still left with this feeling of … a bit of a wall—the veil. Thursday, March 22
Barack—still intrigues me, but so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled. Tuesday, April 3
He talked quite a lot about discontent in a quiet sort of way—balancing the tendency to be always the observer, how to effect change, wanting to get past his antipathy to working at B.I.
“A Superhero Life”
The initials “B.I.” in that journal entry stood for Obama’s employer, Business International, located at 1 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, on Second Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets. Business International had been operating for nearly 30 years by the time Obama went to work there. Established in 1954, its stated goal was “to advance profitable corporate and economic growth in socially desirable ways.” What that entailed, for the most part, was compiling and constantly updating newsletters and reference materials for corporations that did business around the world. Obama was a very junior employee, doing research and writing reports.
By early 1984, Obama was absorbed with Genevieve and with figuring out his place in the world. Whatever and wherever that would be, it would certainly not involve Business International or anything like it. He had turned away from the rhetoric of the left, dubious of its practicality and turned off by radical remnants of the 1960s, but was also leery of succumbing to the allure of the business world. Genevieve knew that he harbored faintly articulated notions of future greatness, of gaining power in order to change things. Once, when they were in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, they saw a young boy in costume, playing out a superhero role. They started to talk about superheroes, the comics he enjoyed as an adolescent in Honolulu, and intimations of “playing out a superhero life.” She considered it “a very strong archetype in his personality.” But he was not to be drawn out—he shut down “and didn’t want to talk about it further.”
Wednesday, May 9, 1984
But he is so wary, wary. Has visions of his life, but in a hiatus as to their implementation—wants to fly, and hasn’t yet started to take off, so resents extra weight. Saturday, May 26
Dreamt last night for what I’m sure was an hour of waiting to meet him at midnight, with a ticket in my hand. Told me the other night of having pushed his mother away over past 2 years in an effort to extract himself from the role of supporting man in her life—she feels rejected and has withdrawn somewhat. Made me see that he may fear his own dependency on me, but also mine on him, whereas I only fear mine on him He wants to preserve our relationship but either felt or wanted it to be well protected from some sense of immediate involvement.
Genevieve was out of her mother’s Upper East Side apartment by then. Earlier that spring she had moved and was sharing the top floor of a brownstone at 640 Second Street in Park Slope. The routine with Barack was now back and forth, mostly his place, sometimes hers. When she told him that she loved him, his response was not “I love you, too” but “thank you”—as though he appreciated that someone loved him. The relationship still existed in its own little private world. They spent time cooking. Barack loved to make a ginger beef dish that he had picked up from his friend Sohale Siddiqi. He was also big on tuna-fish sandwiches made the way his grandfather had taught him, with finely chopped dill pickles. For a present, Genevieve bought him an early edition of The Joy of Cooking. They read books together and talked about what they had read. For a time they concentrated on black literature, the writers Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Ntozake Shange.
If Barack and Genevieve were in social occasions as a couple, it was almost always with the Pakistanis. Hasan Chandoo had moved back from London and taken a place in a converted warehouse on the waterfront below Brooklyn Heights. Wahid Hamid, starting a rise up the corporate ladder that would take him to the top of PepsiCo, lived on Long Island with his wife. Sohale Siddiqi was part of the crowd, along with Beenu Mahmood. It was a movable feast, and invariably a matter of bounty and excess, friends losing themselves in food and conversation. Barack for the most part declined alcohol and drugs. “He was quite abstemious,” Genevieve said. She enjoyed the warmth of the gatherings, but was usually ready to go home before him. He was pushing away from the Pakistanis, too, politely, for a different reason, she thought. He wanted something more.
Beenu Mahmood saw a shift in Obama that corresponded to Genevieve’s perceptions. He could see Obama slowly but carefully distancing himself as a necessary step in establishing his political identity as an American. For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective. He was one of them, in that sense. But to get to where he wanted to go he had to change.
Mahmood remembered that “for a period of two or three months” Obama “carried and at every opportunity read and reread a fraying copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It was a period during which Barack was struggling deeply within himself to attain his own racial identity, and Invisible Man became a prism for his self-reflection.” There was a riff in that book that Mahmood thought struck close to the bone with Obama. The narrator, an intelligent black man whose skills were invisible to white society, wrote: “America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It’s ‘winner take nothing’ that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.” His friend Barack, Mahmood thought, “was the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity, and his achievement was really an achievement of identity in the modern world. [That] was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”
Obama disciplined himself in two activities—writing and running. When he was on the Upper West Side, he would run in Riverside Park. When he was in Brooklyn, he would run in Prospect Park. He was what Genevieve called “a virtuous daily jogger,” and that was one of the differences between them. For weeks that summer, Genevieve challenged Barack to a footrace. Not long-distance but a sprint. If they sprinted, she insisted, she would beat him. Barack kept putting it off. “His response was merry disbelief,” Genevieve recalled. “By merry I don’t mean he laughed at me, though he was amused. He had this way … where he inhabits a mocking space—it’s sort of a loving mocking—as if to imply ‘Ah, the frailties and tendencies we all have to be delusional, self-deceiving, preposterous even, but you are cute, and I like you better for it.’ ” Finally, he relented. They picked a day, went to the park, and chose a walkway lined by lampposts for the dash. Her journal entry:
On Sunday Barack and I raced, and I won. I ran so fast my body transformed itself onto another plane. We ran, he started off behind me and I just said to myself stay ahead, stay ahead and my body became a flat thin box w/ my arms and legs coming each precisely from a corner. And I didn’t know how long I could keep it up, but I was going to try—my whole sight concentrated on the lamp post when I felt him slow and yell you beat me, at first I thought he was giving up, but then I realized he’d meant the lamp post on the left and I’d really won! The feel of the race was exhilarating, but I didn’t feel very victorious. Barack couldn’t really believe it and continued to feel a bit unsettled by it all weekend, I think. He was more startled to discover that I had expected to win than anything else. Anyway, later in the shower (before leaving to see The Bostonians) I told him I didn’t feel that good about winning, and he promptly replied probably cos of feelings of guilt about beating a man. In which case, no doubt, he’d already discovered the obverse feelings about being beaten by a woman. Nevertheless, it was a good metaphor for me, despite, as I confessed to Barack, that in some ways it would have appeased some aspect of my self-image to have tried and lost. But I didn’t; I won.
The Dream
Kenya had been weighing on Obama’s mind since the death of his father, and he talked to Genevieve about wanting to visit his family in Kenya. On one occasion he had a vivid dream about his father. It was a dream of a distant place and the lost figure brought back to life, a vision that later inspired his memoir’s title. In this dream, as he recounted it in Dreams from My Father, Barack rode a bus across a landscape of “deep fields of grass and hills that bucked against an orange sky” until he reached a jail cell and found his father before him “cloth wrapped around his waist.” The father, slender, with hairless arms, saw his son and said, “Look at you, so tall—and so thin. Gray hairs, even,” and Obama approached him and hugged him and wept as Barack Hussein Obama Sr. said the words Barack Hussein Obama II would never hear in real life—“Barack, I always wanted to tell you how much I love you.”
Genevieve recalled the morning he awoke from that dream. “I remember him being just so overwhelmed, and I so badly wanted to fix him, help him fix that pain. He woke up from that dream and started talking about it. I think he was haunted.”
Genevieve and Barack talked about race quite often, as part of his inner need to find a sense of belonging. She sympathized and encouraged his search for identity. If she felt like an outsider, he was a double outsider, racial and cross-cultural. He looked black, but was he? He confessed to her that at times “he felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.” At some point that summer she realized that, “in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black.”
Early in Barack’s relationship with Genevieve, he had told her about “his adolescent image of the perfect ideal woman” and how he had searched for her “at the expense of hooking up with available girls.” Who was this ideal woman? Genevieve conjured her in her mind, and it was someone other than herself. She wrote, “I can’t help thinking that what he would really want, be powerfully drawn to, was a woman, very strong, very upright, a fighter, a laugher, well-experienced—a black woman I keep seeing her as.”
In Dreams from My Father, Obama chose to emphasize a racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman he described as his New York girlfriend.
One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.
None of this happened with Genevieve. She remembered going to the theater only once with Barack, and it was not to see a work by a black playwright. When asked about this decades later, during a White House interview, Obama acknowledged that the scene did not happen with Genevieve. “It is an incident that happened,” he said. But not with her. He would not be more specific, but the likelihood is that it happened later, when he lived in Chicago. “That was not her,” he said. “That was an example of compression I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect for them. So that was a consideration. I thought that [the anecdote involving the reaction of a white girlfriend to the angry black play] was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends. And so, that occupies, what, two paragraphs in the book? My attitude was it would be dishonest for me not to touch on that at all … so that was an example of sort of editorially how do I figure that out?”
Obama wrote another scene into his memoir to serve a dual purpose, exposing what he saw as a cultural gap with Genevieve. He described how his New York girlfriend finally persuaded him to go with her to the family’s country estate in Norfolk, in northwestern Connecticut, for a weekend.
The parents were there, and they were very nice, very gracious. It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore. The family knew every inch of the land. They knew how the hills had formed, how the glacial drifts had created the lake, the names of the earliest white settlers—their ancestors—and before that, the names of the Indians who’d once hunted the land. The house was very old, her grandfather’s house. He had inherited it from his grandfather. The library was filled with old books and pictures of the grandfather with famous people he had known—presidents, diplomats, industrialists. There was this tremendous gravity to the room. Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.
The differences in this case between Barack’s portrayal and Genevieve’s recollections are understandable matters of perspective. It was her stepfather’s place. They rode the Bonanza bus up from New York and got off at the drugstore in Norfolk. It was indeed a beautiful autumn weekend, though colder than expected, and Obama complained about it. He did not bring warm enough clothes, so he had to borrow a woolen shirt from Genevieve. The Jessup property was 14 acres, with woods, brook, and pond. The library was exactly as he described it, cluttered with photographs and memorabilia of the grandfather’s distinguished career. The family mostly watched the evening news in there, and played charades.
From the distance of decades, in reading the memoir, what struck Genevieve most was Obama’s description of the gravity of that library, and the vast distance between their worlds, and his conviction that he alone was the one who knew how to live as an outsider. She felt as estranged from that milieu as he did, and he knew it, and over the ensuing decades it was Barack, not Genevieve, who would move closer to presidents, diplomats, and industrialists, the world of an insider. “The ironic thing,” she noted, “is he moved through the corridors of power in a far more comfortable way than I ever would have.”
“I Pushed Her Away”
Genevieve had started teaching at P.S. 133, on Butler Street in Park Slope, that fall of 1984. She had fretted about it all of the previous summer, and now that she was in the classroom it proved even more difficult than she had anticipated. She confided to Barack one day that she had mentioned the idea of leaving to a colleague, who told her that if she stayed she would end up with a nice pension. “That was the only time he raised his voice and got really, really upset with me,” she recalled. “He went berserk about the trade-offs he saw his grandparents make for some supposed safety net at the expense of something He meant at the expense of their souls.”
That was something Obama, in his own self-assessment, deeply wanted to avoid. He said he would never keep a job just for security. In early December, after one year at Business International, he quit. He also left the apartment on 114th Street and moved in with Genevieve. It was to be a temporary arrangement until he left for Hawaii over the Christmas holidays. When he returned, he would find another place of his own, he said. Their time living together did not go well.
Monday, December 10
After a week of Barack and I adjusting to each others constant presence and his displacement, I expect that this week will make it hard to be alone again when he has gone [to Hawaii for Christmas]. We got very irritated w/ each other Fri. night and Saturday, talked about it. Thursday, December 13
Induced a flare-up yesterday between Barack and me over a suddenly felt irritation at doing the breakfast dishes. Then I was less than honest when I broached my irritation w/ Barack in the vein of, I’m going to tell you I’m irritated, but only because I don’t want to be, and expected him to just let it roll off his back … living w/ someone, you inevitably turn your private frustrations out on that person, because that kind of projection is such a basic and pervasively influencing ego defense mechanism. And too, as one is so unaware of the other person’s living reality, I had not taken into account Barack’s feeling of being displaced and in the way. In the end he said I know it’s irritating to have me here, and I wanted to say and mean, no of course it isn’t, but I couldn’t. That has been the biggest surprise, that rather than enjoying his extended presence like a very long weekend, as I think I thought I would, and reveling in the comfort of reliably having someone to eat dinner with, and talk to and go to sleep with, I’ve been …resentful I suppose—no—as he said, impatient and domineering How beneath the surface things are after all.
Before Obama left for Hawaii, she bought him an expensive Aran-wool cable-knit white sweater at Saks Fifth Avenue to replace an old one he had inherited, likely from his grandfather, that had holes in it and that Genevieve liked to wear. He was embarrassed that she had spent so much money on it.
When he returned from his western travels in mid-January, he was still without a place of his own and back in her apartment in Park Slope. He had landed his first organizing job for the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit founded in the state in 1973 and inspired by the national organization created by citizen activist Ralph Nader. Obama had focused his ambitions on organizing since his last year at Columbia, while acknowledging that he was not entirely certain what it meant. He was hired at a salary that was barely more than half what he had earned at B.I., and his job was to organize students up on the Harlem campus of the City University of New York, focusing on environmental and student-aid issues.
He succeeded at the job, by most standards, bringing more students into the organization and rejuvenating the chapter. But the issues seemed secondary to him, and he went to work every day with that same sense of remove and distance that he had carried with him at Columbia. Looking back on it decades later, he said that that first organizing job “had always felt sort of like a tryout of organizing as opposed to plunging into it in a serious way.” When he talked about the job with Genevieve, he mostly just said that it was depressing, which captured his mood much of that winter and early spring of 1985.
In his memoir, explaining his relationship with Genevieve to his Kenyan sister, Auma, he wrote: “I pushed her away. We started to fight. We started thinking about the future, and it pressed in on our warm little world.” All in the perspective, again. From Genevieve: “My take on it had always been that I pushed him away, found him not to be ‘enough,’ had chafed at his withheld-ness, his lack of spontaneity, which, eventually, I imagined might be assuaged, or certain elements of it might be, by living together. Because it felt so intrinsically to be part of his character, though, this careful consideration of everything he does, I saw it, then, as a sort of wound, one which ultimately I decided I was not the person he would ‘fix’ it with.”
At the end of March, Genevieve moved from Second Street to another apartment, on Warren Street, in Brooklyn. Barack helped her move, then found a place for himself in the 30s, off Eighth Avenue, in Hell’s Kitchen. He and Genevieve continued their earlier routine of seeing each other on weekends, but things had changed. By the middle of May, their relationship was over.
Thursday, May 23, 1985
Barack leaving my life—at least as far as being lovers goes. In the same way that the relationship was founded on calculated boundaries and carefully, rationally considered developments, it seems to be ending along coolly considered lines. I read back over the past year in my journals, and see and feel several themes in it all … how from the beginning what I have been most concerned with has been my sense of Barack’s withholding the kind of emotional involvement I was seeking. I guess I hoped time would change things and he’d let go and “fall in love” with me. Now, at this point, I’m left wondering if Barack’s reserve, etc. is not just the time in his life, but, after all, emotional scarring that will make it difficult for him to get involved even after he’s sorted his life through with age and experience.
Hard to say, as obviously I was not the person that brought infatuation. (That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere!)
A Direction
Obama had been thinking about Chicago since April 29, 1983, when Harold Washington made history, sworn in as the city’s first black mayor. Obama’s hope initially had been that he could land a job in the Washington administration after he graduated, which only showed how unschooled and naïve he was. Not until a decade later, when he was fully immersed in the give-and-take world of Illinois politics, would he learn how crucial it was to have a patron, or “Chinaman,” as it was called in that inimitable legislative milieu. In the spring of 1985—from the remove of New York City, having visited Chicago only once in his life, on a summer tour of the mainland with his family when he was 12 years old—Obama had no Chinaman, but he did have something. He had a telephone call from Jerry Kellman.
The connection began when Obama was at the New York Public Library and came across the latest copy of Community Jobs, a publication of six to eight pages that listed employment opportunities in the social-justice and social-services fields. One listing was for a group called the Developing Communities Project, which needed a community organizer to work in the Roseland neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. Right city. Right line of work. Obama sent in his résumé and cover letter, something he had done many times before with no luck. Two matters left unstated in the ad were that Kellman, who oversaw the project, specifically wanted an African-American for the job, and that he was getting desperate.
Obama’s application seemed intriguing, though it gave no indication of his race. The résumé noted his Hawaiian childhood. The surname sounded Japanese. Kellman’s wife was Japanese. He knew that Obama could be a Japanese name and that Japanese-Americans were common in Hawaii. It would take a conversation to find out more, so he reached Obama in New York and they talked on the phone for about an hour. At some point, without asking directly, Kellman came to the realization that Obama was black. It was even more apparent to him that this applicant was smart and engaging and interested in social issues. Definitely worth a deeper look. Kellman told Obama that he would be in Manhattan soon to visit his father, a theatrical-copyright attorney who lived at 92nd and Broadway, and suggested they get together then. The meeting took place across town and down in Midtown, at a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue.
Kellman challenged Obama, throwing questions in his path as obstacles, one after another. Why did he want this line of work, with its low pay, long hours, and endless frustration? How did he feel about living and working in the black community for the first time in his life? “I asked him, ‘Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to organize? You graduated from Columbia. You are an African-American when corporations are looking for people like you. Why don’t you do something else?’ But first, Why? Where does this come from? What place and how deep does it come from? And what I got from him was that the people in the civil-rights movement were his heroes. And I also got from him that his mom was a social activist, an academic social activist, but a social activist.”
As the coffee-shop conversation progressed, Obama turned the tables and started interviewing Kellman. He wanted to make sure that the Developing Communities Project was legitimate and serious. This wasn’t some far-left enterprise, was it? He had moved beyond that, he said. Obama turned his questioning to Chicago and what this disheveled white man could teach him. Kellman wondered what Obama knew about Chicago. Not much. Hog butcher for the world, Obama said, reciting the famous Carl Sandburg line. Not anymore—the stockyards had closed, Kellman responded. Obama mentioned the Cubs, perennial losers, and Harold Washington, the town’s new winner. He pressed Kellman for more observations about the city and the South Side neighborhoods, what was happening with the steel mills, the decline of factory work, the fraying of families and communities. The more they talked, the more it became obvious to Kellman that Obama was his man.
Before leaving New York, Barack spent $2,000 on a blue Honda Civic that he would drive into the heartland to start his new life. He also took along the white cable-knit sweater that Genevieve had given him for Christmas. It would comfort him in the cold Chicago winter.
Andrew Breitbart was never a “Birther,” and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of “Birtherism.” In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.
Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama’s ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him.
It is for that reason that we launched “The Vetting,” an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other presidential candidates)–not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.
It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below–one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review.
It is evidence–not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.
***
Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”
The booklet, which was distributed to “business colleagues” in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel.
It also promotes Obama’s anticipated first book, Journeys in Black and White–which Obama abandoned, later publishing Dreams from My Father instead.
Obama’s biography in the booklet is as follows (image and text below):
Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.
The booklet, which is thirty-six pages long, is printed in blue ink (and, on the cover, silver/grey ink), using offset lithography. It purports to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Acton & Dystel, which was founded in 1976.
Front cover (outside) – note Barack Obama listed in alphabetical order
Front cover (inside)
Jay Acton no longer represents Obama. However, Jane Dystel still lists Obama as a client on her agency’s website.
According to the booklet itself, the text was edited by Miriam Goderich, who has since become Dystel’s partner at Dystel & Goderich, an agency founded in 1994. Breitbart News attempted to reach Goderich by telephone several times over several days. Her calls are screened by an automated service that requires callers to state their name and company, which we did. She never answered.
The design of the booklet was undertaken by Richard Bellsey, who has since closed his business. Bellsey, reached by telephone, could not recall the exact details of the booklet, but told Breitbart News that it “sounds like one of our jobs, like I did for [Acton & Dystel] twenty years ago or more.”
The parade of authors alongside Obama in the booklet includes politicians, such as former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill; sports legends, such as Joe Montana and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; and numerous Hollywood celebrities.
The reverse side of the page that features Barack Obama includes former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader and early-1990s “boy band” pop sensation New Kids On the Block.
Acton, who spoke to Breitbart News by telephone, confirmed precise details of the booklet and said that it cost the agency tens of thousands of dollars to produce.
He indicated that while “almost nobody” wrote his or her own biography, the non-athletes in the booklet, whom “the agents deal[t] with on a daily basis,” were “probably” approached to approve the text as presented.
Dystel did not respond to numerous requests for comment, via email and telephone. Her assistant told Breitbart News that Dystel “does not answer questions about Obama.”
The errant Obama biography in the Acton & Dystel booklet does not contradict the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate. Moreover, several contemporaneous accounts of Obama’s background describe Obama as having been born in Hawaii.
The biography does, however, fit a pattern in which Obama–or the people representing and supporting him–manipulate his public persona.
David Maraniss’s forthcoming biography of Obama has reportedly confirmed, for example, that a girlfriend Obama described in Dreams from My Father was, in fact, an amalgam of several separate individuals.
In addition, Obama and his handlers have a history of redefining his identity when expedient. In March 2008, for example, he famously declared: “I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.”
Several weeks later, Obama left Wright’s church–and, according to Edward Klein’s new biography, The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House, allegedly attempted to persuade Wright not to “do any more public speaking until after the November [2008] election” (51).
Obama has been known frequently to fictionalize aspects of his own life. During his 2008 campaign, for instance, Obama claimed that his dying mother had fought with insurance companies over coverage for her cancer treatments.
That turned out to be untrue, but Obama has repeated the story–which even the Washington Post called “misleading”–in a campaign video for the 2012 election.
The Acton & Dystel biography could also reflect how Obama was seen by his associates, or transitions in his own identity. He is said, for instance, to have cultivated an “international” identity until well into his adulthood, according to Maraniss.
Regardless of the reason for Obama’s odd biography, the Acton & Dystel booklet raises new questions as part of ongoing efforts to understand Barack Obama–who, despite four years in office remains a mystery to many Americans, thanks to the mainstream media.
By 2005 the profile was updated, and still said he was born in Kenya.
BARACK OBAMA is the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, and was the dynamic keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago. His first book, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER: A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE, is a New York Times bestseller.
One week later, on February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for President
Saturday, February 10, 2007; 3:28 PM
Text of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s speech, as prepared for delivery Saturday in Springfield, Ill., and released by his campaign, in which he announced he is seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2008:
For 17 years it was advantageous to say that he was born in Kenya, but after he announced his candidacy for president – he needed to be born in the US. Why did Obama choose to lie about his birthplace?
Online archive from April 2007 by publishing agency Acton & Dystel has Mr Obama’s birthplace listed as Kenya – two months after he announced he was running for president
The same online archive dated two weeks later in April 2007 has changed the current U.S president’s birthplace to Hawaii
President Obama published Hawaiian birth certificate last year in hopes to end ‘birther’ theories
This follows the discovery of a 1991 booklet from Acton & Dystel announcing that the Democrat was ‘born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’
Beth Stebner
Daily Mail
Barack Obama’s literary agents were still listing the U.S President’s birthplace as Kenya in their online author bios two months after he first announced his run for president in 2007.
Viewed on web.archive.org the April 3rd 2007 listing from Acton & Dystel for Mr Obama still touts the then-Democratic junior senator from Illinois as ‘born in Kenya’.
Indeed, the short biography even references his now famous speech to the Democratic National Convention which launched Mr Obama to national fame and announced him as potential candidate for the presidency.
The April 3rd 2007 listing from Mr Obama’s literary agents Acton & Dystel touts the then-Democratic junior senator from Illinois as ‘born in Kenya’
However, the next available listing online at web.archive.org is from April 21 2007 and the future president’s biography has changed to state that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and not Kenya.
By the time the biography was changed Mr Obama had been sitting in the U.S senate for two years.
This new information comes as the row over Mr Obama’s heritage was reignited by the discovery of a 1991 booklet boldly announcing that the Democrat was ‘born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’
Just over two weeks later on April 21 2007 the same listing from Acton & Dystel has the future President Obama’s biography stating that he was born in Hawaii
In the cover for a 1991 promotional booklet by Mr Obama’s then-publisher Acton & Dystel, he is as ‘the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, (who) was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’
Bio: The biography for Mr Obama published in a literary agency’s promotional pamphlet says he was born in Kenya
The information, which could be used as more ammunition against the incumbent, comes months before what will likely be a close campaign between Mr Obama and likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
The 36-page promotional booklet was exclusively obtained by Breitbart, and was sent out to colleagues within the publishing industry in the early 1990s.
A later biography, which can still be found on Acton & Dystel’s archives, reads: ‘Barack Obama is the junior Democratic senator from Illinois and was the dynamic keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
‘He was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago. His first book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, has been a long time New York Times bestseller.
The blue, teal, and silver booklet was printed in part to celebrate Acton & Dystel’s 15th anniversary, and also to display the breadth and depth of authors the imprint published.
Other authors featured include Ralph Nader, former Speaker of the House Thomas P. O’Neill, and pop group New Kids on the Block.
Miriam Goderich, who now works at partner company Dystel & Goderich, is listed as the pamphlet’s editor.
An assistant for Ms Goderich told MailOnline that she was not commenting on the story at this time.
Though he no longer represents Mr Obama, Jay Acton spoke with Breitbart about the cover, saying that ‘almost nobody’ wrote their own biography, though non-athletes were ‘probably’ approached to confirm the veracity of it.
Mr Obama later left Acton & Dystel, submitting a book proposal to Simon & Schuster imprint Poseidon Press worth more than six figures.
Dreams of my father: The 1991 pamphlet says Barack Obama was born in Kenya and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia; Mr Obama is pictured here with his father, Barack Obama Sr, in an undated 1960s photo
Controversy: Obama, pictured with his mother Ann Dunham in the 1960s. The president settled birther claims when he published his Hawaiian birth certificate publically last year
‘LATEST INSTALLMENT OF WILDLY INCOMPETENT VETTING’: PUNDITS TAKE AIM AT BREITBART
Pundits took to the Breitbart story like wildfire, with both the left and right coming up with heated responses to the article.
New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait writes that the ‘controversy’ was little more than the result of a ‘lazy literary agent.’
He failed to see the pattern that Breitbart was trying to make, and notes: ‘Breitbart is careful to tiptoe around (the birther shock angle.)’
Media Matters for America, a politically progressive watchdog group, calls the article ‘the latest installment of the self-serious and wildly incompetent Breitbart.com-let “vetting” of President Obama.’
They point out an article published February 6, 1990 in the New York Times, which declares that Mr Obama, 28, was elected as the first black president to The Harvard Law Review.
It reads: ‘His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr Obama was born in Hawaii.’
The book, tentatively called Journeys In Black And White, was later abandoned for the autobiography Dreams From My Father.
A note from Breitbart’s senior management at the top of the article offers the following disclaimer: ‘It is evidence – not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.’
President Obama released his birth certificate to the public last April. He said during a press briefing at the time that he was ‘puzzled at the degree to which this thing just keeps going on.’
He said: ‘We’ve had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican, every news outlet that has investigated this, confirm that, yes, in fact, I was born in Hawaii, August 4, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital.’
The president concluded his speech by acknowledging that some people – despite the evidence – would not let go of the issue.
‘I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest,’ he said.
‘But I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do.’
Proof is in the papers: Mr Obama released his birth certificate last April to try and quiet a debate within Republican circles that he was not born in the country
American: Mr Obama said during the press briefing at the time that he was ‘puzzled at the degree to which this thing just keeps going on’
Though the White House was certainly hoping to silence the ‘birther’ movement by releasing the president’s birth certificate, grumbles and murmurs have been commonplace since the April 27, 2011 release.
‘We’ve had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican, every news outlet that has investigated this, confirm that, yes, in fact, I was born in Hawaii, August 4, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital.’
-Mr Obama, addressing the press on April 27, 2011
On May 12, Colorado Republican Congressman Mike Coffman brought up the issue at a fundraiser, saying: ‘I don’t know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America.
‘I don’t know that. But I do know this – that in his heart, he’s not an American.
‘He’s just not an American.’
According to 9 News, Rep Coffman was first met with silence, but after several moments, fundraiser attendees offered tentative applause.
However, the congressman issued an apology later in the week, writing: ‘I have confidence in President Obama’s citizenship and legitimacy as President of the United States.’
He further qualified his statement by saying: ‘I don’t believe the president shares my belief in American Exceptionalism. His policies reflect a philosophy that America is but one nation of many equals.
‘As a Marine, I believe America is unique and based on a core set of principles that makes it superior to other nations.’
THE ‘BIRTHER’ DEBATE: WHO SUPPORTED IT AND WHY OBAMA CHOSE TO RELEASE HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE
Debated: Donald Trump led the ‘birther’ movement
Celebrity developer Donald Trump, who took the lead in sowing doubts about Mr Obama’s birth, was gaining a following as he flirted with a Republican presidential bid.
A 2011 poll showed two-thirds of all Republicans – and smaller percentages of independents and Democrats – believing Mr Obama was born overseas or voicing uncertainty about his place of birth.
The public doubts about his birth, with their hints of xenophobic and even racist attitudes, threatened to feed broader suspicions and grievances among millions of Americans.
Unchallenged, those sentiments would linger through his re-election campaign, the Associated Press said in 2011.
Among many party activists, questioning Obama’s birthplace – and thus his constitutional legitimacy as president – was a test of party allegiance.
Republican presidential hopefuls were forced into uncomfortable corners where they had to distance themselves from the birthers’ claims without alienating potential voters.
Recognizing the potential backlash, Republican House Speaker John Boehner put some distance between the GOP establishment and the conspiracy theorists.
‘This has long been a settled issue,’ Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said last April. ‘The speaker’s focus is on cutting spending, lowering gas prices and creating American jobs.’
What had given the issue its drive was the success critics such as Trump achieved by simply questioning why Mr Obama had not released the long-form version of his birth document.
The White House choreographed the release of the birth certificate.
Aides said Obama decided that he had had enough of the issue and asked his White House counsel, Bob Bauer, to look into getting a waiver from the state of Hawaii to release the document.
-Associated Press
Watch President Obama talk about his birth certificate
Quatre Saoudiens condamnés à mort pour meurtre et vol et un Pakistanais jugé pour trafic de drogue ont été décapités jeudi en Arabie saoudite, portant à 26 le nombre de personnes exécutées dans ce royaume ultraconservateur depuis le début de l’année. (…) Viol, meurtre, apostasie, vol à main armée et trafic de drogue sont passibles de la peine capitale en Arabie saoudite, royaume régi par une version rigoriste de la charia, la loi islamique.Peine de mort.org (5 février 2015)
Nous tentons d’éviter de décrire quelqu’un comme un terroriste, ou un geste comme étant terroriste. (…) Les Nations unies ont tenté pendant une décennie de définir ce mot, sans y parvenir. C’est très délicat. Nous savons ce qu’est la violence politique, nous savons ce que sont les meurtres, les attentats et les fusillades et nous pouvons les décrire. Et cela explique bien plus de choses, à nos yeux, qu’utiliser le mot ‘terrorisme’. » Tarik Kafala (service arabophone de la BBC)
Personne ne souffre davantage de tout ça que le peuple palestinien.Barack Hussein Obama (Iowa, 27 avril 2007)
Mon père était originaire du Kenya, et beaucoup de gens dans son village étaient musulmans. Il ne pratiquait pas l’islam. La vérité est qu’il n’était pas très religieux. Il a rencontré ma mère. Ma mère était une chrétienne originaire du Kansas, et ils se marièrent puis divorcèrent. Je fus élevé par ma mère. Aussi j’ai toujours été chrétien. Le seul lien que j’ai eu avec l’islam est que mon grand-père du côté de mon père venait de ce pays. Mais je n’ai jamais pratiqué l’islam. Pendant un certain temps, j’ai vécu en Indonésie parce que ma mère enseignait là-bas. Et c’est un pays musulman. Et je suis allé à l’école. Mais je ne pratiquais pas. Mais je crois que cela m’a permis de comprendre comment pensaient ces gens, qui partagent en partie ma façon de voir, et cela revient à dire que nous pouvons instaurer de meilleurs rapports avec le Moyen-Orient ; cela contribuerait à nous rendre plus assurés si nous pouvons comprendre comment ils pensent sur certains sujets.Barack Hussein Obama (Oskaloosa, Iowa, décembre 20007)
Je n’ai jamais été musulman. (…) à part mon nom et le fait d’avoir vécu dans une population musulmane pendant quatre ans étant enfant [Indonésie, 1967-1971], je n’ai que très peu de lien avec la religion islamique.Barack Hussein Obama (février 2008)
Nous cherchons à ouvrir un nouveau chemin en direction du monde musulman, fondé sur l’intérêt mutuel et le respect mutuel. (…) Nous sommes une nation de chrétiens, de musulmans, de juifs, d’hindous et de non croyants. Barack Hussein Obama (discours d’investiture, le 20 janvier 2009)
… une nation de musulmans, de chrétiens et de juifs … Barack Hussein Obama (Entretien à la télévision saoudienne Al-Arabiya, 27 janvier, 2009)
Nous exprimerons notre appréciation profonde de la foi musulmane qui a tant fait au long des siècles pour améliorer le monde, y compris mon propre pays. Barack Hussein Obama (Ankara, avril 2009)
Les Etats-Unis et le monde occidental doivent apprendre à mieux connaître l’islam. D’ailleurs, si l’on compte le nombre d’Américains musulmans, on voit que les Etats-Unis sont l’un des plus grands pays musulmans de la planète. Barack Hussein Obama (entretien pour Canal +, le 2 juin 2009)
Salamm aleïkoum (…) Comme le dit le Saint Coran, « Crains Dieu et dis toujours la vérité ». (…) Je suis chrétien, mais mon père était issu d’une famille kényane qui compte des générations de musulmans. Enfant, j’ai passé plusieurs années en Indonésie où j’ai entendu l’appel à la prière (azan) à l’aube et au crépuscule. Jeune homme, j’ai travaillé dans des quartiers de Chicago où j’ai côtoyé beaucoup de gens qui trouvaient la dignité et la paix dans leur foi musulmane. Barack Hussein Obama (Prêche du Caire)
En tant que citoyen, en tant que président, je crois que les musulmans ont autant le droit de pratiquer leur religion que quiconque dans ce pays. Cela inclut le droit de construire un lieu de culte et un centre socio-culturel sur un terrain privé dans le lower Manhattan, en respect des lois et décrets locaux. Nous sommes en Amérique. Notre engagement en faveur de la liberté de religion doit être inébranlable. Barack Hussein Obama
L’avenir ne doit pas appartenir à ceux qui calomnient le prophète de l’Islam. Barack Obama (siège de l’ONU, New York, 26.09.12)
Nous montons sur nos grands chevaux mais souvenons-nous que pendant les croisades et l’inquisition, des actes terribles ont été commis au nom du Christ. Dans notre pays, nous avons eu l’esclavage, trop souvent justifié par le Christ. Barack Hussein Obama
Il est tout à fait légitime pour le peuple américain d’être profondément préoccupé quand vous avez un tas de fanatiques vicieux et violents qui décapitent les gens ou qui tirent au hasard dans un tas de gens dans une épicerie à Paris.Barack Hussein Obama
Il ressort clairement de la bouche des terroristes et de certains des écrits qu’ils ont fait circuler par la suite ce qui était leur motivation. L’adverbe que le président a choisi a été utilisé pour indiquer que les personnes qui ont été tuées dans cet incident terrible et tragique ont été tuées non en raison de qui elles étaient, mais au hasard de l’endroit où elles se sont trouvées être. (…) Ces individus n’ont pas été ciblés par nom. (…) Il n’y avait pas que des juifs dans cette épicerie.Josh Earnest (porte-parolede la Maison blanche)
This is a chronic problem. I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They’re about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for anybody else’s life, that’s not what the Koran says. Europe has an enormous radical problem. I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult. Howard Dean
Yes, Charlie Hebdo was a magazine that delighted in controversy and provocation. Yes, it skewered religion and took joy in giving offense. Yes, the magazine knowingly antagonized extremists — Charlie Hebdo’s web site had been hacked and its offices firebombed before today; French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius had asked of its cartoons, « Is it really sensible or intelligent to pour oil on the fire? » And yes, Charlie Hebdo’s editor said in 2012, prophetically, that « I prefer to die than live like a rat. » But this isn’t about Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, any more than a rape is about what the victim is wearing, or a murder is about where the victim was walking. What happened on Wednesday, according to current reports, is that two men went on a killing spree. Their killing spree, like most killing sprees, will have some thin rationale. Even the worst villains believe themselves to be heroes. But in truth, it was unprovoked slaughter. The fault lies with no one but them and their accomplices. Their crime isn’t explained by cartoons or religion. Plenty of people read Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons and managed to avoid responding with mass murder. Plenty of people follow all sorts of religions and somehow get through the day without racking up a body count. The answers to what happened today won’t be found in Charlie Hebdo’s pages. They can only be found in the murderers’ sick minds. (…) Part of Charlie Hebdo’s point was that respecting these taboos strengthens their censorial power. Worse, allowing extremists to set the limits of conversation validates and entrenches the extremists’ premises: that free speech and religion are inherently at odds (they are not), and that there is some civilizational conflict between Islam and the West (there isn’t). These are also arguments, by the way, made by Islamophobes and racists, particularly in France, where hatred of Muslim immigrants from north and west Africa is a serious problem. And that is exactly why Charlie Hebdo’s « Love is stronger than hate » cover so well captures the magazine’s oft-misunderstood mission and message. Yes, the slobbery kiss between two men is surely meant to get under the skin of any conservative Muslims who are also homophobic, but so too is it an attack on the idea that Muslims or Islam are the enemy, rather than extremism and intolerance. Allowing extremists to set the limits of conversation validates and entrenches the extremists’ premises. That was true in the criticism of Charlie Hebdo’s covers, and it’s even truer in today’s crimes. These murders can’t be explained by a close read of an editorial product, and they needn’t be condemned on free speech grounds. They can only be explained by the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong. This is a tragedy. It is a crime. It is not a statement, or a controversy. Ezra Klein (Vox)
I was stunned that the president could say something so at once banal and offensive. Here we are now two days away from an act shocking barbarism, the burning alive of a prisoner of war, and Obama’s message is that we should remember the crusades and the inquisition. I mean, for him to say that all of us have sinned, all religions have been transgressed, is, you know, is adolescent stuff. Everyone knows that. What’s important is what’s happening now. Christianity no longer goes on crusades and it gave up the inquisition a while ago. The Book of Joshua is knee deep in blood. That story is over too. The story of today, of our generation, is the fact that the overwhelming volume of the violence and the barbarism that we are seeing in the world from Nigeria to Paris all the way to Pakistan and even to the Philippines, the island of Mindanao in the Philippines — is coming from one source. And that’s from inside Islam. It is not the prevalent idea of Islam, but it is coming from Islam, as many Islamic leaders including the president of Egypt and many others have admitted. And there needs to be a change in Islam. It is not a coincidence that all of these attacks on other religions are happening, all over the world, in a dozen countries, two dozen countries, all in the name of one religion. It’s not a coincidence. And for the president to be lecturing us and to say we shouldn’t get on our high horse and to not remember our own path is ridiculous. The present issue is Muslim radicalism and how to attack it. (…) From Obama’s first speech at West Point in December 2009, ironically announcing the surge in Afghanistan, you could tell that his heart has never been in this fight, never. He’s the commander in chief and yet he announces one sentence after he talks about the surge, he talks about the day to withdraw. Everyone in the region knows that. Everyone in the Middle East knows that he took on the fight on ISIS only because of the public reaction to the video of the beheading of the two Americans. He never would have lifted a finger otherwise. He hasn’t helped the rebels in Syria. He has not given the weapons that Jordan needs. The Kurds, who are actually able, courageous, and well — and committed to the fight against is, still cannot get direct arms from the United States. Charles Krauthammer
His secretary of defense says “the world is exploding all over.” His attorney general says that the threat of terror “keeps me up at night.” The world bears them out. On Tuesday, American hostage Kayla Mueller is confirmed dead. On Wednesday, the U.S. evacuates its embassy in Yemen, cited by President Obama last September as an American success in fighting terrorism. Yet Obama’s reaction to, shall we say, turmoil abroad has been one of alarming lassitude and passivity. Not to worry, says his national security adviser: This is not World War II. As if one should be reassured because the current chaos has yet to achieve the level of the most devastating conflict in human history. Indeed, insists the president, the real source of our metastasizing anxiety is . . . the news media. Russia pushes deep into eastern Ukraine. The Islamic State burns to death a Jordanian pilot. Iran extends its hegemony over four Arab capitals — Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and now Sanaa. And America watches. Obama calls the policy “strategic patience.” That’s a synonym for “inaction,” made to sound profoundly “strategic.” (…) Such on-the-ground appeasement goes well with the linguistic appeasement whereby Obama dares not call radical Islam by name. And whereby both the White House and State Department spend much of a day insisting that the attack on the kosher grocery in Paris had nothing to do with Jews. It was just, as the president said, someone “randomly shoot[ing] a bunch of folks in a deli.” (By the end of the day, the administration backed off this idiocy. By tweet.)Charles Krauthammer
At least Obama was kind enough to acknowledge that Americans had some reason to be concerned about “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks.” As it turns out, these random people who got themselves shot in a “deli” in Paris happen to have been Jewish. The random people getting themselves shot at a satirical newspaper happened to have mocked Mohammad. And those 10 random people who were murdered and had their churches burned down by mobs in Niger last week, well they happened to be Christian folks. It’s likely that all these victims would – with astonishing precision – be able to pinpoint both the religious affiliation and rationale of those responsible for their deaths. President Obama refuses to do the same. For the president, acknowledging who the victims of Islamic terrorism are means acknowledging the motives that drive it. Recognizing what drives a terrorist undermines the progressive theory that says this movement is merely a byproduct of shiftlessness, criminality and poverty rather than a movement driven by faith and political goals. Gone are the days when were allowed to make (appropriate) distinctions between peaceful and radical Islam. Now we’re supposed to accept that these string of events are executed by aimless zealots, detached from any tradition or faith. Random. We are supposed to believe that this problem can be dealt with, as the president notes, in “the same way a big city mayor’s got to cut the crime rate down if he wants that city to thrive.” Dealing with political Islam is just like getting rid of graffiti and waiting for gentrification. You know, if only Saudi Arabia had a few extra bucks laying around, we’d rid the world of all of these delinquents. For Jews, there is another reality that wishful thinking can’t change. According to Pew, there is rampant anti-Semitism in the Islamic world. Not only among radical factions, but everywhere. In moderate Jordan, 97 percent of the folks unfavorable view of Jews (not Zionists, Jews). The ADL found that 74 percent of the folks surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa had anti-Semitic attitudes. The number was 24 percent in Western Europe and 34 percent in Eastern Europe. Not all of this aversion to Jews is equality vitriolic or dangerous, of course. But it is undeniable that in Europe there is increasing violence, and much of it comes from Muslims. (…) Put it this way: the president is more inclined to call out Christian crimes against the Rhineland Jews of 1096 than Islamic crimes against Jews today. He’d rather dissemble for the sake of political correctness, using heavy-handed historical comparisons that aren’t only irrelevant to contemporary discussions about religious violence, but a stretch even if we discussed them in the context of history. David Harsanyi
Sous la pression de critiques grandissantes, qui se plaignent que le Président Obama n’a aucune stratégie susceptible de combattre l’Etat Islamique, la Conseillère à la Sécurité Nationale, Susan Rice, a dû déployer une nouveau plan de bataille, la semaine dernière. Loin de résorber cette volée de mises en cause, les omissions, inexactitudes et incohérences ne feront qu’ajouter aux accusations formulées par les détracteurs de l’Administration Obama qu’elle ne connaît rien en matière de sécurité nationale. L’une des erreurs les plus flagrantes de la nouvelle stratégie, c’est la façon dont elle colle à la pratique spécieuse de l’équipe Obama, dans la manière de faire référence aux groupes terroristes comme l’EI et Al Qaïda, en les désignant comme de « violents extrémistes », en refusant de les nommer selon les termes « d’Islam radical », « Islamistes radicaux » et « Jihadistes ». Cette stratégie répète à l’infini la mauvaise interprétation du Président, en situant cette extrémisme violent comme une simple idéologie, tout en ne parvenant pas à reconnaître l’idéologie réelle qui guide Al Qaïda et l’EI, dans leur campagne mondiale de déclenchement d’actes de violence : l’Islam radical et la doctrine de la Chari’a. Plutôt que de reconnaître que ces groupes sont motivés par l’Islam radical, cette stratégie prétend affirmer qu’il ne s’agit que d’opportunistes qui exploitent l’instabilité, l’oppression et le manque d’opportunités économiques. Les preuves abondent pourtant que ce n’est pas le cas. Osama Ben Laden n’a pas formé Al Qaïda parce qu’il était pauvre : son père était milliardaire. L’Etat Islamique reçoit des financements de richissimes donneurs d’Arabie Saoudite, du Qatar et du Koweit. Les fameux terroristes islamistes « autoradicalisés » sont recrutés ou simplement inspirés par Internet, pour commettre des actes de terreur aux Etats-Unis,au Canada, en Australie, au Royaume-Uni, en France et, pourtant, ils vivent bien dans des sociétés où se présentent des opportunités économiques. Et il y a même pire que le refus de cette « nouvelle stratégie de sécurité nationale » de reconnaître la menace provenant de l’Islam radical. Elle minorise, en effet, totalement l’urgence d’agir contre cette menace, en affirmant que les Etats-Unis doivent faire preuve de « patience stratégique ». Susan Rice et le Président Obama a, récemment, déclenché une controverse, lorsqu’ils ont fait des déclarations identiques, qui minimisaient la menace venant de ces groupes terroristes, en prétendant que le terrorisme ne représente pas une « menace existentielle » pour les Etats-Unis. Fred Fleitz
Pendant qu’entre la Syrie et l’Irak mais aussi de l’Afrique sahélienne au Mahgreb, les djihadistes imposent leur barbarie à des millions de personnes …
Et qu’alors que du Liban au Yemen et au Soudan, nos futurs amis iraniens continuent à attiser les flammes du terrorisme tout en préparant leur bombe, chez nos amis saoudiens, on en est déjà à 26 décapitations en un peu plus d’un mois …
Qui après avoir comparé l’actuelle violence djihadiste à nos croisades et refusé de recevoir un dirigeant israélien invité à parler devant le Congrès, réduit le massacre de quatre juifs dans l’épicerie cachère Hyper cacher il y avait exactement un mois jour pour jour …
A un « tas de fanatiques vicieux et violents qui tirent au hasard dans un tas de gens dans une épicerie à Paris » …
Sur le blog d’une belle âme qui affirmait deux jours plus tôt …
Que ledit massacre n’avait « rien à voir avec les caricatures ou la religion » …
L’incapacité presque congénitale de l’Administration Obama, à l’instar de la BBC elle-même, à prendre la véritable mesure de ce qui se joue actuellement ?
Et ne pas s’inquiéter, avec nombre de commentateurs américains, de l’efficacité face à ladite menace de concepts tels que celui de « patience stratégique » ?
Le président américain, Barack Obama, a créé lundi une polémique après avoir expliqué que les quatre victimes françaises de confession juive assassinées début janvier par un djihadiste français dans une épicerie casher, ont été abattues « au hasard ».
« Il est tout à fait légitime pour le peuple américain d’être profondément préoccupé quand vous avez un tas de fanatiques vicieux et violents qui décapitent les gens ou qui tirent au hasard dans un tas de gens dans une épicerie à Paris », a déclaré le dirigeant américain lors d’une interview accordée à la chaine allemande Vox.
L’auteur de l’attentat, Amédy Coulibaly, avait déclaré à BFMTV qu’il avait ciblé les clients de l’épicerie casher « parce qu’ils étaient Juifs » ainsi que « pour venger les Palestiniens ».
Embarrassés par la sortie de leur président, les porte-paroles de l’administration Obama ont expliqué que les victimes ont été probablement tuées parce que présentes « au mauvais moment, au mauvais endroit » et ont rappelé que les États-Unis avaient qualifié « d’antisémite » l’attaque contre le commerce juif.
L’absence de Barack Obama à la marche républicaine à Paris en soutien aux victimes des attentats parisiens avait été vivement critiquée par la presse française et américaine.
Obama : comment lutter contre le terrorisme dont on occulte les causes ? Telle semble bien la question centrale que pose la polémique gonflée à bloc autour de la visite controversée de Binyamin Netanyahu et de son discours devant le Congrès.
Sous la pression de critiques grandissantes, qui se plaignent que le Président Obama n’a aucune stratégie susceptible de combattre l’Etat Islamique, la Conseillère à la Sécurité Nationale, Susan Rice, a dû déployer une nouveau plan de bataille, la semaine dernière.
Loin de résorber cette volée de mises en cause, les omissions, inexactitudes et incohérences ne feront qu’ajouter aux accusations formulées par les détracteurs de l’Administration Obama qu’elle ne connaît rien en matière de sécurité nationale.
L’une des erreurs les plus flagrantes de la nouvelle stratégie, c’est la façon dont elle colle à la pratique spécieuse de l’équipe Obama, dans la manière de faire référence aux groupes terroristes comme l’EI et Al Qaïda, en les désignant comme de « violents extrémistes », en refusant de les nommer selon les termes « d’Islam radical », « Islamistes radicaux » et « Jihadistes ». Cette stratégie répète à l’infini la mauvaise interprétation du Président, en situant cette extrémisme violent comme une simple idéologie, tout en ne parvenant pas à reconnaître l’idéologie réelle qui guide Al Qaïda et l’EI, dans leur campagne mondiale de déclenchement d’actes de violence : l’Islam radical et la doctrine de la Chari’a.
Plutôt que de reconnaître que ces groupes sont motivés par l’Islam radical, cette stratégie prétend affirmer qu’il ne s’agit que d’opportunistes qui exploitent l’instabilité, l’oppression et le manque d’opportunités économiques.
Les preuves abondent pourtant que ce n’est pas le cas. Osama Ben Laden n’a pas formé Al Qaïda parce qu’il était pauvre : son père était milliardaire. L’Etat Islamique reçoit des financements de richissimes donneurs d’Arabie Saoudite, du Qatar et du Koweit.
Les fameux terroristes islamistes « autoradicalisés » sont recrutés ou simplement inspirés par Internet, pour commettre des actes de terreur aux Etats-Unis,au Canada, en Australie, au Royaume-Uni, en France et, pourtant, ils vivent bien dans des sociétés où se présentent des opportunités économiques.
Et il y a même pire que le refus de cette « nouvelle stratégie de sécurité nationale » de reconnaître la menace provenant de l’Islam radical. Elle minorise, en effet, totalement l’urgence d’agir contre cette menace, en affirmant que les Etats-Unis doivent faire preuve de « patience stratégique ».
Susan Rice et le Président Obama a, récemment, déclenché une controverse, lorsqu’ils ont fait des déclarations identiques, qui minimisaient la menace venant de ces groupes terroristes, en prétendant que le terrorisme ne représente pas une « menace existentielle » pour les Etats-Unis.
Le fatras de propositions incohérentes, en matière de politique étrangère, fait partie des autres aspects de cette soi-disant « stratégie » : « le pouvoir en douceur » (smart power) et des prétentions douteuses à des succès en matière de relations extérieures. Ignorant totalement la détérioration de la sécurité en Irak et en Afghanistan depuis 2009, cette stratégie tisse des couronnes au retrait des troupes américaines de ces pays et affirme que les Etats-Unis y ont engagés dans des efforts en matière de contre-terrorisme, aussi bien que dans un effort complet en vue de détériorer et de vaincre finalement l’Etat Islamique.
Selon cette stratégie, les progrès du programme nucléaire iranien ont été stoppés et « nous avons clairement fait comprendre à l’Iran qu’il doit remplir ses obligations internationales et exposer la réalité de son programme nucléaire ». En se fondant sur les concessions énormes faites par les Etats-Unis à l’Iran, au cours de l’année passée et du fait que l’Iran n’a pas réduit son programme d’enrichissement d’uranium, ces prétentions apparaissent fausses. La stratégie souligne les succès d’un « rebalancement américain vers l’Asie » (qu’on connaît sous le nom de pivot vers l’Asie), même si, finalement, l’Administration a fait très peu dans ce domaine pour instaurer efficacement cette initiative.
Le changement climatique a aussi été ajouté à la liste prioritaire des menaces stratégiques des Etats-Unis. Les Etats-Unis ont un besoin urgent d’une stratégie nationale de sécurité claire, reconnaissant la menace de l’Islam radical comme une idéologie globale qui a déclaré la guerre à la civilisation occidentale. La nouvelle stratégie de sécurité nationale d’Obama est une occasion manquée qui démontre que le Président Obama demeure déterminé à nier l’évidence et à ne reconnaître d’aucune façon l’ampleur et la réalité de cette menace.
Le Centre d’étude des Politiques de Sécurité a présenté, dans son rapport, la Chari’a et l’Islam radical comme des menaces graves qui ne peuvent être vaincues aussi longtemps que les responsables américains refusent de les regarder en face. Ce Centre parraine, le mercredi 11 février, à Washington DC : « Le Sommet de la Défaite du Jihad ». Ce programme évoquera lanature de la menace isalmiste, une évaluation des politiques américaines pour y faire face et les meilleures approches en vue de vaincre cette menace.
Les participants attendus comprennent Le Sénateur du Texas, Ted Cruz, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, l’ancien Procureur Général Michael Mukaseyl’ancien porte-parole du Congrès, Newt Gingrich, le député hollandais Geert Wilders, Lord Malcolm Pearson de Grande-Bretagne, L’ancien Président de la Commission des Renseignements Pete Hoekstra, Le défenseur danois de la liberté d’expression Lars Hedegaard, et l’ancien procureur fédéral Andrew McCarthy.
Cet évènement sera rediffusé en direct sur le site du Centre pour les Politiques de Sécurité :
Fred Fleitz a couvert le programme nucléaire iranien pour la CIA, le Départment d’Etat,et la Commission des renseignements du Congrès. Il est actuellement chercheur principal au Centre des Politiques de Sécurité.
Voir également:
White House stands behind Obama’s claim that Paris shooter ‘randomly’ selected kosher deli and targets – but admits Jewish heritage was a factor
In an interview released Monday Obama referred to ‘violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris’
Today the White House argued Obama merely meant to say the victims ‘were not specifically targeted’ and ‘happened to randomly be in this deli’
The president’s spokesman eventually said that Obama has ‘no’ doubt the grocery was selected because it was frequented by Jews
But not before stating ‘there were people other than just Jews who were in that…deli’
Francesca Chambers
Dailymail.com
10 February 2015
President Barack Obama’s claim that a gunman who last month killed four French Jews inside a kosher deli ‘randomly’ selected the location and his targets came under heavy scrutiny today at a White House briefing, with multiple reporters badgering the president’s spokesman to admit a tie between the victims’ religion and their murders.
In an interview with Vox published on Monday Obama said, ‘It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.’
Today the White House Press Secretary argued that his boss merely meant to say they ‘were not specifically targeted’ and ‘were individuals who happened to randomly be in this deli.’
The shooter, Amedy Coulibaly, told French television station BFM-TV in a newly released interview that he picked kosher grocery Hyper Cacher because, according to the station, ‘he was targeting Jews.’
A journalist with the station says he also explained ‘why he did this: to defend oppressed Muslims…notably in Palestine.’
‘He claimed to be part of the Islamic State [ISIS] very clearly,’ BFM reporter Sarah-Lou Cohen said of the phone conversation with Coulibaly. ‘He said he had instructions from the caliphate. And then another very important element, evidently, as we were saying in the afternoon, he established a link with the Kouachi brothers.’
Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the brothers allegedly behind the attack on the Paris-based satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, were later killed in stand off with police, as was Couilbaly.
Coulibaly’s ties to ISIS are documented by a propaganda video taped by his wife, possibly a co-conspirator in the grocery store siege, in which she calls for French Muslims to carry out additional acts of terror.
The White House found itself in several testy back and forths with reporters this afternoon over Obama’s statement – provided to Vox more than a week ago but released just yesterday.
First asked about Obama’s remark by CNN’s Jim Acosta, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest replied, ‘I believe the point that the president was trying to make is that these individuals were not specifically targeted.’
He added: ‘These were individuals who happened to randomly be in this deli and were shot while they were there. And that is the point that the president was making.’
Flabbergasted, ABC News’ Jon Karl pressed Earnest to confirm that president believes the deli goers’ Jewish heritage were related to the assault.
‘It is clear from the terrorists and some of the writings they’ve put out afterward what their motivation was,’ Obama’s spokesman told him.
‘The adverb that the president chose was used to indicate that the individuals who were killed in that terrible, tragic incident were killed not because of who they were, but because of where they randomly happened to be.
Not satisfied, Karl again pointed out that they were in a kosher deli when they were killed, moments later contending that even if they weren’t personally targeted they were attacked because of their religion, to which Earnest told him ‘there were people other than just Jews who were in that…deli.’
‘Does he have any doubt…that deli was attacked because it was a kosher deli, it was not any random deli, it was a kosher deli,’ Karl eventually shouted at Earnest, who interrupted him to say, ‘no,’ Obama does not doubt that.
Picking up where Karl left off, seconds later Fox News’ White House Correspondent Ed Henry asked, why then, ‘didn’t the president acknowledge that? If he knows that, and it’s obvious, why didn’t he say that?’
‘The president has acknowledged that on many occasions when he’s had the opportunity to speak about this incident,’ Earnest tersely told him
‘But he didn’t there!’ Henry noted before moving on to another topic.
Chérif Kouachi, one of the alleged perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, spoke to a French journalist by phone at around 10 a.m. Paris time on Friday, according to the reporter. Shortly after, Kouachi was killed by police. In the call, he stated that he had been sent by al-Qaeda’s Yemen-based branch.
« I was sent, me, Chérif Kouachi, by al-Qaeda of Yemen, » he says in the call, mentioning Anwar al-Awlaki specifically.
He spoke to Igor Sahiri, a journalist from BFM-TV, who recorded the conversation. In a video clip above, the TV news channel plays part of the tape and discusses the call that yielded it. The channel chose not to broadcast the phone conversations because, at the time, Kouachi was still in a standoff with police.
According to BFM journalist Sarah-Lou Cohen, Koauchi went on to say that he was seeking revenge for the Prophet Mohammed.
« They explained as well that they deny having killed civilians, » Cohen said, paraphrasing from parts of the call that were not played on-air. « That’s important, because for them, the journalists at Charlie Hebdo were not civilians, they were targets, » Cohen said. « Then he continued, very calmly, explaining that they did not come to kill women and children but it’s us, the Westerners, he said, who are killing children in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Syria. »
« He spoke in a manner … that was very calm and very determined, » Cohen said, « as if he had also prepared answers. » It was « extremely troubling, » she said. « The message was to pass along his claim of responsibility. He intended that his claims be publicly known. »
In a separate interview slightly after 3 p.m. Paris time, the channel also spoke with Amedy Coulibaly. « That was a different situation, because we got a phone call, » Cohen said. « He called us because in fact he was looking to contact the police. »
« He claimed to be part of the Islamic State [ISIS] very clearly, » Cohen said. « He said he had instructions from the caliphate. And then another very important element, evidently, as we were saying in the afternoon, he established a link with the Kouachi brothers. »
Coulibaly told Alexis Delahousse, another BFM journalist, that he and the Kouachi brothers had planned their attacks together but had not been in touch since they began the operations. This detail has puzzled terrorism analysts, as al-Qaeda and ISIS are rivals rather than allies.
« Finally, he explained also why he did this: to defend oppressed Muslims, he said, notably in Palestine, » Cohen said. « And finally he explained his target, why this kosher store: because he was targeting Jews. »
Yes, Charlie Hebdo was a magazine that delighted in controversy and provocation. Yes, it skewered religion and took joy in giving offense. Yes, the magazine knowingly antagonized extremists — Charlie Hebdo’s web site had been hacked and its offices firebombed before today; French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius had asked of its cartoons, « Is it really sensible or intelligent to pour oil on the fire? » And yes, Charlie Hebdo’s editor said in 2012, prophetically, that « I prefer to die than live like a rat. »
But this isn’t about Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, any more than a rape is about what the victim is wearing, or a murder is about where the victim was walking.
What happened on Wednesday, according to current reports, is that two men went on a killing spree. Their killing spree, like most killing sprees, will have some thin rationale. Even the worst villains believe themselves to be heroes. But in truth, it was unprovoked slaughter. The fault lies with no one but them and their accomplices. Their crime isn’t explained by cartoons or religion. Plenty of people read Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons and managed to avoid responding with mass murder. Plenty of people follow all sorts of religions and somehow get through the day without racking up a body count. The answers to what happened today won’t be found in Charlie Hebdo’s pages. They can only be found in the murderers’ sick minds.
Today is a good day to honor Charlie Hebdo and to share its work. It’s a good day to do that because good people died today and we should remember them. It’s a good day to do that because much of the work in Charle Hebdo was brilliant and any day is a good day to share it.
Don’t allow extremists to set the terms of the conversation
But we shouldn’t buy into the bullshit narrative of a few madmen that their murders were a response to some cartoons. We shouldn’t buy into it even if we’re saying that murdering in response to cartoons is always wrong. This is related to a point Charlie Hebdo made often and well. As my colleague Max Fisher wrote about the magazine’s wonderful cover, « Love is Stronger Than Hate » (pictured above):
Part of Charlie Hebdo’s point was that respecting these taboos strengthens their censorial power. Worse, allowing extremists to set the limits of conversation validates and entrenches the extremists’ premises: that free speech and religion are inherently at odds (they are not), and that there is some civilizational conflict between Islam and the West (there isn’t).
These are also arguments, by the way, made by Islamophobes and racists, particularly in France, where hatred of Muslim immigrants from north and west Africa is a serious problem.
And that is exactly why Charlie Hebdo’s « Love is stronger than hate » cover so well captures the magazine’s oft-misunderstood mission and message. Yes, the slobbery kiss between two men is surely meant to get under the skin of any conservative Muslims who are also homophobic, but so too is it an attack on the idea that Muslims or Islam are the enemy, rather than extremism and intolerance.
Allowing extremists to set the limits of conversation validates and entrenches the extremists’ premises. That was true in the criticism of Charlie Hebdo’s covers, and it’s even truer in today’s crimes.
These murders can’t be explained by a close read of an editorial product, and they needn’t be condemned on free speech grounds. They can only be explained by the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong.
This is a tragedy. It is a crime. It is not a statement, or a controversy.
Each day seems to bring new testament to the nature of the Islamist terror threat, the latest casualty another American. If only it brought more clarity from the U.S. government about the threat.
On Tuesday U.S. officials confirmed the death of Kayla Jean Mueller, a 26-year-old humanitarian from Arizona who was snatched by the Islamic State while helping Syrian refugees. Neither the U.S. nor her family disclosed details of how she died, though in a statement President Obama blamed “unconscionable evil” and promised to “find and bring to justice the terrorists who are responsible for Kayla’s captivity and death.”
In a different context, however, the Commander in Chief was more equivocal. In an interview with the liberal Vox.com website, Mr. Obama explained that while terrorism is merely one danger among many such as climate change or cybersecurity, “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”
His choice of words was strange, given that the Charlie Hedbo assassins were explicit about their ideological and anti-Semitic reasons for targeting a kosher grocery. White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Tuesday didn’t help with his explanation: “The adverb that the President chose was used to indicate that the individuals who were killed in that terrible tragic incident were killed not because of who they were, but because of where they randomly happened to be.”
The State Department’s Jen Psaki also refused to explore the motivations of the killers, adding that “there were not all victims of one background or one nationality.” All the victims were Jewish.
This is the confusion that arises among those who are unwilling to confront the character of America’s enemies.
Acknowledging who the victims of Islamic terrorism are means acknowledging its motivations
David Harsanyi
The Federalist
February 10, 2015
During his sycophantic conversation with President Barack Obama, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias poses a “question” that I imagine reflects the opinion of many on the Left these days: “Do you think the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism and this kind of chaos, as opposed to a longer-term problem of climate change and epidemic disease?”
Obama:
Look, the point is this: my first job is to protect the American people. It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.
The president, in his own peripatetic way, ends up concurring with Yglesias’ appraisal of the world. Terrorism, the violent arm of a religious movement that threatens innocent lives and liberal ideals on every continent and people of every faith (including other Muslims), is entirely overblown when compared to a slight variation in the climate or some highly debatable assumptions about the future of human progress.
And, as you all know, there is a dearth of chilling stories about climate change in the media.
At least Obama was kind enough to acknowledge that Americans had some reason to be concerned about “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks.” As it turns out, these random people who got themselves shot in a “deli” in Paris happen to have been Jewish. The random people getting themselves shot at a satirical newspaper happened to have mocked Mohammad. And those 10 random people who were murdered and had their churches burned down by mobs in Niger last week, well they happened to be Christian folks.
It’s likely that all these victims would – with astonishing precision – be able to pinpoint both the religious affiliation and rationale of those responsible for their deaths. President Obama refuses to do the same. For the president, acknowledging who the victims of Islamic terrorism are means acknowledging the motives that drive it. Recognizing what drives a terrorist undermines the progressive theory that says this movement is merely a byproduct of shiftlessness, criminality and poverty rather than a movement driven by faith and political goals.
Gone are the days when were allowed to make (appropriate) distinctions between peaceful and radical Islam. Now we’re supposed to accept that these string of events are executed by aimless zealots, detached from any tradition or faith. Random. We are supposed to believe that this problem can be dealt with, as the president notes, in “the same way a big city mayor’s got to cut the crime rate down if he wants that city to thrive.”
Dealing with political Islam is just like getting rid of graffiti and waiting for gentrification. You know, if only Saudi Arabia had a few extra bucks laying around, we’d rid the world of all of these delinquents.
For Jews, there is another reality that wishful thinking can’t change. According to Pew, there is rampant anti-Semitism in the Islamic world. Not only among radical factions, but everywhere. In moderate Jordan, 97 percent of the folks unfavorable view of Jews (not Zionists, Jews). The ADL found that 74 percent of the folks surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa had anti-Semitic attitudes. The number was 24 percent in Western Europe and 34 percent in Eastern Europe. Not all of this aversion to Jews is equality vitriolic or dangerous, of course. But it is undeniable that in Europe there is increasing violence, and much of it comes from Muslims.
All of which makes Obama’s politically correct construing of events even more disturbing.
Put it this way: the president is more inclined to call out Christian crimes against the Rhineland Jews of 1096 than Islamic crimes against Jews today. He’d rather dissemble for the sake of political correctness, using heavy-handed historical comparisons that aren’t only irrelevant to contemporary discussions about religious violence, but a stretch even if we discussed them in the context of history.
It should go without saying that Americans deserve a more accurate conversation about the threats they face. Maintaining precision of language throughout a long interview is probably tough. So I imagine Obama’s liberal use of “folks” wasn’t meant in a dismissive way. I don’t believe he has a problem with Jews – though, as Jonathan Tobin puts it, he sure has a blind spot. And his contention that terrorism isn’t tied to any specific religion comports well with things he’s said before. There was little chance the president would say the words “Islamic terrorists” – actually, “Islam” doesn’t make an appearance at all– to strip the conversation of a reality. But there was nothing “random” or senseless about these events. The message was sent. It’s why French soldiers have to stand outside synagogues and satirical newspapers today.
It’s also why, incidentally, a random bunch of folks with a nuclear weapon might make the Jews even more nervous.
There has been a great deal of justified criticism about President Obama’s unwillingness to respond to terrorist outrages with the sort of moral leadership that can rally the West to fight back. His comments at last week’s National Prayer Breakfast in which he sought to create a false moral equivalency between ISIS’s horrific burning alive of a captured Jordanian pilot and the Christian West’s past sins during the Inquisition and even the Crusades have been rightly blasted for his tone-deaf approach to terrorism. The president seems so mired in his deep ambivalence about the West’s role in world history that he is unable to play his part as leader of the free world in what is, like it or not, a life-and-death struggle against truly evil forces. It is also revealed in his administration’s refusal to call Islamist terrorism by that name. But just as troubling is his unwillingness to address one of the primary characteristics of this brand of terror: anti-Semitism. In an interview with Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, he described the terror attack on a Paris kosher market as a “random” event rather than an act of murder motivated by Jew hatred. Though it won’t get the same attention as his outrageous speech last week, it gives us just as much insight into the president’s foreign-policy mindset.
It should be recalled that in the immediate aftermath of the shootings at the Hyper Cacher market by killers associated with those who perpetrated the Charlie Hebdo massacre days earlier, President Obama also refused to call it an act of anti-Semitism. That was, in its own way, as shocking as the president’s decision to not send any high-ranking U.S. official to the Paris unity march that took place to protest the murders or to go himself as did many other Western leaders.
But official American statements that did mention anti-Semitism and the subsequent rally boycott overtook this controversy. The kerfuffle over that initial comment was soon forgotten. But the president’s return to this topic has brought that statement back to mind.
His Vox comments are, in fact, far worse than his initial reaction which was more a matter of omission than a conscious twisting of events. Here’s what the president said in response to a question about whether the media is blowing terrorist incidents out of proportion:
It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.
Let’s first note that his characterization of the assailants again omits their Islamist loyalties and the fact that religion was the motivating factor for their crime. This is consistent with administration policy that seeks to cleanse ISIS, al-Qaeda, or other Islamists of any connection with the Muslim faith. This is absurd not just because it is wrong. It also puts Obama in the position of trying to play the pope of Islam who can decide who is or is not a real Muslim, a responsibility that no American president should try to usurp.
But it is also significant that once again the president chooses to treat a deliberate targeting of a Jewish business filled with Jewish customers as something that is random rather than an overt act of anti-Semitism. Doing so once might be excused as an oversight. The second time makes it a pattern that can’t be ignored.
This is a peculiar talking point especially since the increase of anti-Semitism in Europe with violent incidents going up every year is something that even the Obama State Department has dubbed a “rising tide” of hate.
Why does the president have such a blind spot when it comes to anti-Semitism? His critics will jump to conclusions that will tell us more about their views of Obama than about his thinking. But suffice it to say that this is a president who finds it hard to focus on the siege of Jews in Europe or of the State of Israel in the Middle East. Nor can it be entirely coincidental that a president who treats Israeli self-defense and concerns for its security as a bothersome irritant to his foreign policy or seeks to blame the Jewish state’s leaders for obstructing a peace process that was actually blown up by the Palestinians would have a blind spot about anti-Semitism.
To address the spread of violent anti-Semitism in Europe would require the administration to connect the dots between slaughters such as the ones that took place at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher and the hate spread by the Islamists of Iran with whom Obama is so keen on negotiating a new détente. To put these awful events in a context that properly labels them an outbreak of violent Muslim Jew-hatred would require the administration to rethink its policies toward Israel as well as Iran. And that is something this president has no intention of doing.
You can’t defeat an enemy that you refuse to call by his right name. That’s why ignoring Islamism and calling ISIS and the Paris killers mere “zealots” or “extremists” not only misses the point but also hampers the West’s ability to resist them. By the same token, the omission of any discussion of anti-Semitism about an event that was an unambiguous act of Jew hatred similarly undermines the effort to strike back at such atrocities. When a president calls one of the more egregious acts of anti-Semitism in recent years a mere “random” shooting, it trivializes the victims and places the U.S. on the wrong side of the moral divide. In doing so, Obama does the nation and the cause of freedom a grave disservice.
At the World Economic Forum last week, Secretary of State John Kerry argued that while extremists may cite Islam as a justification for terrorism, the world should refrain from using the term “Islamic radicals.” Extremism, Kerry maintained, is apart from Islam, and the millions who support or engage in violence in its name are driven by “criminal conduct rooted in alienation, poverty, thrill-seeking and other factors.”
This soothing half-baked philosophy is cant in the Obama Administration. So when ISIS takes credit for beheading the Japanese hostage Haruna Yukawa, it shouldn’t have been surprising that the most important thing Rick Stengel, an undersecretary of state for happy thoughts, could think to tweet to his followers was that the decapitation had, “Nothing religious about it.”
We’ve gone from incessantly offering (appropriate) distinctions between factions of Islam to fantasizing that terrorists are a bunch of shiftless underprivileged adrenaline junkies with no particular philosophy at all. Religion is an organized collection of beliefs that makes sense of existence. Under no definition of “faith” is there a stipulation that it must be devoid of any violence. And whether or not violence used in Islam is a distortion of the faith is for people of that religion to work out for themselves, not for a talking head from Vermont to decree.
If the administration is interested in seeing how this works, we don’t have to look farther than our good allies in Saudi Arabia, where the national flag features an inscription of the Islamic creed – “There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God” – which is neatly underlined by a sword. This, I think is fair to say, may insinuate that a coupling of violence and faith is indeed possible in modern religion.
Perhaps Barack Obama can ask new Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz when he pays his respects (an honor the victims in Paris did not receive) what the deal is. He could ask how women are thrown into the streets for public beheadings has anything to do with religion and violence. The Saudi government, after all, has defended the recent decapitation of a Burmese woman (caught on video) as compulsory to “implement the rulings of God.” It’s the ninth such execution this year. (All these beheadings sure are a weird coincidence, no?) Perhaps Saudi monarchs are driven by alienation and poverty when they are induced to flog writers who insult them? And perhaps Kerry has a better grasp of Islamic law than the Wahhabi sect running the religious police force in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam? I imagine he thinks he does.
I don’t propose invading the Arabian Peninsula, or anyone else for that matter. But George Bush, another House of Saud coddler, used to claim that U.S.’s fight in the Middle East was about promoting democracy. Obama has talked about how important it is for our diplomacy to mirror our values. In reality, of course, friendly autocrats help us fight stateless Islamic extremism and offer stability. King Abdullah and his successor have also acted as a counterbalance to Iran – a precarious situation we helped establish. (Though, under this president, we do not afford an Egyptian army that scuttled the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of that nation the same courtesy.)
So everyone understands why we ignore the fact that King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia became the world’s largest source of funds of Salafist jihadism and the fact that religious state institutions are the leading voices perpetuating that jihadism. Obama will pay his respects to the government in a nation that has no real elections, political parties or dissent. We ignore that, too. And Saudi Arabia also proves that governments run by certain faiths have been more inclined to create alienation, poverty and a whole lot of thrillseekers – even when in the fortuitous position of sitting on a wealth-producing commodity.
But surely there is some kernel of moral duty among American leaders to promote liberal values around the world. Juxtapose how this administration treats allies; how the president admonishes and undermines an elected leader he doesn’t particularly care for and, at the same time, reveres and celebrates the life of a degenerate dictator. King Abdullah had “about” 30 wives, and fathered “about” 35 children, according to sources. Some of them were only young teens when they were forced to wed the then middle-aged King. Some of these women remained prisoners for many decades against their will. Considering the human trafficking and white slavery that is generally overlooked by the monarchs, perhaps he really is a moderate. The freshly deceased King Abdullah, says the president, was “a candid leader who had the courage of his convictions, including his passionate belief in the importance of the U.S.-Saudi relationship as a force for stability and security in the Middle East.”
While this administration is having a meltdown over the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu will be speaking to congress about the threat Iranian nuclear ambitions, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is sponsoring an essay competition in the United States to Honor former Saudi King. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Frederick M. Padilla, the president of the National Defense University, want to challenge future students “while honoring the late king.” “This scholarly research competition presents NDU students with a unique opportunity to focus their research and writing efforts on relevant issues at the intersection of U.S. security interests and the Arab-Muslim world,” the release said.
It’s fair to say that every administration has gone out of its way to avoid insulting these immoral dictatorships. It’s just that so few have been as consistent and obsequious as this one.
ETATS-UNIS Selon les conservateurs, le président «insulte» les chrétiens…
Il y a trois thèmes qui font démarrer les républicains au quart de tour: Obamacare, l’oléoduc Keystone et l’islam. Jeudi, à l’occasion du petit-déjeuner annuel de prière, le président américain a voulu jouer les rassembleurs, dans un moment d’union spirituelle. C’est raté: toute la journée de vendredi, les conservateurs ont tiré à boulets rouges sur ses remarques.
Evoquant les violences et les actes «barbares» des djihadistes de Daesh (Isis, en anglais), Obama a invité les chrétiens à ne pas jeter la première pierre. «Nous montons sur nos grands chevaux mais souvenons-nous que pendant les croisades et l’inquisition, des actes terribles ont été commis au nom du Christ. Dans notre pays, nous avons eu l’esclavage, trop souvent justifié» par la religion.
«S’occuper de la menace de l’islam radical»
«Les commentaires du président au petit-déjeuner de prière sont les plus insultants que j’ai entendus de ma vie», a attaqué le républicain Jim Gilmore. «Il a insulté tous les Chrétiens des Etats-Unis. Cela prouve une fois de plus que Mr Obama ne croit pas en nos valeurs américaines et ne les partage pas.»
L’ex-candidat Rick Santorum, très catholique, estime, lui, que les mots présidentiels étaient «inappropriés alors que des Chrétiens sont décapités et persécutés au Moyen-Orient». «La menace chrétienne médiévale est sous contrôle, Mr le président. Il serait temps de s’occuper de la menace de l’islam radical d’aujourd’hui», a renchéri Bobby Jindal, qui pourrait se lancer dans la primaire républicaine. L’outrage est parfois une arme politique.
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: Welcome back to « Hannity. » Now more on the big two top stories of the day. Catching headlines, Brian Williams caught red handed and the president lecturing Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast. Here with reaction, author of the number one New York Times bestseller « Things that Matter, » Fox News contributor, the one and only Charles Krauthammer. Charles, good to see you, my friend.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Pleasure to be with you again.
HANNITY: What was your reaction to the prayer breakfast?
KRAUTHAMMER: I was stunned that the president could say something so at once banal and offensive. Here we are now two days away from an act shocking barbarism, the burning alive of a prisoner of war, and Obama’s message is that we should remember the crusades and the inquisition.
I mean, for him to say that all of us have sinned, all religions have been transgressed, is, you know, is adolescent stuff. Everyone knows that.
What’s important is what’s happening now. Christianity no longer goes on crusades and it gave up the inquisition a while ago. The Book of Joshua is knee deep in blood. That story is over too. The story of today, of our generation, is the fact that the overwhelming volume of the violence and the barbarism that we are seeing in the world from Nigeria to Paris all the way to Pakistan and even to the Philippines, the island of Mindanao in the Philippines —
HANNITY: Australia —
KRAUTHAMMER: — is coming from one source. And that’s from inside Islam. It is not the prevalent idea of Islam, but it is coming from Islam, as many Islamic leaders including the president of Egypt and many others have admitted. And there needs to be a change in Islam.
It is not a coincidence that all of these attacks on other religions are happening, all over the world, in a dozen countries, two dozen countries, all in the name of one religion. It’s not a coincidence. And for the president to be lecturing us and to say we shouldn’t get on our high horse and to not remember our own path is ridiculous. The present issue is Muslim radicalism and how to attack it.
HANNITY: I actually think —
KRAUTHAMMER: A lot of people are dying.
HANNITY: I think it’s not only ridiculous but it’s dangerous that he can’t identify this enemy. A quick example, the Jordanian reaction to the killing of the mass murder — the murder of this Jordanian pilot burned to death and then bulldozed, you know, compare the president’s reaction to James Foley and his beheading, a quick, you know, three-minute comment. Three minutes later he’s on the golf course for five hours, and no strong statement or reaction from the president.
KRAUTHAMMER: From Obama’s first speech at West Point in December 2009, ironically announcing the surge in Afghanistan, you could tell that his heart has never been in this fight, never. He’s the commander in chief and yet he announces one sentence after he talks about the surge, he talks about the day to withdraw. Everyone in the region knows that. Everyone in the Middle East knows that he took on the fight on ISIS only because of the public reaction to the video of the beheading of the two Americans. He never would have lifted a finger otherwise. He hasn’t helped the rebels in Syria. He has not given the weapons that Jordan needs. The Kurds, who are actually able, courageous, and well — and committed to the fight against is, still cannot get direct arms from the United States.
HANNITY: Yes.
KRAUTHAMMER: The world knows this. Our enemies know it and our friends know it.
HANNITY: And so not only West Point but the first summer being president when he goes to a foreign country apologizing at foreign capitals for America for sins real and even imagined.
Let me transition and ask you, we work in the media business. You’ve been following the story of Brian Williams of NBC News.
KRAUTHAMMER: Yes.
HANNITY: To me it’s bewildering. I’ve met him. He seemed like a nice guy. Why would somebody risk their credibility in a totally fabricated story that got bigger and bigger and bigger every time he told it?
KRAUTHAMMER: Look, this is a big mistake on his part. I don’t like to pile on. I mean, all of us have embellished. Once you start to embellish you’re trapped in it and you can’t escape. Let’s remember Hillary made the story about being shot at in Bosnia.
HANNITY: I know. That’s true.
KRAUTHAMMER: And she is the odds on favorite to be the Democratic nominee of the presidency. So course you expect a politician to lie and not a broadcaster. So I can understand the difference. But what stuns me is how dumb this is. If you’re going to make up a story, do it when there aren’t other people around. You know, you tell a story —
(LAUGHTER)
HANNITY: If you’re going to tell a lie, don’t have witnesses, is that what you’re saying?
KRAUTHAMMER: Exactly. You tell a story about wrestling a lion to the ground because generally speaking lions don’t have access to the Internet. But you don’t do it about an event that everybody saw.
HANNITY: That’s a good point.
KRAUTHAMMER: You know in the end you’re going to be unmasked about it.
HANNITY: All right, last question. The phenomenon of « American Sniper, » I’ve interviewed Chris Kyle’s wife, brother, his father. They’re amazing people. He was an amazing man, more confirmed kills than anybody else in military history. But yet people still pile on. The latest person is Jesse Ventura on our mutual friend Alan Colmes’ radio show. Here’s what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, ALAN COLMES RADIO, FEB. 3)
JESSE VENTURA: He was obviously a great sniper. He’s obviously a great shot. He obviously did his job correctly. Alan, let me fire this one at you. Do you think the Nazis have heroes?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HANNITY: What is it about people that just have total contempt and lack of understanding for what it is that we are given as a gift from those brave men and women that the American people obviously responded to at the box office?
KRAUTHAMMER: I think it’s fairly simple. I think the whole fight over the meaning and popularity of the movie is a surrogate for rearguing the war in Iraq. What worries the left is that they thought they won the argument. And here’s a movie amazingly popular that actually acknowledges the courage and heroism and sacrifice of those who fought in Iraq. And I think that is sort of unpalatable.
Remember, Hollywood put out half a dozen anti-war, anti-Iraq, we are the bad guy movies, and nobody went to see any of them. And here is one movie which celebrates a courageous soldier, and it is extremely popular and actually rather artistically done, well-done by Clint Eastwood. And the left has to now re-litigate the war because they thought they had won the argument and they want to make sure that they retain that at least ideological victory.
HANNITY: All right, Charles Krauthammer, always good to see you. Thank you so much for being with us.
09 février 2015
Agence France-Presse
WASHINGTON
Le premier ministre israélien Benyamin Nétanyahou a dit lundi sa détermination à prononcer un discours sur le nucléaire iranien en mars à Washington, mais n’y verra pas Barack Obama, qui a invoqué des raisons protocolaires pour justifier son refus.
«Je suis déterminé à prononcer un discours devant le Congrès, c’est pourquoi je suis décidé à me rendre à Washington et à présenter la position d’Israël» sur le dossier iranien, a lancé M. Nétanyahou lors d’une réunion électorale, à un peu plus d’un mois des législatives, prévues le 17 mars.
La Maison-Blanche a fait part de son irritation à la suite de l’annonce de l’invitation lancée par des élus républicains du Congrès à M. Nétanyahou.
Le vice-président américain Joe Biden a annoncé qu’il serait absent lors du discours qui doit avoir lieu le 3 mars.
Et Barack Obama a de nouveau explicité lundi sa décision de ne pas rencontrer M. Nétanyahou lors de son séjour à Washington.
«Notre politique est de ne jamais organiser de rencontres avec des dirigeants avant les élections», a déclaré le président américain lors d’une conférence de presse conjointe avec la chancelière allemande Angela Merkel.
La relation entre les États-Unis et Israël «transcende les partis. C’est un lien indestructible, nous sommes attachés à la sécurité d’Israël, nous partageons des valeurs», a-t-il ajouté.
Mais le président américain a reconnu avoir «un vrai différend» avec Israël au sujet de l’Iran, surtout depuis que M. Nétanyahou a annoncé qu’il allait s’exprimer devant le Congrès, dont des élus menacent d’adopter de nouvelles sanctions contre Téhéran.
En Israël, plusieurs chefs de file de l’opposition centriste et de gauche en Israël, ainsi que de nombreux commentateurs ont multiplié les appels à Benyamin Nétanyahou à annuler son discours pour ne pas fragiliser la «relation spéciale» entre les États-Unis et leur pays.
M. Nétanyahou a rejeté toutes ces pressions en expliquant qu’un «mauvais accord est en préparation avec l’Iran qui va mettre en danger l’existence de l’État d’Israël. Il est de mon devoir de tout faire pour l’empêcher».
«Depuis la création de l’État d’Israël jusqu’à aujourd’hui, il y a eu des divergences de fond entre Israël et les États-Unis, mais nos relations sont restées solides et il en sera de même cette fois-ci», a prédit le premier ministre.
En novembre, l’Iran et le groupe 5+1 (États-Unis, France, Royaume-Uni, Russie, Chine et Allemagne) se sont entendus pour parvenir d’abord à un accord politique avant le 31 mars et ensuite en finaliser les détails techniques pour un accord global avant le 1er juillet.
Mais ces négociations piétinent, laissant craindre une nouvelle extension des discussions, déjà prorogées à deux reprises.
M. Obama a prévenu lundi l’Iran qu’il n’y aurait pas de prolongation au-delà du 31 mars et que Téhéran devait dorénavant se décider.
«Les problèmes ne sont plus techniques. Les problèmes sont maintenant de savoir si l’Iran a la volonté politique et le désir de conclure un accord», a-t-il souligné.
Non, les frères Kouachi ne sont pas des terroristes. Du moins pas aux yeux des journalistes du service arabophone de la BBC, le plus important service hors langue anglaise de la radio publique britannique, suivi chaque semaine par près de 36 millions d’auditeurs. Son responsable, Tarik Kafala, s’en est expliqué le 26 janvier dans une interview au quotidien The Independent : « Nous tentons d’éviter de décrire quelqu’un comme un terroriste, ou un geste comme étant terroriste. »
La raison ? La notion de « terrorisme » est politiquement trop connotée, note Tarik Kafala, qui explique que sa chaîne évite d’employer le terme « terroriste ». Dans le cas des attentats de Paris, on a immédiatement entendu parler d' »attaques terroristes » et du déploiement de la « police anti-terroriste » dans les rues de la capitale française. « Clairement, tous les officiels et les commentateurs utilisent ce mot pour qu’il soit repris par tous les médias », ajoute le journaliste.
Aucune définition internationale claire
D’une manière générale, la BBC a des règles éditoriales spécifiques concernant le terme « terrorisme », rappelle The Independent. Sans interdire l’utilisation de ce terme, la chaîne demande à ses journalistes d’être « très attentifs » lorsqu’ils évoquent des actes considérés comme des actes de terreur, expliquant qu’il y a des termes plus précis pour les expliquer que le mot « terrorisme ». En anglais, le mot « terroriste » n’a pas non plus été utilisé par la BBC pour désigner les frères Kouachi.
Même s’il est sans doute l’un des plus utilisés aujourd’hui dans le monde, le terme « terrorisme » ne fait l’objet d’aucune définition internationale claire, rappelle enfin Tarik Kafala : « Les Nations unies ont tenté pendant une décennie de définir ce mot, sans y parvenir. C’est très délicat. Nous savons ce qu’est la violence politique, nous savons ce que sont les meurtres, les attentats et les fusillades et nous pouvons les décrire. Et cela explique bien plus de choses, à nos yeux, qu’utiliser le mot ‘terrorisme’. »
In his 2007 book The Audacity of Hope, then-Sen. Barack Obama laid out his theory of America’s political and policy problems as it stood on the eve of his first presidential campaign. He worried, he said, about « the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics. »
On January 23, he sat down with Vox for a wide-ranging interview about his theory of America’s political and policy problems as it stands at the beginning of the seventh year of his presidency. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the first part of the conversation, which focused on domestic policy and politics. You can find the second half, which focuses on America’s role in the world, here.
Ezra Klein
The economy is growing. We have very high corporate profits. We have a record stock market. And yet for decades now, we’ve not been seeing significant wage increases for the American people. How have we gotten to a point where businesses can be doing so well but workers don’t necessarily share in that prosperity? 1
1 Corporate profits and workers’ wages
as a share of GDP
Source: St. Louis Fed
Barack Obama
Well, this has been at least a three-decade-long trend. And this was a major topic in my State of the Union address. We obviously came in at a time of enormous crisis, and the first task was making sure we didn’t have a complete global economic meltdown. The steps we took, whether making sure the financial system was functioning — saving the auto industry, encouraging state and local spending — all those things made a difference in buoying the economy. And then it’s been a hard but steady slog to the point where now we’re growing at a robust pace and unemployment has come down faster than any time in the last 30 years.
Obama on why income inequality has skyrocketed
In some ways we’re now back to the position where we can focus on what is this longer-term trend, and that is a larger and larger share of wealth and income going to the very top, and the middle class or folks trying to get into the middle class feeling increasingly squeezed because their wages have stagnated.
Now, there are a whole bunch of reasons for that. Some of it has to do with technology and entire job sectors being eliminated — travel agents, bank tellers, a lot of middle management — because of efficiencies with the internet and a paperless office. A lot of it has to do with globalization and the rest of the world catching up. Post-World War II, we just had some enormous structural advantages because our competitors had been devastated by war, and we had also made investments that put us ahead of the curve, whether in education or infrastructure or research and development.
And around the ’70s and ’80s and then accelerating beyond that, those advantages went away at the same time as, because of technology, companies are getting a lot more efficient. One last component of this is that workers increasingly had less leverage because of changes in labor laws and the ability for capital to move and labor not to move. 2 You combine all that stuff, and it’s put workers in a tougher position. So our job now is to create additional tools that, number one, make sure that everybody’s got a baseline of support to be able to succeed in a constantly moving economy. Whether it’s health care that survives job loss. Whether it is making sure we have child care that allows a two-working-household family to prosper while still caring for their kids. Having a certain baseline in terms of wages, through the minimum wage. 3 So that’s one set of issues.
2 Union membership, in millions
Source: Pew Research Center
3 Because of inflation, today’s federal minimum wage of $7.25 is worth significantly less than the minimum wage in the ’70s. The Obama administration has proposed raising it to $10.10.
A second set of issues then becomes: how do we make sure that everybody has the tools to succeed in an economy where they constantly have to adapt? And how do they move up the value chain, essentially because they can work in higher-wage, higher-skill professions, and were able to compete for those jobs internationally?
Then the third thing is making sure that we have an economy that’s productive. Now, if we do all those things, then what I’m confident about is that we can continue to lower the unemployment rate, increase the participation rate, and continue to grow and increase productivity. We’re still going to have a broader, longer-term, global question, and that is: how do we make sure that the folks at the very top are doing enough of their fair share? The winner-take-all aspect of this modern economy means that you’ve got some people who just control enormous amounts of wealth. We don’t really resent their success; on the other hand, just as a practical matter, if we’re going to pay for schools, roads, et cetera, and you’ve got, you know, 50 people or 80 people having as much wealth as 3 billion, you know you’re going to have problems making sure that we’re investing enough in the common good to be able to move forward. 4 So that’s a long-term question. But right now, there’s some very specific things we can do that can make a difference and help middle-class families. And that’s why I called it middle-class economics.
4 It’s worth noting that this statistic is as much a reflection of global indebtedness as global wealth.
Ezra Klein
To focus a bit on that long-term question, does that put us in a place where redistribution becomes, in a sense, a positive good in and of itself? Do we need the government playing the role not of powering the growth engine — which is a lot of what had to be done after the financial crisis — but of making sure that while that growth engine is running, it is ensuring that enough of the gains and prosperity is shared so that the political support for that fundamental economic model remains strong?
Barack Obama
That’s always been the case. I don’t think that’s entirely new. The fact of the matter is that relative to our post-war history, taxes now are not particularly high or particularly progressive compared to what they were, say, in the late ’50s or the ’60s. 5 And there’s always been this notion that for a country to thrive there are some things, as Lincoln says, that we can do better together than we can do for ourselves. And whether that’s building roads, or setting up effective power grids, or making sure that we’ve got high-quality public education — that teachers are paid enough — the market will not cover those things. And we’ve got to do them together. Basic research falls in that category. So that’s always been true.
5 The history of effective federal tax rates in America
Source: Quartz/The Tax Foundation
I think that part of what’s changed is that a lot of that burden for making sure that the pie was broadly shared took place before government even got involved. 6 If you had stronger unions, you had higher wages. If you had a corporate culture that felt a sense of place and commitment so that the CEO was in Pittsburgh or was in Detroit and felt obliged, partly because of social pressure but partly because they felt a real affinity toward the community, to re-invest in that community and to be seen as a good corporate citizen. Today what you have is quarterly earning reports, compensation levels for CEOs that are tied directly to those quarterly earnings. You’ve got international capital that is demanding maximizing short-term profits. And so what happens is that a lot of the distributional questions that used to be handled in the marketplace through decent wages or health care or defined benefit pension plans — those things all are eliminated. And the average employee, the average worker, doesn’t feel any benefit.
6 What Obama is talking about here is the difference between pre-tax and post-tax inequality. It’s possible to have low inequality either because the market itself spreads gains widely, or because the government intervenes at tax time to spread gains widely. Germany and Britain have higher pre-tax inequality than the US, but lower actual inequality because the government does so much through taxes and transfers.
So part of our job is, what can government do directly through tax policy? What we’ve proposed, for example, in terms of capital gains — that would make a big difference in our capacity to give a tax break to a working mom for child care. And that’s smart policy, and there’s no evidence that would hurt the incentives of folks at Google or Microsoft or Uber not to invent what they invent or not to provide services they provide. It just means that instead of $20 billion, maybe they’ve got 18, right? But it does mean that Mom can go to work without worrying that her kid’s not in a safe place.
We also still have to focus on the front end. Which is even before taxes are paid, are there ways that we can increase the bargaining power: making sure that an employee has some measurable increases in their incomes and their wealth and their security as a consequence of an economy that’s improving. And that’s where issues like labor laws make a difference. That’s where say in shareholder meetings and trying to change the culture in terms of compensation at the corporate level could make a difference. And there’s been some interesting conversations globally around issues like inclusive capitalism and how we can make it work for everybody.
Ezra Klein
When you drill into that pre-tax portion, one thing you can find in wages is health-care costs.
Barack Obama
Yeah.
Ezra Klein
And when you drill deeper into the health-care costs, one thing you find is that a major piece of why Americans pay so much more is that when we go to a hospital, an MRI, or an appendectomy, or even a bottle of cholesterol drugs just costs much more for an American to buy than it does in Germany, in Japan, in Canada, in Great Britain. Why do you think Americans pay so much higher health-care prices than folks in other countries? 7
7 The seminal paper on this is the wonderfully named « It’s the Prices, Stupid: Why the United States Is So Different From Other Countries. »
Barack Obama
Well, you know there are a lot of theories about this. But I think the evidence points to a couple of key factors. One is that we’ve got a third-party system. Mostly we’ve got a system where everybody gets their health insurance through their employers. Obviously the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, helps to cover the gap for those who aren’t in that system. But for those of us who have an insurer, we don’t track it. And the market then becomes really opaque and really hard to penetrate. Health providers are able to, I think, charge without much fear that somebody’s looking over their shoulders and asking, well, why does this cost that much?
That’s one of the reasons [that with] the Affordable Care Act, a lot of the attention’s been on making sure that the uninsured have peace of mind, and people who currently have insurance but at some point might lose it or have pre-existing conditions are going to have it. That’s obviously the moral basis for what we did. But people haven’t been paying as much attention to the delivery-system reforms that we’re trying to institute through the Affordable Care Act as well.
I can’t take credit for all four years of the lowest health-care inflation in the last 50 that we’ve seen since the Affordable Care Act passed. 8 Some of the trends, I think, were already on their way. But we are accelerating a lot of reforms. For example, what do we do to make sure that instead of paying a doctor in a hospital for just providing a service, let’s make sure that they’re being rewarded for a good outcome? Which may mean in some cases fewer tests or a less expensive generic drug, or just making sure that all your employees are washing your hands so that you’re cutting the infection rate, or making sure that hospitals are reimbursed when there’s a lower readmissions rate, as opposed to when they’re doing more stuff. And using Medicare as a lever, I think, is creating an environment in the health-care field where we can start getting better outcomes and lower costs at the same time. 9 There are still going to be those who argue that unless you get a single-payer system, you’re never going to get all the efficiencies. There’s certain areas like drugs, where the fact that Congress — and the Republican Party in particular — has been resistant to letting drug makers and Medicare negotiate for the lowest price. It results in us paying a lot more than we should. But if we’re paying 4, 5, 6, 8 percent more than other countries for the same outcomes, I’d be pretty happy where we’re only paying 2 or 3 percent more. Because that represents hundreds of billions of dollars, and means we can do a lot with that money.
8 Annual growth in health-care spending
Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
9 The White House is proposing tying 85 percent of all Medicare payments to outcomes by the end of 2016 — rising to 90 percent by 2018.
Ezra Klein
When you talk about Medicare as a lever, Medicare tends to pay a lot less per service than private insurers by a margin. Before single-payer there’s also this idea you hear occasionally of letting private insurers band together with Medicare, with Medicaid, to jointly negotiate prices. 10 Do you think that’s a good idea?
10 The technical term for this is « all-payer rate setting. »
Barack Obama
You know, I think that moving in the direction where consumers and others can have more power in the marketplace, particularly when it comes to drugs, makes a lot of sense. Now, you’ll hear from the drug companies that part of the reason other countries pay less for drugs is they don’t innovate; we, essentially through our system, subsidize the innovation, and other countries are free riders. There’s probably a little bit of truth to that, but when you look at the number of breakthrough drugs and the amount of money that drug companies now are putting into research and where they’re putting it, a whole lot of it is actually in redesigning, modestly, existing drugs so they can renew patents and maintain higher prices and higher profits. That’s not entirely true, but there’s some of that. So there is a lot of savings that could be achieved while still making sure that our drug industry is the best in the world, and will still be making a healthy profit.
Obama on why he’s such a polarizing president
Ezra Klein
To turn a bit towards politics, at this point, according to the polls, you are the most polarizing president really since we began polling. 11 But before you, the record was set by George W. Bush, and before George W. Bush the record was set by Bill Clinton. It seems that there’s something structural happening there in terms of party polarization and the way it affects approval ratings and cooperation with presidents. In your State of the Union, you struck back at critics who say that the idea of healing some of these divisions is naïve or impossible. So when you welcome your successor into office, what would you tell them is worth trying that you think can still work, that would reduce the polarization?
11 Presidents’ popularity gaps
Source: Gallup
Barack Obama
Well, there are a couple of things that in my mind, at least, contribute to our politics being more polarized than people actually are. And I think most people just sense this in their daily lives. Everybody’s got a family member or a really good friend from high school who is on the complete opposite side of the political spectrum. And yet, we still love them, right? Everybody goes to a soccer game, or watching their kids, coaching, and they see parents who they think are wonderful people, and then if they made a comment about politics, suddenly they’d go, « I can’t believe you think that! » But a lot of it has to do with the fact that a) the balkanization of the media means that we just don’t have a common place where we get common facts and a common worldview the way we did 20, 30 years ago. And that just keeps on accelerating, you know. And I’m not the first to observe this, but you’ve got the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh folks and then you’ve got the MSNBC folks and the — I don’t know where Vox falls into that, but you guys are, I guess, for the brainiac-nerd types. But the point is that technology which brings the world to us also allows us to narrow our point of view. That’s contributed to it.
Gerrymandering contributes to it. 12 There’s no incentive for most members of Congress, on the House side at least, in congressional districts, to even bother trying to appeal. And a lot of it has to do with just unlimited money. So people are absorbing an entirely different reality when it comes to politics, even though the way they’re living their lives and interacting with each other isn’t that polarizing. So my advice to a future president is increasingly try to bypass the traditional venues that create divisions and try to find new venues within this new media that are quirkier, less predictable.
12 For an interesting discussion of the evidence around gerrymandering and political polarization, see Vox’s gerrymandering card stack.
You know, yesterday I did three interviews with YouTube stars that generally don’t spend a lot of time talking about politics. And the reason we did it is because they’re reaching viewers who don’t want to be put in some particular camp. On the other hand, when you talk to them very specifically about college costs or about health care or about any of the other things that touch on their individual lives, it turns out that you can probably build a pretty good consensus.
Now, that doesn’t ignore the fact that I would love to see some constitutional process that would allow us to actually regulate campaign spending the way we used to, and maybe even improve it. I’d love to see changes at the state level that reduce political gerrymandering. So there’s all kinds of structural things that I’d like to see that I think would improve this but, you know, there’ve been periods in the past where we’ve been pretty polarized. I think there just wasn’t polling around. As I recall, there was a whole civil war — that was a good example of polarization that took place.
Ezra Klein
Do you think if we don’t get some of those structural reforms, and more to the point, if we continue along this path, in terms of where the parties are in Congress, are there ways to govern with polarization? It occurs to me that [this was] your argument when you came to office. But before you, Bush was a « uniter not a divider, » and before him Clinton, who was going to moderate and change the Democratic party with his sort of Third Way approach. The last couple of presidents have come to office promising the way they would get things done is to reduce polarization. Is there an argument or an approach that can be made to govern amidst polarization?
Barack Obama
A couple observations. Number one is that in American history — even during the so-called golden age where, you know, you had liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats and there was deal-cutting going on in Congress — generally speaking, big stuff didn’t get done unless there was a major crisis and/or you had big majorities of one party controlling the Congress and a president of the same party. I mean, that’s just been the history. There have been exceptions, but that’s often been the case in terms of big-muscle movements in the political system. And you know, my first two years in office when I had a Democratic majority and Democratic House and Democratic Senate, we were as productive as any time since Lyndon Johnson. And when the majority went away, stuff got blocked.
Probably the one thing that we could change without a constitutional amendment that would make a difference here would be the elimination of the routine use of the filibuster in the Senate. 13 Because I think that does, in an era in which the parties are more polarized, it almost ensures greater gridlock and less clarity in terms of the positions of the parties. There’s nothing in the Constitution that requires it. The framers were pretty good about designing a House, a Senate, two years versus six-year terms, every state getting two senators. There were a whole bunch of things in there to assure that a majority didn’t just run rampant. The filibuster in this modern age probably just torques it too far in the direction of a majority party not being able to govern effectively and move forward its platform. And I think that’s an area where we can make some improvement.
13 For more on the filibuster, see Vox’s card stack on Congressional dysfunction.
Ezra Klein
One of the powerful things that’s happened as polarization has increased politically is it’s begun structuring people’s other identities. The one I’m particularly interested in here is race. If you look back at polling around the OJ Simpson verdict or the Bernhard Goetz shooting in New York, Republicans and Democrats — you basically couldn’t tell them apart. Now you look at the Zimmerman verdict or you look at what’s going on in Ferguson, and opinion on racial issues is very sharply split by party. 14 Do you worry about the merging of racial and partisan identity?
In his 2007 book The Audacity of Hope, then-Sen. Barack Obama laid out his theory of America’s political and policy problems as it stood on the eve of his first presidential campaign. He worried, he said, about « the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics. »
On January 23, he sat down with Vox for a wide-ranging interview about his theory of America’s political and policy problems as it stands at the beginning of the seventh year of his presidency. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the first part of the conversation, which focused on domestic policy and politics. You can find the second half, which focuses on America’s role in the world, here.
Ezra Klein
The economy is growing. We have very high corporate profits. We have a record stock market. And yet for decades now, we’ve not been seeing significant wage increases for the American people. How have we gotten to a point where businesses can be doing so well but workers don’t necessarily share in that prosperity? 1
1 Corporate profits and workers’ wages
as a share of GDP
Source: St. Louis Fed
Barack Obama
Well, this has been at least a three-decade-long trend. And this was a major topic in my State of the Union address. We obviously came in at a time of enormous crisis, and the first task was making sure we didn’t have a complete global economic meltdown. The steps we took, whether making sure the financial system was functioning — saving the auto industry, encouraging state and local spending — all those things made a difference in buoying the economy. And then it’s been a hard but steady slog to the point where now we’re growing at a robust pace and unemployment has come down faster than any time in the last 30 years.
Obama on why income inequality has skyrocketed
See more videos from the Obama interview
In some ways we’re now back to the position where we can focus on what is this longer-term trend, and that is a larger and larger share of wealth and income going to the very top, and the middle class or folks trying to get into the middle class feeling increasingly squeezed because their wages have stagnated.
Now, there are a whole bunch of reasons for that. Some of it has to do with technology and entire job sectors being eliminated — travel agents, bank tellers, a lot of middle management — because of efficiencies with the internet and a paperless office. A lot of it has to do with globalization and the rest of the world catching up. Post-World War II, we just had some enormous structural advantages because our competitors had been devastated by war, and we had also made investments that put us ahead of the curve, whether in education or infrastructure or research and development.
And around the ’70s and ’80s and then accelerating beyond that, those advantages went away at the same time as, because of technology, companies are getting a lot more efficient. One last component of this is that workers increasingly had less leverage because of changes in labor laws and the ability for capital to move and labor not to move. 2 You combine all that stuff, and it’s put workers in a tougher position. So our job now is to create additional tools that, number one, make sure that everybody’s got a baseline of support to be able to succeed in a constantly moving economy. Whether it’s health care that survives job loss. Whether it is making sure we have child care that allows a two-working-household family to prosper while still caring for their kids. Having a certain baseline in terms of wages, through the minimum wage. 3 So that’s one set of issues.
2 Union membership, in millions
Source: Pew Research Center
3 Because of inflation, today’s federal minimum wage of $7.25 is worth significantly less than the minimum wage in the ’70s. The Obama administration has proposed raising it to $10.10.
A second set of issues then becomes: how do we make sure that everybody has the tools to succeed in an economy where they constantly have to adapt? And how do they move up the value chain, essentially because they can work in higher-wage, higher-skill professions, and were able to compete for those jobs internationally?
Then the third thing is making sure that we have an economy that’s productive. Now, if we do all those things, then what I’m confident about is that we can continue to lower the unemployment rate, increase the participation rate, and continue to grow and increase productivity. We’re still going to have a broader, longer-term, global question, and that is: how do we make sure that the folks at the very top are doing enough of their fair share? The winner-take-all aspect of this modern economy means that you’ve got some people who just control enormous amounts of wealth. We don’t really resent their success; on the other hand, just as a practical matter, if we’re going to pay for schools, roads, et cetera, and you’ve got, you know, 50 people or 80 people having as much wealth as 3 billion, you know you’re going to have problems making sure that we’re investing enough in the common good to be able to move forward. 4 So that’s a long-term question. But right now, there’s some very specific things we can do that can make a difference and help middle-class families. And that’s why I called it middle-class economics.
4 It’s worth noting that this statistic is as much a reflection of global indebtedness as global wealth.
Ezra Klein
To focus a bit on that long-term question, does that put us in a place where redistribution becomes, in a sense, a positive good in and of itself? Do we need the government playing the role not of powering the growth engine — which is a lot of what had to be done after the financial crisis — but of making sure that while that growth engine is running, it is ensuring that enough of the gains and prosperity is shared so that the political support for that fundamental economic model remains strong?
Barack Obama
That’s always been the case. I don’t think that’s entirely new. The fact of the matter is that relative to our post-war history, taxes now are not particularly high or particularly progressive compared to what they were, say, in the late ’50s or the ’60s. 5 And there’s always been this notion that for a country to thrive there are some things, as Lincoln says, that we can do better together than we can do for ourselves. And whether that’s building roads, or setting up effective power grids, or making sure that we’ve got high-quality public education — that teachers are paid enough — the market will not cover those things. And we’ve got to do them together. Basic research falls in that category. So that’s always been true.
5 The history of effective federal tax rates in America
Source: Quartz/The Tax Foundation
I think that part of what’s changed is that a lot of that burden for making sure that the pie was broadly shared took place before government even got involved. 6 If you had stronger unions, you had higher wages. If you had a corporate culture that felt a sense of place and commitment so that the CEO was in Pittsburgh or was in Detroit and felt obliged, partly because of social pressure but partly because they felt a real affinity toward the community, to re-invest in that community and to be seen as a good corporate citizen. Today what you have is quarterly earning reports, compensation levels for CEOs that are tied directly to those quarterly earnings. You’ve got international capital that is demanding maximizing short-term profits. And so what happens is that a lot of the distributional questions that used to be handled in the marketplace through decent wages or health care or defined benefit pension plans — those things all are eliminated. And the average employee, the average worker, doesn’t feel any benefit.
6 What Obama is talking about here is the difference between pre-tax and post-tax inequality. It’s possible to have low inequality either because the market itself spreads gains widely, or because the government intervenes at tax time to spread gains widely. Germany and Britain have higher pre-tax inequality than the US, but lower actual inequality because the government does so much through taxes and transfers.
So part of our job is, what can government do directly through tax policy? What we’ve proposed, for example, in terms of capital gains — that would make a big difference in our capacity to give a tax break to a working mom for child care. And that’s smart policy, and there’s no evidence that would hurt the incentives of folks at Google or Microsoft or Uber not to invent what they invent or not to provide services they provide. It just means that instead of $20 billion, maybe they’ve got 18, right? But it does mean that Mom can go to work without worrying that her kid’s not in a safe place.
We also still have to focus on the front end. Which is even before taxes are paid, are there ways that we can increase the bargaining power: making sure that an employee has some measurable increases in their incomes and their wealth and their security as a consequence of an economy that’s improving. And that’s where issues like labor laws make a difference. That’s where say in shareholder meetings and trying to change the culture in terms of compensation at the corporate level could make a difference. And there’s been some interesting conversations globally around issues like inclusive capitalism and how we can make it work for everybody.
Ezra Klein
When you drill into that pre-tax portion, one thing you can find in wages is health-care costs.
Barack Obama
Yeah.
Ezra Klein
And when you drill deeper into the health-care costs, one thing you find is that a major piece of why Americans pay so much more is that when we go to a hospital, an MRI, or an appendectomy, or even a bottle of cholesterol drugs just costs much more for an American to buy than it does in Germany, in Japan, in Canada, in Great Britain. Why do you think Americans pay so much higher health-care prices than folks in other countries? 7
7 The seminal paper on this is the wonderfully named « It’s the Prices, Stupid: Why the United States Is So Different From Other Countries. »
Barack Obama
Well, you know there are a lot of theories about this. But I think the evidence points to a couple of key factors. One is that we’ve got a third-party system. Mostly we’ve got a system where everybody gets their health insurance through their employers. Obviously the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, helps to cover the gap for those who aren’t in that system. But for those of us who have an insurer, we don’t track it. And the market then becomes really opaque and really hard to penetrate. Health providers are able to, I think, charge without much fear that somebody’s looking over their shoulders and asking, well, why does this cost that much?
That’s one of the reasons [that with] the Affordable Care Act, a lot of the attention’s been on making sure that the uninsured have peace of mind, and people who currently have insurance but at some point might lose it or have pre-existing conditions are going to have it. That’s obviously the moral basis for what we did. But people haven’t been paying as much attention to the delivery-system reforms that we’re trying to institute through the Affordable Care Act as well.
I can’t take credit for all four years of the lowest health-care inflation in the last 50 that we’ve seen since the Affordable Care Act passed. 8 Some of the trends, I think, were already on their way. But we are accelerating a lot of reforms. For example, what do we do to make sure that instead of paying a doctor in a hospital for just providing a service, let’s make sure that they’re being rewarded for a good outcome? Which may mean in some cases fewer tests or a less expensive generic drug, or just making sure that all your employees are washing your hands so that you’re cutting the infection rate, or making sure that hospitals are reimbursed when there’s a lower readmissions rate, as opposed to when they’re doing more stuff. And using Medicare as a lever, I think, is creating an environment in the health-care field where we can start getting better outcomes and lower costs at the same time. 9 There are still going to be those who argue that unless you get a single-payer system, you’re never going to get all the efficiencies. There’s certain areas like drugs, where the fact that Congress — and the Republican Party in particular — has been resistant to letting drug makers and Medicare negotiate for the lowest price. It results in us paying a lot more than we should. But if we’re paying 4, 5, 6, 8 percent more than other countries for the same outcomes, I’d be pretty happy where we’re only paying 2 or 3 percent more. Because that represents hundreds of billions of dollars, and means we can do a lot with that money.
8 Annual growth in health-care spending
Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
9 The White House is proposing tying 85 percent of all Medicare payments to outcomes by the end of 2016 — rising to 90 percent by 2018.
Ezra Klein
When you talk about Medicare as a lever, Medicare tends to pay a lot less per service than private insurers by a margin. Before single-payer there’s also this idea you hear occasionally of letting private insurers band together with Medicare, with Medicaid, to jointly negotiate prices. 10 Do you think that’s a good idea?
10 The technical term for this is « all-payer rate setting. »
Barack Obama
You know, I think that moving in the direction where consumers and others can have more power in the marketplace, particularly when it comes to drugs, makes a lot of sense. Now, you’ll hear from the drug companies that part of the reason other countries pay less for drugs is they don’t innovate; we, essentially through our system, subsidize the innovation, and other countries are free riders. There’s probably a little bit of truth to that, but when you look at the number of breakthrough drugs and the amount of money that drug companies now are putting into research and where they’re putting it, a whole lot of it is actually in redesigning, modestly, existing drugs so they can renew patents and maintain higher prices and higher profits. That’s not entirely true, but there’s some of that. So there is a lot of savings that could be achieved while still making sure that our drug industry is the best in the world, and will still be making a healthy profit.
Obama on why he’s such a polarizing president
Ezra Klein
To turn a bit towards politics, at this point, according to the polls, you are the most polarizing president really since we began polling. 11 But before you, the record was set by George W. Bush, and before George W. Bush the record was set by Bill Clinton. It seems that there’s something structural happening there in terms of party polarization and the way it affects approval ratings and cooperation with presidents. In your State of the Union, you struck back at critics who say that the idea of healing some of these divisions is naïve or impossible. So when you welcome your successor into office, what would you tell them is worth trying that you think can still work, that would reduce the polarization?
11 Presidents’ popularity gaps
Source: Gallup
Barack Obama
Well, there are a couple of things that in my mind, at least, contribute to our politics being more polarized than people actually are. And I think most people just sense this in their daily lives. Everybody’s got a family member or a really good friend from high school who is on the complete opposite side of the political spectrum. And yet, we still love them, right? Everybody goes to a soccer game, or watching their kids, coaching, and they see parents who they think are wonderful people, and then if they made a comment about politics, suddenly they’d go, « I can’t believe you think that! » But a lot of it has to do with the fact that a) the balkanization of the media means that we just don’t have a common place where we get common facts and a common worldview the way we did 20, 30 years ago. And that just keeps on accelerating, you know. And I’m not the first to observe this, but you’ve got the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh folks and then you’ve got the MSNBC folks and the — I don’t know where Vox falls into that, but you guys are, I guess, for the brainiac-nerd types. But the point is that technology which brings the world to us also allows us to narrow our point of view. That’s contributed to it.
Gerrymandering contributes to it. 12 There’s no incentive for most members of Congress, on the House side at least, in congressional districts, to even bother trying to appeal. And a lot of it has to do with just unlimited money. So people are absorbing an entirely different reality when it comes to politics, even though the way they’re living their lives and interacting with each other isn’t that polarizing. So my advice to a future president is increasingly try to bypass the traditional venues that create divisions and try to find new venues within this new media that are quirkier, less predictable.
12 For an interesting discussion of the evidence around gerrymandering and political polarization, see Vox’s gerrymandering card stack.
You know, yesterday I did three interviews with YouTube stars that generally don’t spend a lot of time talking about politics. And the reason we did it is because they’re reaching viewers who don’t want to be put in some particular camp. On the other hand, when you talk to them very specifically about college costs or about health care or about any of the other things that touch on their individual lives, it turns out that you can probably build a pretty good consensus.
Now, that doesn’t ignore the fact that I would love to see some constitutional process that would allow us to actually regulate campaign spending the way we used to, and maybe even improve it. I’d love to see changes at the state level that reduce political gerrymandering. So there’s all kinds of structural things that I’d like to see that I think would improve this but, you know, there’ve been periods in the past where we’ve been pretty polarized. I think there just wasn’t polling around. As I recall, there was a whole civil war — that was a good example of polarization that took place.
Ezra Klein
Do you think if we don’t get some of those structural reforms, and more to the point, if we continue along this path, in terms of where the parties are in Congress, are there ways to govern with polarization? It occurs to me that [this was] your argument when you came to office. But before you, Bush was a « uniter not a divider, » and before him Clinton, who was going to moderate and change the Democratic party with his sort of Third Way approach. The last couple of presidents have come to office promising the way they would get things done is to reduce polarization. Is there an argument or an approach that can be made to govern amidst polarization?
Barack Obama
A couple observations. Number one is that in American history — even during the so-called golden age where, you know, you had liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats and there was deal-cutting going on in Congress — generally speaking, big stuff didn’t get done unless there was a major crisis and/or you had big majorities of one party controlling the Congress and a president of the same party. I mean, that’s just been the history. There have been exceptions, but that’s often been the case in terms of big-muscle movements in the political system. And you know, my first two years in office when I had a Democratic majority and Democratic House and Democratic Senate, we were as productive as any time since Lyndon Johnson. And when the majority went away, stuff got blocked.
Probably the one thing that we could change without a constitutional amendment that would make a difference here would be the elimination of the routine use of the filibuster in the Senate. 13 Because I think that does, in an era in which the parties are more polarized, it almost ensures greater gridlock and less clarity in terms of the positions of the parties. There’s nothing in the Constitution that requires it. The framers were pretty good about designing a House, a Senate, two years versus six-year terms, every state getting two senators. There were a whole bunch of things in there to assure that a majority didn’t just run rampant. The filibuster in this modern age probably just torques it too far in the direction of a majority party not being able to govern effectively and move forward its platform. And I think that’s an area where we can make some improvement.
13 For more on the filibuster, see Vox’s card stack on Congressional dysfunction.
Ezra Klein
One of the powerful things that’s happened as polarization has increased politically is it’s begun structuring people’s other identities. The one I’m particularly interested in here is race. If you look back at polling around the OJ Simpson verdict or the Bernhard Goetz shooting in New York, Republicans and Democrats — you basically couldn’t tell them apart. Now you look at the Zimmerman verdict or you look at what’s going on in Ferguson, and opinion on racial issues is very sharply split by party. 14 Do you worry about the merging of racial and partisan identity?
14 The growing partisan divide on racial issues
Source: Gallup, Pew Research Center, via Michael Tesler
Barack Obama
I don’t worry about that, because I don’t think that’s going to last. I worry very much about the immediate consequences of mistrust between police and minority communities. I think there are things we can do to train our police force and make sure that everybody is being treated fairly. And the task force that I assigned after the Ferguson and New York cases is intended to produce very specific tools for us to deal with it.
But over the long term, I’m pretty optimistic, and the reason is because this country just becomes more and more of a hodgepodge of folks. Again, this is an example where things seem very polarized at the national level and media spotlight, but you go into communities — you know, one of the great things about being president is you travel through the entire country, and you go to Tennessee and it turns out that you’ve got this huge Kurdish community. And you go to some little town in Iowa and you see some Hasidic Jewish community, and then you see a bunch of interracial black and white couples running around with their kids. 15 And this is in these little farm communities, and you’ve got Latinos in the classroom when you visit the schools there. So people are getting more and more comfortable with the diversity of this country, much more sophisticated about both the cultural differences but more importantly, the basic commonality that we have. And, you know, the key is to make sure that our politics and our politicians are tapping into that better set of impulses rather than our baser fears.
15 Specifically you see this in Postville, Iowa, where a Lubavitcher family’s purchase of a meat-processing plant in the late 1980s has led to the migration of a small community of Hasidim to the area.
And my gut tells me, and I’ve seen it in my own career and you see it generally, a politician who plays on those fears in America, I don’t think is going to over time get a lot of traction. Even, you know, it’s not a perfect analogy, but if you think about how rapidly the whole issue of the LGBT community and discrimination against gays and lesbians has shifted. The Republican party, even the most conservative, they have much less ability, I think, to express discriminatory views than they did even 10 years ago. 16 And that’s a source of optimism. It makes me hopeful.
16 Support for same-sex marriage
Source: Pew Research Center
Ezra Klein
On Obamacare, something that members of your administration have always said, and I think you may have said: there’s been a lot of language about it being a good start, a platform to begin building. It’s full of experiments. The idea is that there will be learning, and there will be change. Now we’re in the second year of open enrollment. What would you like to see, if Congress were able to take up a bill, to tweak, to improve, to change, to build on that platform? What specifically from what you wanted in there originally or what we’ve learned since it’s actually been in operation? How would you like to see it improved?
Barack Obama
Well, I’m not sure, Ezra, that we’ve got enough years of it being in place to know perfectly what needs to be improved, where there’s still gaps. It’s been a year. So far the verdict is that this thing’s working for a lot of people. You’ve got 10 million people who’ve been enrolled, you’ve got more folks who’ve been signed up for the expanded Medicaid coverage, you’ve seen health-care inflation stay low or actually be significantly lower than before the ACA was passed, satisfaction with the insurance seems to be high. We haven’t seen major disruptions to the medical system that a lot of people had predicted. So, there’s a lot of stuff that’s working.
Over time, I think seeing if we can do more on delivery-system reform, making sure that we fill the gaps in those states that haven’t expanded Medicaid. The big problem we have right now with Obamacare is that it was designed to make sure that some subset of people qualified for Medicaid, and that’s how they were going to get coverage, and others were going to go into the exchanges because they had slightly higher incomes. And because of the decision of the Roberts court — that we couldn’t incentivize states to expand Medicaid the way we had originally intended — you’ve got a lot of really big states, you’ve got tens of millions of people who aren’t able to get their Medicaid coverage. And so there’s this gap. And that’s probably the biggest challenge for us.
The good news is in dribs and drabs. Much as was true with the original Medicaid program, you’re starting to see Republican governors and Republican state legislatures realize that we’re cutting off our nose to spite our face. We’ve got an ideological objection to us helping our own constituencies and our own health-care systems. And to their credit, you’ve got folks like John Kasich in Ohio and Snyder in Michigan and now, most recently the governor up in Alaska, and others who are saying, « You know what? This is the right thing to do. Let’s go ahead and expand it. » So until that kind of settles, I don’t think we’ll fully know where there’s still gaps in coverage, what more we still need to do. But I think that so far, at least, the performance of the plan itself, not the website in the first three months but the performance of the actual plan, you know, has at least met and perhaps exceeded a lot of people’s expectations. The website, by the way, works great now.
Barack Obama
I don’t worry about that, because I don’t think that’s going to last. I worry very much about the immediate consequences of mistrust between police and minority communities. I think there are things we can do to train our police force and make sure that everybody is being treated fairly. And the task force that I assigned after the Ferguson and New York cases is intended to produce very specific tools for us to deal with it.
But over the long term, I’m pretty optimistic, and the reason is because this country just becomes more and more of a hodgepodge of folks. Again, this is an example where things seem very polarized at the national level and media spotlight, but you go into communities — you know, one of the great things about being president is you travel through the entire country, and you go to Tennessee and it turns out that you’ve got this huge Kurdish community. And you go to some little town in Iowa and you see some Hasidic Jewish community, and then you see a bunch of interracial black and white couples running around with their kids. 15 And this is in these little farm communities, and you’ve got Latinos in the classroom when you visit the schools there. So people are getting more and more comfortable with the diversity of this country, much more sophisticated about both the cultural differences but more importantly, the basic commonality that we have. And, you know, the key is to make sure that our politics and our politicians are tapping into that better set of impulses rather than our baser fears.
15 Specifically you see this in Postville, Iowa, where a Lubavitcher family’s purchase of a meat-processing plant in the late 1980s has led to the migration of a small community of Hasidim to the area.
And my gut tells me, and I’ve seen it in my own career and you see it generally, a politician who plays on those fears in America, I don’t think is going to over time get a lot of traction. Even, you know, it’s not a perfect analogy, but if you think about how rapidly the whole issue of the LGBT community and discrimination against gays and lesbians has shifted. The Republican party, even the most conservative, they have much less ability, I think, to express discriminatory views than they did even 10 years ago. 16 And that’s a source of optimism. It makes me hopeful.
16 Support for same-sex marriage
Source: Pew Research Center
Ezra Klein
On Obamacare, something that members of your administration have always said, and I think you may have said: there’s been a lot of language about it being a good start, a platform to begin building. It’s full of experiments. The idea is that there will be learning, and there will be change. Now we’re in the second year of open enrollment. What would you like to see, if Congress were able to take up a bill, to tweak, to improve, to change, to build on that platform? What specifically from what you wanted in there originally or what we’ve learned since it’s actually been in operation? How would you like to see it improved?
Barack Obama
Well, I’m not sure, Ezra, that we’ve got enough years of it being in place to know perfectly what needs to be improved, where there’s still gaps. It’s been a year. So far the verdict is that this thing’s working for a lot of people. You’ve got 10 million people who’ve been enrolled, you’ve got more folks who’ve been signed up for the expanded Medicaid coverage, you’ve seen health-care inflation stay low or actually be significantly lower than before the ACA was passed, satisfaction with the insurance seems to be high. We haven’t seen major disruptions to the medical system that a lot of people had predicted. So, there’s a lot of stuff that’s working.
Over time, I think seeing if we can do more on delivery-system reform, making sure that we fill the gaps in those states that haven’t expanded Medicaid. The big problem we have right now with Obamacare is that it was designed to make sure that some subset of people qualified for Medicaid, and that’s how they were going to get coverage, and others were going to go into the exchanges because they had slightly higher incomes. And because of the decision of the Roberts court — that we couldn’t incentivize states to expand Medicaid the way we had originally intended — you’ve got a lot of really big states, you’ve got tens of millions of people who aren’t able to get their Medicaid coverage. And so there’s this gap. And that’s probably the biggest challenge for us.
The good news is in dribs and drabs. Much as was true with the original Medicaid program, you’re starting to see Republican governors and Republican state legislatures realize that we’re cutting off our nose to spite our face. We’ve got an ideological objection to us helping our own constituencies and our own health-care systems. And to their credit, you’ve got folks like John Kasich in Ohio and Snyder in Michigan and now, most recently the governor up in Alaska, and others who are saying, « You know what? This is the right thing to do. Let’s go ahead and expand it. » So until that kind of settles, I don’t think we’ll fully know where there’s still gaps in coverage, what more we still need to do. But I think that so far, at least, the performance of the plan itself, not the website in the first three months but the performance of the actual plan, you know, has at least met and perhaps exceeded a lot of people’s expectations. The website, by the way, works great now.
Years before he was a national figure, Barack Obama delivered a speech at a rally against the proposed invasion of Iraq that became integral to his underdog primary campaign in 2008. « I don’t oppose all wars, » he said. « What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. » And yet an actual presidential foreign policy is far more complex than a single speech. The world is vast, and modern technology has rendered war less a binary choice than a broad spectrum of possible uses of force. When Obama sat down with Vox in late January, we asked him not about the crises of the day but about the big ideas that shape his thinking on America’s relationship to the world outside our borders.
Matthew Yglesias
This is a really sort of big-picture question, but over the years, I’ve heard a number of different members of your team refer to your kind of philosophy in foreign affairs as « realism. » 1 Is that a term you would use?
1 Foreign-policy realism is associated with the cold-hearted pursuit of national interests, rather than an emphasis on human rights or international law. The extent of Obama’s realist commitments is frequently debated among foreign-policy insiders.
Barack Obama
You know, traditionally, a lot of American foreign policy has been divided into the realist camp and the idealist camp. And so if you’re an idealist, you’re like Woodrow Wilson, and you’re out there with the League of Nations and imagining everybody holding hands and singing « Kumbaya » and imposing these wonderful rules that everybody’s abiding by. And if you’re a realist, then you’re supporting dictators who happen to be our friends, and you’re cutting deals and solely pursuing the self-interest of our country as narrowly defined. And I just don’t think that describes what a smart foreign policy should be.
Obama on the goal of his foreign policy
See more videos from the Obama interview
I think it is realistic for us to want to use diplomacy for setting up a rules-based system wherever we can, understanding that it’s not always going to work. If we have arms treaties in place, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a stray like North Korea that may try to do its own thing. But you’ve reduced the number of problems that you have and the security and defense challenges that you face if you can create those norms. And one of the great things about American foreign policy in the post-World War II era was that we did a pretty good job with that. It wasn’t perfect, but the UN, the IMF, and a whole host of treaties and rules and norms that were established really helped to stabilize the world in ways that it wouldn’t otherwise be.
Now, I also think that if we were just resorting to that and we didn’t have a realistic view that there are bad people out there who are trying to do us harm — and we’ve got to have the strongest military in the world, and we occasionally have to twist the arms of countries that wouldn’t do what we need them to do if it weren’t for the various economic or diplomatic or, in some cases, military leverage that we had — if we didn’t have that dose of realism, we wouldn’t get anything done, either. So what I do think is accurate in describing my foreign policy is a strong belief that we don’t have military solutions to every problem in the 21st century. That we don’t have a peer in terms of a state that’s going to attack us and bait us. The closest we have, obviously, is Russia, with its nuclear arsenal, but generally speaking they can’t project the way we can around the world. China can’t, either. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined. 2
2 Military spending by the US vs. other countries
Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies
So the biggest challenge we have right now is disorder. Failed states. Asymmetric threats from terrorist organizations. And what I’ve been trying to do is to make sure that over the course of the last six years and hopefully the next two, we just have more tools in our toolkit to deal with the actual problems that we have now and that we can project into the future, rather than just constantly relying on the same tools that we used when we were dealing with Germany and Japan in World War II.
And so ending two wars was important, not because I was under any illusions that that would mean we wouldn’t have any terrorist threat. 3 It does mean, though, that by not having 180,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can then more strategically deploy, with a smaller footprint, special forces, trainers, partnering, that allows us to get at the actual problem and then frees us up to be able to send a team to prevent Ebola. To double-down on our investments in things like cybersecurity. To look at the new threats and opportunities that are out there. And that, I think, has been the real challenge over the last six to eight years.
3 There are still about 10,000 American military personnel serving in Afghanistan in training and advisory roles, and about 3,000 American troops are in Iraq to train Iraqi soldiers to fight ISIS.
Matthew Yglesias
In the Middle East, where we’re still very much engaged despite the draw-down from Iraq, the Clinton administration had a policy they called Dual Containment of Iraq and Iran. The Bush administration had an idea about preventative war and about rollback and democracy promotion. Under your administration, the country is still very involved in that region, but I don’t think we have as clear a sense of what is the sort of strategic goal of that engagement.
Barack Obama
Well, partly it’s because of the nature of what’s happened in the Middle East. I came in with some very clear theories about what my goals were going to be. We were going to end the war in Iraq. We were going to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, trying diplomacy first. We were going to try to promote increased economic development in the Muslim countries to deal with this demographic bulge that was coming into play. We were going to promote Palestinian and Israeli peace talks. So, there were all kinds of theories.
And then the Arab Spring happened. I don’t recall all the wise men in Washington anticipating this. And so this has been this huge, tumultuous change and shift, and so we’ve had to adapt, even as it’s happening in real time, to some huge changes in these societies. But if you look at the basic goals that I’ve set: making sure that we are maintaining pressure on terrorist organizations so that they have a limited capacity to carry out large-scale attacks on the West. Increasing our partnering and cooperation with countries to deal with that terrorist threat. Continuing to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And using the tool of sanctions to see if we can get a diplomatic breakthrough there. And continuing to try to move the Israeli-Palestinian relationship into a better place, while at the same time helping the region as a whole integrate itself more effectively into the world economy so that there’s more opportunity. Those basic goals still hold true.
But what people rightly have been concerned about [is] that the forces of disorder — sectarianism, most tragically in Syria, but lingering elements of that in Iraq as well, the incapacity of Israelis and Palestinians to get together, and the continued erosion of basic state functions in places like Yemen, mean that there’s more to worry about there than there might have been under the old order. We’re kind of going through a passage that is hard and difficult, but we’re managing it in a way to make sure that Americans are safe and that our interests are secured. And if we can make progress in restoring a functioning, multi-sectarian Iraqi government, and we’re able to get a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran, then we have the basis, I think, for a movement towards greater stability.
But this is going to be a generational challenge in the Muslim world and the Middle East that not only the United States but everybody’s going to have to deal with. And we’re going to have to have some humility in recognizing that we don’t have the option of simply invading every country where disorder breaks out. And that to some degree, the people of these countries are going to have to, you know, find their own way. And we can help them but we can’t do it for them.
Matthew Yglesias
It seems to me, on that point, that members of your administration often seem acutely aware of the idea of limits of American power, maybe to a greater extent than they always feel comfortably articulating publicly. Is it difficult to say, in the political and media system, that there are things that you can’t really do?
Barack Obama
Well, American leadership, in part, comes out of our can-do spirit. We’re the largest, most powerful country on Earth. As I said previously in speeches: when problems happen, they don’t call Beijing. They don’t call Moscow. They call us. And we embrace that responsibility. The question, I think, is how that leadership is exercised. My administration is very aggressive and internationalist in wading in and taking on and trying to solve problems.
Where the issue of limits comes in is what resources do we devote that are going to be effective in solving the problem. So, in Iraq, when ISIL arises, if you think you have no constraints, no limits, then I have the authority as commander-in-chief to send back 200,000 Americans to re-occupy Iraq. I think that’d be terrible for the country. I don’t think it’d be productive for Iraq. What we’ve learned in Iraq is you can keep a lid on those sectarian issues as long as we’ve got the greatest military on Earth there on the ground, but as soon as we leave, which at some point we would, we’d have the same problems again. 4 So what I said was Iraqis have to show us that they are prepared to put together a functioning government, that the Shia majority is prepared to reach out to the Kurds and Sunnis, and that they’re credibly willing to fight on the ground. And if they do those things, then we can help, and we’re going to have a 60-nation coalition to do it. So, if you look at that strategy, yes, it acknowledges limits. It acknowledges that it’s a bad idea for us, after 13 years of war, to take over a country again. But that doesn’t mean we’re not engaged, and it doesn’t mean we’re not leading.
4 Civilian deaths in Iraq, before and after US departure
Source: The Economist
And so, I think the real challenge for the country not just during my presidency but in future presidencies is recognizing that leading does not always mean occupying. That the temptation to think that there’s a quick fix to these problems is usually a temptation to be resisted. And that American leadership means wherever possible leveraging other countries, other resources, where we’re the lead partner because we have capabilities that other folks don’t have. But that way there’s some burden-sharing and there’s some ownership for outcomes. And many of these problems don’t get solved in a year or two years or three years.
I mean, the Shia-Sunni split in the Middle East right now is one that has been playing itself out over centuries. 5 We have the opportunity, I think, to lessen those tensions and to lift up voices that are less prone to exploit those sectarian divides, but, you know, we’re not going to eliminate that stuff overnight.
5 Share of Muslim population that is Shia, by country
Source: Pew Research Center
The trend towards extremism among a small segment of Muslim youth in the region, that’s a trend that’s been building up over a period time in part because of broader demographic problems and economic problems in the region, partly because of a perverted ideology that’s been hypercharged through the internet. It’s winning the hearts and minds of that cohort back. 6 That’s a multi-year project.
6 Obama’s State Department has gone so far as to launch an initiative called « Think Again, Turn Away » that uses YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms to try to convince young people that extremist groups are bad.
And so in the meantime, you take the victories where you can. You make things a little bit better rather than a little bit worse. And that’s in no way a concession to this idea that America is withdrawing or there’s not much we can do. It’s just a realistic assessment of how the world works.
Matthew Yglesias
You seemed to resist the realist label earlier, but when you talked about your goals earlier, you seemed very concerned about disorder, and you didn’t mention anything like democracy and human rights. And the countries you mentioned partnering with, it’s places like Egypt, where they came to power in a military coup; Saudi Arabia, with public beheadings; Bahrain, where during the Arab Spring they were beating nonviolent demonstrators and repressing that violently. Do you have any concerns about the sort of long-term sustainability of those kind of partnerships?
Barack Obama
This is a perfect example, Matt, of where the division between realism and idealism kind of breaks down. I think any realist worth their salt would say that any society that consistently ignores human rights and the dignity of its citizens at some point is going to be unstable and not a great partner. So it’s not just the right thing to do; it’s also very much in our interest to promote reforms throughout the Middle East. Now, the fact that we have to make real-time decisions about who are we partnering with and how perfectly are they abiding by our ideals, and are there times where we’ve got to mute some of our criticism to get some stuff done, are there times where we have an opportunity to press forward — that doesn’t negate the importance of us speaking out on these issues.
As I said during the State of the Union speech and as I’ve said in any speech that I’ve made in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world, it just means that we’ve got to do more than one thing at a time. We need a strong bilateral relationship with China to achieve a bunch of international goals like climate change that are of great national-security importance to us and billions of other people. That doesn’t mean it’s not smart for us also to speak out about censorship and political prisoners in China. We have to do both those things, and there’s going to be some times they come a little more into the fore than in other times. And the same is true in the Middle East and elsewhere. But I am a firm believer that particularly in this modern internet age, the capacity of the old-style authoritarian government to sustain itself and to thrive just is going to continue to weaken. It’s going to continue to crumble that model. My argument to any partner that we have is that you are better off if you’ve got a strong civil society and you’ve got democratic legitimacy and you are respectful of human rights. That’s how you’re going to attract businesses, that’s how you’re going to have a strong workforce, that’s how ultimately you’ve got a more durable not just economy but also political system.
But in those conversations, I’m also going to acknowledge that for a country that, say, has no experience in democracy or has no functioning civil society or where the most organized factions are intolerant, you know, religious sects, that progress is going to be happening in steps as opposed to in one big leap. And, I think, the goal of any good foreign policy is having a vision and aspirations and ideals, but also recognizing the world as it is, where it is, and figuring out how do you tack to the point where things are better than they were before. That doesn’t mean perfect. It just means it’s better. The trajectory of this planet overall is one toward less violence, more tolerance, less strife, less poverty. I’ve said this before and I think some folks in Washington were like, « Oh, he’s ignoring the chaos of all the terrible stuff that’s happening. » Of course, I’m not ignoring it. I’m dealing with it every day. That’s what I wake up to each morning. I get a thick book full of death, destruction, strife, and chaos. That’s what I take with my morning tea.
Matthew Yglesias
Do you think the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism and this kind of chaos, as opposed to a longer-term problem of climate change and epidemic disease?
Barack Obama
Absolutely. And I don’t blame the media for that. What’s the famous saying about local newscasts, right? If it bleeds, it leads, right? You show crime stories and you show fires, because that’s what folks watch, and it’s all about ratings. And, you know, the problems of terrorism and dysfunction and chaos, along with plane crashes and a few other things, that’s the equivalent when it comes to covering international affairs. There’s just not going to be a lot of interest in a headline story that we have cut infant mortality by really significant amounts over the last 20 years or that extreme poverty has been slashed or that there’s been enormous progress with a program we set up when I first came into office to help poor farmers increase productivity and yields. 7 It’s not a sexy story. And climate change is one that is happening at such a broad scale and at such a complex system, it’s a hard story for the media to tell on a day-to-day basis.
7 The little-noticed « Feed the Future » initiative has reached about 7 million people already, and introduces farmers in poor countries to more advanced technologies and management practices to boost crop production.
Look, the point is this: my first job is to protect the American people. It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris. We devote enormous resources to that, and it is right and appropriate for us to be vigilant and aggressive in trying to deal with that — the same way a big city mayor’s got to cut the crime rate down if he wants that city to thrive. But we also have to attend to a lot of other issues, and we’ve got to make sure we’re right-sizing our approach so that what we do isn’t counterproductive. I would argue that our invasion of Iraq was counterproductive to the goal of keeping our country safe.
And despite the incredible valor of our troops — and I’m in awe of them every single day when I work with them — you know, the strategy that was crafted in Washington didn’t always match up with the actual threats that were out there. And we need to make sure that we’re doing the right things and doing those well so that we can also deal with future threats like cybersecurity or climate change or different parts of the world where there are huge opportunities, but [that] before I came into office, we had neglected for quite some time, Asia Pacific being a perfect example. Or our own backyard, the Western Hemisphere, where there’s been real progress in Latin America and we’ve got the opportunity to strengthen our relationships. But there are also some big problems like Central America where, with a relatively modest investment, we could really be making a difference and making ourselves safer. 8
8 This is not necessarily directly relevant to « our safety, » but it’s worth noting the horrific conditions documented by NGOs that have looked at the lives of Central Americans sent back to their homes by US officials. Here’s what the administration is doing now in Central America.
Matthew Yglesias
So there’s this idea of a pivot to Asia, and what does that mean to you in specific terms? 9 A transfer of hard military resources, a transfer of time on your agenda in the National Security Council? Is it something you’ve really managed to pull off or does the Middle East really still have us kind of sucked in?
9 The origins of the « pivot to Asia » term are a bit shrouded, but the strategic concept of focusing more on the Pacific Rim and less on the Middle East dates back to a series of speeches and initiatives starting in the fall of 2011.
Barack Obama
I think it means all of the above. Look, Asia is the fastest growing region in the world, the most populous region in the world, and you’ve got the largest country in the world, China, that has undergone this incredible, dramatic transformation over the several last decades. 10 How well America does, economically, from a security perspective, is going to be linked to our relationship to that region. So we’ve said, a) we’ve got to make sure we’ve got a constructive relationship with China, one that is hardheaded enough to make sure they’re not taking advantage of us, but also sends a message to them that we can create a win-win situation as opposed to a pure competition that could be dangerous. And in order to do that, China, you’ve got to step up and help us underwrite these global rules that in fact help to facilitate your rise. Things like free-trade rules that are fair and maritime rules that don’t allow large countries to bully small ones. So that’s one big piece of it.
10 Growth in China’s Gross Domestic Product
Source: The World Bank
A second big piece of it is making sure that our allies like Japan and South Korea feel confident that we’re always going to be there and that our presence is not one that over time wanes, because they’re looking at a really big neighbor next door. They want to make sure that if America is their key partner, that America is going to stand with them through thick and thin. Then you’ve got all these smaller countries, or countries that are developing, and are coming into their own in the South Pacific, in Southeast Asia, and what we see there is this enormous hunger for more engagement with America. They want to do more business with us. They want to have more defense cooperation with us. And what we’ve been able to do over the last six years is to have systematically built this set of relationships and strengthen trading platforms, strengthen security cooperation — everything from how we deal with disaster relief, so if something like what happened in the Philippines happens in other countries, we can work more robustly, and we’re building resilience to how we’re dealing with deforestation. All these things are areas where we’ve made an enormous investment and there have been significant payoffs.
Obama on what most Americans get wrong about foreign aid
See more videos from the Obama interview
Matthew Yglesias
You mentioned the Philippines, and earlier the idea that there are big gains potentially to be made by giving some assistance to Central America. Does it really make sense to have so much of America’s foreign aid going to a country like Israel that’s quite wealthy when there are other democratic allies in other regions in the world that seem maybe more in need of assistance?
Barack Obama
Well, our relationship with Israel is in many ways unique. It’s our strongest ally in the region. Our people-to-people ties are unmatched. And partly because of world history, the vulnerabilities of a Jewish population in the midst of a really hostile neighborhood create a special obligation for us to help them. I think the more interesting question is if you look at our foreign assistance as a tool in our national security portfolio, as opposed to charity, and you combine our defense budget with our diplomatic budget and our foreign assistance budget, then in that mix there’s a lot more that we should be doing when it comes to helping Honduras and Guatemala build an effective criminal-justice system, effective police, and economic development that creates jobs. 11
11 Composition of US federal budget, 2014
Source: The White House Office of Management and Budget
Matthew Yglesias
So you’re saying it would make sense to reallocate those resources?
Barack Obama
Well, and part of the challenge here is just public awareness. Time and time again, when they do surveys, and they ask people what proportion of the foreign budget is spent on foreign aid, they’ll say, « 25 percent. » They’re pretty sure all their hard-earned money that they pay in taxes is somehow going to other folks. And if we can say, it varies between 1-2 percent depending on how you define it. And if we were to make some strategic investments in countries that really could use our help, we would then not have to deploy our military as often and we would be in a better position to work with other countries to stand down violent extremism. Then I think people could be persuaded by that argument, but we haven’t traditionally talked about it in those terms. It’s one of the things I’d like to do over the next couple of years: to try to erase this very sharp line between our military efforts in national security and our diplomatic and foreign assistance efforts. Because in this environment today, we’ve got to think of it all in one piece.
Matthew Yglesias
The transformation and growing prosperity in China is really probably the biggest story of the times we’re living through. And it’s something that it seems to me as something that causes a lot of anxiety to a lot of Americans. You know, we’ve been having our own economic struggles, but also from a geopolitical standpoint, it’s a country with a very different political system, with very different values. Is this something that you think people should regard as alarming?
Barack Obama
No, we shouldn’t alarm it. In fact, we should welcome China’s peaceful rise, partly from just an ethical perspective. To see hundreds of millions of people rise out of dire poverty and be able to feed their children and have a decent home: that’s a good thing and we should encourage it. In addition, a China that is disorderly is a big problem because there are a lot of Chinese in the world, and if they’re not doing well and they’re unstable, that’s very dangerous for the region.
Where Americans have a legitimate reason to be concerned is that in part this rise has taken place on the backs of an international system in which China wasn’t carrying its own weight or following the rules of the road and we were, and in some cases we got the short end of the stick. 12 This is part of the debate that we’re having right now in terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal that, you know, we’ve been negotiating. There are a lot of people who look at the last 20 years and say, « Why would we want another trade deal that hasn’t been good for American workers? It allowed outsourcing of American companies locating jobs in low-wage China and then selling it back to Walmart. And, yes, we got cheaper sneakers, but we also lost all our jobs. »
12 The most notable example here is probably the longstanding dispute over Chinese currency policy, which, especially in the late-aughts, seemed calculated to undermine American manufacturers by creating an artificially cheap yuan relative to the dollar.
And my argument is two-fold. Number one: precisely because that horse is out of the barn, the issue we’re trying to deal with right now is, can we make for a higher bar on labor, on environmental standards, et cetera, in that region and write a set of rules where it’s fairer, because right now it’s not fair, and if you want to improve it, that means we need a new trading regime. We can’t just rely on the old one because the old one isn’t working for us.
But the second reason it’s important is because the countries we’re negotiating with are the same countries that China is trying to negotiate with. And if we don’t write the rules out there, China’s going to write the rules. And the geopolitical implications of China writing the rules for trade or maritime law or any kind of commercial activity almost inevitably means that we will be cut out or we will be deeply disadvantaged. Our businesses will be disadvantaged, our workers will be disadvantaged. So when I hear, when I talk to labor organizations, I say, right now, we’ve been hugely disadvantaged. Why would we want to maintain the status quo? If we can organize a new trade deal in which a country like Vietnam for the first time recognizes labor rights and those are enforceable, that’s a big deal. It doesn’t mean that we’re still not going to see wage differentials between us and them, but they’re already selling here for the most part. And what we have the opportunity to do is to set long-term trends that keep us in the game in a place that we’ve got to be.
Matthew Yglesias
Why do you think that you haven’t been able to persuade your friends in the labor movement of that? They presumably look at these issues pretty closely. They know the interests of their members.
Barack Obama
Well, look, the story, the narrative, the experience that people have seen over the last 20 years, that’s a real experience, that’s not something we deny. That’s why during the State of the Union address, I was very explicit. I said, look, not every trade deal has lived up to the hype. And there are real gaps in the current trading regime that mean there are a whole lot of Toyotas sold here and almost no Fords or Chryslers sold in Japan. But what I say to them [is] if, in fact, the current situation disadvantages us, why would we want to stick with the current situation?
Now, sometimes their response will be, well, what you’re doing isn’t enough; what we need to do is to have union recognition in Vietnam or we need Japan to completely open its markets and not have any barriers whatsoever, and we need that immediately. And I say, well, I can’t get that for you. But what I can do is make the current situation better for American workers and American businesses that are trying to export there. I can open up more markets than what we have open right now, so that American farmers can sell their goods there. And, you know, better is better. It’s not perfect.
Those experiences that arose over the last 20 years are not easily forgotten, and the burden of proof is on us, then, to be very transparent and explicit in terms of what we’re trying to accomplish. It’s similar to the challenge we’ve got on the Iran negotiations.
And maybe I’ll close with that point, because that’s been an issue of great interest. People are right to be suspicious of Iran. Iran has sponsored state terrorism. It has consistently, at the highest levels, made deplorable anti-Israeli statements. It is repressive to its own people, and there is clear and unavoidable evidence that in the past they have tried to develop a weapons program and have tried to hide it from view. 13 So that’s a given. And it’s understandable why people are concerned, both here and around the world.
13 Iran has long supported a variety of radical groups around the region, notably including but by no means limited to Hezbollah. The government has brutalized pro-democracy protestors, and a range of leaders have promised to eliminate Israel as a state.
But what I’ve also said is that the deal that we’ve struck, this interim deal brought about by the tough sanctions regime that we put together, offers us our best opportunity to solve the problem of a nuclear Iran without resorting to military force. Iran is negotiating seriously for the first time, and they have made, so far, real concessions in the negotiations. We have been able to freeze the program for the first time and, in fact, roll back some elements of its program, like its stockpiles of ultra highly enriched uranium. And so, for us to give an additional two to three months to exhaust all possibilities of a diplomatic resolution when nobody denies — including our intelligence agencies, and Mossad and others — nobody denies that Iran right now really is abiding by the terms of our agreement, so we’re not losing ground. They’re not surreptitiously developing a weapon while we talk. For us to give two [or] three months to figure that out makes sense.
Now, same thing with respect to trade. You’re going to meet some folks who are going to be skeptical, and their impulse is going to be, well, let’s pile on some more sanctions, and let’s squeeze them a little bit more, and any deal that you’re going to strike, they’re going to cheat, and we can’t trust them, and it’s going to be a bad deal — and I get all that. 14 But my message is that we have to test the proposition, and if, in fact, a deal is struck, then it’s going to be a deal that everyone around the world is going to be able to look at. And everybody’s going to be able to determine, does this in fact prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? And if the answer is yes, then it’s a good deal. If the answer is no, then it’s not a deal that I’m interested in striking. There may be some technical arguments, in part because there are some who will only be satisfied with the Iranian regime being replaced. They don’t even like the idea of Iran having any nuclear technology or nuclear know-how.
14 Obama is referring to a bill introduced into the Senate by Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) that would impose new sanctions on Iran, violating the US side of the agreement and likely killing the negotiations.
Matthew Yglesias
In your first campaign, there was talk of the idea that you might hold direct negotiations with countries like that.
Barack Obama
Well, we have had direct negotiations. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re now testing the proposition, and the question then, Matt, is whether or not Iran can say yes to the world community that has determined this is a fair approach that gives Iran the ability to re-enter the international community and verify that it’s not pursuing a nuclear weapon.
But this is another example of the overall point that I was making at the start. So it’s a good way to summarize: we can’t guarantee that the forces inside of Iran take what should be seen as a good deal for Iran. We can’t guarantee that they make a rational decision any more than we can guarantee Russia and Mr. Putin make rational decisions about something like Ukraine. We’ve got to guard against their efforts militarily. Any aggression they may show we’ve got to meet firmly and forcefully. But we’ve also got to see whether things like diplomacy, things like economic sanctions, things like international pressure and international norms, will in fact make a difference.
Our successes will happen in fits and starts, and sometimes there’s going to be a breakthrough and sometimes you’ll just modestly make things a little better. And sometimes the play you run doesn’t work and you’ve got to have a plan B and a plan C. But the overall trajectory, the overall goal, is a world in which America continues to lead, that we’re pushing in the direction of more security, more international norms and rules, more human rights, more free speech, less religious intolerance. And those efforts over time add up, and I’m confident that there’s a way for us to maintain our idealism, be hardheaded in assessing what’s out there, confronting the dangers that we face without exaggerating them. America, I’m pretty certain, is going to be the indispensable nation for the remainder of this century just like it was the last one. All right. Thanks so much.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Well, good morning. Giving all praise and honor to God. It is wonderful to be back with you here. I want to thank our co-chairs, Bob and Roger. These two don’t always agree in the Senate, but in coming together and uniting us all in prayer, they embody the spirit of our gathering today.
I also want to thank everybody who helped organize this breakfast. It’s wonderful to see so many friends and faith leaders and dignitaries. And Michelle and I are truly honored to be joining you here today.
I want to offer a special welcome to a good friend, His Holiness the Dalai Lama — who is a powerful example of what it means to practice compassion, who inspires us to speak up for the freedom and dignity of all human beings. (Applause.) I’ve been pleased to welcome him to the White House on many occasions, and we’re grateful that he’s able to join us here today. (Applause.)
There aren’t that many occasions that bring His Holiness under the same roof as NASCAR. (Laughter.) This may be the first. (Laughter.) But God works in mysterious ways. (Laughter.) And so I want to thank Darrell for that wonderful presentation. Darrell knows that when you’re going 200 miles an hour, a little prayer cannot hurt. (Laughter.) I suspect that more than once, Darrell has had the same thought as many of us have in our own lives — Jesus, take the wheel. (Laughter.) Although I hope that you kept your hands on the wheel when you were thinking that. (Laughter.)
He and I obviously share something in having married up. And we are so grateful to Stevie for the incredible work that they’ve done together to build a ministry where the fastest drivers can slow down a little bit, and spend some time in prayer and reflection and thanks. And we certainly want to wish Darrell a happy birthday. (Applause.) Happy birthday.
I will note, though, Darrell, when you were reading that list of things folks were saying about you, I was thinking, well, you’re a piker. I mean, that — (laughter.) I mean, if you really want a list, come talk to me. (Laughter.) Because that ain’t nothing. (Laughter.) That’s the best they can do in NASCAR? (Laughter.)
Slowing down and pausing for fellowship and prayer — that’s what this breakfast is about. I think it’s fair to say Washington moves a lot slower than NASCAR. Certainly my agenda does sometimes. (Laughter.) But still, it’s easier to get caught up in the rush of our lives, and in the political back-and-forth that can take over this city. We get sidetracked with distractions, large and small. We can’t go 10 minutes without checking our smartphones — and for my staff, that’s every 10 seconds. And so for 63 years, this prayer tradition has brought us together, giving us the opportunity to come together in humility before the Almighty and to be reminded of what it is that we share as children of God.
And certainly for me, this is always a chance to reflect on my own faith journey. Many times as President, I’ve been reminded of a line of prayer that Eleanor Roosevelt was fond of. She said, “Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength.” Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength. I’ve wondered at times if maybe God was answering that prayer a little too literally. But no matter the challenge, He has been there for all of us. He’s certainly strengthened me “with the power through his Spirit,” as I’ve sought His guidance not just in my own life but in the life of our nation.
Now, over the last few months, we’ve seen a number of challenges — certainly over the last six years. But part of what I want to touch on today is the degree to which we’ve seen professions of faith used both as an instrument of great good, but also twisted and misused in the name of evil.
As we speak, around the world, we see faith inspiring people to lift up one another — to feed the hungry and care for the poor, and comfort the afflicted and make peace where there is strife. We heard the good work that Sister has done in Philadelphia, and the incredible work that Dr. Brantly and his colleagues have done. We see faith driving us to do right.
But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge — or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon. From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it. We see ISIL, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism — terrorizing religious minorities like the Yezidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.
We see sectarian war in Syria, the murder of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, religious war in the Central African Republic, a rising tide of anti-Semitism and hate crimes in Europe, so often perpetrated in the name of religion.
So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities — the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?
Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. Michelle and I returned from India — an incredible, beautiful country, full of magnificent diversity — but a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs — acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhiji, the person who helped to liberate that nation.
So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith. In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance. But God compels us to try. And in this mission, I believe there are a few principles that can guide us, particularly those of us who profess to believe.
And, first, we should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt — not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.
Our job is not to ask that God respond to our notion of truth — our job is to be true to Him, His word, and His commandments. And we should assume humbly that we’re confused and don’t always know what we’re doing and we’re staggering and stumbling towards Him, and have some humility in that process. And that means we have to speak up against those who would misuse His name to justify oppression, or violence, or hatred with that fierce certainty. No God condones terror. No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives, or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number.
And so, as people of faith, we are summoned to push back against those who try to distort our religion — any religion — for their own nihilistic ends. And here at home and around the world, we will constantly reaffirm that fundamental freedom — freedom of religion — the right to practice our faith how we choose, to change our faith if we choose, to practice no faith at all if we choose, and to do so free of persecution and fear and discrimination.
There’s wisdom in our founders writing in those documents that help found this nation the notion of freedom of religion, because they understood the need for humility. They also understood the need to uphold freedom of speech, that there was a connection between freedom of speech and freedom of religion. For to infringe on one right under the pretext of protecting another is a betrayal of both.
But part of humility is also recognizing in modern, complicated, diverse societies, the functioning of these rights, the concern for the protection of these rights calls for each of us to exercise civility and restraint and judgment. And if, in fact, we defend the legal right of a person to insult another’s religion, we’re equally obligated to use our free speech to condemn such insults — (applause) — and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with religious communities, particularly religious minorities who are the targets of such attacks. Just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t question those who would insult others in the name of free speech. Because we know that our nations are stronger when people of all faiths feel that they are welcome, that they, too, are full and equal members of our countries.
So humility I think is needed. And the second thing we need is to uphold the distinction between our faith and our governments. Between church and between state. The United States is one of the most religious countries in the world — far more religious than most Western developed countries. And one of the reasons is that our founders wisely embraced the separation of church and state. Our government does not sponsor a religion, nor does it pressure anyone to practice a particular faith, or any faith at all. And the result is a culture where people of all backgrounds and beliefs can freely and proudly worship, without fear, or coercion — so that when you listen to Darrell talk about his faith journey you know it’s real. You know he’s not saying it because it helps him advance, or because somebody told him to. It’s from the heart.
That’s not the case in theocracies that restrict people’s choice of faith. It’s not the case in authoritarian governments that elevate an individual leader or a political party above the people, or in some cases, above the concept of God Himself. So the freedom of religion is a value we will continue to protect here at home and stand up for around the world, and is one that we guard vigilantly here in the United States.
Last year, we joined together to pray for the release of Christian missionary Kenneth Bae, held in North Korea for two years. And today, we give thanks that Kenneth is finally back where he belongs — home, with his family. (Applause.)
Last year, we prayed together for Pastor Saeed Abedini, detained in Iran since 2012. And I was recently in Boise, Idaho, and had the opportunity to meet with Pastor Abedini’s beautiful wife and wonderful children and to convey to them that our country has not forgotten brother Saeed and that we’re doing everything we can to bring him home. (Applause.) And then, I received an extraordinary letter from Pastor Abedini. And in it, he describes his captivity, and expressed his gratitude for my visit with his family, and thanked us all for standing in solidarity with him during his captivity.
And Pastor Abedini wrote, “Nothing is more valuable to the Body of Christ than to see how the Lord is in control, and moves ahead of countries and leadership through united prayer.” And he closed his letter by describing himself as “prisoner for Christ, who is proud to be part of this great nation of the United States of America that cares for religious freedom around the world.” (Applause.)
We’re going to keep up this work — for Pastor Abedini and all those around the world who are unjustly held or persecuted because of their faith. And we’re grateful to our new Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Rabbi David Saperstein — who has hit the ground running, and is heading to Iraq in a few days to help religious communities there address some of those challenges. Where’s David? I know he’s here somewhere. Thank you, David, for the great work you’re doing. (Applause.)
Humility; a suspicion of government getting between us and our faiths, or trying to dictate our faiths, or elevate one faith over another. And, finally, let’s remember that if there is one law that we can all be most certain of that seems to bind people of all faiths, and people who are still finding their way towards faith but have a sense of ethics and morality in them — that one law, that Golden Rule that we should treat one another as we wish to be treated. The Torah says “Love thy neighbor as yourself.” In Islam, there is a Hadith that states: « None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” The Holy Bible tells us to “put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” Put on love.
Whatever our beliefs, whatever our traditions, we must seek to be instruments of peace, and bringing light where there is darkness, and sowing love where there is hatred. And this is the loving message of His Holiness, Pope Francis. And like so many people around the world, I’ve been touched by his call to relieve suffering, and to show justice and mercy and compassion to the most vulnerable; to walk with The Lord and ask “Who am I to judge?” He challenges us to press on in what he calls our “march of living hope.” And like millions of Americans, I am very much looking forward to welcoming Pope Francis to the United States later this year. (Applause.)
His Holiness expresses that basic law: Treat thy neighbor as yourself. The Dalai Lama — anybody who’s had an opportunity to be with him senses that same spirit. Kent Brantly expresses that same spirit. Kent was with Samaritan’s Purse, treating Ebola patients in Liberia, when he contracted the virus himself. And with world-class medical care and a deep reliance on faith — with God’s help, Kent survived. (Applause.)
And then by donating his plasma, he helped others survive as well. And he continues to advocate for a global response in West Africa, reminding us that “our efforts needs to be on loving the people there.” And I could not have been prouder to welcome Kent and his wonderful wife Amber to the Oval Office. We are blessed to have him here today — because he reminds us of what it means to really “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Not just words, but deeds.
Each of us has a role in fulfilling our common, greater purpose — not merely to seek high position, but to plumb greater depths so that we may find the strength to love more fully. And this is perhaps our greatest challenge — to see our own reflection in each other; to be our brother’s keepers and sister’s keepers, and to keep faith with one another. As children of God, let’s make that our work, together.
As children of God, let’s work to end injustice — injustice of poverty and hunger. No one should ever suffer from such want amidst such plenty. As children of God, let’s work to eliminate the scourge of homelessness, because, as Sister Mary says, “None of us are home until all of us are home.” None of us are home until all of us are home.
As children of God, let’s stand up for the dignity and value of every woman, and man, and child, because we are all equal in His eyes, and work to send the scourge and the sin of modern-day slavery and human trafficking, and “set the oppressed free.” (Applause.)
If we are properly humble, if we drop to our knees on occasion, we will acknowledge that we never fully know God’s purpose. We can never fully fathom His amazing grace. “We see through a glass, darkly” — grappling with the expanse of His awesome love. But even with our limits, we can heed that which is required: To do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.
I pray that we will. And as we journey together on this “march of living hope,” I pray that, in His name, we will run and not be weary, and walk and not be faint, and we’ll heed those words and “put on love.”
May the Lord bless you and keep you, and may He bless this precious country that we love.
Combattez ceux qui ne croient pas en Allah, qui ne considèrent pas comme illicite ce qu’Allah et son prophète ont déclaré illicite (…) jusqu’à ce qu’ils paient, humiliés et de leurs propres mains le tribut. Sourate 9 v 29
Le combat vous est prescrit et pourtant vous l’avez en aversion. Peut-être avez-vous de l’aversion pour ce qui est un bien et de l’attirance pour ce qui est un mal. Allah sait et vous ne savez pas. Sourate 2 v 216
Lorsque les mois sacrés seront expirés, tuez les infidèles partout où vous les trouverez. Sourate 9 v 5
Vous ne les avez pas tué (vos ennemis). C’est Allah qui les a tués. Lorsque tu portes un coup, ce n’est pas toi qui le porte mais Allah qui éprouve ainsi les croyants par une belle épreuve. Sourate 8 v 17
Ne faiblissez pas et ne demandez pas la paix quand vous êtes les plus forts et qu’Allah est avec vous ! Sourate 47 v 35
La récompense de ceux qui font la guerre à Allah (…) c’est qu’ils soient tués ou crucifiés, ou que soient coupés leurs mains ou leurs pieds …Sourate 47 v 35
Les infidèles ne sont que souillure ... Sourate 9 verset 28
(les juifs et les chrétiens) « Qu’Allah les maudissent … Sourate 9 verset 30
(ceux qui quittent l’Islam) saisissez-les alors, et tuez-les où que vous vous trouviez. Sourate 4 verset 89
C’est pourquoi le Prophète –sur lui soit la paix- a dit : « Il m’a été ordonné de combattre les hommes jusqu’à ce qu’ils disent ‘Il n’y a de divinité qu’Allah’ et qu’ils croient en moi. Ibn Rushd (alias Averroès)
Les savants s’accordent à dire que le djihad est un devoir collectif et non personnel. (…) De l’avis de la majorité des savants, la nature obligatoire du djihad est fondée sur: «Le combat vous a été prescrit alors qu’il vous est désagréable.» (…) L’obligation de participer au djihad s’applique aux hommes adultes libres qui disposent des moyens de partir en guerre et qui sont en bonne santé. (…) Les savants s’accordent sur le fait que tous les polythéistes doivent être combattus. Cela est fondé sur: «Et combattez-les jusqu‘à ce qu’il ne subsiste plus d’association, et que la religion soit entièrement à Allah. Ibn Rush dit Averroès
Les groupes n’aiment guère ceux qui vendent la mèche, surtout peut-être lorsque la transgression ou la trahison peut se réclamer de leurs valeurs les plus hautes. (…) L’apprenti sorcier qui prend le risque de s’intéresser à la sorcellerie indigène et à ses fétiches, au lieu d’aller chercher sous de lointains tropiques les charmes rassurant d’une magie exotique, doit s’attendre à voir se retourner contre lui la violence qu’il a déchainée. Pierre Bourdieu
Lorsque Mahomet se mit à prêcher son dieu unique, prétendit en être le messager et se mit à légiférer en Son nom, déclarant ceci « permis » ou cela « interdit », certains de ces poètes se moquèrent de lui. Mahomet savait pardonner à ceux qui l’avaient combattu, mais ne tolérait pas qu’on mette en doute sa mission prophétique. Il demanda donc qui allait le débarrasser de ces poètes. Des volontaires se présentèrent et les assassinèrent. Ils tuèrent d’abord Ka’b ibn Achraf, un juif, puis Abou Afak, un vieillard, enfin Asma bint Marwan, une femme qui allaitait. (…) Mahomet assura les assassins qu’ils n’avaient commis aucune faute, un peu dans l’esprit du verset du Coran : « Ce n’est pas vous qui les avez tués ; mais Dieu les a tués » (sourate VIII, verset 17 a). On comprend l’embarras des musulmans d’aujourd’hui. (…) au-delà du refus constamment réitéré, et d’ailleurs légitime, de l’« amalgame » et de la « stigmatisation », comment dire que ces agissements n’ont rien à voir avec l’islam ? Le Coran appelle Mahomet « le bel exemple » (sourate XXXIII, verset 21), qu’il est loisible, voire louable, d’imiter. Comment ne pas comprendre que certains se croient autorisés à commettre en son nom et pour le venger ce genre de crimes ?Rémi Brague
Le mot de «religion» est déjà trompeur en soi. Notre idée d’une religion est calquée, même chez le bouffeur de curés le plus recuit, sur celle que nous nous faisons du christianisme. Nous allons donc dire: dans l’islam, il y a du religieux (les prières, le jeûne, le pèlerinage, etc.) et du non-religieux, la charia, dont les règles vestimentaires, alimentaires, etc. Et nous avons le culot de dire aux musulmans: renoncez à la charia et nous acceptons votre religion! Mais ils ne voient pas les choses comme nous; pour eux, la charia sous ses différentes formes, et avec toutes ses règles, fait partie intégrante de la religion. La mystique, elle, est certes permise, mais facultative. Tout le système de l’islam, si l’on peut dire, repose sur la révélation faite à Mahomet. Attaquer le Prophète, c’est mettre en danger tout l’édifice. Allah est de toute façon bien au-dessus de tous les blasphèmes, c’est pourquoi le nier est presque moins grave… La violence, inhérente à une religion? Il faut distinguer les adhérents à une religion qui ont pu se laisser aller à des violences. Ils ont même pu les justifier au nom de leur religion. Ainsi Charlemagne convertissant de force les Saxons ou, bien sûr, ceux dont on parle toujours, les croisés et les inquisiteurs. Mais aussi les généraux japonais de la Seconde Guerre, bouddhistes zen. Ou Tamerlan, qui s’appuya au début sur les soufis de la confrérie des naqchbandis, dont les massacres, au XIVe siècle, surpassèrent ceux de Gengis Khan. Et rappelons que le plus grand pogrom antichrétien de notre siècle, en 2008, à Kandhamal (Odisha), a été le fait d’hindouistes, qui ne sont pas tendres envers les musulmans non plus. Ceci dit, reste à se demander si l’on peut attribuer des actes de violence au fondateur d’une religion, à celui qui en reste le modèle et à son enseignement. Pour Jésus et Bouddha, on a du mal. Or, malheureusement, nous avons les recueils de déclarations attribuées à Mahomet (le hadith) et ses biographies anciennes, et avant tout celle d’Ibn Ishaq-Ibn Hicham (vers 830). Il faut la lire et se méfier des adaptations romancées et édulcorées. Or, ce qu’on y raconte comme hauts faits du Prophète et de ses compagnons ressemble beaucoup à ce que l’on a vu chez nous et à ce qui se passe à une bien plus grande échelle au Nigeria, sur le territoire de l’État islamique, ou ailleurs. Mahomet a en effet fait décapiter quelques centaines de prisonniers, torturer le trésorier d’une tribu juive vaincue pour lui faire avouer où est caché le magot (on pense au sort d’Ilan Halimi) et, ce qui ressemble fort à notre affaire, commandité les assassinats de trois chansonniers qui s’étaient moqués de lui. Il ne sert de rien de répéter «contextualiser! contextualiser!» Un crime reste un crime.
La figuration de Dieu dans le christianisme repose elle-même sur l’idée d’incarnation. Le Dieu chrétien n’est pas enfermé dans sa transcendance. On ne peut monter vers lui, mais il a voulu descendre vers nous. Il est d’une liberté tellement absolue qu’il peut, pour ainsi dire, transcender sa propre transcendance et se donner lui-même une figure visible en Jésus-Christ. Les icônes, tableaux, fresques, statues, etc., bref les neuf dixièmes de l’art plastique européen, sont, en divers styles, la petite monnaie de cette première entrée dans la visibilité. Quant à se moquer de lui une fois qu’il a pris le risque de prendre une figure humaine, cela a été fait depuis longtemps, et en abondance. Les caricatures de Charlie, et les autres, ne sont rien à côté de ce qu’a dû subir, en vrai, le Crucifié. Leurs tentatives pour blasphémer sont donc moins du scandaleux que du réchauffé. Il est en tout cas intéressant que l’on se moque dans ce cas, non des tortionnaires, mais de leur victime…
[«l’esprit Charlie» … héritier de Voltaire?] «Esprit» me semble un bien grand mot pour qualifier ce genre de ricanement et cette manie systématique, un peu obsessionnelle, de représenter, dans les dessins, des gens qui s’enculent… Voltaire savait au moins être léger quand il voulait être drôle. Ceci dit, Voltaire est pour moi, outre l’un des plus enragés antisémites qui fut, celui qui a fait deux fois embastiller La Beaumelle, qui avait osé critiquer son Siècle de Louis XIV. Plus que ses tragédies, c’est l’affaire Calas qui lui a permis de devenir un de nos totems. Elle n’était pas la seule erreur judiciaire de l’époque. Pourquoi Voltaire a-t-il choisi de s’y consacrer? Ses premières lettres, au moment où il apprend l’histoire, fin mars 1762, le montrent à l’évidence: parce qu’il voulait avant tout attaquer le christianisme. On se souvient du cas: un père protestant soupçonné d’avoir tué son fils qui aurait voulu se faire catholique. On pouvait donc gagner à coup sûr. Si le père Calas était coupable, honte au fanatisme protestant; s’il était innocent, haro sur le fanatisme catholique… Mais attaquer les vrais puissants, les riches fermiers généraux ou les souverains, comme le régent ou le roi, pas question. (…) n’avons-nous rien d’autre à offrir à nos concitoyens, et en particulier aux musulmans, qu’«être Charlie»? Leur proposer, que dis-je, les sommer de s’identifier à cet irrespect crasseux comme résumant la France, n’est-ce pas les encourager dans le mépris de notre pays et dans le repli identitaire? J’aurais préféré qu’on défilât en scandant: «Je suis Descartes», «Je suis Cézanne», «Je suis Proust», Je suis Ravel»…
On a effectivement le droit de tout dire, sauf ce qui fâche… Appeler un chat un chat est devenu difficile. On préfère des euphémismes, au moyen de divers procédés, les sigles par exemple. On dira IVG pour ne pas dire «avortement», et GPA pour ne pas dire «location d’utérus», etc. Ou alors, on dilue en passant au pluriel: on dira «les religions» alors que tout le monde pense «l’islam». Ce n’est pas d’hier: on disait naguère «les idéologies» pour ne pas dire «le marxisme-léninisme». Rémi Brague
Faut-il oublier Averroès sous prétexte qu’il y a eu Ben Laden? À suivre un tel amalgame, il faudrait oublier le Christ sous prétexte qu’il y a eu Torquemada. Henri Pena Ruiz
À partir de 1195, Averroès, déjà suspect comme philosophe, est victime d’une campagne d’opinion qui vise à anéantir son prestige de cadi. Al-Mansûr sacrifie alors ses intellectuels à la pression des oulémas. Averroès est exilé en 1197 à Lucena, petite ville andalouse peuplée surtout de Juifs, en déclin depuis que les Almohades ont interdit toute religion autre que l’islam. Après un court exil d’un an et demi, il est rappelé au Maroc où il reçoit le pardon du sultan, mais n’est pas rétabli dans ses fonctions. Il meurt à Marrakech le 10 ou 11 décembre 1198 sans avoir revu l’Andalousie. La mort d’Al-Mansûr peu de temps après marque le début de la décadence de l’empire almohade. Suspecté d’hérésie, il n’aura pas de postérité en terre d’islam. Une part de son œuvre sera sauvée par des traducteurs juifs. Elle passera par les Juifs de Catalogne et d’Occitanie dans la scolastique latine.Wikipedia
Le sinistre Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi qui ne voulait pas rester dans l’ombre d’Ahmadienjad a rappelé à son public les noms que le saint Coran a employé pour qualifier les juifs : « des menteurs, des falsificateurs de Coran, des racistes, des déviants mentaux, des meurtriers, des bouchers, des corrompus, des fous à lier et des cupides…Iran-Resist
Juifs et musulmans pour moi, ça n’existe pas. Donc, antisémite n’existe pas, parce que juif n’existe pas. Ce sont deux notions aussi stupides l’une que l’autre. Personne n’est juif ou alors tout le monde … pour moi, les juifs, c’est une secte, une escroquerie. C’est une des plus graves parce que c’est la première. Certains musulmans prennent la même voie en ranimant des concepts comme « la guerre sainte » … Dieudonné(Lyon Capitale, 23 janvier 2002)
En dépit de l’emploi des termes « secte et escroquerie », le contexte de l’entretien en cause laisse apparaître qu’en critiquant d’autres religions en des propos également vifs, le prévenu a seulement manifesté son hostilité au principe même du fait religieux et qu’ainsi, les invectives proférées ne s’adressent pas à la communauté juive en tant que telle. Tribunal correctionnel de Paris (30 juin 2004)
Replacés dans leur contexte, les termes « les juifs, c’est une secte, c’est une escroquerie » relèvent d’un débat théorique sur l’influence des religions et ne constituent pas une attaque dirigée contre la communauté juive en tant que communauté humaine ». Cour d’appel de Paris (9 février 2006)
Cohen , il a dit que j’avais un cerveau malade , alors tu vois , quand j’entends parler Patrick Cohen, je me dis les chambres à gaz… Dommage ! Dieudonné
Jean Sarkozy, digne fils de son paternel et déjà conseiller général de l’UMP, est sorti presque sous les applaudissements de son procès en correctionnelle pour délit de fuite en scooter. Le Parquet a même demandé sa relaxe ! Il faut dire que le plaignant est arabe ! Ce n’est pas tout : il vient de déclarer vouloir se convertir au judaïsme avant d’épouser sa fiancée, juive, et héritière des fondateurs de Darty. Il fera du chemin dans la vie, ce petit !Siné
Les propos de Siné sur Jean Sarkozy et sa fiancée, outre qu’ils touchaient la vie privée, colportaient la fausse rumeur de sa conversion au judaïsme. Mais surtout ils pouvaient être interprétés comme faisant le lien entre la conversion au judaïsme et la réussite sociale et ce n’était ni acceptable ni défendable devant un tribunal.Philippe Val
Le département le plus pauvre et le plus jeune de France est confronté à une crise de vocation des enseignants. A la rentrée de septembre, quatre cent cinquante postes en école primaire étaient vacants. « Avant, on se bagarrait pour les créations de postes. Maintenant, on a les postes, mais ils sont vides », a expliqué Isabelle Guigon, de l’UNSA Education, lors d’une conférence de presse. A ce jour, trois cent vingt-deux contractuels ont été nommés et, face au mécontentement qui monte, notamment à Saint-Denis, la ministre de l’éducation nationale, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, a annoncé jeudi soir plusieurs mesures pour améliorer leur formation et les aider à remplir leur mission.Le Monde (07.11.2014)
Plus l’année avance, plus les exigences semblent baisser pour assurer la présence d’un adulte devant les classes et calmer les parents d’élèves.(…) Comme avec les autres remplaçants recalés au concours.(…) Le ministère reconnaît que la situation en Seine-Saint-Denis est tendue : 250 contractuels y ont été recrutés au mois de septembre. Il en manque encore. « Comme tous les services publics, nous avons un problème d’attractivité en Seine-Saint-Denis. Mais il faut relativiser, car 97 % de notre personnel est stable », explique Béatrice Gilles, la rectrice. Sur ce département, la hausse démographique cumulée au manque de postes et de candidats a créé une véritable thrombose. L’académie recrute mais sans vivier de professeurs formés, les remplaçants habituels étant déjà tous en poste. Pour faire face à cette pénurie, elle fait appel à des adultes sélectionnés par Pôle emploi, pour des contrats à l’année à 1 699,31 euros brut par mois ou des vacations à 20,64 euros de l’heure. Pour la première fois, l’académie a tenu un stand au dernier Forum pour l’emploi des jeunes le 7 octobre au Stade de France. « Depuis trois ans, les dotations augmentent mais on ne fait que courir après la hausse du nombre d’enfants et les créations de classes. On a installé une situation de crise permanente », dénonce Rachel Schneider, responsable départementale du SNUipp-FSU. La crise est encore plus aiguë à Saint-Denis, banlieue qui pâtirait d’une « mauvaise réputation ».Le Monde
La race juive est une race maudite par Allah ! Beaucoup de savants de l’islam le disent. Elève de terminale Lettres (Lycée Averroès)
Oui, ce prophète caricaturé, insulté, moqué, mais surtout ignoré, est aussi Charlie aujourd’hui, n’en déplaise à un grand nombre de musulmans qui trouveront peut-être ce propos déplacé ou naïf, voire insultant, surtout de la part de quelqu’un qui se réclame comme eux de la culture islamique. Oui, j’ose le dire, comme le très beau dessin de Luz le suggère avec tendresse et intelligence : le prophète de l’islam, Mohamed, pleure avec nous toutes les victimes innocentes de la barbarie et de l’ignorance, et demande à Allah le pardon pour les nombreuses brebis égarées se réclamant de sa religion alors qu’elles n’ont toujours pas compris l’essentiel de son message. Soufiane Zitouni
Ces jeunes étaient avant tout Français et ont grandi sur le territoire de la République. En déplaçant le débat sur le terrain religieux, certains ne font que servir la soupe aux populistes et aux islamophobes de tout bord. D’autant que notre démocratie est en train de payer le prix de cette liberté d’expression à géométrie variable qui s’applique au gré des intérêts économiques et politiques de nos oligarques. Je m’étonne, par ailleurs, qu’on n’ait dit mot sur cette recrudescence tangible, au lendemain de l’affaire « Charlie Hebdo », des actes islamophobes et, plus largement, sur cette islamophobie galopante et banalisée dans le discours médiatique, qui se répand dans la société au rythme des images défilant sur nos écrans et qui contribue chaque jour à alimenter les peurs et le rejet de l’autre. Ces partis populistes qui dénigrent en permanence les musulmans sous couvert d’une laïcité dénaturée et bien loin des idéaux défendus par Aristide Briand et Jean Jaurès, n’ont-ils pas aussi une part de responsabilité dans cet attentat ? Ne sommes-nous pas aussi en train de payer le prix de la politique étrangère de la France qui s’ingère avec toute l’arrogance et la cupidité qui l’animent en Afrique et au Proche-Orient ? Sans parler de la question du chômage et du problème de l’éducation. Ne faudrait-il pas construire un nouveau Nous et faire cause commune pour relever les défis de notre époque plutôt que de fabriquer un bouc-émissaire sur lequel chacun va fixer ses peurs et ses angoisses ? Émile Zola affirmait avec éloquence : « À force de montrer au peuple un épouvantail, on crée le monstre réel. » Ces trois jeunes ne sont-ils pas, au fond, le produit de notre société ? Réduire donc cette affaire à une question religieuse ou un problème d’humour en tranchant à coup d’aphorismes prophétiques mal compris est simpliste, voire fallacieux. (…) Pour terminer, les musulmans n’ont bien entendu aucun problème avec l’humour, ni ne sont paranoïaques ; il s’agit plus d’un mépris de la bassesse. Et le prophète, contrairement aux justifications de mon collègue, n’aurait accordé aucun crédit, ni aucune attention à l’humour de « Charlie Hebdo » qui concourt, chaque jour, à la banalisation des actes racistes. Il cueillait la beauté là où elle reflétait le Juste. « Charlie » cultive l’abject ; le prophète, lui, célébrait le beau. Il aurait sans doute honoré la beauté qui émane de la musique de Schubert, de la peinture hollandaise ou de la poésie baudelairienne. Mais à « Charlie », il aurait tourné le dos. Car la liberté n’a de sens que dans un cadre. C’est un sujet classique en philo, pourtant. Si l’humour de « Charlie Hebdo » ne me fait pas rire, il ne faut pas m’en tenir rigueur, car je ne souris qu’à la beauté… et chaque sourire qui se dessine sur mon visage n’aspire qu’à être le reflet du beau. Je ne partage pas les idées de mon cher collègue mais, qu’il s’en assure, je me battrais pour qu’il puisse les exprimer. En salle des profs, notamment ! Sofiane Meziani
Le 20 janvier, un professeur du lycée, proche des frères Tariq et Hani Ramadan, publia une sorte de «réplique» sur le site «L’Obs Le plus». Dans cette tribune, il incrimina mon manque de raison, et tira à boulets rouges sur Charlie Hebdo en affirmant que ce journal «cultive l’abject» et qu’il «concourt, chaque jour, à la banalisation des actes racistes» (sic). Voilà donc ce que pensait un «représentant» du lycée Averroès d’un journal qui venait d’être attaqué tragiquement par des terroristes au nom d’Al Qaeda ! Pas étonnant alors que certains de mes élèves m’aient affirmé en cours que les caricaturistes de Charlie Hebdo assassinés l’avaient bien cherché, voire mérité… Et évidemment, nombre d’élèves me tiendront exactement le même discours que mon «contradicteur» : «vous n’auriez jamais dû écrire dans la presse que le Prophète est aussi Charlie !», «c’est un blasphème !», «vous léchez les pieds des ennemis de l’islam !», etc. (…) Pendant mes cours de philosophie avec mes quatre classes de terminale, les désillusions ont continué. Tout d’abord, le thème récurrent et obsessionnel des Juifs… En plus de vingt années de carrière en milieu scolaire, je n’ai jamais entendu autant de propos antisémites de la bouche d’élèves dans un lycée ! Une élève de terminale Lettres osa me soutenir un jour que «la race juive est une race maudite par Allah ! Beaucoup de savants de l’islam le disent !» Après un moment de totale sidération face à tant de bêtise, j’ai rétorqué à l’adresse de cette élève et de toute sa classe que le Prophète de l’islam lui-même n’était ni raciste, ni antisémite, et que de nombreux textes de la tradition islamique le prouvaient clairement. Dans une classe de terminale ES, un élève au profil de leader, m’a soutenu un jour en arborant un large sourire de connivence avec un certain nombre de ses camarades, que les Juifs dominent tous les médias français et que la cabale contre l’islam en France est orchestrée par ce lobby juif très puissant. Et j’ai eu beau essayer de démonter rationnellement cette théorie du complot sulfureuse, rien n’y a fait, c’était entendu : les Juifs sont les ennemis des musulmans, un point c’est tout ! Cet antisémitisme quasi «culturel» de nombre d’élèves du lycée Averroès s’est même manifesté un jour que je commençais un cours sur le philosophe Spinoza : l’un d’entre eux m’a carrément demandé pourquoi j’avais précisé dans mon introduction que ce philosophe était juif ! En sous-entendant, vous l’aurez compris, que le signifiant «juif» lui-même lui posait problème ! Autre cause de grosses tensions avec mes élèves : ma prétendue non-orthodoxie islamique ! Car évidemment, en tant que professeur de philosophie de culture islamique travaillant dans un lycée musulman, il m’arrivait régulièrement d’établir des passerelles entre mon cours et certains passages du Coran ou de la Sunna (un ensemble d’histoires relatant des propos et des actes du Prophète). Mais j’ai été agressé verbalement par des élèves qui considéraient que je n’avais aucune légitimité pour leur parler de la religion islamique, et de surcroît dans un cours de philosophie ! J’avais beau leur dire que c’était précisément la grande idée du philosophe Averroès que de considérer qu’il ne pouvait y avoir de contradiction entre la vérité philosophique et la vérité coranique, rien n’y faisait. Et puis il y avait les thèmes et les mots tabous… La théorie darwinienne de l’évolution ? Le Coran ne dit pas cela, donc cette théorie est fausse ! J’avais beau me référer au livre de l’astrophysicien Nidhal Guessoum, Réconcilier l’islam et la science moderne dont le sous-titre est justement l’Esprit d’Averroès ! [Aux Presses de la Renaissance, ndlr], qui affirme avec de très solides arguments scientifiques et théologiques que la théorie de l’évolution est non seulement compatible avec le Coran, mais que plusieurs versets coraniques vont dans son sens, rien n’y faisait non plus. Le mot «sexe» lui-même pouvait être tabou. Un jour, une élève (voilée) qui s’était proposée pour lire un texte de Freud, refusa de prononcer le mot «sexe» à chacune de ses occurrences dans l’extrait concerné, et c’est la même élève qui refusa lors d’un autre cours de s’asseoir à côté d’un garçon alors qu’il n’y avait pas d’autre place possible pour elle dans la salle où nous nous trouvions ! J’ai dû alors lui rappeler fermement que la mixité dans l’enseignement français était un principe intangible et non négociable. Enfin, combien d’élèves du lycée n’ai-je pas entendu encenser, défendre, soutenir Dieudonné ! Avec toujours cette même rengaine, comme répétée par des perroquets bien dressés : pourquoi permet-on à Charlie Hebdo d’insulter notre Prophète alors qu’on interdit à Dieudonné de faire de l’humour sur les Juifs ? Je peux vous parler aussi de la salle des professeurs du lycée Averroès, où des collègues musulmans pratiquants font leurs ablutions dans les toilettes communes, donc en lavant leurs pieds dans les lavabos communs, et où la prière peut être pratiquée à côté de la machine à café… Quid des collègues non musulmans (il y en a quelques-uns) qui aimeraient peut-être disposer d’un espace neutre, d’un espace non religieux, le temps de leur pause ? En réalité, le lycée Averroès est un territoire «musulman» sous contrat avec L’Etat… D’ailleurs, certains collègues musulmans masculins se sont permis de faire des remarques sur des tenues vestimentaires de collègues féminines non musulmanes, sous prétexte qu’elles n’étaient pas conformes à l’éthique du lycée ! Et l’une de ces collègues féminines non musulmane m’a dit un jour également qu’elle ne se sentait pas «légitime» (sic) dans le regard de ses élèves, parce qu’elle n’était pas musulmane précisément… Je ne pouvais donc plus cautionner ce qui se passe réellement dans les murs de ce lycée, hors caméras des médias et derrière la vitrine officielle, même si je sais pertinemment que les adultes y travaillant et les élèves ne sont pas tous antisémites et sectaires. Mais, j’ai fini par comprendre au bout de cinq mois éprouvants dans cet établissement musulman sous contrat avec l’Etat français (mon véritable employeur en tant que professeur certifié), que les responsables de ce lycée jouent un double jeu avec notre République laïque : d’un côté montrer patte blanche dans les médias pour bénéficier d’une bonne image dans l’opinion publique et ainsi continuer à profiter des gros avantages de son contrat avec l’Etat, et d’un autre côté, diffuser de manière sournoise et pernicieuse une conception de l’islam qui n’est autre que l’islamisme, c’est-à-dire, un mélange malsain et dangereux de religion et de politique. Enfin, last but not least, il y a ce propos entendu de la bouche même d’un responsable du lycée, lors d’un discours prononcé à l’occasion d’une remise des diplômes à l’américaine aux bacheliers du lycée de la session 2014, en présence de deux «mécènes» du Qatar : «Un jour, il y aura aussi des filles voilées dans les écoles publiques françaises !» Un programme politique ? Soufiane Zitouni
Attention: un double langage peut en cacher un autre !
Discours d’excuse de la violence, accusations de blasphème, thème récurrent et obsessionnel des Juifs, propos antisémites, théories du complot sioniste, refus de travailler sur des textes d’auteurs juifs, rejet de tout discours sur l’islam autre que de la part d’autorités légitimes, thèmes et mots tabous (théorie darwinienne de l’évolution, « sexe »), refus de la mixité hommes-femmes, soutien de Dieudonné au nom même des lois liberticides qui le condamnent, accaparement religieux et rituel de l’espace, pressions vestimentaires, double langage, financements qataris …
Alors qu’un mois après les attentats de Charlie hebdo et de l’Hypercacher comme du « sursaut républicain » nous sommant de nous identifier à notre tour, derrière la nécessaire critique, à la déconstruction nihiliste et pipi caca de tout ce qui nous reste de valeurs ...
Et six mois après le prétendu rétablissement du califat par l’Etat islamique en Irak et la barbarie que l’on sait …
L’on attend toujours la protestation massive de musulmans occidentaux pourtant si rapides à dénoncer drapeau noir à l’appui la violence d’un Israël exerçant, face aux bombardements incessants du Hamas, son simple droit à l’autodéfense …
Pendant que, ne s’étant toujours pas résolu à prononcer le nom de l’ennemi, le prétendu chef du Monde libre n’a même pas pris la peine de se joindre ni à la Marche de Paris contre le terrorisme ni au 70e anniversaire de la libération d’Auschwitz …
Et que dans les zones dites sensibles, on n’arrive plus à trouver de professeurs …
Comment au lendemain de la polémique suscitée par la tribune puis la démission d’un professeur de philosophie du seul lycée musulman de France …
Et ses révélations sur le climat réel dudit lycée et ses financements …
Ne pas reconnaitre nombre de choses et attitudes depuis longtemps entendues ou vécues …
Mais, politiquement correct oblige, le plus souvent atténuées ou tues autour de nous ?
Mais comment aussi hélas contre l’affirmation bien intentionnée du professeur assurant tout anachronisme mis à part …
Que « le Prophète de l’islam lui-même n’était ni raciste, ni antisémite, et que de nombreux textes de la tradition islamique le prouvent clairement » …
Ne pas accorder à l’une de ses élèves le mérite au moins de la franchise lorsqu’elle soutient au contraire …
Que « beaucoup de savants de l’islam disent que la race juive est une race maudite par Allah » ?
Et surtout ne pas voir derrière la vulgarité hélas obscurcissante de Charlie hebdo …
Le vrai problème, à l’instar de ce qui a été fait par les traditions tant juive que chrétienne, de la critique nécessaire …
De textes appelant explicitement – pourquoi continuer à le cacher ? – à la violence et au rejet de l’infidèle ?
TRIBUNE Pourquoi j’ai démissionné du lycée Averroès
Soufiane Zitouni raconte ses difficultés suite à la publication de sa tribune intitulée «Le Prophète est aussi Charlie», ainsi que son quotidien durant les cinq mois passés au sein de ce lycée.
Soufiane ZITOUNI (Ancien professeur de philosophie au lycée Averroès à Lille)
Libération
5 février 2015
Depuis la rentrée 2014, Soufiane Zitouni enseigne au lycée Averroès, établissement privé musulman, sous contrat avec l’Etat, situé à Lille. Le 15 janvier, il publiait dans Libération une tribune intitulée «Le Prophète est aussi Charlie» dans laquelle il concluait «le prophète de l’islam, Mohamed, pleure avec nous toutes les victimes innocentes de la barbarie et de l’ignorance, et demande à Allah le pardon pour les nombreuses brebis égarées se réclamant de sa religion alors qu’elles n’ont toujours pas compris l’essentiel de son message.»
Il raconte ici ses difficultés suite à la publication de ce texte, ainsi que son quotidien durant les cinq mois passés au sein de ce lycée. Depuis deux semaines, démissionnaire de son poste, Soufiane Zitouni est en arrêt maladie. D’origine algérienne, il se réclame du soufisme, un courant ésotérique de l’islam moins attaché au caractère prescriptif de la religion, privilégiant une voie intérieure. Pendant une vingtaine d’années, il a enseigné dans des établissements catholiques et souhaite favoriser le dialogue interreligieux, tout en prônant un Islam plus ouvert et fraternel.
Depuis la publication de mon texte intitulé «Aujourd’hui, le Prophète est aussi Charlie» dans Libération le 15 janvier, il y a eu quelques «rebonds» dans ma vie, et certains d’entre eux, très négatifs, m’ont mené à démissionner du lycée musulman Averroès de Lille, lycée sous contrat avec l’Etat où j’ai tenté d’exercer durant cinq mois éprouvants mon métier de professeur de philosophie.
J’ai reçu de nombreux soutiens et remerciements après la publication de ce texte, certains m’ont même parlé de «courage». Mais pour moi, prendre la plume pour faire entendre ma voix en tant que citoyen français de culture islamique après les horribles attentats contre Charlie Hebdo et l’Hyper Cacher était surtout de l’ordre du devoir. Or, le jour même de la publication de ce texte, un proche de la direction de mon lycée vint m’interrompre en plein cours pour me dire en catimini dans le couloir attenant à ma classe : «Il est très bien ton texte, je suis d’accord avec toi sur le problème des musulmans qui manquent d’humour et de recul par rapport à leur religion, mais tu dois savoir que tu vas te faire beaucoup d’ennemis ici, et je te conseille de regarder derrière toi quand tu marcheras dans la rue…».
Par la suite, un enseignant décida d’afficher une photocopie de mon texte en salle des professeurs. Bien mal lui en prit ! Ma pauvre tribune libre sera retirée plusieurs fois du tableau d’affichage «Vie de l’établissement» par des collègues musulmans furieux qui crieront au sacrilège ! Puis le 20 janvier, un professeur du lycée, proche des frères Tariq et Hani Ramadan, publia une sorte de «réplique» sur le site «L’Obs Le plus». Dans cette tribune, il incrimina mon manque de raison, et tira à boulets rouges sur Charlie Hebdo en affirmant que ce journal «cultive l’abject» et qu’il «concourt, chaque jour, à la banalisation des actes racistes» (sic). Voilà donc ce que pensait un «représentant» du lycée Averroès d’un journal qui venait d’être attaqué tragiquement par des terroristes au nom d’Al Qaeda ! Pas étonnant alors que certains de mes élèves m’aient affirmé en cours que les caricaturistes de Charlie Hebdo assassinés l’avaient bien cherché, voire mérité… Et évidemment, nombre d’élèves me tiendront exactement le même discours que mon «contradicteur» : «vous n’auriez jamais dû écrire dans la presse que le Prophète est aussi Charlie !», «c’est un blasphème !», «vous léchez les pieds des ennemis de l’islam !», etc. Ce texte sera ensuite affiché à côté du mien en salle des professeurs, par souci du «débat démocratique», a-t-on essayé de me faire croire…
J’ai commencé à enseigner la philosophie au lycée Averroès en septembre 2014. Bien qu’on m’ait prévenu que cet établissement était lié à l’Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (UOIF), réputée proche de l’idéologie de Frères Musulmans, j’ai tout de même voulu tenter cette expérience en espérant pouvoir travailler dans l’esprit du grand philosophe Averroès, et donc contribuer, à ma mesure, au développement sur notre territoire national d’un islam éclairé par la raison, comme le philosophe andalou du XIIe siècle a tenté de le faire lui-même de son vivant. Mais en cinq mois de travail dans ce lycée, mon inquiétude et ma perplexité n’ont fait que s’accroître jusqu’à l’épilogue que fut cette réaction incroyable à un texte dont le tort principal aux yeux de mes détracteurs était sans doute d’être intitulé : «Aujourd’hui, le Prophète est aussi Charlie»…
Pour vous donner une première idée de l’illusion qui fait office d’image positive dans la vitrine publique de ce lycée, je vais vous relater ma première mauvaise surprise : la direction m’a confié des élèves de seconde pour deux heures hebdomadaires d’enseignement d’exploration en «Littérature et Société», alors en tant que professeur de philosophie, j’ai décidé de travailler avec eux sur un projet que j’ai nommé «L’esprit d’Averroès» afin de leur faire découvrir celui qui a donné son nom à leur lycée. Mais quelle n’a pas été ma surprise de constater que sur les rayons du CDI de cet établissement, il n’y avait ni livres du philosophe andalou, ni livres sur lui ! En revanche, j’y ai trouvé des ouvrages des frères Ramadan, très prisés dans ce lycée… J’ai dû alors me rabattre sur des bibliothèques municipales de Lille pour pouvoir commencer mon travail.
Pendant mes cours de philosophie avec mes quatre classes de terminale, les désillusions ont continué. Tout d’abord, le thème récurrent et obsessionnel des Juifs… En plus de vingt années de carrière en milieu scolaire, je n’ai jamais entendu autant de propos antisémites de la bouche d’élèves dans un lycée ! Une élève de terminale Lettres osa me soutenir un jour que «la race juive est une race maudite par Allah ! Beaucoup de savants de l’islam le disent !» Après un moment de totale sidération face à tant de bêtise, j’ai rétorqué à l’adresse de cette élève et de toute sa classe que le Prophète de l’islam lui-même n’était ni raciste, ni antisémite, et que de nombreux textes de la tradition islamique le prouvaient clairement. Dans une classe de terminale ES, un élève au profil de leader, m’a soutenu un jour en arborant un large sourire de connivence avec un certain nombre de ses camarades, que les Juifs dominent tous les médias français et que la cabale contre l’islam en France est orchestrée par ce lobby juif très puissant. Et j’ai eu beau essayer de démonter rationnellement cette théorie du complot sulfureuse, rien n’y a fait, c’était entendu : les Juifs sont les ennemis des musulmans, un point c’est tout ! Cet antisémitisme quasi «culturel» de nombre d’élèves du lycée Averroès s’est même manifesté un jour que je commençais un cours sur le philosophe Spinoza : l’un d’entre eux m’a carrément demandé pourquoi j’avais précisé dans mon introduction que ce philosophe était juif ! En sous-entendant, vous l’aurez compris, que le signifiant «juif» lui-même lui posait problème !
Autre cause de grosses tensions avec mes élèves : ma prétendue non-orthodoxie islamique ! Car évidemment, en tant que professeur de philosophie de culture islamique travaillant dans un lycée musulman, il m’arrivait régulièrement d’établir des passerelles entre mon cours et certains passages du Coran ou de la Sunna (un ensemble d’histoires relatant des propos et des actes du Prophète). Mais j’ai été agressé verbalement par des élèves qui considéraient que je n’avais aucune légitimité pour leur parler de la religion islamique, et de surcroît dans un cours de philosophie ! J’avais beau leur dire que c’était précisément la grande idée du philosophe Averroès que de considérer qu’il ne pouvait y avoir de contradiction entre la vérité philosophique et la vérité coranique, rien n’y faisait.
Et puis il y avait les thèmes et les mots tabous… La théorie darwinienne de l’évolution ? Le Coran ne dit pas cela, donc cette théorie est fausse ! J’avais beau me référer au livre de l’astrophysicien Nidhal Guessoum, Réconcilier l’islam et la science moderne dont le sous-titre est justement l’Esprit d’Averroès ! [Aux Presses de la Renaissance, ndlr], qui affirme avec de très solides arguments scientifiques et théologiques que la théorie de l’évolution est non seulement compatible avec le Coran, mais que plusieurs versets coraniques vont dans son sens, rien n’y faisait non plus.
Le mot «sexe» lui-même pouvait être tabou. Un jour, une élève (voilée) qui s’était proposée pour lire un texte de Freud, refusa de prononcer le mot «sexe» à chacune de ses occurrences dans l’extrait concerné, et c’est la même élève qui refusa lors d’un autre cours de s’asseoir à côté d’un garçon alors qu’il n’y avait pas d’autre place possible pour elle dans la salle où nous nous trouvions ! J’ai dû alors lui rappeler fermement que la mixité dans l’enseignement français était un principe intangible et non négociable. Enfin, combien d’élèves du lycée n’ai-je pas entendu encenser, défendre, soutenir Dieudonné ! Avec toujours cette même rengaine, comme répétée par des perroquets bien dressés : pourquoi permet-on à Charlie Hebdo d’insulter notre Prophète alors qu’on interdit à Dieudonné de faire de l’humour sur les Juifs ?
Je peux vous parler aussi de la salle des professeurs du lycée Averroès, où des collègues musulmans pratiquants font leurs ablutions dans les toilettes communes, donc en lavant leurs pieds dans les lavabos communs, et où la prière peut être pratiquée à côté de la machine à café… Quid des collègues non musulmans (il y en a quelques-uns) qui aimeraient peut-être disposer d’un espace neutre, d’un espace non religieux, le temps de leur pause ?
En réalité, le lycée Averroès est un territoire «musulman» sous contrat avec L’Etat… D’ailleurs, certains collègues musulmans masculins se sont permis de faire des remarques sur des tenues vestimentaires de collègues féminines non musulmanes, sous prétexte qu’elles n’étaient pas conformes à l’éthique du lycée ! Et l’une de ces collègues féminines non musulmane m’a dit un jour également qu’elle ne se sentait pas «légitime» (sic) dans le regard de ses élèves, parce qu’elle n’était pas musulmane précisément…
Je ne pouvais donc plus cautionner ce qui se passe réellement dans les murs de ce lycée, hors caméras des médias et derrière la vitrine officielle, même si je sais pertinemment que les adultes y travaillant et les élèves ne sont pas tous antisémites et sectaires. Mais, j’ai fini par comprendre au bout de cinq mois éprouvants dans cet établissement musulman sous contrat avec l’Etat français (mon véritable employeur en tant que professeur certifié), que les responsables de ce lycée jouent un double jeu avec notre République laïque : d’un côté montrer patte blanche dans les médias pour bénéficier d’une bonne image dans l’opinion publique et ainsi continuer à profiter des gros avantages de son contrat avec l’Etat, et d’un autre côté, diffuser de manière sournoise et pernicieuse une conception de l’islam qui n’est autre que l’islamisme, c’est-à-dire, un mélange malsain et dangereux de religion et de politique.
Enfin, last but not least, il y a ce propos entendu de la bouche même d’un responsable du lycée, lors d’un discours prononcé à l’occasion d’une remise des diplômes à l’américaine aux bacheliers du lycée de la session 2014, en présence de deux «mécènes» du Qatar : «Un jour, il y aura aussi des filles voilées dans les écoles publiques françaises !» Un programme politique ?
Soufiane ZITOUNI (Ancien professeur de philosophie au lycée Averroès à Lille)
Voici une tradition prophétique islamique (hadith) que j’aime raconter à mes élèves de terminale : un jour, un compagnon du prophète Mohamed surprend celui-ci en train de pleurer, et lui demande la raison de ces larmes qui lui fendent le cœur. Le Prophète lui répond alors entre deux sanglots : «J’ai vu que dans le futur j’allais devoir témoigner contre ma propre communauté.» Et je pose ensuite cette question à mes élèves : «Ce futur sur lequel pleurait le Prophète de l’islam, n’est-ce pas notre propre époque ?»
Je veux témoigner dans Libération (journal pour lequel j’ai travaillé dans les années 80 à Lyon au côté de Philippe Lançon que je salue affectueusement et auquel je souhaite un prompt rétablissement), de mon vécu propre des événements tragiques de ces derniers jours, en tant que citoyen français d’abord, et de culture musulmane ensuite. Oui, c’est bel et bien en tant que citoyen français qu’il me faut réagir aujourd’hui, et non pas en tant que membre d’une communauté religieuse (nécessairement hétérogène d’ailleurs, donc imaginaire, irréelle…), d’un mouvement politique, d’un courant d’idée, etc.
J’ai raconté ce hadith mardi à une classe de terminale dans laquelle les élèves sont majoritairement musulmans, et où il y a des filles voilées et d’autres non voilées. Je leur ai raconté cette histoire en ayant à l’esprit la une du Charlie Hebdo, renaissant de ses cendres, révélée par les médias la veille de sa sortie, mais aussi un dessin de Cabu tellement juste et si peu compris par beaucoup de musulmans, malheureusement, montrant un prophète de l’islam en colère s’exclamant : «C’est dur d’être aimé par des cons !» J’atteste ici en tant que citoyen français de culture musulmane de l’authenticité de ce hadith relayé par Cabu, paix à son âme ! Et je brandis en même temps une pancarte avec écrit dessus en lettres capitales : «Humour !»
Depuis quelque temps, et surtout depuis ces horribles meurtres d’innocents commis par des fous furieux criant «Allah est le plus grand !» ou «Le prophète Mohamed a été vengé !», je me demande si beaucoup de musulmans n’ont pas un énorme problème avec l’humour. Et j’ai repensé à un livre du psychanalyste François Roustang, qui m’avait beaucoup intéressé lors de sa sortie, intitulé Comment faire rire un paranoïaque ? François Roustang y explique que nous avons tous en nous un paranoïaque qui a besoin d’ennemis identifiés pour se rassurer quant à son identité propre, parce que ses ennemis lui servent de «limites» ou de «bornes» (qu’il n’a pas pu se constituer lui-même) lui permettant imaginairement de ne pas se diluer en un chaos angoissant. Et François Roustang ajoute que ce paranoïaque en nous, manque cruellement d’humour. Parce que ne plus prendre au sérieux sa propre paranoïa, ses «ennemis certains», ce serait renoncer à son identité imaginaire aussi consistante qu’un ectoplasme. Pourtant, commencer à rire de sa propre folie est le début de la guérison nous révèle aussi Roustang dans son très bon livre tragiquement d’actualité.
Pourquoi tant de musulmans manquent aussi cruellement d’humour, de recul, de sérénité dès que l’on touche à un tabou, un dogme, un interdit auquel ils sont jalousement attachés ? Prenons l’exemple de l’interdiction de la représentation du Prophète. Un sacré tabou au sein de l’islam ! Mais un tabou indéboulonnable vraiment ? J’ai été très proche un temps d’une confrérie soufie, la Tariqa Alawiya, dont le guide spirituel vivant en France est le cheikh Khaled Bentounès. En 2009, à l’occasion du centenaire de cette confrérie, le cheikh Bentounès a édité un bel album, d’une grande richesse iconographique, dans lequel il a osé publier des miniatures persanes représentant le prophète Mohamed, en considérant sereinement que ces représentations faisaient partie du patrimoine de l’islam, et qu’il n’y avait pas toujours eu, dans l’histoire de cette religion, un consensus des savants musulmans quant à l’interdiction de ce type de représentation. Comme il fallait s’y attendre, une polémique violente a immédiatement éclaté dans la presse algérienne, provoquée par deux institutions islamiques de poids, le Haut Conseil islamique et l’Association des oulémas, celle-là même qui combattit avec acharnement les confréries soufies du temps de la colonisation française en les accusant de superstitions non conformes à la charia et d’accointances coupables avec l’envahisseur. Ces mêmes institutions islamiques ont aussi accusé le cheikh Bentounès d’avoir associé dans son album commémoratif le sceau de l’émir Abdelkader à l’étoile de David, symbole du sionisme selon eux, alors qu’il ne faisait que reprendre le symbolisme profond et commun à l’islam et au judaïsme du sceau de Salomon. Mais l’ignorance de ces prétendus «savants» de l’islam (ouléma veut dire «savant» en arabe) nous aura permis au moins de découvrir avec enchantement dans la même presse algérienne, et cela grâce à la pugnacité du cheikh Bentounès, que nombre d’édifices musulmans en Algérie recèlent dans leur architecture ou leur mobilier ce «symbole du sionisme».
Est-ce à dire, alors, que la connaissance serait sœur de l’humour ? A cette question, je réponds sans hésitation, oui ! Ils sont risibles ces pseudo-savants de l’islam qui connaissent si mal leur religion et son patrimoine universel ! Mais ils sont risibles tant qu’ils ne passent pas au stade de la kalachnikov ou de l’attentat dit «kamikaze» pour répondre à ceux qu’ils perçoivent comme des ennemis de l’islam. Rappelons-nous que le prophète Mohamed lui-même disait que «l’encre du savant est plus précieuse que le sang du martyr».
Alors oui, ce prophète caricaturé, insulté, moqué, mais surtout ignoré, est aussi Charlie aujourd’hui, n’en déplaise à un grand nombre de musulmans qui trouveront peut-être ce propos déplacé ou naïf, voire insultant, surtout de la part de quelqu’un qui se réclame comme eux de la culture islamique. Oui, j’ose le dire, comme le très beau dessin de Luz le suggère avec tendresse et intelligence : le prophète de l’islam, Mohamed, pleure avec nous toutes les victimes innocentes de la barbarie et de l’ignorance, et demande à Allah le pardon pour les nombreuses brebis égarées se réclamant de sa religion alors qu’elles n’ont toujours pas compris l’essentiel de son message.
Soufiane ZITOUNI Professeur de philosophie au lycée Averroès à Lille
Voir encore:
« Charlie Hebdo »: le problème n’est pas religieux. Stigmatiser les musulmans est une erreur
Après l’attentat de « Charlie Hebdo » et la prise d’otages de la Porte de Vincennes, des voix se sont élevées contre les musulmans, allant parfois même absurdement les sommer de se désolidariser de ces actes. Pour Sofiane Meziani, professeur et membre du Collectif des musulmans de France, à culturaliser le problème, on a évité de regarder la réalité en face.
Édité par Henri Rouillier
Sofiane Meziani
Professeur d’éthique
LE PLUS/Le Nouvel Obs
20-01-2015
Mon cher collègue, professeur de philosophie, a récemment publié sur « Libération » une tribune intitulée « Aujourd’hui, le prophète est aussi ‘Charlie' », dans laquelle il exprime avec une émotion échappant parfois à sa plume son indignation à l’encontre de cette « majorité de musulmans » – à l’intérieur de laquelle je m’inscris – qui, à ses yeux, manque d’humour et, plus encore, de connaissance.
Quand l’émotion parle, la raison se tait
J’ai d’abord été surpris car je n’ai repéré à aucun moment la marque, l’empreinte du philosophe. Il a parlé de ses élèves en évoquant un hadith qui n’existe pas dans les termes cités, de cheikh Bentounès, de Roustang, de son contentieux avec certaines institutions islamiques sans compter cette longue parenthèse qu’il consacre à son ancien collègue de « Libération », mais mon très cher collègue n’a pas, à mon grand étonnement, abordé le fond du problème. Quand l’émotion parle, la raison se tait.
Je m’étonne de voir mon collègue qui enseigne Kant et Hegel emprunter un tel raccourci en réduisant la « majorité des musulmans » à des paranoïaques et surtout en qualifiant certaines autorités religieuses de pseudo-savants risibles.
Qui ne le connaît pas dirait qu’il prétend détenir le monopole de la compréhension de l’islam. Qui ne le connaît pas dirait que ce professeur de philo a peut-être vécu l’expérience de l’ascension ; qu’il est parvenu à contempler le monde des idées et à s’imprégner de la Lumière véritable, cette Lumière si douce, si éclatante, si pénétrante qu’il tente de répandre dans l’obscurité de la caverne où de nombreux musulmans grincheux, installés confortablement dans leur ignorance, prennent leurs illusions pour des réalités.
Qui ne le connaît pas dirait qu’il est sans doute un poète incompris, cet Albatros, géant maître des cieux, qui une fois au sol parmi les « brebis égarées » s’attire la foudre d’un public peinant à s’affranchir de sa piteuse condition : « Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule ! / Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid ! »
Qui ne le connaît pas dirait, tout simplement, qu’il prend la communauté musulmane de haut. Mais moi je le connais et ne doute point de son humilité. Je le salue au passage.
La communauté musulmane est la principale victime de ces attentats
Cela dit, ce que je regrette, c’est le manque de nuance dans certains discours qui, très vite, trop vite, tendent à culturaliser le problème. Bien entendu, je me suis profondément indigné devant le crime porté contre « Charlie Hebdo ». Non pas en tant que musulman ou citoyen français, mais, tout simplement, en tant que membre du corps de l’humanité. L’indignation, néanmoins, est la seule chose que je partage dans certains discours. Et ce, pour plusieurs raisons.
Sans violence, certes, mais avec non moins d’incompréhension que celle qui guidait les trois individus à l’origine des attentats contre « Charlie Hebdo », les discours en question nous prennent intellectuellement en otages, nous les musulmans, en nous réduisant à la folie de ces « fous furieux », parce que nous n’aurions pas d’humour ou, plutôt, parce que nous ne partageons pas leurs humours.
Je regrette parfois le ton dogmatique de certains propos. Je ne crois pas qu’on résoudra le problème en l’essentialisant et, surtout, en stigmatisant systématiquement la communauté musulmane qui, au fond, est la principale victime de ces crimes. Évitons les raccourcis et empruntons, plutôt, les chemins longs de l’analyse, et partant, renouons avec la culture de la complexification.
Il ne faut pas déplacer le débat sur le terrain religieux
On ne bâtit pas une société à coups d’humeur volatile ou de slogans, « Charlie ou pas Charlie », dénués de sens. Je refuse cette lecture simpliste et binaire du problème et me défends de me positionner selon le ton et les termes du débat qui nous ont été imposés.
Je crois qu’il faut dans un premier temps s’affranchir du type de discours qu’on veut nous définir. Comme s’il n’y avait qu’une seule façon de condamner et de se positionner. Il ne faut donc pas tomber dans le piège de la simplification. Gardons la nuance car il ne s’agit pas seulement d’être pour ou contre. Et plutôt que de coller trop facilement une étiquette culturelle sur le crime, il serait plus pertinent de risquer une réflexion en amont pour tenter de comprendre les causes qui conduisent certains jeunes citoyens français à trouver leurs repères dans la violence.
Ces jeunes étaient avant tout Français et ont grandi sur le territoire de la République. En déplaçant le débat sur le terrain religieux, certains ne font que servir la soupe aux populistes et aux islamophobes de tout bord. D’autant que notre démocratie est en train de payer le prix de cette liberté d’expression à géométrie variable qui s’applique au gré des intérêts économiques et politiques de nos oligarques.
Éviter de fixer la peur et l’angoisse sur un bouc émissaire
Je m’étonne, par ailleurs, qu’on n’ait dit mot sur cette recrudescence tangible, au lendemain de l’affaire « Charlie Hebdo », des actes islamophobes et, plus largement, sur cette islamophobie galopante et banalisée dans le discours médiatique, qui se répand dans la société au rythme des images défilant sur nos écrans et qui contribue chaque jour à alimenter les peurs et le rejet de l’autre.
Ces partis populistes qui dénigrent en permanence les musulmans sous couvert d’une laïcité dénaturée et bien loin des idéaux défendus par Aristide Briand et Jean Jaurès, n’ont-ils pas aussi une part de responsabilité dans cet attentat ? Ne sommes-nous pas aussi en train de payer le prix de la politique étrangère de la France qui s’ingère avec toute l’arrogance et la cupidité qui l’animent en Afrique et au Proche-Orient ?
Sans parler de la question du chômage et du problème de l’éducation. Ne faudrait-il pas construire un nouveau Nous et faire cause commune pour relever les défis de notre époque plutôt que de fabriquer un bouc-émissaire sur lequel chacun va fixer ses peurs et ses angoisses ? Émile Zola affirmait avec éloquence : « À force de montrer au peuple un épouvantail, on crée le monstre réel. » Ces trois jeunes ne sont-ils pas, au fond, le produit de notre société ?
Réduire donc cette affaire à une question religieuse ou un problème d’humour en tranchant à coup d’aphorismes prophétiques mal compris est simpliste, voire fallacieux. Certains discours, d’ailleurs, devraient s’inspirer de la méthode résolutive-compositive de Thomas Hobbes, laquelle permet de comprendre rationnellement le mode de fonctionnement d’une société, comme une horloge dont les ressorts sont un peu difficiles à discerner si on ne la démonte pas pièce à pièce et si l’on ne considère pas chaque composant de façon isolée.
Aussi, éviteraient-ils de passer par ces obscurs raccourcis où la menace de l’ignorance est sans cesse aux aguets.
« Charlie » cultive l’abject
Pour terminer, les musulmans n’ont bien entendu aucun problème avec l’humour, ni ne sont paranoïaques ; il s’agit plus d’un mépris de la bassesse. Et le prophète, contrairement aux justifications de mon collègue, n’aurait accordé aucun crédit, ni aucune attention à l’humour de « Charlie Hebdo » qui concourt, chaque jour, à la banalisation des actes racistes.
Il cueillait la beauté là où elle reflétait le Juste. « Charlie » cultive l’abject ; le prophète, lui, célébrait le beau. Il aurait sans doute honoré la beauté qui émane de la musique de Schubert, de la peinture hollandaise ou de la poésie baudelairienne. Mais à « Charlie », il aurait tourné le dos. Car la liberté n’a de sens que dans un cadre. C’est un sujet classique en philo, pourtant.
Si l’humour de « Charlie Hebdo » ne me fait pas rire, il ne faut pas m’en tenir rigueur, car je ne souris qu’à la beauté… et chaque sourire qui se dessine sur mon visage n’aspire qu’à être le reflet du beau.
Je ne partage pas les idées de mon cher collègue mais, qu’il s’en assure, je me battrais pour qu’il puisse les exprimer. En salle des profs, notamment !
Rémi Brague est philosophe et historien de la pensée médiévale arabe et juive. Il est l’auteur, entre autres, de « Europe, la voie romaine » (1999), « La loi de Dieu. Histoire philosophique d’une alliance » (Gallimard, 2005), et de « Modérément moderne » (Flammarion, 2014). Il s’exprime au sujet des assassinats de Charlie Hebdo :
« L’attentat contre les dessinateurs de Charlie Hebdo rappelle de vieilles histoires qu’il me faut malheureusement rappeler ici.
À l’époque de Mahomet, dans l’Arabie du début du VIIe siècle, il n’y avait évidemment pas de journalistes, faute de journaux, d’imprimerie, etc. Mais il y avait des poètes. Leurs vers, transmis d’abord de bouche à oreille, pouvaient être louangeurs ou satiriques. Ils influençaient l’opinion, comme le font de nos jours les organes de presse. Lorsque Mahomet se mit à prêcher son dieu unique, prétendit en être le messager et se mit à légiférer en Son nom, déclarant ceci « permis » ou cela « interdit », certains de ces poètes se moquèrent de lui. Mahomet savait pardonner à ceux qui l’avaient combattu, mais ne tolérait pas qu’on mette en doute sa mission prophétique. Il demanda donc qui allait le débarrasser de ces poètes. Des volontaires se présentèrent et les assassinèrent. Ils tuèrent d’abord Ka’b ibn Achraf, un juif, puis Abou Afak, un vieillard, enfin Asma bint Marwan, une femme qui allaitait. Leurs meurtres sont racontés dans la plus ancienne biographie de Mahomet, « La vie de l’envoyé d’Allah » (Sirâ) d’Ibn Ichak, éditée par Ibn Hicham vers 830. Abdourrahman Badawi en a donné une traduction rocailleuse, mais intégrale (Beyrouth, Albouraq, 2001, 2 vol.), qu’on préférera aux nombreuses adaptations de ce texte, qui sont toutes plus ou moins romancées. Mahomet assura les assassins qu’ils n’avaient commis aucune faute, un peu dans l’esprit du verset du Coran : « Ce n’est pas vous qui les avez tués ; mais Dieu les a tués » (sourate VIII, verset 17 a).
On comprend l’embarras des musulmans d’aujourd’hui. Je ne possède pas de statistiques fondées sur des sondages d’opinion parmi eux, mais tout nous invite à croire que leur grande majorité désapprouve ces crimes. Et, en tout cas, ceux qui s’expriment les condamnent sans nuances. Ce qui est à leur honneur. Mais, au-delà du refus constamment réitéré, et d’ailleurs légitime, de l’« amalgame » et de la « stigmatisation », comment dire que ces agissements n’ont rien à voir avec l’islam ? Le Coran appelle Mahomet « le bel exemple » (sourate XXXIII, verset 21), qu’il est loisible, voire louable, d’imiter. Comment ne pas comprendre que certains se croient autorisés à commettre en son nom et pour le venger ce genre de crimes ? »
FIGAROVOX/ENTRETIEN – Rémi Brague analyse les questions philosophiques soulevées par l’attentat de Charlie Hebdo et le sursaut national qui a suivi: la notion de blasphème, la laïcité et la liberté d’expression.
Rémi Brague est philosophe. Son dernier ouvrage «Modérément moderne. Les temps modernes ou l’invention d’une supercherie» est paru en mars 2014 aux éditions Flammarion.
L’attentat contre Charlie Hebdo prétend prendre appui sur des motifs religieux. Y a-t-il une violence inhérente à la religion en général?
Le mot de «religion» est déjà trompeur en soi. Notre idée d’une religion est calquée, même chez le bouffeur de curés le plus recuit, sur celle que nous nous faisons du christianisme. Nous allons donc dire: dans l’islam, il y a du religieux (les prières, le jeûne, le pèlerinage, etc.) et du non-religieux, la charia, dont les règles vestimentaires, alimentaires, etc. Et nous avons le culot de dire aux musulmans: renoncez à la charia et nous acceptons votre religion! Mais ils ne voient pas les choses comme nous; pour eux, la charia sous ses différentes formes, et avec toutes ses règles, fait partie intégrante de la religion. La mystique, elle, est certes permise, mais facultative. Tout le système de l’islam, si l’on peut dire, repose sur la révélation faite à Mahomet. Attaquer le Prophète, c’est mettre en danger tout l’édifice. Allah est de toute façon bien au-dessus de tous les blasphèmes, c’est pourquoi le nier est presque moins grave…
La violence, inhérente à une religion? Il faut distinguer les adhérents à une religion qui ont pu se laisser aller à des violences. Ils ont même pu les justifier au nom de leur religion. Ainsi Charlemagne convertissant de force les Saxons ou, bien sûr, ceux dont on parle toujours, les croisés et les inquisiteurs. Mais aussi les généraux japonais de la Seconde Guerre, bouddhistes zen. Ou Tamerlan, qui s’appuya au début sur les soufis de la confrérie des naqchbandis, dont les massacres, au XIVe siècle, surpassèrent ceux de Gengis Khan. Et rappelons que le plus grand pogrom antichrétien de notre siècle, en 2008, à Kandhamal (Odisha), a été le fait d’hindouistes, qui ne sont pas tendres envers les musulmans non plus.
Ceci dit, reste à se demander si l’on peut attribuer des actes de violence au fondateur d’une religion, à celui qui en reste le modèle et à son enseignement. Pour Jésus et Bouddha, on a du mal. Or, malheureusement, nous avons les recueils de déclarations attribuées à Mahomet (le hadith) et ses biographies anciennes, et avant tout celle d’Ibn Ishaq-Ibn Hicham (vers 830). Il faut la lire et se méfier des adaptations romancées et édulcorées. Or, ce qu’on y raconte comme hauts faits du Prophète et de ses compagnons ressemble beaucoup à ce que l’on a vu chez nous et à ce qui se passe à une bien plus grande échelle au Nigeria, sur le territoire de l’État islamique, ou ailleurs. Mahomet a en effet fait décapiter quelques centaines de prisonniers, torturer le trésorier d’une tribu juive vaincue pour lui faire avouer où est caché le magot (on pense au sort d’Ilan Halimi) et, ce qui ressemble fort à notre affaire, commandité les assassinats de trois chansonniers qui s’étaient moqués de lui. Il ne sert de rien de répéter «contextualiser! contextualiser!» Un crime reste un crime.
Comment a évolué la notion de blasphème en France?
La dernière condamnation pour sacrilège, chez nous, a été celle du chevalier de La Barre, en 1766. Je rappelle d’ailleurs qu’il avait été condamné par des tribunaux civils, les parlements d’Abbeville, puis de Paris, alors que les gens d’Église avaient essayé de le sauver… Nul doute que c’est en reconnaissance de ces efforts que l’on a donné son nom à la rue qui longe la basilique de Montmartre!
Une loi sur le sacrilège, votée en 1825 au début du règne de Charles X, a été abrogée dès 1830, au début de la monarchie de Juillet. Depuis lors, on pense davantage à des délits verbaux ou picturaux qu’à des profanations d’objets considérés comme sacrés. Ce qui n’empêche pas des crétins de combiner le verbal et le matériel en taguant des insultes sur des églises ou des synagogues et aujourd’hui sur des mosquées.
La représentation de Dieu n’est pas autorisée par toutes les religions. La figuration de Dieu permet-elle plus facilement sa caricature?
La figuration de Dieu dans le christianisme repose elle-même sur l’idée d’incarnation. Le Dieu chrétien n’est pas enfermé dans sa transcendance. On ne peut monter vers lui, mais il a voulu descendre vers nous. Il est d’une liberté tellement absolue qu’il peut, pour ainsi dire, transcender sa propre transcendance et se donner lui-même une figure visible en Jésus-Christ. Les icônes, tableaux, fresques, statues, etc., bref les neuf dixièmes de l’art plastique européen, sont, en divers styles, la petite monnaie de cette première entrée dans la visibilité.
Quant à se moquer de lui une fois qu’il a pris le risque de prendre une figure humaine, cela a été fait depuis longtemps, et en abondance. Les caricatures de Charlie, et les autres, ne sont rien à côté de ce qu’a dû subir, en vrai, le Crucifié. Leurs tentatives pour blasphémer sont donc moins du scandaleux que du réchauffé. Il est en tout cas intéressant que l’on se moque dans ce cas, non des tortionnaires, mais de leur victime…
Peut-on dire que «l’esprit Charlie» est héritier de Voltaire?
«Esprit» me semble un bien grand mot pour qualifier ce genre de ricanement et cette manie systématique, un peu obsessionnelle, de représenter, dans les dessins, des gens qui s’enculent… Voltaire savait au moins être léger quand il voulait être drôle.
Ceci dit, Voltaire est pour moi, outre l’un des plus enragés antisémites qui fut, celui qui a fait deux fois embastiller La Beaumelle, qui avait osé critiquer son Siècle de Louis XIV. Plus que ses tragédies, c’est l’affaire Calas qui lui a permis de devenir un de nos totems. Elle n’était pas la seule erreur judiciaire de l’époque. Pourquoi Voltaire a-t-il choisi de s’y consacrer? Ses premières lettres, au moment où il apprend l’histoire, fin mars 1762, le montrent à l’évidence: parce qu’il voulait avant tout attaquer le christianisme. On se souvient du cas: un père protestant soupçonné d’avoir tué son fils qui aurait voulu se faire catholique. On pouvait donc gagner à coup sûr. Si le père Calas était coupable, honte au fanatisme protestant; s’il était innocent, haro sur le fanatisme catholique… Mais attaquer les vrais puissants, les riches fermiers généraux ou les souverains, comme le régent ou le roi, pas question.
Donc, en ce sens, oui, il y a bien une filiation. Et n’avons-nous rien d’autre à offrir à nos concitoyens, et en particulier aux musulmans, qu’«être Charlie»? Leur proposer, que dis-je, les sommer de s’identifier à cet irrespect crasseux comme résumant la France, n’est-ce pas les encourager dans le mépris de notre pays et dans le repli identitaire? J’aurais préféré qu’on défilât en scandant: «Je suis Descartes», «Je suis Cézanne», «Je suis Proust», Je suis Ravel»…
La liberté d’expression étant inhérente à la démocratie, peut-on imaginer un islam modéré qui en accepte la règle, au point d’accepter la représentation de Mahomet?
Je préférerais parler des musulmans de chair et d’os, non de l’«islam», mot ambigu qui désigne à la fois une religion, une civilisation millénaire et des hommes. Il est clair que bon nombre d’entre eux s’accommodent très bien de la démocratie et de la liberté d’expression qu’elle permet en France, liberté qui est plus limitée dans leurs pays d’origine. D’ailleurs, même les extrémistes en profitent, à leur façon, pour répandre leur propagande.
Parler d’islam «modéré» me semble de toute façon insultant pour les musulmans. Car enfin, si l’islam est une bonne chose, alors aucune dose ne sera trop forte. Il y a des musulmans que je ne dirais pas «modérés», mais tout simplement, pour employer un mot qui fera sourire, «vertueux»…
N’y a-t-il pas, en France, une contradiction entre les usages du politiquement correct, la novlangue qui l’accompagne et l’affirmation que l’on a le droit de tout dire?
Elle est manifeste, et pas seulement en France. On a effectivement le droit de tout dire, sauf ce qui fâche… Appeler un chat un chat est devenu difficile. On préfère des euphémismes, au moyen de divers procédés, les sigles par exemple. On dira IVG pour ne pas dire «avortement», et GPA pour ne pas dire «location d’utérus», etc. Ou alors, on dilue en passant au pluriel: on dira «les religions» alors que tout le monde pense «l’islam». Ce n’est pas d’hier: on disait naguère «les idéologies» pour ne pas dire «le marxisme-léninisme».
En Allemagne, en Autriche, en Irlande, les lois proscrivent les atteintes au sacré. En France, le principe de laïcité, âprement défendu, les autorise. Comment concilier l’irrespect, le droit de ridiculiser, avec le respect des croyances?
Les lois dont vous parlez sont très variées selon les pays. Et elles visent avant tout à protéger non les croyances, mais les personnes concrètes qui les professent. Elles ne se distinguent guère de lois contre la diffamation en général. En tout cas, les règles qui régissent notre chère laïcité n’autorisent pas les atteintes au sacré, au sens où elles les recommanderaient; je préférerais dire qu’elles les tolèrent.
Le christianisme n’est pas une religion du sacré, mais de la sainteté. Un objet peut être sacré: un «lieu où souffle l’esprit», un monument, un arbre vert, une source, un animal -une vache par exemple-, mais il ne peut en aucun cas être saint. Seule une personne peut être sainte et, en elle, ce qu’elle a de plus personnel, sa volonté libre. Pour le christianisme, Dieu seul est saint. Ceux que nous appelons des saints ne le sont que par participation, par reflet.
Aucune croyance ne mérite le respect, même pas les miennes. C’est que les croyances sont des choses, alors que le respect ne peut avoir pour objet que des personnes. Et ce dernier respect, le seul qui mérite ce nom, est sans limite. Souhaitons qu’il soit réciproque…
«Nous vivons un temps de profanation généralisée», disait Alain Finkielkraut au mois de janvier 2013, au moment de l’affaire Dieudonné. Que reste-t-il de sacré dans nos sociétés modernes?
Nous payons le prix d’une vision des choses selon laquelle «ce qui est juste, c’est ce que dit la loi, voilà, c’est tout», comme l’a rappelé le 14 février 2013 le sénateur Jean-Pierre Michel, faisant d’ailleurs écho, sans le savoir, au système de défense des accusés du procès de Nuremberg. La conséquence de cette façon de voir est que ce que les hommes font, ils peuvent le défaire. En conséquence, ce qui sera solennellement décrété «inviolable et sacré» à un moment donné pourra très bien devenir par la suite un «tabou» qu’il faudra «dépasser». Rien n’est donc à l’abri de la profanation.
Bon nombre de gens font de la profanation leur fonds de commerce. Je ne les envie pas, car leur tâche devient de plus en plus difficile. Sans parler du «politiquement correct» déjà mentionné, ils ont à affronter une baisse tendancielle du taux du profit, car il ne reste plus beaucoup de choses à profaner, faute de sacré encore capable de servir de cible. On a déjà dégommé tant de baudruches… Et à la longue, on s’ennuie à tirer sur des ambulances. On ne peut plus, par exemple, se moquer des gens qui se croient distingués, collet monté, comme on le faisait encore dans les films d’avant-guerre, car tout le monde, et surtout les grands bourgeois, a adopté des mœurs cool, décontract, etc.
Bien des symboles n’ayant pas ou plus de divisions blindées pour les défendre, on pourra donc cracher dessus sans danger. Mais alors, «on triomphe sans gloire». Quand on persiste à s’en prendre à eux, il faudra constamment renchérir sur le blasphème précédent, aller de plus en loin, par exemple dans le scatologique.
En revanche, on voit apparaître de nouvelles idoles, que l’on reconnaît à une sorte d’interdiction d’en rire.
Un enseignant de l’établissement modèle lillois Averroès, sous contrat avec l’État, dénonce une laïcité flouée, un antisémitisme ambiant et une proximité avec l’idéologie des Frères musulmans..
Un pavé dans la «vitrine» Averroés? La démission de Soufiane Zitouni, 47 ans, professeur de philosophie au lycée Averroès, annoncée au grand public par le biais d’une tribune de l’intéressé dans le journal Libération du 6 février porte un coup à l’établissement lillois modèle.
Car ce lycée, portant le nom du philosophe musulman andalou du XIIe siècle, est le symbole de la synthèse réussie entre Islam et la République laïque. Il est le premier établissement musulman privé à avoir passé, en 2008, un contrat avec l’État (au même titre que les établissements catholiques, juifs et laïques privés).
«Une façade», selon Soufiane Zitouni, qui dénonceune laïcité flouée, un antisémitisme ambiant, une élève évoquant même «la race juive maudite par Allah», et une proximité avec l’idéologie des Frères musulmans. Il explique ainsi n’avoir pu trouver un seul livre d’Averroès dans le centre de documentation de l’établissement, quand on y trouve en revanche des ouvrages des frères Ramadan. «Les responsables de ce lycée jouent un double jeu avec notre République laïque: d’un côté montrer patte blanche dans les médias (…) et ainsi continuer à profiter des gros avantages de son contrat avec l’État, et d’un autre côté, diffuser de manière sournoise et pernicieuse une conception de l’islam qui n’est autre que l’islamisme, c’est-à-dire, un mélange malsain et dangereux de religion et de politique», assène-t-il.
«Les responsables de ce lycée jouent un double jeu avec notre République laïque.»
Soufiane Zitouni
Le 15 janvier, au lendemain des attentats, l’enseignant avait publié une première tribune dans Libération. «Ce Prophète caricaturé, insulté, moqué, mais surtout ignoré, est aussi Charlie, expliquait-il. Pourquoi tant de musulmans manquent aussi cruellement d’humour, de recul, de sérénité?»
Aucune remarque alors du côté de la direction du lycée, qui opte pour la libre expression. Mais certains parmi les professeurs et élèves y voient un «blasphème». Jusqu’à cet échange avec «une élève récidiviste, raconte Soufiane Zitouni. Elle a expliqué en substance que les gens de Charlie n’étaient pas si innocents et les frères Kouachi pas si fous». Propos qu’il rapporte à la direction. «Ils m’ont expliqué que certains sujets étaient sensibles et m’ont invité à mettre de l’eau dans mon thé à la menthe…» sourit-il.
«Accusations sans fondement»
Du côté d’Averroès, c’est l’indignation. D’une même voix, les enseignants sous le choc se disent «salis». La direction a tenu hier une conférence de presse et annoncé son intention de porter plainte pour diffamation contre l’enseignant démissionnaire. «Nous sommes profondément choqués. Il s’agit d’accusations sans fondement. Du bavardage», s’insurge Makhlouf Mamèche, directeur adjoint du lycée, en charge de l’enseignement privé à l’Union des organisations islamistes de France (UOIF). Ce dernier est par ailleurs président de la toute jeune Fédération nationale de l’enseignement musulman (Fnem), qui recense deux établissements sous contrat (Averroès et le groupe scolaire al-Kindi à Lyon) et une trentaine d’autres hors contrat (3 000 élèves au total). La Fnem a été créée en mars 2014, en partenariat avec l’UOIF, laquelle est présidée par Amar Lasfar, recteur de la mosquée de Lille-Sud. «L’enseignement musulman en France va prouver qu’il peut former dans l’espace public des citoyens éclairés et responsables, des femmes et des hommes qui ont réussi leurs vies sociales et professionnelles et, dans la sphère privée, de bons musulmans», expliquait à l’époque Makhlouf Mamèche. L’affaire Averroès ne risque-t-elle pas d’éclabousser la fédération? Dans le cadre de la grande mobilisation de l’école pour les valeurs de la République, celle-ci était reçue pour la première fois rue de Grenelle par Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, au lendemain des attentats. Pour l’heure, le rectorat a annoncé qu’il avait demandé, «en accord avec le directeur de l’établissement», la mise en place d’une «mission d’inspection afin de vérifier le respect des termes du contrat d’association signé avec l’État». Dans le cadre de ce contrat, conformément à la loi Debré, le lycée est déjà régulièrement visité. Il se doit de suivre les programmes scolaires, en échange de quoi les salaires des enseignants sont financés. Et son «caractère propre» – tout ce qui relève de la «vie scolaire» – respecté.
C’est en dehors des cours qu’un des responsables du lycée, lors d’un discours de remise des diplômes 2014, aurait expliqué «en présence de mécènes du Qatar» qu’«un jour, il y aura aussi des filles voilées dans les écoles publiques françaises», raconte encore Soufiane Zitouni. L’enseignant d’origine algérienne, né à Roanne, a passé une vingtaine d’années dans des établissements catholiques sous contrat, avant de rejoindre Averroès en septembre dernier. En prélude à toute discussion, il explique qu’il se réclame du soufisme, ce courant mystique de l’islam qui met l’accent sur l’expérience intérieure. Il estime que les professeurs d’éthique ou de culture islamique du lycée enseignent un dogme.
Par le biais d’une autre tribune publiée sur le site L’Obs Le plus, le 20 janvier», Sofiane Meziani, l’un de ces professeurs d’éthique, a répondu à Soufiane Zitouni. «Le prophète, contrairement aux justifications de mon collègue, n’aurait accordé aucun crédit, ni aucune attention à l’humour de «Charlie Hebdo. (…) Charlie cultive l’abject ; le prophète, lui célébrait le beau»
En arrêt-maladie depuis 15 jours, le professeur de philosophie a écrit à Najat Vallaud-Belkacem le 30 janvier. Il espère une nouvelle affectation. Sereinement. «Les soufis ne craignent que Dieu».
2015-02-07
A teacher at France’s only state-funded Muslim faith school has quit his job, writing in a leading newspaper that the establishment was riddled with anti-Semitism and was “promoting Islamism” to pupils.
Philosophy teacher Sofiane Zitouni wrote in left-leaning daily Libération on February 5 that the Averroès Lycée (high school) in the northern French city of Lille was a hotbed of “anti-Semitism, sectarianism and insidious Islamism”.
Zitouni, who is of Algerian descent and began teaching philosophy (which is compulsory for all high-school students in France) at Averroès in September, wrote that he could no longer tolerate the school’s alleged contradictions with France’s strictly secular “Republican values”.
“The reality is that Averroès Lycée is a Muslim territory that is being funded by the state,” he wrote. “It promotes a vision of Islam that is nothing other than Islamism. And it is doing it in an underhand and hidden way in order to maintain its [80 percent] state funding.”
Zitouni’s view of the school could not be further from how the establishment, which has been judged an “excellent” lycée by school inspectors, and achieves a 100 percent pass rate in the baccalaureate exams taken by all French high school students, sees itself.
The school’s director, El Hassane Oufker, told FRANCE 24 the school’s staff and student body were “hugely shocked and upset” by Zitouni’s comments and said that he would be suing him for defamation.
“We are in a state of shock,” he said. “The teachers are depressed and the students are very upset. We never got the chance to discuss [the allegations of Islamism]. We feel betrayed.”
‘Keep an eye over your shoulder’
A week after the terror attacks on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Zitouni wrote his first opinion piece in Libération titled “Today, the Prophet (Mohammed) is also Charlie”, a reference to the popular slogan “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie).
In his article, the teacher criticised “pseudo-experts on Islam who don’t understand their own religion”. He also blasted Muslims for failing to have a sense of humour about their own faith.
Zitouni wrote in his second article that after publication of the first, colleagues whispered to him threateningly that he would be wise to “keep an eye over your shoulder when you walk down the street”.
One of his colleagues, ethics teacher Sofiane Meziani, went on to pen a counter article, published in the French weekly L’Obs, where he argued that Charlie Hebdo, which had published cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, was a publication that “contributed to the trivialisation of racist acts”.
‘I have never heard so many anti-Semitic remarks’
Students also voiced their anger, Zitouni wrote, telling him he “licked the shoes of the enemies of Islam” and that his words were “blasphemy”.
His colleagues and pupils’ were even more angered by his statement that in his “20 years as a teacher I have never heard so many anti-Semitic remarks coming from the mouths of students”.
“I would hear that ’Jews dominate in the media’ and that ‘Jews are a cursed race’,” he wrote. “Even the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is viewed with scepticism purely because he was a Jew.”
“I did all I could to rationally dispel these conspiracy theories but to no avail,” he added. “I hit a brick wall. The Jews [his pupils told him] are the enemies of Islam. Full stop.”
But the school’s principal, El Hassane Oufker, insisted that nothing could be further from the truth.
“He worked here for three months and he saw and heard things that no one else has,” he told FRANCE 24. “The only thing that rings true about what he says is that he has spent a large amount of time talking about Islam in his philosophy lessons.”
‘Professional error’
“He tried to convert the pupils to his Sufi interpretation of Islam, particularly in terms of the veil and the role of women in society,” he added, referring to the more “spiritual” branch of Islam that places less emphasis on the literal interpretation of the Koran.
“It was a professional error on his part. He should have concentrated on the syllabus that is laid out quite clearly in the French state curriculum, something that he did not do.”
The entire teaching staff at the school have subsequently signed a joint communiqué in which they “strongly condemn the slanderous lies” of their former colleague Zitouni.
“This lycée was founded on the principles of openness and tolerance, in keeping with an understanding of Islam that is perfectly in tune with the values of the French Republic”.
Teacher quits French Muslim school accusing it of ‘promoting Islamism’
A teacher in France’s first Muslim faith school quits after accusing it of promoting Islamism to its pupils and alleging that it was was riddled with anti-Semitism
Rory Mulholland, Paris
The Telegraph
08 Feb 2015
France’s first state-funded Muslim faith school says it will sue for defamation one of its teachers who resigned after writing in a national newspaper that the establishment was a hotbed of anti-Semitism and was “promoting Islamism” to pupils.
A week after the terror attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, Sofiane Zitouni wrote a first opinion piece in the daily Libération titled “Today, the Prophet is also Charlie”.
He wrote in a second article in the same paper this week that he had decided to resign from the school in Lille where he had been teaching philosophy since last September because of the negative reaction to the publication of the first piece.
He said that a colleague at the school told him that he “should know that you are going to make yourself a lot of enemies here, and I advise you to keep an eye over your shoulder when you walk down the street.”
“In reality the Averroès Lycée is a Muslim territory that is being funded by the state,” Mr Zitouni wrote. “(It) promotes in a sneaky and pernicious way a vision of Islam that is nothing other than Islamism, which is to say an unhealthy mix of religion and politics.”
He also said that “in twenty years of teaching I have never heard so many anti-Semitic remarks from the mouths of pupils.”
The school in a poor neighbourhood of Lille was the first Muslim faith school to be opened in France and has since its launch in 2004 been judged an “excellent” lycée by school inspectors and scores a 100 percent pass rate in the baccalaureate school-leaving exams.
Its principal, El Hassane Oufker, rejected Mr Zitouni’s allegations and said that he planned to sue him for defamation.
“This lycée was founded on the principles of openness and tolerance and teaches an understanding of Islam that is perfectly in tune with the values of the French Republic,” the school said in a statement.
The local education authority said that, in agreement with the principal, it would carry out an inspection to ”verify that the school was adhering to the terms of the contract that it had signed with the state.”
A French philosophy teacher has resigned from one of the country’s only state-funded Muslim schools, claiming it promoted “Islamism” and was riddled with anti-Semitism.
The head of the Averroès Lycée strongly denied Sofiane Zitouni’s claims and threatened to sue him for defamation.
The teacher, who describes himself as a “French citizen of Muslim culture” had been at the private school in Lille for only five months but recorded his alleged experiences in French newspaper Libération.
A week after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Mr Zitouni wrote a piece entitled “today, the Prophet is also Charlie”, expanding on the “je suis Charlie” slogan that became a rallying call for the satirical newspaper’s supporters around the world.
People take part in a vigil in Trafalgar Square, London, following the deadly terror attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris People take part in a vigil in Trafalgar Square, London, following the deadly terror attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris He claimed that many Muslims failed to have a sense of humour with their faith, claiming the controversial Charlie Hebdo cover depicting a weeping Mohamed was hated only by those who “still have not understood the essence of his message”.
Mr Zitouni alleged that his article was badly received back at school, with pupils saying his stance was “blasphemy”, that he was grovelling at the feet of the “enemies of Islam” and that the murdered cartoonists “had it coming”.
A colleague warned him that he had made “enemies” with the piece, he claimed, whispering that he should “look behind him” as he walked in the street.
Another teacher from Averroès Lycée wrote an article in response in weekly French newspaper L’Obs. Sofiane Meziani, who is also a member of the French Association of Muslims, wrote that Charlie Hebdo “trivialised racist acts” and that characterising the attacks as a religious issue was reductive.
He concluded: “I do not share the ideas of my dear colleague, but he can be assured that I would fight for his right to express them. Especially in the staff room!”
On the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack, the school’s head teacher issued a statement expressing his condolences to the victims and saying the gunmen had “betrayed and defiled” the values of Islam.
Students held a minute’s silence and a protest holding signs reading “not in my name” and “the Prophet never asked to be avenged”.
People take part in the Unity rally People take part in the Unity rally « Marche Republicaine » in Paris in tribute to the 17 victims of a three-day killing spree by homegrown Islamists But Mr Zitouni, writing yesterday, claimed he resigned from Averroès Lycée because it was playing a “double game” with the secular French republic – presenting a positive image and good exam results to secure public funding while “disseminating stealthily and perniciously a conception of Islam that is nothing other than Islamism – an unhealthy and dangerous mix of religion and politics”.
“The reality is that Averroès Lycée is a Muslim territory that is being funded by the state,” he wrote.
The school has been rated “excellent” by the French schools inspectorate and reportedly achieves an 100 per cent page rate in high school exams.
Protesters in Marawi, Philippines, burn a poster with the face of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu The first edition of Charlie Hebdo after the attack sparked angry protests because of its cover featuring the Prophet Mr Zitouni claimed to have been told by students that he was not orthodox enough in his own belief in Islam, that Darwin’s theory of evolution was wrong and that a veiled female student refused to say the word “sex” or sit next to a boy.
“In more than 20 years of my teaching career, I have never heard so many anti-Semitic remarks from the mouths of students,” he wrote.
The teacher said he failed to dissuade a student from the theory that “Jews dominate French media” and that a “powerful Jewish lobby” was trying to crush Islam in France, being told that “Jews are the enemies of Muslims”.
Said and Cherif Kouachi, aged 34 and 32 The head teacher said Said and Cherif Kouachi ‘defiled Islam’ with their crimes The school’s head teacher, El Hassane Oufker, told France 24 staff and students were “hugely shocked and upset” by Mr Zitouni’s claims and that he would be sued for defamation.
“We are in a state of shock,” he added. “The teachers are depressed and the students are very upset. We never got the chance to discuss [the allegations of Islamism].
“We feel betrayed…he worked here for three months and he saw and heard things that no one else has.”
The school’s entire teaching body have reportedly signed a joint letter condemning that “slanderous lies” of their former colleague, France 24 reported.
Une bonne partie de ce que nous observons dans les relations entre la France et les Etats-Unis est le produit d’une structure de relations que l’on doit penser comme la confrontation entre deux impérialismes de l’universel. (…) La France est une sorte d’idéologie réalisée: être français, c’est se sentir en droit d’universaliser son intérêt particulier, cet intérêt particulier qui a pour particularité d’être universel. Et doublement en quelque sorte: universel en matière de politique, avec le modèle pur de la révolution universelle, universel en matière de culture, avec le modèle de chic (de Paris). On comprend que, bien que son monopole de l’universel soit fortement contesté, en particulier par les Etats-Unis, la France reste l’arbitre des élégances en matière de radical chic, comme on dit outre-Atlantique ; elle continue à donner le spectacle des jeux de l’universel, et, en particulier, de cet art de la transgression qui fait les avant-gardes politiques et/ou artistiques, de cette manière (qui se sent inimitable) de se sentir toujours au-delà, et au-delà du delà, de jouer avec virtuosité de tous les registres, difficile à accorder, de l’avant-gardisme politique et de l’avant-gardisme culturel (…) C’est dire que nombre des choses qui s’écrivent ou se disent, à propos de la France ou des USA ou de leurs rapports, sont le produit de l’affrontement entre deux impérialismes, entre un impérialisme en ascension et un impérialisme en déclin, et doivent sans doute beaucoup à des sentiments de revanche ou de ressentiment, sans qu’il soit exclu qu’une partie des réactions que l’on serait porté à classer dans l’antiaméricanisme du ressentiment puissent et doivent être comprises comme des stratégies de résistance légitime à des formes nouvelles d’impérialisme… (…) En fait, on ne peut attendre un progrès vers une culture réellement universelle – c’est-à-dire une culture faite de multiples traditions culturelles unifiées par la reconnaissance qu’elles s’accordent mutuellement – que des luttes entre les impérialismes de l’universel. Ces impérialismes, à travers les hommages plus ou moins hypocrites qu’ils doivent rendre à l’universel pour s’imposer, tendent à le faire avancer et, à tout le moins, à le constituer en recours susceptible d’être invoqué contre les impérialismes mêmes qui s’en réclament.Pierre Bourdieu (1992)
L‘anglais ? Ce n’est jamais que du français mal prononcé. Clémenceau
À la Cour, ainsi que dans les châteaux des grands seigneurs, où la pompe et le cérémonial de la Cour étaient imités, la langue franco-normande était la seule en usage ; dans les tribunaux, les plaidoyers et les arrêts étaient prononcés dans la même langue ; bref, le français était la langue de l’honneur, de la chevalerie et même de la justice ; tandis que l’anglo-saxon, si mâle et si expressif, était abandonné à l’usage des paysans et des serfs, qui n’en savaient pas d’autre. Peu à peu, cependant, la communication obligée qui existait entre les maîtres du sol et les êtres inférieurs et opprimés qui cultivaient ce sol, avait donné lieu à la formation d’un dialecte composé du franco-normand et de l’anglo-saxon, dialecte à l’aide duquel ils pouvaient se faire comprendre les uns des autres, et de cette nécessité se forma graduellement l’édifice de notre langue anglaise moderne, dans laquelle l’idiome des vainqueurs et celui des vaincus se trouvent confondus si heureusement, et qui a été si heureusement enrichie par des emprunts faits aux langues classiques et à celles que parlent les peuples méridionaux de l’Europe. Walter Scott (Ivanhoe, 1820)
According to Karlin, English is the key to Proust’s « doubleness », and the grit in the oyster of his French. Snobbery besides, his great subjects included the related one of etymology. He loved the way words are rubbed like old coins, names changing shape, competing and merging with other currencies, and he knew that the Academie’s propaganda about the classical purity de la langue française was simply fishing for compliments (two entries), then as now. That was why Proust was so fond of English, the vigorous bastard of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, swallower of all known tongues. And this was his view as an outsider, as a Jewish homosexual Dreyfusard bourgeois invalid artist: that English was the global future, more orgiastic than golf itself. Lewis Jones
Un poème écrit par Gérard Nolst Trenite, hollandais connu sous le pseudonyme de Charivarius ( 1870-1946) est une démonstration de toutes les exceptions et irrégularités de la langue anglaise entre l’orthographe et la prononciation . Ce poême est tiré du livre : Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraakoefeningen (…)Le Chaos représente un exploit de virtuose en composition, un catalogue de mammouth d’Environ 800 des irrégularités les plus les plus célèbres d’orthographe anglaise traditionnelle, habilement versifiée (si avec quelques lignes maladroites) dans des distiques avec l’alternance de rimes féminines et masculines. La sélection d’exemples apparaît maintenant quelque peu désuète, tout comme quelques-unes de leurs prononciations, en effet quelques mots peuvent même être inconnus aux lecteurs d’aujourd’hui (combien à savoir ce qu’ « une studding-voile » est, ou que sa prononciation nautique est « stunsail » ?) . Le poids de la poésie représente un acte d’accusation aussi valable du chaos orthographique en anglais. La créature la plus chère dans création » s’adressant à la première ligne, est comme « Susy » à la ligne 5. Ce pourrait être une anonyme quoiqu’une version ronéotypée de la poésie appartenant à Harry Cohen soit consacrée « à Mlle Susanne Delacroix, Paris ». Vraisemblablement elle fut l’une des étudiantes de Nolst Trenité. Chris Upward
Les adultes français ont une maîtrise moyenne de l’anglais, mais globalement ils n’ont pas fait de progrès au cours des 7 dernières années. Dans le 1er rapport EF EPI, la France était en ligne avec le niveau moyen d’anglais en Europe mais, alors que la plupart des pays ont fait des progrès sensibles, la France a stagné. Le niveau d’anglais à Paris est le plus élevé du pays mais reste inférieur à celui de la plupart des capitales européennes. Comme dans la plupart des pays, en France, les femmes parlent mieux anglais que les hommes. En France, le groupe des jeunes adultes est celui qui possède le meilleur niveau. Education First
“There are some countries that are still not giving the basic message that English is a necessary skill,” said Kate Bell, a researcher with EF, in Paris. According to Ms. Bell, the level of English proficiency among French adults suffers both from inadequate teaching at high school level and the reality that — despite fears of French culture’s being overwhelmed by American pop culture, very little English is actually used in everyday life. Unlike its smaller northern European neighbors, France dubs most American films and television shows into French. The top English speakers in continental Europe — Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands — all tend to use subtitling. “It’s a vicious-virtuous cycle,” said Ms. Bell: Audiences not used to subtitling tend to shy away from it, which in turn diminishes their capacity to understand English. France’s secondary school system, which has only recently started testing English oral skills as part of the Baccalaureate, is a major reason for poor language skills, she said. Spain, ranked at 23 in the index, has risen in the listing since introducing public English-Spanish bilingual schools. According to EF data, the country has significantly improved its proficiency level since 2007. Eastern European countries are faring much better. Estonia is fourth in the survey, which puts it in the “very high proficiency” bracket, just after the traditional Scandinavian heavyweights. Poland, Hungary and Slovenia — all in the “high proficiency” bracket — are ranked in the top 10, with Hungary showing significant improvement. “English is the de facto language of communication today between people who don’t share a native language,” Ms. Bell. said “Measuring English proficiency is in many ways a proxy measurement of international integration.” (…) Conversely (…) the EF study suggests that weak proficiency in English may correlate with weak integration into the global economy. “The Middle East and North Africa are the weakest regions in English,” the study said, with Iraq ranked 60th, at the bottom of the list. “Poor English remains one of the key competitive weaknesses of Latin America,” it added, with more than half the countries in the region in the lowest proficiency band. NYT
La relation entre les Français et les langues étrangères est ambiguë. Alors qu’ils se trouvent dans la moyenne en ce qui concerne la mobilité géographique vers un autre pays de l’Union européenne, les Français sont remarquablement peu motivés par la mobilité vers un pays étranger dont la langue n’est pas la leur. Autrement dit, ils disent oui à la mobilité européenne, mais non à l’apprentissage des langues étrangères. Ce constat est d’autant plus inquiétant que leur langue recule face à l’anglais et à l’allemand avec l’élargissement de l’Union européenne: parmi les populations des dix nouveaux États-membres, seuls 3% le maîtrisent, contre 12% dans l’ancienne Union européenne à quinze. Si l’apprentissage des langues ne fait pas l’objet d’un débat sérieux, les Français verront leur marché du travail rétrécir dans les années à venir.Anna Stellinger
En France les gens ne croient pas à la reconversion (…) Un chef de projet ne peut pas plus devenir avocat qu’un mille-pattes se transformer en aigle. L’un exclut l’autre. Bernard (cité par Lauren Zuckerman, Sorbonne confidential, 2007)
C’est la dissertation avec ses exigences incroyablement archaïques qui fait le plus pour écarter de l’enseignement de l’anglais dans les lycées français ceux qui ne disposent pas du capital culturel nécessaire – et en particulier les locuteurs natifs intelligents et expérimentés de l’anglais (…) En théorie, cette épreuve simple et objective permet d’éliminer les critères subjectifs et l’élément humain si souvent accusés d’exclure les étrangers. En réalité, les critères eux-mêmes sont totalement imprégnés de discrimination et sont bien plus efficaces pour éliminer les candidats non-Français de souche que le plus zélé des partisans de la « France aux Français ». Terence Beck (University of Puget Sound, Tacoma)
The present study shows essentially that it is not only the teaching of foreign languages but also the social status given to foreign languages in France which must be challenged. In order to develop a strong foreign language policy within the education system and to integrate it within society at large it will be necessary to conduct a wide ranging reflection. This reflection should not stay within the education system but should also take into account all the political and social implications of the objective that every citizen should have an operational command of at least one foreign language. (…) It would seem that for French teachers of English what comes first for learning a language remains grammatical correctness. This is why the representation given of learning a language is not conducive to communication. Teachers develop a hankering after perfection which hinders pupils. Thus it is necessary, in France, for teachers and for pupils alike, to have a perfect command of grammar in order to pick up the courage to speak, to express oneself. (…) Teachers aim at “perfection” in the message. Gérard Bonnet
De tous les étudiants que nous recevons, les Français sont ceux qui ont le plus d’inhibition, le plus peur du ridicule et le moins d’aisance à se lancer. Or plus on parle, plus on s’améliore. Oxford Intensive School of English (O.I.S.E.)
La France est pénalisée par sa faible exposition à l’anglais. Hormis à Paris et dans les grandes villes, il est par exemple encore compliqué de trouver des films en VO au cinéma. De la pub aux séries télé, tout est traduit. (…) Les pays scandinaves apprennent l’anglais pour peser à l’international et parce que ça leur coûterait trop cher de tout traduire, étant donné leur population limitée en nombre. La France n’a pas ce besoin… Adeline Prévost
Aujourd’hui, même si c’est de plus en plus difficile, on peut encore vivre en France sans jamais entendre de l’anglais. [Pourtant] la situation monolingue de la France est en train de lentement changer. Il y a quinze ans, je ne pouvais pas donner un texte en anglais à lire à des élèves de master. Aujourd’hui, c’est possible. Les jeunes ont l’habitude de regarder des séries américaines en streaming sur Internet. Il faudra du temps mais la prochaine génération sera bien meilleure. Maria Kihlstedt (Université Paris 10)
L’anglais est difficile parce que la graphie et la phonie ne correspondent pas, et parce que la fréquence des sons est différente de celle du français. (…) (…) On n’apprend pas aux enseignants la phonologie et la meilleure manière d’aborder la prononciation de l’anglais. Sans compter la surcharge des classes, qui comptent 35 élèves… (…) [En Espagne]Le gouvernement a décidé que 50% des cours de la moitié des écoles primaires devraient être bilingues, a fait venir des professeurs d’un peu partout, et a même accordé des bourses pour encourager les jeunes à partir à l’étranger pendant deux-trois semaines durant l’été. Adeline Prévost [la France a certes imposé l’enseignement d’une langue étrangère dès le CP] mais elle ne forme pas les professeurs pour ça. Laure Peskine (secrétaire générale de l’Association des professeurs de langue vivante)
Pas d’anglais, s’il vous plait, nous sommes français !
Arrogance culturelle, culture du sans faute, enseignement trop livresque …
Alors qu’entre pickpockets, commerçants antipathiques et piètre maîtrise de l’anglais, la première destination touristique du monde continue ses campagnes pour lutter contre une réputation séculaire …
Et qu’hormis la France, la plupart des pays européens voit baisser leur chômage et remonter leur croissance …
Retour sur la publication, en octobre dernier, d’une nouvelle étude d’Education First sur la maîtrise de l’anglais …
Où les Français se voient à nouveau classer au dernier rang de 21 pays européens et, entre l’Indonésie et Taiwan, 29es sur un total de 63 pays testés …
Société
LANGUES «20 Minutes» fait le point sur le niveau d’anglais des Français, alors que le salon Expolangues a lieu à Paris jusqu’à samedi… Pourquoi les Français are toujours so bad in English
Nicolas Beunaiche
20 Minutes
06.02.2015
«Semble se complaire dans la médiocrité. Peut mieux faire.» Chaque année, le relevé de notes et les appréciations de la France en anglais sont désespérément les mêmes. Dans la dernière étude publiée en octobre, celle d’Education First, les Français se classent ainsi à la 29e place sur 63, et surtout au dernier rang des 21 pays européens testés sur leur maîtrise de l’anglais. Pire encore, ils ne montrent quasiment aucun signe de progrès par rapport aux années précédentes.
Il n’y a pas là qu’une question de génération. Quel que soit l’échantillon étudié, actifs ou étudiants, le résultat est inchangé. «Aujourd’hui, même si c’est de plus en plus difficile, on peut encore vivre en France sans jamais entendre de l’anglais», regrette Maria Kihlstedt, maître de conférences en sciences du langage à Paris 10. «La France est pénalisée par sa faible exposition à l’anglais, confirme Adeline Prévost, qui présentera samedi les résultats de l’étude d’Education First lors du salon Expolangues. Hormis à Paris et dans les grandes villes, il est par exemple encore compliqué de trouver des films en VO au cinéma. De la pub aux séries télé, tout est traduit.»
Les Français et la peur du ridicule
La France tiendrait-elle donc à ce point à sa langue qu’elle serait prête à se tirer une balle dans le pied? Pour certains spécialistes, il faut y voir une question géopolitique. «Les pays scandinaves apprennent l’anglais pour peser à l’international et parce que ça leur coûterait trop cher de tout traduire, étant donné leur population limitée en nombre, analyse Adeline Prévost. La France n’a pas ce besoin…» Pour d’autres, le Français a tout de même l’excuse de la complexité de la langue. «L’anglais est difficile parce que la graphie et la phonie ne correspondent pas, et parce que la fréquence des sons est différente de celle du français», justifie Laure Peskine, secrétaire générale de l’Association des professeurs de langue vivante.
Tous sont en tout cas d’accord sur un point: si les Français ne s’améliorent pas en anglais, c’est d’abord un problème d’enseignement. La France a beau avoir les professeurs d’anglais les plus qualifiés d’Europe, selon Adeline Prévost, la qualité de l’apprentissage laisserait en effet à désirer. «On n’apprend pas aux enseignants la phonologie et la meilleure manière d’aborder la prononciation de l’anglais, estime Laure Peskine. Sans compter la surcharge des classes, qui comptent 35 élèves…» Nombre d’observateurs pointent aussi la culture française du sans-faute. «De tous les étudiants que nous recevons, les Français sont ceux qui ont le plus d’inhibition, le plus peur du ridicule et le moins d’aisance à se lancer. Or plus on parle, plus on s’améliore», explique-t-on à l’organisme de formation Oxford Intensive School of English (O.I.S.E.).
Le pouvoir du streaming
Ces dernières années, la France a vu passer devant elle l’Espagne dans les classements européens. Un pays dont la langue n’est pourtant pas plus proche de l’anglais que le français. «Le gouvernement a décidé que 50% des cours de la moitié des écoles primaires devraient être bilingues, a fait venir des professeurs d’un peu partout, et a même accordé des bourses pour encourager les jeunes à partir à l’étranger pendant deux-trois semaines durant l’été», détaille Adeline Prévost. Et la France? Elle a certes imposé l’enseignement d’une langue étrangère dès le CP, «mais elle ne forme pas les professeurs pour ça», déplore Laure Peskine, qui craint que les enfants acquièrent de mauvais réflexes. Signe de la place que l’Education nationale accorde à l’anglais, le brevet a par ailleurs intégré en 2011 une nouvelle épreuve orale. La langue de Shakespeare? Non, plutôt William Turner, à travers l’histoire des arts.
Il y a donc de quoi être pessimiste. Pourtant, Maria Kihlstedt considère que «la situation monolingue de la France est en train de lentement changer»: «Il y a quinze ans, je ne pouvais pas donner un texte en anglais à lire à des élèves de master. Aujourd’hui, c’est possible.» «Les jeunes ont l’habitude de regarder des séries américaines en streaming sur Internet, poursuit-elle. Il faudra du temps mais la prochaine génération sera bien meilleure.» Croisons les fingers.
MARSEILLE, France — Marseille’s new Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations opened in June, part of the city’s celebration of its status as this year’s European Capital of Culture.
Though the museum is European in ambition, many of its exhibits are labeled only in French: English, though firmly established as the global language of business, education and culture, is glaringly absent from most of the signage, though an English-language audio tour is available.
A study released last week suggests that this absence is symbolic of a significant trend. The study, by Education First, an international education company, found that while English proficiency among European adults is generally increasing, proficiency in France is both low and declining.
According to the third EF English Proficiency Index, released last week, France ranked 35th among 60 nations where English is not the main language. The study put the country’s average English language skills in the “low proficiency” bracket, between China and the United Arab Emirates — and last among European nations. It also found that France was one of only two European countries where proficiency had decreased over the past six years. Norway was the other; but there, proficiency remained at such a high level that the change was insignificant.
The rankings are based on the results of 750,000 online assessment tests completed last year — some online, others by English language school applicants.
EF’s English Proficiency Index, based on the test results, compared country scores with the results of a similar study carried out between 2007 and 2009, to identify trends in proficiency levels over the past six years.
“There are some countries that are still not giving the basic message that English is a necessary skill,” said Kate Bell, a researcher with EF, in Paris.
According to Ms. Bell, the level of English proficiency among French adults suffers both from inadequate teaching at high school level and the reality that — despite fears of French culture’s being overwhelmed by American pop culture, very little English is actually used in everyday life.
Unlike its smaller northern European neighbors, France dubs most American films and television shows into French. The top English speakers in continental Europe — Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands — all tend to use subtitling.
“It’s a vicious-virtuous cycle,” said Ms. Bell: Audiences not used to subtitling tend to shy away from it, which in turn diminishes their capacity to understand English.
France’s secondary school system, which has only recently started testing English oral skills as part of the Baccalaureate, is a major reason for poor language skills, she said.
Spain, ranked at 23 in the index, has risen in the listing since introducing public English-Spanish bilingual schools. According to EF data, the country has significantly improved its proficiency level since 2007.
Eastern European countries are faring much better. Estonia is fourth in the survey, which puts it in the “very high proficiency” bracket, just after the traditional Scandinavian heavyweights. Poland, Hungary and Slovenia — all in the “high proficiency” bracket — are ranked in the top 10, with Hungary showing significant improvement.
“English is the de facto language of communication today between people who don’t share a native language,” Ms. Bell. said “Measuring English proficiency is in many ways a proxy measurement of international integration.”
Turkey, though still a “low proficiency” nation, ranked 41st in the index, was the country showing the biggest improvement in the past six years. EF researchers point to Turkey as a perfect example of economic development and international engagement that go hand-in-hand with English proficiency.
Because of its prominence in international business, higher education and politics, the importance of basic proficiency in English can scarcely be overstated. More than just a linguistic skill, adult English proficiency is key to success in the globalized world.
Conversely, the EF study suggests that weak proficiency in English may correlate with weak integration into the global economy.
“The Middle East and North Africa are the weakest regions in English,” the study said, with Iraq ranked 60th, at the bottom of the list.
“Poor English remains one of the key competitive weaknesses of Latin America,” it added, with more than half the countries in the region in the lowest proficiency band.
Billions of people around the globe are desperately trying to learn English—not simply for self-improvement, but as an economic necessity. It’s easy to take for granted being born in a country where people speak the lingua franca of global business, but for people in emerging economies such as China, Russia, and Brazil, where English is not the official language, good English is a critical tool, which people rightly believe will help them tap into new opportunities at home and abroad.
Why should global business leaders care about people learning English in other parts of the world?
Research shows a direct correlation between the English skills of a population and the economic performance of the country. Indicators like gross national income (GNI) and GDP go up. In our latest edition of the EF English Proficiency Index (EF EPI), the largest ranking of English skills by country, we found that in almost every one of the 60 countries and territories surveyed, a rise in English proficiency was connected with a rise in per capita income. And on an individual level, recruiters and HR managers around the world report that job seekers with exceptional English compared to their country’s level earned 30-50% percent higher salaries.
The interaction between English proficiency and gross national income per capita is a virtuous cycle, with improving English skills driving up salaries, which in turn give governments and individuals more money to invest in language training. On a micro level, improved English skills allow individuals to apply for better jobs and raise their standards of living.
This is one explanation for why Northern European countries are always out front in the EF EPI, with Sweden taking the top spot for the last two years. Given their small size and export-driven economies, the leaders of these nations understand that good English is a critical component of their continued economic success.
It’s not just income that improves either. So does the quality of life. We also found a correlation between English proficiency and the Human Development Index, a measure of education, life expectancy, literacy, and standards of living. As you can see in the chart below, there is a cutoff mark for that correlation. Low and very low proficiency countries display variable levels of development. However, no country of moderate or higher proficiency falls below “Very High Human Development” on the HDI.
For business leaders, knowing which countries are investing in and improving in English can give valuable insight into how a country fits into the global marketplace and how that might affect your company’s strategy. Here are just a few of the questions you might consider:
Which countries are aggressively improving their English proficiency in an effort to attract businesses like mine?
Where could poor English hinder the growth of emerging economies?
In which countries should I target my international recruitment efforts?
As we think about expanding globally, where will my existing, native English-speaking employees find it easiest to relocate?
Business leaders who understand which nations are positioning themselves for a smoother entry into the global marketplace will have a competitive advantage over those who don’t. Your company needs to know how the center of English language aptitude is shifting. Because knowing English is not just a luxury—it’s the sina qua non of global business today.
Christopher McCormick is Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at EF Education First and head of the EF Research Network.
Countries with poor English-language skills also have lower levels of trade, innovation and income, according to a report released last week.
The report ranks 54 countries where English is not a native language, with the top five being Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland and Norway. The bottom five were Colombia, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Libya.
The results were based on a survey of 1.7 million adults on five continents and released by Education First, an international education company based in Switzerland.
“English is key to innovation and competitiveness,” Michael Lu, senior vice president of Education First, said in the report.
Italy, Spain and Portugal were being held back by the fact that they had some of the poorer English skills in Europe, the report said. In the BRIC grouping, India was ranked the highest, at 14th. It was followed by Russia at 29th, China at 36th and Brazil at 46th.
Women generally scored better than men, and the gender gap was widest in the Middle East and North Africa, according to the report.
SYNTHÈSE
La quatrième édition de l’EF EPI classe 63 pays et territoires en fonction du niveau de compétence en anglais des adultes.
En 2014, la langue anglaise est de plus en plus considérée comme une compétence de base dans une économie mondialisée. Cependant, les différents pays adoptent des approches de l’enseignement de l’anglais bien différentes, avec leurs propres préoccupations, contraintes et solutions. Dans certains cas, un événement international, tel que les Jeux olympiques ou la Coupe du monde, constitue une plate-forme d’initiatives d’apprentissage pour les adultes. Dans d’autres cas, les pressions économiques encouragent les pays à utiliser l’anglais comme catalyseur d’internationalisation et de croissance. Aujourd’hui, tous les pays tentent de déterminer si l’anglais représente une menace pour leur langue nationale, évaluent les moyens de former assez d’enseignants pour créer de nouvelles initiatives dans les salles de classe et s’efforcent autant que possible de mettre en place des outils d’évaluation adéquats.
Alors que la discussion sur l’enseignement de l’anglais fait rage au sein des ministères de l’éducation, des parents investissent dans des programmes périscolaires destinés à élever le niveau d’anglais de leurs enfants, des étudiants diplômés migrent à l’étranger, des professionnels ambitieux passent leurs soirées à étudier en ligne et des entreprises octroient des primes aux candidats maîtrisant correctement l’anglais. Un écart considérable subsiste toujours entre l’apprentissage de la langue anglaise dispensé par la plupart des systèmes scolaires et les attentes des parents, des étudiants et des employeurs.
Dans cette quatrième édition de l’indice de compétence en anglais EF, de nombreuses tendances régionales et démographiques examinées dans les éditions précédentes se confirment. L’élaboration de l’indice international annuel comporte une mise à jour de l’analyse des niveaux d’anglais régionaux et de l’écart des compétences en langue anglaise entre les sexes et les générations. Les dernières données indiquent que :
On assiste globalement à un accroissement des compétences en anglais des adultes, bien que cette augmentation soit loin d’être uniforme dans tous les pays et au sein de toutes les populations.
Les femmes parlent mieux anglais que les hommes dans presque tous les pays sondés. Cet écart de compétences constaté est suffisamment important pour avoir des répercussions sur l’emploi. Pour y remédier, il convient tout d’abord de bien comprendre les causes de la faible maîtrise de l’anglais au sein de la population masculine.
Dans le monde, les adultes en milieu de carrière maîtrisent mieux l’anglais que n’importe quelle autre tranche d’âge. Cette constatation soulève des questions quant à la préparation des jeunes diplômés au marché du travail. Elle démontre également que les adultes peuvent améliorer leurs compétences en-dehors d’un cadre scolaire traditionnel.
Le niveau d’anglais en Europe reste bien plus élevé que dans les autres régions et continue de progresser.
Les pays asiatiques présentent un large éventail de niveaux de compétences, d’élevé à très faible, avec à la fois des progrès spectaculaires et une stagnation persistante.
Dans presque tous les pays d’Amérique latine, du Moyen-Orient et d’Afrique du Nord, la maîtrise de l’anglais est faible, voire très faible. Bien que l’on assiste à une amélioration dans quelques pays de ces régions, ce n’est pas le cas pour la plupart.
Il existe des corrélations solides entre la maîtrise de l’anglais et les revenus, la qualité de vie, l’activité commerciale, l’utilisation d’internet et la durée des études. Ces corrélations sont remarquablement stables au fil du temps.
L’ANGLAIS FACILITE LES AFFAIRES
Un meilleur niveau d’anglais facilite les affaires. Partout dans le monde les entreprises traitent de plus en plus d’affaires en anglais. Celles qui ne le font pas risquent de rester en marge derrière leurs concurrents.
ACTIVITÉ COMMERCIALE EN ANGLAIS
La banque mondiale et l’indice Ease of Doing Business de l’International Finance Corporation classent les environnements réglementaires des économies dans le monde en fonction de leur propension à mettre en place et à exploiter une relation professionnelle. L’indice comporte dix sous-indices, parmi lesquels : la facilité à créer une entreprise, l’exercice d’une activité commerciale transfrontalière, l’exécution des contrats et la résolution de l’insolvabilité. Une très bonne maîtrise de l’anglais facilite également les relations commerciales.
Dans les pays où l’anglais n’est pas une langue officielle, sa bonne maîtrise facilite la mise en place d’une activité commerciale. Aujourd’hui dans le monde, l’anglais est de plus en plus utilisé pour les activités professionnelles des entreprises. Un nombre croissant d’entreprises (p. ex., Rakuten, Nokia, Samsung et Renault) adoptent l’anglais en tant que langue d’entreprise. Celles qui refusent de le faire risquent de se trouver à la traîne par rapport à leurs concurrents.
INVESTIR DANS UNE MAIN D’ŒUVRE MAÎTRISANT L’ANGLAIS
Dans un environnement toujours plus international, les entreprises se tournent vers les marchés mondiaux à la recherche de revenus, d’efficacités opérationnelles et de partenariats stratégiques. La capacité à communiquer et à comprendre les cultures étrangères contribue à la réussite de l’expansion des entreprises à l’étranger. Aujourd’hui, l’anglais est devenu le moyen de communication international le plus courant. Plusieurs raisons expliquent pourquoi la maîtrise de la langue anglaise mène à une compétitivité internationale accrue pour une entreprise.
UNE EXPANSION RÉUSSIE À L’ÉTRANGER
La mondialisation pousse un nombre croissant d’entreprises à s’étendre au-delà de leurs frontières et à internationaliser leur manière de faire des affaires. Une enquête de JPMorgan Chase a révélé que 61 % des entreprises du marché intermédiaire ont été très actives sur les marchés internationaux en 2013, jusqu’à 58 % en 2012 et 43 % en 2011. La communication entre les entreprises et leurs clients, collègues, fournisseurs et partenaires en-dehors du marché national est de plus en plus courante. Les entreprises qui prospèrent dans de telles conditions sont celles dont les employés possèdent les compétences et la formation leur permettant de communiquer efficacement au-delà des frontières.
LA MINIMISATION DES PERTES LIÉES AUX PROBLÈMES DE COMMUNICATION
Selon un sondage de l’Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU), près de la moitié des 572 cadres de sociétés multinationales dans le monde a reconnu que des problèmes de communication ont entravé de grands accords internationaux et ont entraîné par là même des pertes importantes pour leurs entreprises. Ce pourcentage est bien plus élevé pour les cadres des entreprises brésiliennes et chinoises : respectivement 74% et 61% d’entre eux ont reconnu avoir subi de telles pertes.
La conclusion est claire : la langue et les différences culturelles sont des obstacles au succès professionnel. D’après cette étude de l’EIU, 64 % des chefs d’entreprise ont déclaré que les différences linguistiques et culturelles rendent difficile l’implantation de leur entreprise sur les marchés étrangers et que les différences culturelles ont nui à leurs objectifs d’expansion internationale. En outre, 70 % ont déclaré rencontrer parfois des difficultés lors des communications avec les actionnaires.
DE MEILLEURS RÉSULTATS
Presque 90 % des cadres interrogés par l’EIU ont déclaré qu’une amélioration de la communication transfrontalière dans leur entreprise permettrait d’augmenter de manière significative à la fois leurs revenus, leurs bénéfices et leur part de marché, avec de meilleures opportunités d’expansion et moins de pertes relatives aux débouchés commerciaux. Selon une autre étude, menée par Illuminas en 2014, une augmentation des ventes a été constatée pour 79 % des décideurs d’entreprises mondiales ayant investi dans la formation en anglais de leur personnel. Parmi les autres avantages commerciaux, on dénombre une meilleure communication entre les salariés, une productivité plus intense de l’effectif et une plus grande satisfaction de la clientèle.
ANGLAIS ET COMPÉTITIVITÉ ÉCONOMIQUE
Dès la première édition de l’EF EPI sont apparues de solides corrélations entre les niveaux de compétence en anglais d’un pays et un certain nombre
d’indicateurs économiques et sociaux.Historiquement, le fait de parler une seconde langue, ou, plus précisément, de parler une seconde langue d’importance notable, a toujours été le marqueur d’une élite sociale et économique. L’Empire britannique et l’expansion économique des États-Unis ont permis d’étendre l’influence de l’anglais. Aujourd’hui, dans de nombreux pays, l’anglais a remplacé le rôle joué autrefois par le français en tant que marqueur de la classe aristocratique instruite. Cependant, la mondialisation, l’urbanisation et Internet ont radicalement changé le rôle de l’anglais ces 20 dernières années. Aujourd’hui, la maîtrise de l’anglais est de moins en moins associée à une élite et n’est plus, comme autrefois, liée aux États-Unis ou au Royaume-Uni. L’anglais devient progressivement une compétence de base nécessaire pour l’ensemble d’une main d’œuvre, tout comme l’alphabétisation est passée, au cours des deux derniers siècles, de privilège d’élite à pré requis de base d’une population éclairée.
UNE BONNE MAÎTRISE DE L’ANGLAIS EST SYNONYME DE REVENUS PLUS ÉLEVÉS
L’anglais est un élément essentiel dans la détermination de l’accès à l’emploi. En Inde par exemple, les employés parlant couramment l’anglais gagnent en moyenne un salaire horaire plus élevé de 34 % par rapport à ceux ne le parlant pas ; même les salariés ayant des connaissances rudimentaires en anglais ont un salaire plus élevé de 13 % par rapport à ceux n’ayant aucune connaissance de cette langue.
L’interaction entre la maîtrise de l’anglais et le revenu national brut par habitant sous-entend l’existence d’un cercle vertueux, par lequel l’amélioration de la langue anglaise fait augmenter les salaires, ce qui permet aux gouvernements et aux individus d’investir plus d’argent dans la formation en anglais. Pour l’anecdote, cette relation s’applique également à l’échelle micro-économique : une bonne maîtrise de la langue anglaise permet aux individus d’obtenir de meilleurs emplois et d’améliorer leur niveau de vie.
Le nombre de chômeurs a baissé en Espagne en 2014, pour la deuxième année consécutive. Une baisse du chômage est également observée au Royaume-Uni, en Irlande ou en Grèce… Mais pas en France, en Italie et en Finlande.
En Europe, la France fait désormais figure de triste exception. Alors que l’Hexagone a recensé 27.400 chômeurs supplémentaires en novembre et 181.000 depuis le début de l’année, la plupart de ses voisins peuvent se targuer d’avoir inversé la fameuse «courbe du chômage». Avec 253.000 chômeurs de moins en 2014, l’Espagne fait figure, elle, de bonne élève. Mais ces derniers mois, l’Allemagne, l’Irlande, la Grèce, les pays baltes, les Pays-Bas, la Pologne ou encore le Royaume-Uni ont tous enregistré une baisse de leur taux de chômage, selon Eurostat. Et si le taux de chômage portugais est légèrement remonté en octobre et en novembre, il s’établit à 13,9%, contre plus de 15% l’anée dernière. Une spirale positive dont ne bénéficie pas la France, l’Italie ou encore la Finlande.
En cause, dans ces pays, une croissance atone qui peine à créer de l’emploi. Alors que le PIB français, au deuxième trimestre, a stagné sur un an, celui de l’Irlande a progressé, sur la même période, de 6,5%, celui du Royaume-Uni de 3,2%, celui de l’Espagne de 1,2% et celui du Portugal de 0,9%. «Dans les pays anglo-saxons, les principaux freins pesant sur la demande semblent à présent levés», note l’Insee dans sa dernière note de conjoncture. Le reste de la zone euro reste pénalisé par une demande intérieure en berne. Mais la France, l’Italie et la Finlande réalisent des performances particulièrement négatives (respectivement 0%, -0,4% et -0,1%). Difficile, dans ces conditions, de faire baisser le chômage de part et d’autres des Alpes.
Contrats zéro heures
Les pays du Sud de l’Europe – la Grèce, l’Espagne et le Portugal- engrangent aussi le fruit des réformes engagées pendant la crise. Pris dans la tourmente financière ces dernières années, ils ont renforcé la compétitivité de leurs économies. L’Espagne a par exemple réformé son marché du travail, facilitant les licenciements comme les baisses de salaires. Pour créer des emplois, une croissance moins forte qu’avant la crise y est aujourd’hui nécessaire. La piste de la modération salariale a également été empruntée par Lisbonne. Quant à la Grèce, elle retrouve le chemin de la croissance après plusieurs années de réformes drastiques et douloureuses. Le taux de chômage n’en reste pas moins extrêmement élevé.
Dans plusieurs pays européens, la baisse du chômage ne va d’ailleurs pas sans contreparties. Au Royaume-Uni, où il ne dépasse pas 6%, les contrats de travail ultra-flexibles, comme les contrats «zéro heure» (le salarié peut être convoqué à la dernière minute) se sont développés, et avec eux le nombre de travailleurs pauvres en situation précaire. «En Espagne, outre la baisse des salaires, les contrats de travail à temps temporaires et à temps partiel ont progressé. Mais avec un taux de chômage qui culmine encore à près d’un quart de la population active, difficile pour les Espagnols de refuser une opportunité de travailler…
Kató Lomb (née à Pécs le 8 février 1909 et morte à Budapest le 9 juin 2003) était une traductrice, linguiste et interprète hongroise.
Elle a appris 17 langues (!) tout au long de sa vie.
Comme elle était plutôt expérimentée dans ce domaine, elle nous a laissé les 10 commandements de l’apprentissage d’une langue étrangère. Vous êtes prêts ? C’est parti !
I – Pratique tous les jours
Pas le temps ? Mais si, voyons.
Il suffit par exemple de se lever un tout petit peu plus tôt tous les jours et de se lancer dans un monologue de 10 minutes.
II – Si ton enthousiasme fléchit, ne force pas, n’abandonne pas tout mais bascule.
Ex : Tu apprends le français et n’en peux plus de cet article et de chercher dans le dictionnaire. Fais une pause en écoutant une chanson francophone que tu apprécies.
III – N’apprends pas de mots isolés. Ne les laisse jamais seuls.
Il vaut mieux apprendre directement des groupes de mots ou des phrases.
IV – Note des éléments de phrases dans la marge des textes que tu lis.
Ils formeront autant d’éléments complets à réutiliser lors des prises de paroles ou lors d’une rédaction.
V – Lorsque tu es fatigué(e), utilise le divertissement pour continuer d’avancer
On peut toujours être en train de pratiquer linguistiquement : par exemple, traduire une publicité dans le bus.
VI – Mémorise seulement le contenu qui a été corrigé par un enseignant.
VII – Mémorise les expressions idiomatiques à la première personne du singulier.
Cette habitude a deux avantages : ne pas tergiverser dans la prise de notes et rendre facilement utilisable l’expression pour plus tard.
VIII – Sois convaincu(e) que tu es fort(e) en langue ! Quand ça ne marche pas, c’est que les connaissances sont en train de se construire, de faire leur chemin, de se mettre en place !
IX – Ne crains pas les erreurs, parle. Parle en demandant à ton interlocuteur de te corriger. Dis-lui que tu apprécies le fait d’être corrigé(e), que tu ne seras pas vexé(e).
X – Une langue étrangère est un château. Il faut l’attaquer de toutes parts, et avec toutes les armes : la radio, les conversations, les manuels, le ciné, le journal, la télé, la radio !
Bonjour Marion, pourriez-vous nous présenter votre parcours ?
Bonjour. J’ai commencé par faire des études d’anglais. Après une maîtrise de littérature britannique, j’ai fait une maîtrise FLE car je voulais enseigner les langues. Après cela, j’ai poursuivi en DEA (l’ancien équivalent du Master 2 recherche) où j’ai commencé à travailler sur la gestuelle des enseignants de langue. Ce sujet m’a passionnée et comme il y avait peu de travaux sur le sujet, j’ai poursuivi avec un doctorat de linguistique, obtenu en 2006. J’ai ensuite été recrutée comme maître de conférences en didactique des langues à Aix Marseille Université où j’enseigne la didactique et les études de la gestuelle. Je suis également membre du Laboratoire Parole et Langage du CNRS.
Pourquoi vous êtes-vous intéressée à la gestuelle ?
J’étais enseignante de FLE et d’anglais et je voyais bien que le geste était une technique pédagogique très pertinente notamment pour l’accès au sens et pour la mémorisation lexicale. Cependant, quand j’ai cherché des informations sur le sujet, j’ai constaté qu’il y avait très peu d’études. Dans les ouvrages pédagogiques ou dans les instructions officielles, on conseille souvent aux enseignants de « faire des gestes » mais personne n’explique comment ni pourquoi. Et surtout aucune étude n’avait cherché à montrer si c’était efficace. Alors, j’ai essayé de le faire.
Pour illustrer cet entretien, auriez-vous 3 techniques à essayer en classe pour les enseignants qui nous lisent ?
Il faut déjà expliquer de quoi il est question lorsque l’on parle de gestes pédagogiques. Il s’agit de la façon dont un enseignant utilise son corps pour faire passer du sens en langue étrangère. Au lieu de traduire ce qu’il dit dans la langue première des apprenants, il utilise son corps pour véhiculer du sens. Par exemple pour expliquer « conduire », je vais mimer le fait de tenir un volant, pour dire « travaillez par groupes de 3 », je vais faire un geste de rassemblement et indiquer le chiffre 3. Ou encore, pour féliciter un apprenant qui a bien répondu, je vais sourire et acquiescer, peut-être même applaudir. On peut donc utiliser les mains, les postures, la tête, le visage, etc.
La première chose à savoir, c’est que pour que la gestuelle soit efficace, elle doit être visible. L’enseignant est comme un acteur sur une scène de théâtre, il doit être vu et entendu de tous. Donc, de la même façon que l’on projette sa voix pour être entendu, on doit produire une gestuelle ample et dans le champ de vision des apprenants pour être vu. Il faut aussi éviter de parler en se tournant vers le tableau, de restreindre ses gestes, par exemple en tenant des feuilles de papier ou un livre des deux mains.
La deuxième chose est importante notamment lorsque l’on enseigne à des apprenants qui n’appartiennent pas à notre culture (par exemple lorsque l’on est un enseignant de FLE natif). Il faut savoir que certains gestes (pas tous, attention) sont marqués culturellement et s’ils ont une signification pour nous, ils n’en ont pas forcément pour les membres d’une autre culture. On appelle ces gestes des « emblèmes », ils ont une forme fixe et chaque culture en possède un répertoire d’environ 200, ils sont un peu comme des expressions idiomatiques gestuelles. Des gestes typiquement français que l’on peut citer en exemple sont ceux qui vont avec les expressions : « être bourré », « passer sous le nez », « c’est rasoir », « mon œil », etc. Il peut aussi arriver que le même geste existe dans deux cultures avec deux sens différents et là, bonjour les situations d’incompréhension !!! Voici quelques exemples que des enseignants de FLE m’ont rapportés : « En fait, ce sont mes élèves qui ont été choqués quand j’ai utilisé le geste « Dépêchez-vous ! « . Au Mexique, cela fait plutôt penser à une invitation à des relations intimes. » / « Dans un cours de langue, une étudiante indienne me faisait un signe de tête qui à mon sens signifiait « non » à chaque fois que je demandais si elle avait compris. J’ai réexpliqué trois fois avant de lui demander ce qu’elle ne comprenait pas (car ce n’était pas difficile) et elle s’est exclamée : ‘Mais ça fait trois fois que je vous dis que j’ai compris !’ »
Comme on peut le voir dans ces deux exemples, le même geste a des significations différentes entre les cultures, ce genre de quiproquo peut être une très bonne occasion d’aborder le sujet des emblèmes comme contenu de cours (notamment dans une perspective interculturelle).
Troisième chose, et là je reviens sur le geste pédagogique du type « mime », il faut savoir que le geste peut avoir un impact sur la mémorisation du lexique ou de la prononciation. Lorsque vous faîtes des gestes pour expliquer un mot ou pour montrer un contour prosodique, vos apprenants visuels et kinesthésiques (c’est-à-dire la majorité de vos apprenants) en bénéficient grandement. Plusieurs études et notamment une que j’ai faite avec des enfants, montrent que le fait de reproduire un geste en répétant un mot renforce la mémorisation lexicale. Ainsi, si on fait répéter le mot « livre » en mimant l’ouverture et la fermeture d’un livre avec les mains jointes, la mémorisation en sera renforcée. Bien sûr, ça marche surtout pour les mots concrets.
Comment peut-on en savoir plus sur ce thème et sur vos travaux ?
J’ai un blog « Sur le bout des doigts » où j’annonce les conférences et formations que je donne ainsi que mes publications.
Et surtout ma page professionnelle où tous mes articles sont en ligne gratuitement.
Et voici un ouvrage sur le corps et la voix de l’enseignant écrit avec Lucile Cadet !
Pleased to meet you Hope you guess my name But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game … The Rolling Stones
Si Hitler envahissait l’enfer, je ferais au moins une allusion favorable au diable à la Chambre des communes. Churchill
Je vais vous parler ce soir, parce que nous venons d’arriver à l’un des tournants importants de la guerre. Le premier de ces brusques tournants critiques a été atteint il y a un an, lorsque la France est tombée, abattue, sous le coup de massue allemand, et que tout seuls nous avons dû faire face à l’ouragan. Le second, lorsque la Royal Air force a vaincu les assaillants barbares, et les a chassés de notre ciel, écartant ainsi l’invasion nazie de notre île, à une époque où nous étions encore mal préparés. Le troisième tournant critique fut le vote, par le président et le Congrès des Etats-Unis, de la loi prêt et bail (…). Voilà les trois premiers tournants. Nous arrivons au quatrième. Aujourd’hui, à quatre heures du matin, Hitler a attaqué et envahi la Russie (…). Les Allemands répètent ainsi, en beaucoup plus grand, le crime que nous leur avons déjà vu commettre, au mépris des engagements internationaux de tout ordre signés par eux et de la parole donnée, contre la Norvège, le Danemark, la Hollande et la Belgique, et que le complice d’Hitler, le chacal Mussol ini, a si fidèlement imité à l’égard de la Grèce. (…) Hitler est un monstre de méchanceté, dont la soif de sang et de rapine est insatiable. Non content d’avoir toute l’Europe sous sa botte, soit terrorisée soit réduite, sous des formes diverses, à une soumission abjecte, il lui faut maintenant poursuivre son oeuvre de boucher et ses ravages parmi les vastes multitudes de la Russie et de l’Asie. La terrible machine de guerre ne peut pas demeurer un instant inactive, sans quoi elle se rouillerait, ou tombe rait en morceaux (…) Il faut la nourrir, non seulement de sang mais d’essence. Voilà donc que ce petit voyou sanguinaire se trouve obligé de lancer ses armées mécanisées sur de nouveaux champs de tuerie, de pillage et de dévastation. Nul n’a été adversaire plus constant du communisme que je ne le suis moi-même depuis vingt-cinq ans. Je ne retire pas une seule des paroles que j’ai dites à ce sujet. Mais tout s’évanouit maintenant devant le spectacle qui s’offre à nos yeux. (…) Tout homme, tout Etat qui se bat contre la puissance nazie peut compter sur notre aide. Tout homme ou tout Etat qui marche avec Hitler est notre ennemi. Et cela s’applique non seulement aux Etats organisés, mais à tous les représentants de cette race abjecte des “collaborateurs” qui se font les instruments et les agents du régime nazi contre leurs propres citoyens et contre leur propre patrie. (…) Par conséquent, nous entendons donner à la Russie et au peuple russe toute l’aide que nous pourrons. Nous ferons appel à tous nos amis et à tous nos alliés du monde entier, en les invitant à faire de même, et à persévérer dans cette voie, comme nous le ferons aussi, fidèlement et sans défaillance, jusqu’au bout.Churchill (22 juin 1941)
Le comité dénonce plusieurs cas d’exécutions de masse de garçons, ainsi que des décapitations, des crucifixions et des ensevelissements d’enfants vivants. (…) les enfants de minorités ont été capturés dans nombre d’endroits, vendus sur des marchés avec sur eux des étiquettes portant des prix, ils ont été vendus comme esclaves. Rapport du Comité des droits de l’enfant aux Nations Unies
Contrary to much of the literature that depicts him first and foremost as a lifelong foe of communism, Winston Churchill was actually quite pragmatic regarding his opposition to various forms of totalitarianism, a worldview which explains his near-rabid anti-communism following the First World War and also his gradually softening change as he began to see fascist Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to a stable world order in the years before the Second World War. It is this pragmatism and a basic hostility to tyranny, then, that best explains Churchill’s approach to all forms of totalitarianism. Antoine Capet
La Jordanie pourchassera avec toutes ses forces l’organisation (EI) n’importe où. Tout membre de Daech (acronyme en arabe de l’EI) est une cible pour nous. Nous les pourchasserons et nous les éradiquerons (…) Nous sommes en première ligne, c’est notre bataille. (…) Toutes les cibles ont été détruites. Des camps d’entraînement et des dépôts d’armes et de munitions ont été touchés. Ces frappes ne sont que le début de notre vengeance pour le meurtre du pilote. (…) Il faut tenir compte de plusieurs facteurs, les opérations militaires en cours, garantir la sécurité dans la région en plus d’objectifs sur le long terme incluant la lutte contre l’idéologie de ce groupe.Nasser Joudeh
If there’s one thing top Republicans know, it’s that America can’t defeat terrorism unless we call it by its real name. (…)There are several problems here. Even if one believed that calling the enemy “radical Islam” were a good idea, it would hardly explain how to defeat it. Yet the Republicans slamming Obama for his linguistic failures mostly stop there. After he chastised the President in Iowa for not saying “radical Islam,” Ted Cruz’s only policy suggestions were that Obama should have attended the anti-terror rally in Paris and that Americans who join ISIS should lose their citizenship. On Fox, Giuliani mentioned the Paris rally too, and then fell back on platitudes like “you know what you do with bullies? You go right in their face!” In reality, denouncing “radical Islam” offers little guidance for America’s actual policy dilemmas. In reality, denouncing “radical Islam” offers little guidance for America’s actual policy dilemmas. How does calling the enemy by its “real name” help determine whether the United States should take a harder or softer line toward the government in Baghdad? We need its help to retake central Iraq from ISIS, but its Shia sectarianism drives Sunnis into ISIS’ arms. Or how would this linguistic pivot help determine whether the best way to weaken ISIS in Syria is by backing Bashar Assad or seeking his ouster? After 9/11, hawks backed up their aggressive rhetoric with aggressive policies. At their behest, America invaded and occupied two Muslim countries. Today, by contrast, with land invasions effectively off the table, the rhetoric has become largely an end in itself. What Republicans are really declaring war on is “political correctness.” They’re sure that liberal sensitivities about Islam are hindering the moral clarity America needs to win. Just don’t ask them how. But it’s worse than that. Because far from providing the moral clarity Republicans demand, saying America is at war with « radical Islam » actually undermines it. How can a term provide clarity when it’s never clearly defined? If America is at war with « radical Islam, » does that include Saudi Arabia, a key US ally that for decades has both practiced and exported a radically illiberal Wahhabi creed? Does it include Iran, a semi-theocracy that has sponsored « radical Islamic » terror against the US but is our de facto ally against ISIS? Does it include Muslim Brotherhood parties like the one that briefly held power in Egypt, which run in democratic elections but want a government based on Islamic law? Listening to some GOP rhetoric, you might think the answer is yes. But to suggest the US is at « war » with key allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt strips the term of any real meaning. ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are actual organizations. Reasonable people can delineate where they begin and end, and thus craft specific strategies for fighting them. Good luck doing that with “radical Islam.” As so often happens in today’s GOP, the Republicans demanding a war against “radical Islam” are working off a false analogy with the Cold War. Since Ronald Reagan’s “moral clarity” against communism supposedly toppled the Soviet Union, America must now do the same with “radical Islam.” But, in fact, the United States was most successful when it did not see its enemy as “communism.” It was the belief that America must battle communism itself that led the Kennedy and Johnson administrations into a war against a communist regime in North Vietnam that posed no real threat to American security. The US fared far better when it limited its focus to one specific regime, the Soviet Union, and made alliances with other communist governments in order to weaken it. In the late 1940s, the Truman administration worked with communist Yugoslavia to undermine Soviet control of Eastern Europe. And under Richard Nixon, Washington cozied up to Beijing, which despite being even more ideologically zealous than Moscow, helped the US contain Soviet power. Reagan, for all his anti-communist rhetoric, maintained America’s de facto partnership with China because his real target was the USSR. Obviously, the United States need not be ideologically agnostic. American presidents should say they believe liberal democracy is morally superior to Islamic theocracy, just as it was preferable to fascism and communism. But that’s a far cry from declaring war on every regime based upon an -ism we don’t like. For much of the cold war, the United States battled the Soviet Union but not communist China. In the 1940s, the United States went to war against Germany, Italy and Japan but not fascist Spain. And today, the United States is at war with those “radical Muslim” organizations that actively seek to kill Americans while allying ourselves with other “radical Muslim” regimes that don’t. Why is that so hard for Ted Cruz to understand?Peter Beinart
The president has the right goal to degrade and destroy ISIL, but he doesn’t have the right strategy. An aerial campaign will not destroy them. You’re going to need boots on the ground not only in Iraq, but Syria. And there’s got to be some regional force formed with an American component, somewhere around 10,000, I think, American soldiers to align with the Arab armies in the region and go in to Syria and take back territory from ISIL. That is what will make it stop. (…) They won’t destroy ISIL. They do help in some regard. How do you dislodge ISIL from Syria? Iraq, you hope you can get the Kurds and the Iraqi security forces and the Anbar Sunni tribes to work together to defeat them in Western Anbar take back Mosul. But Syria is very complicated. You are going to need a regional force, Saudi, Turkey, the entire region, putting together an army with American people embedded, special forces, intel folks, forward air controllers to go in on the ground and not only dislodge them from Syria, but hold the territory. And you can’t do that until you deal with Assad. () Quite frankly, Syria and Iraq combined are the best platforms to launch an attack on United States I have seen since 9/11. So, every day that goes by, we have got more terrorist organizations with more capability to strike the homeland than any time since 9/11. You have got AQAP in Yemen. But ISIL’s presence in Syria and Iraq, they’re very rich. Foreign fighters flow with passports that can penetrate the United States and our Western allies. So, you will see a Paris on steroids here pretty soon if you don’t disrupt this organization and take the fight to them on the ground. And, again, you cannot successfully defeat ISIL on the ground in Syria with the Free Syrian Army and regional coalition of Arab nations until you deal with Assad, because he will kill anybody that comes in there that tries to defeat ISIL.Senator Lindsay Graham
No American boots on the ground, in my view. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t have special ops forces and air controllers and that sort of thing to help with the air war. But we are going to have to find a way to put some boots on the ground. We might be able to find that in Iraq with the Iraqi army if we get them trained up. So far, it doesn’t look very promising. But (…) Syria is an entirely different matter. You can’t win this war just from the air. You can’t eject ISIS, you can’t destroy ISIS, eject them from territory just from the air. My idea would be to go to the Turks, 60-year allies of the United States, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They have a good army. It’s an army that will fight. They want to take down Assad. President Obama has said Assad must go. They want to destroy ISIS. We want to destroy ISIS. There’s a conversion of interests here. Why don’t we get together and we say, look, we will supply the air, the logistics and the intelligence, you put the boots on the ground, and go in there and do the job? And, in addition, get some of our Arab allies in the region to put boots on the ground as well, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan and the others.James Baker
On “Face the Nation” Sunday, Mr. Baker said ground troops are necessary but must come from Arab and Muslim allies, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. (…) I spoke to Mr. Baker at CBS before his appearance. He said the world is “coalescing,” and this is the time to move, with diplomacy and leadership. So, a multinational Arab and Muslim military force to fight ISIS on the ground. Is this the right way to go?Peggy Noonan
Le débat sur la terminologie à employer semble oiseux. Il s’agit bien d’une guerre et c’est d’ailleurs le terme utilisé par les djihadistes. Le problème est de savoir quelle sera la durée du conflit. En effet, la situation est peu banale : l’assise territoriale de Daesh semble se renforcer constamment. État atypique, le Califat s’enracine chaque jour davantage du simple fait que personne ne se trouve actuellement en mesure de le déloger. L’asymétrie favorise la sanctuarisation. Parallèlement, la mouvance terroriste que le Califat inspire à l’échelle mondiale persiste et s’amplifie, sans se structurer en réseau, ce qui complique considérablement le renseignement, la parade et l’éventuelle riposte. Territorialisation et déterritorialisation se combinent donc pour former un gigantesque casse-tête stratégique. La question de la violence djihadiste ne saurait être résolue par une réponse strictement militaire. D’ailleurs, si les frappes aériennes semblent avoir enrayé la progression de Daesh, elles ne paraissent pas avoir empêché sa consolidation dans les zones de peuplement arabe sunnite. Les sociétés arabo-musulmanes connaissent une crise profonde affectant toutes leurs dimensions. Leur stabilisation ne peut donc résulter que d’un processus politique, au sens noble du terme. C’est-à-dire le traitement de l’ensemble des maux qui affectent les habitants. Pour réussir, ce processus doit être le fait des populations elles-mêmes, mené à leur rythme et bénéficier, le cas échéant, de l’aide de la communauté internationale. Cela devrait être la leçon des échecs occidentaux en Afghanistan, en Irak et en Libye. Encore faut-il que les sociétés arabo-musulmanes forgent le contexte favorable pour que la frange de leurs élites disposée à conduire ces changements puisse agir efficacement.Patrice Gourdin
Attention: un diable peut en cacher un autre !
A l’heure où, devant la pusallinimité du Monde libre et d’abord de son prétendu chef à la Maison blanche …
Un Etat Islamique (pardon: Daech !) dont personne n’ose même évoquer le nom …
Pourrait avec quelque 40 000 fanatiques dont plus de 4 000 étrangers …
Mais aussi d’anciens cadres de l’armée de Saddam et surtout la complicité de nos prétendus amis turcs, saoudiens ou qataris comme d’une rue arabe assoiffée de revanche …
Contrôler un territoire grand comme moitié de la France et quelque 15% du PIB irakien soit l’équivalent du budget militaire français …
Tenant sous sa coupe une population de quelque 10 millions d’habitants dont une ville dépassant le million de résidents …
Et où aux Etats-Unis mêmes, l’on commence à se rendre compte de l’inefficacité du seul bombardement aérien …
Pendant que piquée au vif par l’incinération vive d’un de ses pilote, la Jordanie se voit contrainte d’annoncer sa volonté d’éradiquer les djihadistes …
Comment ne pas voir avec l’excellente analyse de Patrice Gourdin sur le site Diploweb …
Que rien ne pourra se faire sans le fait, élites comme populations, des sociétés arabo-musulmanes elles-mêmes ?
Mais aussi, comme le rappellent le sénateur américain Lindsay Graham ou l’ancien secrétaire d’Etat James Baker …
Qu’il serait peut-être temps de demander aux premiers intéressés de joindre leurs actes à la parole …
Et de mettre enfin vraiment au sol ces fameuses troupes dont tout le monde n’arrête pas de parler ?
Géopolitique de Daesh. La situation est peu banale : l’assise territoriale de Daesh semble se renforcer constamment. État atypique, le Califat s’enracine chaque jour davantage du simple fait que personne ne se trouve actuellement en mesure de le déloger. L’asymétrie favorise la sanctuarisation. Parallèlement, la mouvance terroriste que le Califat inspire à l’échelle mondiale persiste et s’amplifie, sans se structurer en réseau, ce qui complique considérablement le renseignement, la parade et l’éventuelle riposte. Territorialisation et déterritorialisation se combinent donc pour former un gigantesque casse-tête stratégique.
Solidement documenté, rédigé de façon maîtrisée, ce texte est appelé à faire référence.
TRÉS affaibli entre 2006 et 2010 par les forces américaines épaulées par les milices arabes sunnites antidjihadistes, l’État islamique en Irak, antenne locale d’Al Qaida, se revivifia à partir de 2011 dans la guerre civile syrienne. Engageant sur le champ de bataille ses combattants aguerris survivants, il remporta des succès qui lui procurèrent peu à peu les moyens de sa conquête : nouvelles recrues, armement et ressources financières. Cela sans attirer suffisamment l’attention de la communauté internationale qui fut donc prise au dépourvu par l’offensive lancée début 2014 dans le nord de l’Irak. En dépit de quelques revers, les forces de ce qui s’appelait depuis 2013 l’État islamique en Irak et au Levant opérèrent une progression foudroyante. Disposant d’un excellent réseau de renseignement, dotées de nombreux véhicules, appuyées par de l’artillerie et des chars sans pour autant perdre en souplesse, elles menèrent des offensives conventionnelles victorieuses, tout en poursuivant leurs actions de guérilla et leurs attentats terroristes [1]. Leur avancée leur permit de renforcer leurs effectifs par la libération de centaines de combattants emprisonnés en Irak et par le ralliement d’anciens cadres et soldats de l’armée de Saddam Hussein.
Forts de ces résultats, les djihadistes de l’organisation rebaptisée, en juin 2014, État islamique (Daesh) [2] ont entrepris de fonder un État territorial de part et d’autre de la frontière internationale séparant l’Irak et la Syrie. Prise de court, la communauté internationale a réagi de manière brouillonne et, pour le moment du moins, inefficace. Dénier à cette entité la qualité d’État ainsi que son appartenance à l’islam ne résout rien. Il semble paradoxal que les États en lutte contre le terrorisme islamiste soient surpris par cette entreprise. Agissant à l’échelle mondiale, comme Al Qaida et Daesh, ou localement, comme les taliban afghans et pakistanais, le Groupe islamique armé algérien des années 1990 ou Al Qaida au Maghreb islamique, son avatar contemporain, les shabab somaliens ou les Nigérians de Boko Haram, les radicaux de l’islam ambitionnent tous de conquérir un territoire sur lequel exercer le pouvoir. Les événements en cours en Irak et en Syrie offrent l’occasion d’examiner le projet et la stratégie des refondateurs du califat.
L’espace, les ressources et la population de plus de 200 000 km² (approximativement 170 000 km2 en Irak et 60 000 km2 en Syrie, soit environ un tiers de chacun de ces pays) se trouveraient sous l’influence ou le contrôle effectif sinon efficace de l’organisation. Celle-ci tente d’instaurer une variante d’État totalitaire se réclamant d’une conception religieuse et politique qui s’estime légitime parce qu’elle plonge ses racines dans l’islam des origines. Désireux d’échapper au cordon sanitaire qui pourrait l’asphyxier, le Califat reste relié au monde extérieur et cherche à étendre le combat au territoire de ses ennemis.
Patrice Gourdin, Docteur en histoire, professeur agrégé de l’Université
I. Conquérir le territoire d’un État viable
L’examen des cartes localisant les zones contrôlées ou influencées [3] par l’État islamique et leur juxtaposition avec les cartes physiques et économiques révèlent un projet rationnel [4]. Il s’agit d’un phénomène récurrent : depuis le début de l’Histoire, les hommes ou les groupes porteurs d’un projet politique ou politico-religieux cherchent à le réaliser sur un territoire. Autant que faire se peut, ce territoire doit leur conférer ressources et sécurité. Peut-être s’est-on trop focalisé, depuis la fin de la Guerre froide, sur la déterritorialisation prophétisée des rapports de force et sur la montée en puissance des organisations réticulaires. Al Qaida et Daesh poursuivent le même objectif : instaurer un État, c’est-à-dire une autorité régissant la population d’un territoire donné. Ce qui les oppose, hormis de possibles rivalités de personnes, c’est l’ordre des opérations. La première pose la défaite du monde occidental en préalable à la restauration de l’État islamique, le second – influencé par les thèses d’Abou Moussab al-Souri [5], l’auteur de l’Appel à la résistance islamique mondiale, paru en 2004 – fait de la refondation de ce dernier un prérequis à la domination mondiale de l’islam. Gilles Kepel a résumé la stratégie préconisée par al-Souri : « [les] attentats à caractère dispersé appartiennent à une première phase, qu’il nomme “guerre d’usure“, et dont le but est de déstabiliser l’ennemi. Une deuxième, celle de “l’équilibre“, voit les cellules attaquer systématiquement l’armée ou la police, en pourchasser et exécuter les chefs, s’emparer des zones qu’il est possible de libérer. Pendant la troisième, la “guerre de libération“, les cellules se basent sur les zones libérées pour conquérir le reste du territoire, tandis que, derrière les lignes ennemies, continuent assassinats et attentats qui achèvent de détruire le monde de l’impiété [6] ». La feuille de route suivie par l’État islamique depuis 2011 correspond à ce schéma.
L’espace contrôlé ou sous influence occupe une partie du Croissant fertile : des abords de l’axe vital Alep-Damas (Syrie) à l’ouest, aux environs de Bagdad (Irak) à l’est. Il recouvre environ deux tiers de la Mésopotamie antique, celle unifiée et organisée dans le premier empire babylonien (2000-1500 av. J.-C.). Ce qui compte parmi les premières constructions étatiques n’avait pu être édifié que grâce à la présence combinée de l’eau (fleuves Tigre et Euphrate avec leurs affluents) et de terres cultivables (irriguées ou non). Les cartes montrent l’emprise de Daesh sur une partie de ces espaces nourriciers : vallée de l’Euphrate de Jarabulus à Anah, puis (de façon discontinue) de Haditah à Falloudja ; vallée de la Khabour (affluent de l’Euphrate) et vallée du Tigre entre Rabia et l’amont de Samara. Bénéficiaires d’aménagements hydrauliques plus ou moins récents (Daesh exerce son emprise sur la plus grande partie des 56 000 km2 de terres irriguées en Syrie pour bonifier la Djézireh), ces régions produisent notamment du coton, de l’orge et du blé. Selon le ministère irakien de l’agriculture, Daesh aurait la mainmise sur 40% de la production agricole irakienne [7]. La Syrie assurait son autosuffisance alimentaire avant la guerre civile, mais il est difficile de savoir quelles sont aujourd’hui les disponibilités en nourriture dans les zones insurgées. La construction de barrages équipés assure une importante production d’électricité (Tichrin et Tabqa, en Syrie, Haditha en Irak). Les assauts répétés pour contrôler le barrage de Mossoul semblent liés à la nécessité d’assurer l’approvisionnement électrique de la population de cette très grande ville (entre 1 500 000 et 2 000 000 d’habitants avant les combats). Des stations d’épuration permettent aux habitants des villes de consommer une eau potable. Bref, Daesh tente de disposer des ressources et des équipements indispensables à la vie quotidienne des populations. Son emprise sur ces dernières en dépend partiellement. Un économiste a même comparé l’État islamique à un système de Ponzi : il ne tiendrait qu’au prix d’une extension territoriale continue [8]. Ceci explique en partie la poussée enregistrée récemment en direction de la Syrie “utile“ (axe Damas-Alep). Encore faut-il que les équipements demeurent en état de fonctionner et que les travaux agricoles se déroulent normalement, ce que l’état de guerre ne garantit pas. L’influence dans la partie désertique de la Syrie et du centre de l’Irak, milieu particulièrement difficile à contrôler, contribue à occulter une part des activités de Daesh. Mais les conditions de vie n’y favorisent pas la présence humaine et, dans cet espace, l’État islamique règne sur du vide.
Le Califat contrôle des gisements d’hydrocarbures : dans les provinces de Hassaké et surtout de Deir ez-Zor (avec deux raffineries de pétrole et une usine de liquéfaction de gaz) au nord-est de la Syrie (60% de la production syrienne [9]) ; les sites de Akkas, Husaybah (province d’Al-Anbar), Ajeel, Hamrin et Baiji, ainsi que les raffineries de pétrole de Baiji et de Tikrit (province de Salah Ad-Din) au nord-ouest de l’Irak (entre 10 et 20% de la production irakienne, selon les sources). La zone de peuplement arabe sunnite en Irak est pratiquement dépourvue de pétrole et la prise de contrôle de gisements en zone de peuplement kurde sonne aussi comme une revanche sur la géologie. Mais les Kurdes sont tenaces et n’abandonneront pas facilement les hydrocarbures, qui sont la principale source de financement de leur autonomie et de leur éventuelle indépendance. Grâce à des circuits de contrebande vers la Turquie cela assure des revenus substantiels : potentiellement de l’ordre de plusieurs centaines de millions de dollars par an, mais les chiffres les plus divers circulent, sans aucun fondement sérieux. Élément tout aussi important, ces ressources couvriraient les besoins énergétiques locaux et opérationnels de Daesh. Voici une des spécificités du Califat : pour la première fois, une organisation djihadiste contrôle un territoire à haute valeur économique. Mais soulignons le caractère potentiel de celle-ci. Les sites pétroliers et gaziers font l’objet de bombardements incessants de la part de la coalition internationale depuis l’automne 2014, précisément pour annihiler cette source de revenus. Aucun bilan de ces opérations n’est disponible, mais il semble que le flux acheminé ait diminué. Les installations ne peuvent être entretenues et réparées faute de pièces de rechange et les hydrocarbures sont écoulés à des prix très inférieurs aux cours officiels (réduits eux-mêmes de moitié depuis la fin de l’été 2014).
Daesh maîtrise le réseau des communications terrestres entre Alep et Ramadi ainsi qu’entre Falloudja et Mossoul. À quoi il faut ajouter le contrôle de Rutba, au cœur du désert, carrefour des pistes reliant la vallée de l’Euphrate à Amman ou à Damas. Voies de transport de marchandises licites, chemins de toutes les contrebandes, support de longs tronçons des oléoducs (en service ou non) reliant le Golfe Arabo-Persique et la mer Méditerranée, ces axes de communications représentent un atout considérable en temps de guerre et pourraient contribuer à la relance économique d’un Proche-Orient en paix. Là réside une autre particularité du Califat : il s’agit de la première entreprise djihadiste assurant son emprise durable sur un territoire à très haute valeur stratégique : au centre du plus important carrefour terrestre mondial (charnière Afrique-Asie-Europe). Les taliban n’ont jamais régné que sur l’aire pashtoune, zone isolée du monde depuis l’abandon des routes de la soie. Les shabab ne dominent qu’une frange d’un État failli et qui a perdu sa valeur stratégique, même s’il exerce une nuisance non négligeable comme havre de la piraterie (activité dont les djihadistes ne détiennent pas le monopole). Al Qaida dans la Péninsule Arabique demeure cantonné aux montagnes du sud du Yémen, en dépit d’opérations ponctuelles à l’extérieur. Al Qaida au Maghreb islamique est aux abois dans les rudes Aurès et n’a pu faire mieux que coloniser des zones de la bande saharo-sahélienne désertique ou semi-désertique, enclavée et réduite au transit des trafics divers. Boko Haram sévit dans la partie sahélienne, isolée, enclavée et la plus déshéritée du Nigéria.
Daesh possède une portion de la frontière commune (longue au total de 822 kilomètres) entre la Syrie et la Turquie, bénéficiant de plusieurs points de passage sur la section d’environ 200 kilomètres située entre Jarabulus (sur l’Euphrate) et Ras Al-Aïn (sur le Khabour). Cela présente deux avantages : d’une part, la garantie de la liberté de circulation pour assurer les trafics qui abondent les caisses du Califat (hydrocarbures, antiquités) et pourvoient en partie à l’approvisionnement des miliciens et des populations civiles. D’autre part, sont facilités l’arrivée de cadres civils indispensables au bon fonctionnement du Califat et le maintien du flux de combattants étrangers volontaires pour le djihad dont Daesh a besoin pour mener ses opérations – défensives ou offensives – sur les divers fronts ouverts. Le segment de frontière à sécuriser pour gêner les réseaux Daesh est nettement moins long que ce que prétend Ankara, ce qui alimente la suspicion de complicité avec les djihadistes.
Le territoire du Califat est un territoire en guerre, aux limites mouvantes, vidé de toute autorité légale, ravagé et extrêmement dangereux. Depuis l’invasion américaine de 2003, la partie arabe du nord-ouest de l’Irak n’a pas cessé de connaître des affrontements de plus ou moins grande ampleur. Au printemps 2011, le nord-est de la Syrie a basculé à son tour dans la violence armée (rebelles contre loyalistes, factions rebelles entre elles, djihadistes contre Kurdes, une partie de la coalition internationale contre les djihadistes). Cela relativise la normalité du fonctionnement de l’État fondé par al-Baghdadi et ses partisans.
II. Contrôler la population d’un État viable
L’assise territoriale d’un État n’a de valeur que si elle porte une population. Les stratèges de l’État islamique ont pris soin de conserver sous leur contrôle ou leur influence une part non négligeable des habitants, probablement entre huit et dix millions [10]. Main-d’œuvre, contribuables, bouclier humain, esclaves, cobayes pour une forme ressuscitée de gouvernance, adeptes, recrues, autant d’utilisations possibles de cet ensemble humain.
États de création récente, la Syrie et l’Irak englobent des populations hétérogènes, dont les composantes se trouvent le plus souvent réparties sur plusieurs pays. Les Arabes (89% de la population en Syrie, 75% en Irak) sont les plus nombreux. La région héberge depuis des siècles des populations non-arabes : Kurdes (8% de la population en Syrie, 20% en Irak) et Turcs (0,5% de la population en Syrie, 3% en Irak). Ces minorités ethniques sont en butte à de mauvais traitements. Mais ces pratiques, en particulier vis-à-vis des Kurdes, sont antérieures à l’emprise de Daesh.
La population est très largement de confession musulmane, mais partagée entre sunnites (70% de la population en Syrie, 35% en Irak) et chiites ou assimilés (19% de la population en Syrie en comptant les alaouites, 60% en Irak). Le Califat aspire à éliminer de sa population tous les éléments “impurs“. Il œuvre donc à l’éradication des tenants du chiisme sous toutes ses formes ainsi que des nombreuses minorités religieuses présentes depuis l’Antiquité : chrétiens (10% de la population en Syrie, 5% en Irak), yézidis et zoroastriens, notamment. Promis au massacre, au viol ou à l’esclavage, les membres de ces communautés ont fui en masse, ajoutant bien contre leur gré aux difficultés de la région.
Daesh s’intéresse avant tout aux Arabes de confession sunnite (majoritaires en Syrie, minoritaires en Irak). Parmi ceux-ci, un nombre non négligeable – mais impossible à évaluer avec précision – ont appelé de leurs vœux l’avènement de l’État islamique ou, du moins, ont observé une neutralité bienveillante à son égard. À l’origine, dans les cas irakien comme syrien, leurs motivations semblent avoir été plus politiques (lutte contre l’oppression, du clan al-Assad en Syrie et rejet de la politique sectaire pro-chiite de Nouri al-Maliki en Irak) que religieuses. D’autres Arabes sunnites, en revanche, ont fui et certains sont demeurés contre leur gré. Ces derniers subissent la radicalisation religieuse dans toute sa rigueur, mais restent pris au piège et ne semblent pas en mesure de s’opposer à la terreur djihadiste. D’autant que, selon une pratique totalitaire bien rôdée, Daesh infiltre l’ensemble de la société afin de la surveiller au plus près et de la réprimer, souvent de manière préventive. Il aurait identifié et recensé les avocats, les professeurs, les médecins et les ingénieurs, les contrôlerait étroitement et exercerait des pressions sur eux. Les juristes seraient même contraints à quitter le Califat car ils connaissent trop bien le droit et pourraient dénoncer les abus commis au nom de la charia ou du fait de son ignorance. L’organisation aurait également utilisé des cinquièmes colonnes pour préparer certaines de ses opérations militaires les plus audacieuses, comme la prise de Mossoul. Ces agents clandestins seraient également à l’œuvre dans les régions loyalistes pour détruire de l’intérieur la société, par exemple en contraignant ses cadres qualifiés à ne plus exercer leurs activités.
Ces populations comptent un grand nombre de jeunes (49% des Irakiens et 45% des Syriens sont âgés de 20 ans ou moins), inégalement éduqués (taux d’analphabétisme de 20 à plus de 30% de la population jeune dans la zone contrôlée en Syrie alors que la moyenne nationale est de 6%, entre 5% et 20% dans la zone contrôlée en Irak alors que la moyenne nationale est de 11%), mais victimes dans une proportion significative des défaillances de leurs dirigeants. Ces derniers n’ont ni su ni voulu consentir les efforts nécessaires pour assurer un emploi et, plus largement, une insertion sociale à l’ensemble de ces jeunes. Une partie d’entre eux, désœuvrés, sans perspectives, se trouvent disponibles pour les aventures les plus hasardeuses. D’autant plus que le niveau de vie de ces populations est des plus modestes : l’indice de développement humain-IDH classe la Syrie 120e (équivalent à celui de l’Afrique du Sud) et l’Irak 121e (proche de celui du Guyana ou du Viêt Nam) sur 187 pays évalués. Les zones contrôlées ou influencées par Daesh figurent parmi les plus déshéritées. Les plaines alluviales et les plateaux steppiques de la Djézireh, en dépit de l’irrigation et des hydrocarbures, constituent une région périphérique, en Syrie comme en Irak. Dans chaque camp en présence, l’engagement dans les forces armées, les unités paramilitaires ou les milices constitue un (le seul) moyen d’exister et/ou de nourrir les siens.
Faute d’États garantissant à l’ensemble des habitants le statut de citoyennes ou de citoyens libres et égaux en droits et en devoirs, la Syrie et l’Irak demeurent marqués par l’emprise des structures tribales sur la population. Loin d’être le symptôme d’un attachement archaïque à la tradition, il s’agit de pragmatisme. Les hommes se tournent vers les liens de solidarité traditionnels, les seuls qui leur assurent la sécurité, les moyens de vivre et d’avoir une existence sociale. Cette survivance sanctionne l’échec de l’instauration (en admettant qu’elle ait été tentée ou… que les tribus ne s’y soient pas opposées victorieusement) d’un État de droit. Parce qu’il s’agit d’intermédiaires indispensables, l’État islamique noue, avec des fortunes diverses, des relations avec les notables des principales tribus de sa zone d’opérations. En Irak, dans la province d’Al Anbar, il s’appuie sur un partie de la puissante confédération Dulaymi (très présente dans l’armée de Saddam Hussein avant 2003) et autour de Mossoul, il compte des partisans au sein de la branche al Djarba, sunnite, des Shammar. En Syrie, il est lié à une partie des Shammar al-Kursah et des Charabya. Mais la logique tribale est dominée par l’impératif de survie du groupe, ce qui rend les allégeances aléatoires car elles fluctuent au gré des intérêts et des rapports de force. La résistance de la tribu al-Sheitaat (provinces de Raqqa et de Deir ez-Zor) à l’État islamique tenait au moins en partie à la concurrence pour l’exploitation des champs de pétrole. Conjuguée à la règle fondamentale de la vengeance (intiqâm) contre tout outrage, la segmentation propre à ce type de société pose le problème des luttes intertribales. Celles-ci contribuent à empêcher toute unification durable des populations de la zone contrôlée et facilitent les manœuvres, comme l’utilisation des certaines tribus contre les djihadistes. Les massacres spectaculaire de plusieurs centaines de membres (parmi lesquels de nombreux civils) de la tribu al-Sheitaat (provinces de Raqqa et de Deir ez-Zor), en août 2014, et de la tribu Albou Nimr (province d’Al-Anbar), en novembre 2014, visaient, notamment, à imposer par la terreur une neutralité sinon une loyauté durables. Le cheik de la tribu al-Sheitaat, Rafaa Aakla al-Raju, avait appelé (en particulier sur une vidéo diffusée par YouTube) les tribus bédouines à se soulever contre l’État islamique. Cela révèle les limites de l’efficacité tant des liens personnels tissés par Daesh que du réseau de renseignement extrêmement dense que l’État islamique a organisé dans les zones arabes sunnites d’Irak et de Syrie. Ce dernier lui permet d’empêcher, y compris par des assassinats préventifs, la constitution d’une vaste coalition semblable au Réveil (Sahwa). Organisée par les Américains, à l’instigation du général David L. Petraeus, entre 2006 et 2010, elle avait pratiquement anéanti Al Qaida en Mésopotamie, la matrice de Daesh. Mais rien ne garantit à Daesh un soutien sincère et durable. En outre, la terreur ne dissuade que jusqu’à ce que le seuil de l’insupportable soit atteint. Et les pratiques extrêmement violentes et cruelles du Califat risquent de provoquer rapidement cette saturation. Encore faudra-t-il que les adversaires de Daesh soient capables de le savoir et d’en tirer parti.
L’État islamique se trouve confronté à un défi majeur où il joue en grande partie sa crédibilité et donc son avenir vis-à-vis des populations locales : sa capacité à assurer le fonctionnement normal d’une société. La logique d’un conflit asymétrique répond habituellement à la démarche inverse : paralyser ou bloquer tous les services qu’une population attend de ses dirigeants afin qu’elle se tourne vers les insurgés. Quelques témoignages récents [11] rapportent que le Califat, s’il fait régner la sécurité, s’avèrerait incapable de fournir en suffisance l’électricité, l’eau potable, l’alimentation de base, les médicaments et les soins médicaux dont ont besoin les hommes et les femmes qui se trouvent dans ses zones de domination ou d’influence. Cela s’expliquerait d’une part, par les dégâts résultant des combats, d’autre part, par le manque de main-d’œuvre qualifiée, en particulier des spécialistes de haut niveau (ingénieurs et médecins, notamment).
Daesh s’est emparé de plusieurs villes – notamment Raqqa, Falloudja et Tikrit -, de taille variable, toutes en zone de peuplement arabe sunnite, dont la plus grande est Mossoul. Compte tenu des difficultés d’administration et d’approvisionnement que semble rencontrer l’organisation, la raison de ces conquêtes serait d’abord stratégique. Les djihadistes se fondent dans la population qui se retrouve ainsi servir involontairement de bouclier humain contre les bombardements aériens. En outre, la reconquête de ces périmètres urbains nécessitera des effectifs et du matériel en quantité considérable et sera tout à la fois extrêmement meurtrière et destructrice. Les forces loyalistes de Syrie et d’Irak ne paraissent pas en état de mener de telles opérations, encore moins de vaincre. Quant à la coalition internationale, elle n’entend pas s’engager au sol. Par conséquent, le Califat peut, jusqu’à nouvel ordre, conforter ses positions urbaines. Nul doute que ses stratèges ont étudié avec soin les combats auxquels ils ont pris part dans les villes d’Irak depuis 2003 et de Syrie depuis 2011, ainsi que les pratiques du Hezbollah au Sud Liban et du Hamas à Gaza. Ces précédents n’augurent pas d’une déterritorialisation rapide de Daesh. La reconquête de Kobane par des Kurdes appuyés par l’aviation de la coalition internationale, le 26 janvier 2015, ne semble pas significative. L’État islamique, peut-être pris d’hybris à cause de ses victoires antérieures et certainement aveuglé par son idéologie, était tombé dans le piège de la bataille symbolique. Il usa ses forces pour un enjeu insignifiant sur le plan stratégique, mais transformé en enjeu politique majeur par la médiatisation de la résistance héroïque des milicien(ne)s kurdes. Daesh s’est révélé vulnérable et a sorti les marrons du feu au profit des nationalistes kurdes. Gageons que les leçons de cet échec seront tirées et que les stratèges du Califat ne reproduiront pas cette erreur-là.
III. S’appuyer sur une représentation géopolitique cohérente
Loin d’être une entreprise aberrante, la restauration du califat dans la région conquise ou sous influence, résulte d’un projet idéologique rigoureux et élaboré. En effet, tout s’inscrit dans la mémoire arabe, musulmane et sunnite, dans le but de susciter l’adhésion du plus grand nombre possible d’Arabes musulmans sunnites. À commencer par ceux dont le désir de revanche semble le plus intense : ceux d’Irak, dépossédés du pouvoir et humiliés par les chiites depuis 2003, et ceux de Syrie, chassés du pouvoir, discriminés et impitoyablement réprimés par certains clans alaouites depuis 1970.
Le chef suprême cultive la ressemblance avec le prophète Mahomet. Outre qu’il arbore une barbe fournie, il se couvre d’un turban et revêt un manteau réputés pareils à ceux que portait le fondateur de l’islam. Ces effets sont de couleur noire, celle du prophète, reprise par ceux qui se présentaient comme ses descendants légitimes : les souverains abbassides. Il s’attribue une filiation avec la tribu de la Mecque à laquelle appartenait Mahomet : les Quraysh. Les généalogies ne présentent pas toujours d’incontestables garanties d’authenticité, mais cette ascendance est indispensable car, selon la tradition musulmane [12], le califat ne peut être détenu que par l’un d’entre eux.
La proclamation du Califat, le 29 juin 2014, vise à réactiver la mémoire glorieuse de l’empire au temps de la dynastie abbasside. Dans la civilisation arabo-musulmane, ce geste revêt une importance en général mal comprise et/ou sous estimée en Occident. La définition d’Ibn Khaldûn (1332-1406), référence essentielle à ce sujet, permet de comprendre : le calife, écrit-il, est « le substitut du Législateur pour la garde de la religion et le gouvernement des affaires d’ici-bas sur un fondement religieux [13] ». Le calife ( khalifa ) est, littéralement, le “successeur“ du prophète Mahomet. Ce fut le titre adopté par celui qui, à sa suite, prit la tête de la communauté des croyants (oumma), son beau-père Abu Bakr (632-634). Il fut pérennisé par ‘Umar (634-644), autre beau-père de Mahomet, véritable bâtisseur du califat en tant que forme particulière d’autorité, à la fois politique et religieuse. Héritée des pratiques tribales de la péninsule arabique, la conception califale du pouvoir est, dans le meilleur des cas du moins, arbitrale et non despotique. Toutefois, elle peut déroger à cet idéal pour accomplir sa tâche prioritaire, qui est de garantir l’unité de l’oumma, d’en éviter la division (fitna). Afin d’écarter l’anarchie, chacun des membres de l’oumma doit, lors d’une cérémonie collective, prêter un serment d’allégeance personnelle (bay’a) au calife. Toute contestation est impitoyablement châtiée car considérée comme une rébellion contre l’État voulu par Dieu, une innovation (bid’a) déviante par rapport à un ordre qui doit demeurer immuable. La doctrine du pouvoir fixée sous les Abbassides rend obligatoire l’obéissance à l’égard de toute personne qui gouverne, sauf si celle-ci ordonne la désobéissance (ma’siya) à Dieu. Cette obligation équivaut à un devoir religieux. Calife, prétendant renouer le fil de l’histoire interrompue en 1258, Ibrahim ne pouvait donc que réclamer la bay’a dans les zones qu’il contrôle et c’est en toute “légitimité“ qu’il pratique une politique de terreur à l’encontre des tribus rebelles.
Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi veut signer la revanche de la communauté des Arabes sunnites sur une humiliation pluriséculaire. Il traduit la volonté de renouer avec la grandeur perdue.
Durant la période abbasside (750-1258), la réflexion politique fixa la doctrine du pouvoir califal et définit les fonctions principales du détenteur de celui-ci : préserver la religion telle que fixée par Mahomet et les premiers musulmans (salaf) ; protéger les territoires musulmans ; combattre pour la conversion des non-musulmans. Le supplice du dernier souverain abbasside, Al-Muta’sim, par les Mongols lors de la prise de Bagdad, en 1258, marqua la fin à la fois de la lignée califale et de la prépondérance politique et économique des Arabes sunnites dans l’empire. Le geste d’Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi veut signer la revanche de la communauté des Arabes sunnites sur une humiliation pluriséculaire. Il traduit la volonté de renouer avec la grandeur perdue. Il entend aussi et surtout marquer la renaissance de l’islam que ses adeptes considèrent comme le seul véritable : celui “restauré“ par les Abbassides après le dévoiement dont ceux-ci accusaient les Omeyyades de s’être rendus coupables. Cela le place, enfin, en position de force, au moins symbolique, face au chef d’Al Qaida, Ayman al-Zaouahiri : le calife impose sa primauté. Selon la pratique instaurée par les Abbassides, les décisions du calife ne peuvent être ni contredites, ni ignorées ni enfreintes sans que ses adversaires ne soient considérés comme des traîtres à l’islam. Encore faut-il que le calife dispose des moyens de faire respecter son autorité. Ce qui suppose préalablement la reconnaissance de sa légitimité, ce que, dans le cas d’Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi, n’ont fait ni Ayman al-Zaouahiri, ni aucune des autorités religieuses respectées par l’immense majorité des musulmans sunnites.
Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, dit Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi se fait désormais appeler calife Ibrahim. Certes, il s’agit de son vrai prénom et cela pourrait être une raison suffisante pour expliquer ce choix. Toutefois, ce prénom revêt également une très forte valeur symbolique dans la religion musulmane. Correspondant à l’Abraham des juifs et des chrétiens, Ibrahim compte parmi les prophètes reconnus par les musulmans. Ceux-ci le considèrent comme le père du monothéisme et comme le modèle du croyant, absolument soumis à Allah, comme en témoigne son acceptation du sacrifice d’Ismaël. La tradition musulmane lui attribue la construction du temple de la Ka’ba, à La Mecque. Certaines tribus arabes, parmi lesquelles les Quraysh, se proclament descendantes de son fils Ismaël. En effet, ce dernier vécut : alors qu’Ibrahim s’apprêtait à le sacrifier comme Allah le lui avait demandé pour éprouver sa foi, sur l’ordre de ce dernier, l’ange Jibril arrêta sa main et substitua un mouton à Ismaël. C’est ce que commémore l’Aïd el-Kebir.
Les djihadistes entendent également manifester leur rejet de la conception occidentale de l’État, celle de l’État-nation (construction d’un vouloir-vivre en commun forgé par une population hétérogène), devenue la norme internationale par le biais de l’expansion impériale des nations européennes au XIXe et dans la première moitié du XXe siècle.
La destruction spectaculaire d’un poste frontière entre la Syrie et l’Irak, le 26 juin 2014, affirme la volonté de rompre avec un ordre territorial imposé de l’extérieur. Le découpage du Proche-Orient résulte des accords Sykes-Picot, conclus secrètement par la France et la Grande-Bretagne en 1916, révisés à la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale, puis entérinés par la Société des Nations-SDN à San Remo en 1920. Ils consacraient le démantèlement de l’Empire ottoman et la domination de la région par les deux principales puissances occidentales d’alors [14]. Dans la mémoire collective arabe, donc bien au-delà des rangs de Daesh, ces frontières constituent la marque tangible de la trahison des promesses faites en 1916 (correspondance Hussein-McMahon reconnaissant l’existence de la nation arabe et acceptant le principe de la création d’un État arabe), du dépècement des territoires arabes et de la privation d’indépendance de leur population. Les djihadistes entendent également manifester leur rejet de la conception occidentale de l’État, celle de l’État-nation (construction d’un vouloir-vivre en commun forgé par une population hétérogène), devenue la norme internationale par le biais de l’expansion impériale des nations européennes au XIXe et dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. L’État islamique (dawla al-islâmiya) forgé sous les Abbassides dont se réclame le calife Ibrahim, regroupe une communauté homogène : les croyants d’une seule religion, l’islam, dans une seule composante, le salafisme djihadiste, et régie par une loi divine, la charia. Il récuse tout ordre politique, intérieur ou international, qui ne procède ni ne se fonde sur le divin. D’où l’inutilité des ergotages sur l’appellation de l’entité créée le 29 juin 2014. Daesh n’est pas un mouvement indépendantiste combattant en vue de sa reconnaissance juridique en tant qu’État-nation, il a instauré un Salafistan , un territoire où règnent de nouveau la Vérité révélée par Mahomet et la Loi qui en découle. Le calife Ibrahim entend en faire le noyau auquel s’agglomèreront toutes les terres d’islam, un ensemble transcendant les frontières et les appartenances tribales ou nationales, et une base à partir de laquelle la conversion du monde entier à l’islam sera menée à bien.
Prétendant à la qualité d’État, le Califat ajouta aux prérogatives régaliennes qu’il exerce de fait (sécurité, justice, défense) celle de battre monnaie. Le 13 novembre 2014, il présenta les pièces de monnaie qui auraient désormais seules cours sur son territoire : 1 et 5 dinars d’or, 1, 5 et 10 dirhams d’argent, 10 et 20 fills de cuivre. De la sorte, il renouait avec un autre héritage de l’islam originel. Les monnaies iraniennes et byzantines circulèrent jusqu’au règne du calife omeyyade Abd al-Malik (685-705). Celui-ci fit frapper les premières monnaies musulmanes : le dinar (or) et le dirham (argent). Le calife abbasside Al-Ma’mun (813-833) mit en circulation de nouvelles pièces qui fournirent le standard en usage durant plusieurs siècles. Outil économique et fiscal autant que vecteur idéologique (elle porte le nom du souverain et des citations du Coran qui expriment la politique menée par le calife), la monnaie est un instrument essentiel du pouvoir califal que Daesh a restauré. Le retour à un système monétaire métallique, outre la volonté d’affirmer l’existence d’un État et de renouer avec la grandeur des Abbassides, traduit un projet politique émancipateur vis-à-vis de l’ordre économique mondial. Daesh veut briser la domination des institutions financières internationales et américaines. Contrôlées, selon lui, par les chrétiens et les juifs, ce sont, à ses yeux, des instruments voués au pillage des ressources du monde arabe. Battre dinar et dirham est donc sensé libérer l’oumma et montrer aux peuples opprimés la voie à suivre pour se défaire de l’hégémonie occidentale.
S’inscrivant dans la durée, le Califat réorganise la société selon son projet totalitaire. Surveillés de près, les individus doivent tous œuvrer à la réalisation de l’utopie salafiste, faute de quoi ils sont éliminés sans état d’âme. L’administration est maintenue ou rétablie, non seulement pour assurer le fonctionnement normal des services publics, mais aussi pour instaurer et pérenniser l’ordre islamique. Certains auteurs évoquent une “djihadisation“ des esprits. L’action sociale fait l’objet d’une attention particulière, dans une évidente stratégie de séduction. La charia est appliquée dans toute sa rigueur. L’éducation est très étroitement contrôlée, les salafistes désirant endoctriner la jeune génération. Outre la séparation stricte des sexes, le nouveau pouvoir impose une modification complète des programmes. Trois séries de matières sont bannies : d’abord, celles contribuant à l’épanouissement personnel (arts plastiques, musique, sport), ensuite celles développant la réflexion personnelle et l’esprit critique (histoire, philosophie, sciences sociales), enfin celles délivrant une connaissance jugée non conforme au Coran (psychologie, théorie de l’évolution). La lutte contre les Kurdes contient une forte dose idéologique : ceux-ci militent (ou prétendent militer, afin de s’attirer les bonnes grâces de l ’Occident ?) pour un État laïque, “socialiste“ et respectueux des droits de la femme. Ils incarnent donc, aux yeux des salafistes djihadistes, un contre-modèle à détruire.
Bref, Daesh tente de matérialiser le rêve de résurrection de la grandeur perdue en 1258, lorsque les conquérants mongols mirent fin au dernier empire musulman dominé par les Arabes. Rien ne serait plus erroné que de sous-estimer la portée de cette entreprise. Cette nostalgie dépasse très largement les rangs des seuls adeptes de Daesh. Cela ne provoquera probablement pas la levée en masse attendue par ces derniers, mais à tout le moins une sympathie plus ou moins marquée d’une partie des populations arabes sunnites, pouvant évoluer dans certains cas vers un soutien plus ou moins actif.
Ceux qui rejoignent les terres du Califat affichent une détermination sans faille, celle des fanatiques. Au IXe siècle, une tradition apocalyptique naquit dans les rangs chiites : un Mahdi (un être “bien guidé“) accompagné d’une armée invincible viendrait préparer le Jugement Dernier. Au XIe siècle, les savants sunnites reprirent ces croyances afin d’entretenir la ferveur religieuse et de stimuler la fidélité politique des populations de l’empire abbasside. Daesh se réclame de cette eschatologie sunnite et enflamme ses partisans en les persuadant qu’ils sont les annonciateurs du Jugement d’Allah. Les djihadistes pensent que la fin du monde approche et qu’il faut séparer le camp du Bien de celui du Mal, celui de la religion révélée par Mahomet de toutes les autres. Cela impose une purification par la violence et une annihilation des impies, qui passe, en particulier, par la décapitation des ennemis (musulmans et non-musulmans) de l’islam qu’ils défendent, le seul véritable à leurs yeux. Cette pratique, couramment utilisée à l’encontre des animaux, participe de la déshumanisation de l’autre, commune à tous les totalitarismes. En outre, dans la tradition musulmane médiévale, la tête est le siège de l’âme. La victime voit donc son humanité niée dans ses dimensions tant physique que spirituelle. Une prophétie (hadith de Amaq [15]) assure que la bataille finale entre le Bien et le Mal, qui doit assurer la victoire des croyants sur les infidèles, se déroulera au nord du pays de Sham (la Syrie) en un lieu appelé tantôt Amaq, tantôt Dabiq, d’où le choix de ce nom pour le titre de la revue de propagande de Daesh [16]. Ces deux villages se situent entre Alep et la frontière turque [17].
Daesh développe une vision manichéenne du monde : il incarne le camp du Bien – réduit aux salafistes djihadistes qui se rallient à lui. Il se déclare en lutte contre le camp du Mal. Ce dernier regroupe le reste de l’humanité. D’abord, les “mécréants“ (kouffar), au premier rang desquels les athées, les juifs, les chrétiens et les musulmans chiites, mais auxquels s’ajoutent les adeptes de toutes les religions, y compris les musulmans sunnites ne partageant pas leur vision de l’islam. Ensuite, les “hypocrites“, soit tous les dirigeants arabes, corrompus par l’Occident. Enfin, les États-Unis et la Russie sont les ennemis étatiques principaux. La vision salafiste djihadiste du monde s’inscrit dans le droit fil de celle du nazisme – qui sédui(si)t une partie de l’opinion et des dirigeants arabes [18]-, puisqu’il y aurait un complot mondial antimusulman, ourdi par les Juifs, réels détenteurs du pouvoir à Washington et à Moscou.
IV. Provoquer une résonance mondiale
Comme les bolcheviks après la révolution d’octobre 1917, les chefs de l’État islamique redoutent par-dessus tout l’isolement. Le changement radical qu’ils veulent instaurer n’a de chance de survivre que s’il trouve des soutiens extérieurs. Par surcroît, le groupe poursuit des objectifs expansionnistes : contrôler le Moyen Orient, puis tous les pays musulmans et enfin imposer un califat mondial. Pour ces deux motifs, Daesh recrute activement des jeunes djihadistes sur l’ensemble de la planète. De plus, le Califat est un projet politique particulier : la réalisation d’une utopie susceptible de séduire des musulmans du monde entier puisqu’il s’agit d’édifier ici-bas une société régie par la Loi divine. Comme il y eut (a) un “rêve américain“, se dessine un “rêve islamique“, celui de la cité de Dieu sur la Terre. Ainsi pensent les familles qui, depuis les pays les plus divers, rejoignent le Califat : elles sont persuadées d’agir au mieux et, notamment, d’assurer le salut de leurs enfants [19]. Un État animé d’une idéologie universaliste a certes besoin de guerriers pour le défendre et l’étendre, mais son bon fonctionnement suppose qu’il dispose de cadres qualifiés dans tous les domaines. Daesh tente d’en recruter dans le monde entier. Toutefois, ce qui transpire des difficultés d’existence dans le Califat semble limiter les capacités de séduction.
L’une des spécificités de Daesh réside dans sa communication [20]. Très élaborée et très maîtrisée, elle vise tout à la fois à séduire de nouveaux adeptes, à entretenir l’ardeur des combattants, à drainer des financements, à démoraliser les adversaires et à défier le droit international qu’elle récuse. Elle se montre particulièrement prolixe : présente sur internet et les réseaux sociaux, elle diffuse des messages, une revue de propagande (Dabiq), des vidéos d’exécutions sanglantes et des films de propagande (comme Le Choc des épées) qu’elle réalise grâce à son propre organe de production audiovisuelle (Al-Furqân Media Production). Daesh exploite sans vergogne l’obscénité de la violence sanglante et fournit sans se soucier des conséquences les preuves tangibles de sa pratique du crime de guerre et du crime contre l’humanité. Ce que l’on a nommé un “djihad médiatique“ semble séduire puisqu’il contribuerait largement à alimenter le flux de combattants et de résidents qui rejoignent le territoire du Califat. Cette communication est de bien meilleure qualité technique et beaucoup plus manipulatrice que celle d’Al Qaida. Cette dernière occupe d’ailleurs une large place dans les polémiques diffusées par le forum qui relaie le discours de l’État islamique, Al-Minbar. Toutefois, le Califat ne dispose pas (encore ?) des moyens de mener une cyberguerre, notamment contre les États de la coalition qui le combat. La vague d’attaques de janvier 2015, pour médiatisée qu’elle ait été, ne reflétait pas une capacité de nuisance considérable : selon les spécialistes, tous les sites piratés présentaient la caractéristique d’être mal ou peu protégés.
Depuis la fin 2014, Daesh enregistre des ralliements hors de sa zone et a validé l’allégeance (bay’a) de plusieurs groupes : Ansar Bait al-Maqdis dans le Sinaï, Ansar Dawlat al-Islammiyya au Yémen, Majlis Shura Shabab al-Islam en Libye, Jund al- Khilafah fi Ard al-Jazaïr en Algérie, Ansar al-Tawheed en Inde, Jundallah au Pakistan, la Brigade de l’Islam dans le Khorosan en Afghanistan, Abou Sayyaf et les Combattants islamiques pour la liberté de Bangsamoro aux Philippines, une partie du Jamaah Ansharut Tauhid en Indonésie. On ignore le nombre de combattants de ces groupes, mais cela traduit à tout le moins un rayonnement de l’idéologie propre à l’État islamique dans l’ensemble de l’aire musulmane sunnite.
Or, les équilibres régionaux se trouvent menacés. Le destin de la Syrie revêt une importance particulière car le pays est un État-tampon essentiel, ce que révèle la complexité de la guerre civile devenue conflit régional indirect et lieu des rivalités pour l’influence mondiale. Il se trouve à l’intersection des poussées expansionnistes contradictoires des États sunnites (Égypte, Arabie Saoudite, Turquie) et chiites (Iran, Irak), au centre de la lutte entre Israël et les organisations musulmanes extrémistes, au cœur de la rivalité américano-russe. En outre, Daesh a identifié des points faibles dont la prise de contrôle fait ouvertement partie de ses plans : Liban, Jordanie, Sinaï et Arabie Saoudite.
L’Iran, aspirant à la puissance régionale, se trouve largement impliqué aux côtés des forces pro-gouvernementales en Syrie comme en Irak. Au-delà de la solidarité religieuse avec les chiites au pouvoir à Bagdad et avec les alaouites qui tentent de garder le contrôle de la Syrie, l’Iran est engagé dans un bras de fer avec l’Arabie Saoudite. Or, l’Irak et la Syrie sont ses deux principaux appuis. Ajoutons que Téhéran aurait tout à craindre d’un éclatement de l’Irak : l’affirmation d’une entité sunnite extrémiste à ses frontières pourrait déstabiliser sa propre minorité arabe sunnite (province frontalière du Khouzistan) et l’indépendance du Kurdistan réveiller l’irrédentisme de ses propres Kurdes.
Outre les financements privés qu’elle a autorisés par le passé (et dont rien ne garantit qu’ils ont réellement pris fin), l’Arabie Saoudite partage beaucoup avec Daesh : vision salafiste de l’islam, glorification du djihad et mêmes adversaires (les musulmans chiites, le clan al-Assad, le gouvernement chiite d’Irak, l’Iran et le Hezbollah libanais). L’inconvénient pour la dynastie des Saoud résulte du fait que la défense de l’islamisme, fut instrumentalisée par le fondateur du royaume (puis par ses successeurs), d’abord pour imposer son pouvoir à l’intérieur, ensuite pour contrer le nationalisme arabe à l’extérieur. À la suite de Ben Laden, les salafistes djihadistes dénoncent l’hypocrisie de la monarchie, coupable de ne pas respecter les principes salafistes, et proclament leur volonté de chasser ceux qu‘ils qualifient d’“usurpateurs“ pour prendre le contrôle des lieux saints de Médine et de La Mecque. C’est ce qu’a annoncé le calife Ibrahim durant l’été 2014. Or, le projet n’est pas aussi irréaliste qu’il y paraît. D’une part, le programme de Daesh ressemble beaucoup à celui affiché par les Saoud : un régime régi par la Loi divine et fondant sa légitimité sur la défense de la Foi. D’autre part, outre le mécontentement d’une partie de la population, les Saoud redoutent la mécanique des solidarités tribales : certaines tribus arabes de Jordanie, de Syrie et d’Irak proches de Daesh sont originaires de la péninsule arabique et entretiennent des liens avec les tribus peuplant encore aujourd’hui l’Arabie Saoudite. En dépit des frontières tracées à San Remo (1920), les solidarités et les complicités ont persisté, pour le meilleur et pour le pire. La rivalité de puissance avec l’Iran pousse Ryad à manipuler les appartenances communautaires, tout comme Téhéran, au Liban, en Syrie, en Irak, au Bahreïn et au Yémen. Elle n’intervient contre les forces du Califat qu’en Syrie, parce que c’est l’épicentre de Daesh, mais aussi parce qu’elle ne veut pas renforcer le régime chiite de Bagdad, allié de l’Iran.
La Turquie se préoccupe d’abord de sa stabilité intérieure, laquelle dépend en partie de la question kurde. Sa priorité est donc d’empêcher l’émergence d’une entité kurde indépendante, sur son sol comme chez ses voisins. Pareille au Pakistan prêt à tout pour neutraliser l’irrédentisme pashtoun, elle s’appuie sur n’importe quelle force pour briser les aspirations kurdes. Sa surveillance de la frontière avec la Syrie ne semble pas à la hauteur de la situation et, malgré ses dénégations, il paraît plus que probable qu’elle joue la carte des djihadistes contre les Kurdes [21]. Cette alliance objective sinon formelle (dénoncée par le vice-président américain, Joseph Biden, devant des étudiants de Harvard le 2 octobre 2014) explique en partie que le gouvernement turc n’autorise pas les avions de combat de la coalition internationale formée par les États-Unis à utiliser sa base d’Incirlik. Il est vrai que les actuels dirigeants élus du peuple turc puisent eux aussi aux sources du fondamentalisme musulman, même s’ils affirment en rejeter la variante extrémiste. Ankara aspire également à la puissance régionale. Elle estime, à tort ou à raison, que cela passe par le renversement de Bachar al-Assad en Syrie. Elle tente en vain d’en faire la priorité des États-Unis et de leurs alliés, ce qui contribue aussi à expliquer son refus de prêter la base d’Incirlik. Certains évoquent, enfin, un sentiment anti-Arabe assez répandu : pourquoi venir en aide à des gens qui se sont faits les complices des Occidentaux pour trahir l’Empire ottoman durant la Première Guerre mondiale ? Singulière conception pour un État membre de l’Alliance atlantique !
La Russie, bien que directement menacée par Daesh dans une vidéo en russe diffusée le 2 novembre 2014, minimise le danger, du moins dans l’immédiat. Obsédée par sa détestation de l’Occident et accaparée par les conséquences de son aventure ukrainienne, Moscou se borne à défendre ce qu’elle considère comme ses intérêts au Proche-Orient : l’alliance avec Bachar al-Assad en Syrie, avec l’Iran et avec le gouvernement irakien. Cela ne contribue en rien à la solution du conflit.
Une vaste coalition internationale tente d’épauler les forces irakiennes légalistes et les éléments de la résistance syrienne non contaminés par le salafisme djihadiste. Les États-Unis ont pris l’initiative de l’opération Inherent Resolve en septembre 2014. Plusieurs mois après le début des opérations, il semble bien que l’aveu de Barack Obama au début de l’été 2014 demeure d’actualité : Washington n’a pas vraiment de stratégie. Comment en irait-il autrement ? L’équipe dirigeante américaine elle-même est divisée, au point que le secrétaire à la Défense, Chuck Hagel, a été limogé sèchement en novembre 2014. Selon la presse américaine, il préconisait une action militaire aussi intense en Syrie qu’en Irak alors que les partisans d’une intervention essentiellement centrée sur l’Irak, bastion de Daesh, ont emporté l’adhésion du président. Outre un sentiment de culpabilité poussant à tenter de réparer la faute commise en Irak par son prédécesseur, qui fut incapable de réparer le chaos qu’il y avait semé, il semble que Barack Obama ait donné la priorité à deux impératifs : ne pas ajouter encore aux contentieux avec la Russie et ne pas mécontenter l’Iran, avec qui des négociations cruciales sur la prolifération nucléaire militaire sont en cours et dont l’intervention militaire au côté des forces irakiennes est indispensable. En effet, la coalition tire à hue et à dia car les pays qui la composent divergent sur les priorités et le rythme, mais tous se retrouvent sur un plus petit dénominateur commun : aucun ne veut engager de troupes au sol. Donc les Gardiens de la Révolution et autres combattants iraniens sont irremplaçables. L’issue de cette entreprise, fondée essentiellement sur l’emploi des forces aériennes, est incertaine. Tout repose, aujourd’hui, en dernière analyse, sur la réussite de l’attrition du territoire influencé ou contrôlé par Daesh.
Or, le Califat, parfaitement conscient de ce risque mortel, fait tout pour contrer la stratégie de la coalition internationale. Par le biais d’une communication agressive et racoleuse, il cherche à attirer le plus grand nombre possible de djihadistes (environ 20 000 fin janvier 2015 [22]) et de spécialistes civils venus de l’étranger. Le bon fonctionnement de ces flux suppose le contrôle d’une partie de la frontière turque (ce qui pose la question de la complicité objective de la Turquie avec Daesh, comme il a toujours existé une complicité objective entre le Pakistan et les talibans) et la persistance de facilités de déplacement sur l’ensemble de la planète (fruit de l’accélération et de l’amplification de la mondialisation intervenue après la fin de la Guerre froide), notamment dans l’espace de l’Union européenne. Démarche originale, Daesh diffuse de nombreuses vidéos montrant des militants de nationalités diverses afin de prouver qu’il n’y a pas d’exclusion vis-à-vis des musulmans non-Arabes, notamment ceux venus de l’Occident. Citadelle assiégée, Daesh tente également de porter le feu sur le territoire de l’ennemi. Ainsi a-t-il appelé à des actions de guerre sur le territoire de l’ensemble des États qui prennent part à la coalition qui le combat. Cela correspond à la stratégie préconisée par al-Souri, celle des petites cellules disséminées en territoire adverse, partageant la même idéologie, ayant reçu une formation pratique, agissant de manière autonome et au gré des opportunités. Selon lui, les actions spectaculaires type 11 septembre 2001 sont vouées à l’échec car elles requièrent une structure et une logistique importantes donc vulnérables, surtout depuis que l’adversaire est averti.
Une guerre de longue haleine ?
Le débat sur la terminologie à employer semble oiseux. Il s’agit bien d’une guerre et c’est d’ailleurs le terme utilisé par les djihadistes. Le problème est de savoir quelle sera la durée du conflit. En effet, la situation est peu banale : l’assise territoriale de Daesh semble se renforcer constamment. État atypique, le Califat s’enracine chaque jour davantage du simple fait que personne ne se trouve actuellement en mesure de le déloger. L’asymétrie favorise la sanctuarisation. Parallèlement, la mouvance terroriste que le Califat inspire à l’échelle mondiale persiste et s’amplifie, sans se structurer en réseau, ce qui complique considérablement le renseignement, la parade et l’éventuelle riposte. Territorialisation et déterritorialisation se combinent donc pour former un gigantesque casse-tête stratégique.
La question de la violence djihadiste ne saurait être résolue par une réponse strictement militaire. D’ailleurs, si les frappes aériennes semblent avoir enrayé la progression de Daesh, elles ne paraissent pas avoir empêché sa consolidation dans les zones de peuplement arabe sunnite. Les sociétés arabo-musulmanes connaissent une crise profonde affectant toutes leurs dimensions. Leur stabilisation ne peut donc résulter que d’un processus politique, au sens noble du terme. C’est-à-dire le traitement de l’ensemble des maux qui affectent les habitants. Pour réussir, ce processus doit être le fait des populations elles-mêmes, mené à leur rythme et bénéficier, le cas échéant, de l’aide de la communauté internationale. Cela devrait être la leçon des échecs occidentaux en Afghanistan, en Irak et en Libye. Encore faut-il que les sociétés arabo-musulmanes forgent le contexte favorable pour que la frange de leurs élites disposée à conduire ces changements puisse agir efficacement.
Références bibliographiques : Pierre Verluise (sous la direction de) Géopolitiques des terrorismes Diploweb.com, 24 janvier 2015 ISBN : 979-10-92676-01-3
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Docteur en histoire, professeur agrégé de l’Université, Patrice Gourdin enseigne les relations internationales et la géopolitique auprès des élèves-officiers de l’Ecole de l’Air. Membre du Conseil scientifique du Centre géopolitique auquel est adossé le Diploweb.com.
[1] . Laurent Touchard, « État islamique : naissance d’un monstre de guerre (#1) & (#2), Jeune Afrique, 24 et 26 septembre 2014.
[2] . Deux ouvrages utiles : . Patrick Cockburn, Le retour des djihadistes. Aux racines de l’État islamique, Paris, 2014, Équateurs ; . Thomas Flichy de la Neuville et Olivier Hanne, L’État islamique. Anatomie du nouveau Califat, Paris, 2014, Bernard Giovanangeli éditeur.
[3] . En particulier celles publiées par l’Institute for the Study of War (www.understandingwar.org), notamment : ISIS Sanctuary, January 15, 2015, iswiraq.blogspot.fr/2015/01/isis-sanctuary-map-january-15-2015.html, consultée le 16 janvier 2015.
[4] . Voir une synthèse d’octobre 2014 sur http://accelus.thomsonreuters.com/fr/ infographic/islamic-state-how-worlds-richest-terrorist-organization-funds-its-operations#, consultée le 13 janvier 2015.
[5] . Brynjar Lia, Architect of Global Jihad : The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri, Columbia University Press, 2008.
[6] . Gilles Kepel, Terreur et martyre. Relever le défi de civilisation, Paris, 2008, Flammarion, pp. 190-191.
[7] . « Iraqi agriculture drops 40% under IS control », Al Monitor, January 20, 2015.
[8] . « Business of the Caliph », Zeit online, December 4, 2014.
[9] . Barthélémy Gaillard, « Pourquoi il est compliqué de combattre l’État islamique », europe1.fr, 8 septembre 2014.
[10] . Ces chiffres et ceux cités ci-après résultent d’estimations qui nous donnent un ordre de grandeur, en aucun cas une mesure exacte de la réalité.
[11] . Liz Sly, « The Islamic State is failing at being a state », The Washington Post, December 26 2014 ; Susannah George, « The Islamic State is waging war on technocrats », The Guardian, December 26 2014.
[12] . Dans le Sahîh de Muslim, un des deux recueils de hadith considérés comme les plus fiables : « L’autorité restera toujours dans la tribu de Quraysh ». Cité par Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddima, III-24, traduction d’Abdesselam Cheddadi, Paris, 2002, Gallimard, p. 476.
[13] . Ibn Khaldûn, op. cit., p. 470. Il explique : « En effet, les hommes n’ont pas été créés uniquement en vue du monde d’ici-bas, qui n’est que jeu et vanité, puisque destiné à la mort et à l’anéantissement. […] Le but pour lequel ils ont été créés est leur religion, qui doit les conduire au bonheur dans l’autre monde. […] Aussi les lois religieuses sont-elles venues pour exhorter les hommes à suivre ce chemin dans tout ce qu’ils font, aussi bien en matière de culte que dans leurs relations avec leurs semblables. […] Le califat consiste à […] faire agir [les hommes] suivant une vision religieuse des intérêts de l’autre monde et des affaires de ce monde qui en dépendent. » (ibidem, pp. 469-470)
[14] . James Barr, A Line in the Sand. Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East, London, 2011, Simon & Schuster.
[15] . Dans le Sahîh de Muslim.
[16] . Michael W. S. Ryan , « Dabiq : What Islamic State’s New Magazine Tells Us about Their Strategic Direction, Recruitment Patterns and Guerrilla Doctrine », Terrorism Monitor, The Jamestown Foundation, August 1, 2014.
[17] . William McCants ; « ISIS Fantasies of an Apocalyptic Showdown in Northern Syria », blog Markaz, Brookings Institution, October 3, 2014.
[18] . Roger Faligot et Rémi Kauffer, Le Croissant et la croix gammée : Les Secrets de l’alliance entre l’Islam et le nazisme d’Hitler à nos jours, Paris, 1990, Albin Michel Martin Cüppers et Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Croissant fertile et croix gammée : Le Troisième Reich, les Arabes et la Palestine, Paris, 2009, Verdier.
[19] . Kevin Sullivan and Karla Adam, « Hoping to create a new society, the Islamic State recruits entire families », The Washington Post, December 24, 2014.
[20] . Thomas Flichy de la Neuville et Olivier Hanne, « État islamique, un cyber-terrorisme médiatique ? », École de Guerre, décembre 2014, http://www.chaire-cyber.fr/IMG/pdf/… _chaire_cyberdefense.pdf
[21] . Fehim Taştekin, « Turkish military says MIT shipped weapons to al-Qaeda », Al Monitor, January 15, 2015.
[22] . Chiffres de l’International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence : http://icsr.info/2015/01/foreign-fi…, consulté le 27 janvier 2015.
Citation / Quotation
Voir aussi:
Declarations Recrimination Is Not a Plan
Islamic State has Washington paralyzed. Here’s a way forward.
Peggy Noonan
WSJ
Feb. 5, 2015
Everything’s frozen. When you ask, “What is the appropriate U.S. response to ISIS?” half the people in Washington answer: “ George W. Bush broke Iraq and ISIS was born in the rubble. There would be no ISIS if it weren’t for him.” The other half answer: “When Barack Obama withdrew from Iraq, ISIS was born in the vacuum. There would be no ISIS without him.”
These are charges, not answers, and they are getting us nowhere. Bitterness and begging the question are keeping us from focusing on what is. We’re frozen in what was.
There’s plenty to learn and conclude from the past. Great books have been and will be written about the mistakes, poor thinking and dishonesty that accompanied the 2003 invasion and the 2011 withdrawal. But at a certain point you have to unhitch yourself from your predispositions and resentments and face what is happening now.
The White House is paralyzed, the president among the coldest of the frozen. He erects straw men, focuses on what he will not do, refuses to “play Whac A Mole,” waxes on about reading a book about the pains of the deployed. He’s showing how sensitive, layered and alive to moral complexity he is instead of, you know, leading. At the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, he airily and from a great height explained to the audience that ISIS exists within a historical context that includes the Inquisition, slavery and Jim Crow. “People committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” Oh West, you big hypocrite. This is just the moment to dilate on Christendom’s sins, isn’t it? While Christians are being driven from the Mideast? He always says these things as if he’s the enlightened one facing the facts of the buried past instead of the cornered one defeated by complexity, hard calls and ambivalence.
He is lost. His policy is listlessness punctuated by occasional booms.
The public is agitated by the latest killing, of the Jordanian pilot burned alive. That murder may have changed some calculations. Jordan’s King Abdullah is said to have quoted Clint Eastwood during his recent Washington trip: “He mentioned ‘Unforgiven,’ ” a congressman said, without specifying which scene. Well, good.
Which returns us to the question of a plan, a way forward.
We know ISIS is increasingly hated by the civilized world, and by many nations in the Mideast. Each day that brings new word of their atrocities, not only to prisoners but to local, subjugated populations, adds to the anti-ISIS coalition. But we also know they will not be defeated or decisively set back from the air. They have to be removed from the areas they hold. They need to be fought with boots on the ground.
Whose boots?
Some wisdom on that from two veteran players in U.S. foreign policy, former Secretary of State James Baker and the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass.
On “Face the Nation” Sunday, Mr. Baker said ground troops are necessary but must come from Arab and Muslim allies, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. “My idea would be to go to the Turks, 60-year allies of the United States, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They have a good army. It’s an army that will fight. . . . They want to destroy ISIS. We want to destroy ISIS. There’s a convergence of interests here. Why don’t we get together and we say, look, we will supply the air, the logistics and the intelligence, you put the boots on the ground and go in there and do the job?”
I spoke to Mr. Baker at CBS before his appearance. He said the world is “coalescing,” and this is the time to move, with diplomacy and leadership.
So, a multinational Arab and Muslim military force to fight ISIS on the ground. Is this the right way to go?
Very much so, said Mr. Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations. ISIS, he told me this week, is “a network, a movement and an organization.” It poses a geopolitical, economic, and humanitarian threat to the world. It threatens Sunni regimes in the region—if it wins over their populations, “it turns every country into a potential failed state.”
ISIS “can disrupt oil-producing areas like Saudi Arabia. . . . It is inevitable that they will one day challenge the House of Saud” through terrorism or by attempting to rouse the population against it. “If you’re the Islamic State, you have to control the country that controls the two holiest sites in Islam,” Mecca and Medina, Mr. Haass added. America doesn’t worry about the threat to the oil supply because we are close to energy self-sufficiency, but “we are economically linked to the world, and much of the world is linked to Mideastern oil.”
Most famously, “any area controlled by ISIS is a humanitarian nightmare to Muslims not devout enough, to Shia, to Christians.”
There is the threat to American and Western security of returnees. “ISIS has the potential to produce graduates who come home, and to radicalize those who’ve never set foot in Syria. There is the returnee danger and the self-radicalization danger, as we saw recently in France.”
Right now what is important, Mr. Haass says, “is to break their momentum. The region and the world see them as gaining ground both literally and figuratively. This draws support from those around them. It’s important to break that, to allow those who are wavering to see that ISIS is not inevitable. If they are seen as inevitable it is self-fulfilling.”
What to do? Mr. Haass echoes Mr. Baker. “Attacking ISIS from the air is necessary but not sufficient. You need ground forces to seize areas ISIS holds. You need a ground partner.”
That partner should be “a multinational Arab-led expeditionary force—a force on the ground to take territory. It needs to be Arab and it needs to be Sunni, because you need to fight fire with fire.” It is crucial, he says, that Sunni Arab leaders demonstrate it is legitimate to stand up to ISIS.
Haass includes in a hypothetical force Jordan, the Saudis, the UAE, and “others—Egypt too. Even Turkey. . . . That’s what you need, politically as much as militarily. Unless that happens we don’t have a viable strategy.”
He agrees the U.S. should help with intelligence, training and special forces as well as air power. Also needed: “a digital strategy that stresses that ISIS’ behavior contravenes tenets of Islam and means misery for those they dominate.”
So—move to kill the Islamic State’s mystique. Give them a fight, make them the weak horse, and do everything to bring together the Sunni Arab world to do it.
Is this possible? Can it be done? Mr. Haass said it is “a long shot” but “not inconceivable.” Moreover, “it’s the conversation we should be having. We should make answering this question the priority.”
The U.S. would have to lead, push, press, promise and cajole. It would have to use diplomatic and financial muscle. But it would be doing so with allies increasingly alive to the threat ISIS constitutes not only to the world, but to them.
And it is a plan. Who has a better one?
Face the Nation Transcripts February 1, 2015: Graham, Durbin, Baker
(CBS News) — Below is a transcript from the February 1, 2015 edition of Face the Nation. Guests included: Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Dick Durbin, former Secretary of State James Baker, Holly Williams, Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, James Brown, Peggy Noonan, Phil Musser, Stephanie Cutter, John Dickerson, Mark Leibovich and Joseph Califano.
NORAH O’DONNELL, HOST: I’m Norah O’Donnell.
And today on FACE THE NATION: The terror group ISIS strikes again, and a big development in campaign 2016 leaves Republicans dialing for dollars.
Japanese captive Kenji Goto appears to be the latest victim of ISIS. We will have a report from Northern Iraq.
And as Mitt Romney bows out of a third presidential run, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham says he may be in. We will talk to him about that and the war on terror.
Then we will hear from the number two Democrat in the Senate, Richard Durbin and former Secretary of State James Baker.
(…)
Good morning. Bob Schieffer is off today.
We begin this morning with the grim news of another execution from the terror group ISIS.
CBS News correspondent Holly Williams is in Kirkuk, Iraq, this morning.
HOLLY WILLIAMS, CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENT: The video released by ISIS does appear to show the beheading of Kenji Goto, a Japanese journalist captured by the extremists late last year. That’s the assessment of the Japanese government.
ISIS had offered to release Goto in return for a failed female suicide bomber, who is on death row in Jordan. Now, the Jordanian government said it would release the woman, Sajida al-Rishawi, but only in exchange for one of its own citizens, a pilot who crashed in ISIS territory during a bombing raid back in December.
In the end, however, there was no prisoner swap, Kenji Goto is dead, and the fate of the Jordanian pilot is unknown. In the Syrian city of Kobani, though, ISIS was finally forced to retreat last week after more than 700 U.S.-led airstrikes and four months of brutal street fighting against Kurdish forces.
The battle for Kobani was a very public test of whether airstrikes would be effective against the militants. But here in the oil-rich Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Friday, ISIS launched a surprise offensive, killing a local commander and four of his men. The extremists were later beaten back, but their confidence in attacking a well-defended place like Kirkuk suggest ISIS still a very long way from defeat.
O’DONNELL: Joining me now by telephone from outside Amman, Jordan, is the foreign minister, Nasser Judeh.
Mr. Foreign Minister, thank you for joining us.
NASSER JUDEH, JORDANIAN FOREIGN MINISTER: Thank you, Norah. O’DONNELL: Let me ask you, do you know if your pilot that is being held by ISIS is still alive?
JUDEH: Well, actually we don’t.
We have been asking publicly for proof of life and so far we have received none.
O’DONNELL: Are the Jordanians still willing to swap Sajida al- Rishawi — this is the failed female suicide bomber — even though ISIS has now executed this other Japanese journalist?
JUDEH: Well, there have been demands, certainly demands by our side as well, as you mentioned before and as I mentioned, for proof of life. We have said publicly that, if we do get proof of life — and this is before the tragic murder, cold-blooded murder of the Japanese journalist, Kenji, we have said that if there is proof of life and if our pilot is released, we are willing to release this woman.
But, like I said, so far, we have seen no proof of life which we have been asking for.
O’DONNELL: The foreign minister also told us that King Abdullah of Jordan will be traveling to Washington to meet with President Obama.
For more now on ISIS and a look at the 2016 presidential politics, we’re joined by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham from Clemson, South Carolina.
Senator, thank you for joining us. SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: Thank you.
O’DONNELL: This is now the seventh public beheading of either a journalist or aide worker by ISIS. When is this going to stop?
GRAHAM: When they’re degraded and destroyed.
And the president has the right goal to degrade and destroy ISIL, he but doesn’t have the right strategy. An aerial campaign will not destroy them. You’re going to need boots on the ground not only in Iraq, but Syria. And there’s got to be some regional force formed with an American component, somewhere around 10,000, I think, American soldiers to align with the Arab armies in the region and go in to Syria and take back territory from ISIL. That is what will make it stop.
O’DONNELL: The Pentagon admitted just last week that ISIS still holds about 20,000 square miles in Syria and Iraq.
GRAHAM: Right.
O’DONNELL: That’s roughly twice the size of Massachusetts. There have been 2,000 airstrikes by American and coalition forces. There were just 34 this weekend. Are these airstrikes effective at all?
GRAHAM: They won’t destroy ISIL. They do help in some regard.
How do you dislodge ISIL from Syria? Iraq, you hope you can get the Kurds and the Iraqi security forces and the Anbar Sunni tribes to work together to defeat them in Western Anbar take back Mosul.
But Syria is very complicated. You are going to need a regional force, Saudi, Turkey, the entire region, putting together an army with American people embedded, special forces, intel folks, forward air controllers to go in on the ground and not only dislodge them from Syria, but hold the territory. And you can’t do that until you deal with Assad.
O’DONNELL: I think one of the most alarming things that I have read is that of these foreign fighters involved in Syria and Iraq, that some 4,000 of them have Western passports, which means they could travel to the United States without a visa.
GRAHAM: Right.
O’DONNELL: Are we watching them?
GRAHAM: We are.
But we’re being overwhelmed. Quite frankly, Syria and Iraq combined are the best platforms to launch an attack on United States I have seen since 9/11. So, every day that goes by, we have got more terrorist organizations with more capability to strike the homeland than any time since 9/11. You have got AQAP in Yemen. But ISIL’s presence in Syria and Iraq, they’re very rich. Foreign fighters flow with passports that can penetrate the United States and our Western allies. So, you will see a Paris on steroids here pretty soon if you don’t disrupt this organization and take the fight to them on the ground.
And, again, you cannot successfully defeat ISIL on the ground in Syria with the Free Syrian Army and regional coalition of Arab nations until you deal with Assad, because he will kill anybody that comes in there that tries to defeat ISIL.
(…)
O’DONNELL: Joining us now is James Baker. He was chief of staff to President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush. He also served as Bush’s secretary of state.
(…)
O’DONNELL: I want to get your take on some foreign policy matters that are out that — first ISIS, because now we have seen this seventh public beheading on television, these videos
BAKER: Right.
O’DONNELL: You heard what I said to Senator Graham. We’re doing these airstrikes and yet ISIS appears to grow in strength.
BAKER: Yes.
Let me tell you, I agree with practically everything that Senator Graham said, in fact, I think probably everything he said.
O’DONNELL: But you don’t think Americans boots?
BAKER: No American boots on the ground, in my view.
Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t have special ops forces and air controllers and that sort of thing to help with the air war. But we are going to have to find a way to put some boots on the ground. We might be able to find that in Iraq with the Iraqi army if we get them trained up. So far, it doesn’t look very promising.
But, as the senator pointed out, Syria is an entirely different matter. You can’t win this war just from the air. You can’t eject ISIS, you can’t destroy ISIS, eject them from territory just from the air.
My idea would be to go to the Turks, 60-year allies of the United States, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They have a good army. It’s an army that will fight. They want to take down Assad. President Obama has said Assad must go. They want to destroy ISIS. We want to destroy ISIS.
There’s a conversion of interests here. Why don’t we get together and we say, look, we will supply the air, the logistics and the intelligence, you put the boots on the ground, and go in there and do the job? And, in addition, get some of our Arab allies in the region to put boots on the ground as well, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan and the others.
O’DONNELL: Want to get your take also on Israel, the news that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ambassador arranged for Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress to Speaker Boehner and went around the White House. Is that a significant breach of protocol?
BAKER: Right.
Yes, it is.
O’DONNELL: How significant is it?
BAKER: Well, I don’t — I can’t remember an incident in which it’s been done.
Now, let me say this. The speaker of the House has every right in the world to invite whoever he wants to speak to the House. It’s a co-equal branch of government. But it’s best done, our foreign policy is best conducted when there’s at least cooperation between the legislative and the executive branches.
The executive — I’m a creature of the executive branch. The executive branch of government really has the primary power and responsibility and authority to conduct the nation’s foreign policy. It’s not in the Congress. It’s in the executive branch. So, our foreign policy benefits when there’s cooperation, and so does our — the problem — the issue of U.S.-Israeli relations.
O’DONNELL: Should they cancel the speech? Do you think it will backfire on Netanyahu?
BAKER: I think it might very well.
And I would point you to what happened back there when we were in office 25 years ago, when Prime Minister Shamir was having trouble managing the U.S. relationship — U.S.-Israel relationship.
Nothing is more important to the citizens of Israel than to know that their leadership is properly managing the relationship with their most important ally.
O’DONNELL: You think this may damage Netanyahu’s chances of reelection?
BAKER: Well, I don’t know whether it will or not. But I think it has the potential to backfire, just as it backfired on Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir back there in 1990 or 1991, when he was challenged by Yitzhak Rabin, and Rabin won, but primarily because Shamir was not seen to be able to manage the relationship with the United States properly.
O’DONNELL: There’s so much to talk to you about and so little time. But I do want to get your take on Saudi Arabia, because you were part of this historic delegation that went to the kingdom to meet the new king, King Salman.
So many secretaries of state, former national security advisers there. We now have one-quarter of the planet is Muslim.
BAKER: Right.
O’DONNELL: Sixty-two percent of them are under the age of 30.
BAKER: Right.
O’DONNELL: What role must Saudi Arabia and this new king play?
BAKER: Well, Saudi Arabia — the king of Saudi Arabia is the custodian of the two holy mosques. They occupy a special role in Islam.
Saudi Arabia today happens to be an island of stability. If you looked at that part of the world, countries on all sides of them are failed states now, Iraq, Syria, Yemen. Bahrain has got problems. Look at Libya. What we did in Libya was a terrible mistake. And it’s now totally — so, we’re going to be — we need the Saudis.
They have been historically a very fine ally of the United States. Are there things that they do that we disagree with? You bet your life. But they’re a very good ally. And they’re going to be critical in dealing with the problem you just pointed out. Is America at War With Radical Islam?
Peter Beinart
The Atlantic
If there’s one thing top Republicans know, it’s that America can’t defeat terrorism unless we call it by its real name. “We are in a religious war with radical Islamists, » Lindsey Graham recently told Fox News. “When I hear the President of the United States and his chief spokesperson failing to admit that we’re in a religious war, it really bothers me.” Rudy Giuliani agrees: “If we can’t use the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ we can’t get rid of them.” So does Ted Cruz. At the Iowa Freedom Summit in January he declared that, “You cannot fight and win a war on radical Islamic terrorism if you’re unwilling to utter the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’”
There are several problems here. Even if one believed that calling the enemy “radical Islam” were a good idea, it would hardly explain how to defeat it. Yet the Republicans slamming Obama for his linguistic failures mostly stop there. After he chastised the President in Iowa for not saying “radical Islam,” Ted Cruz’s only policy suggestions were that Obama should have attended the anti-terror rally in Paris and that Americans who join ISIS should lose their citizenship. On Fox, Giuliani mentioned the Paris rally too, and then fell back on platitudes like “you know what you do with bullies? You go right in their face!”
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The Sophisticated Bigotry of Bobby Jindal
In reality, denouncing “radical Islam” offers little guidance for America’s actual policy dilemmas. How does calling the enemy by its “real name” help determine whether the United States should take a harder or softer line toward the government in Baghdad? We need its help to retake central Iraq from ISIS, but its Shia sectarianism drives Sunnis into ISIS’ arms. Or how would this linguistic pivot help determine whether the best way to weaken ISIS in Syria is by backing Bashar Assad or seeking his ouster?
After 9/11, hawks backed up their aggressive rhetoric with aggressive policies. At their behest, America invaded and occupied two Muslim countries. Today, by contrast, with land invasions effectively off the table, the rhetoric has become largely an end in itself. What Republicans are really declaring war on is “political correctness.” They’re sure that liberal sensitivities about Islam are hindering the moral clarity America needs to win. Just don’t ask them how.
But it’s worse than that. Because far from providing the moral clarity Republicans demand, saying America is at war with « radical Islam » actually undermines it. How can a term provide clarity when it’s never clearly defined? If America is at war with « radical Islam, » does that include Saudi Arabia, a key US ally that for decades has both practiced and exported a radically illiberal Wahhabi creed? Does it include Iran, a semi-theocracy that has sponsored « radical Islamic » terror against the US but is our de facto ally against ISIS? Does it include Muslim Brotherhood parties like the one that briefly held power in Egypt, which run in democratic elections but want a government based on Islamic law? Listening to some GOP rhetoric, you might think the answer is yes. But to suggest the US is at « war » with key allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt strips the term of any real meaning.
ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are actual organizations. Reasonable people can delineate where they begin and end, and thus craft specific strategies for fighting them. Good luck doing that with “radical Islam.”
As so often happens in today’s GOP, the Republicans demanding a war against “radical Islam” are working off a false analogy with the Cold War. Since Ronald Reagan’s “moral clarity” against communism supposedly toppled the Soviet Union, America must now do the same with “radical Islam.”
But, in fact, the United States was most successful when it did not see its enemy as “communism.” It was the belief that America must battle communism itself that led the Kennedy and Johnson administrations into a war against a communist regime in North Vietnam that posed no real threat to American security. The US fared far better when it limited its focus to one specific regime, the Soviet Union, and made alliances with other communist governments in order to weaken it. In the late 1940s, the Truman administration worked with communist Yugoslavia to undermine Soviet control of Eastern Europe. And under Richard Nixon, Washington cozied up to Beijing, which despite being even more ideologically zealous than Moscow, helped the US contain Soviet power. Reagan, for all his anti-communist rhetoric, maintained America’s de facto partnership with China because his real target was the USSR.
Obviously, the United States need not be ideologically agnostic. American presidents should say they believe liberal democracy is morally superior to Islamic theocracy, just as it was preferable to fascism and communism. But that’s a far cry from declaring war on every regime based upon an -ism we don’t like. For much of the cold war, the United States battled the Soviet Union but not communist China. In the 1940s, the United States went to war against Germany, Italy and Japan but not fascist Spain. And today, the United States is at war with those “radical Muslim” organizations that actively seek to kill Americans while allying ourselves with other “radical Muslim” regimes that don’t. Why is that so hard for Ted Cruz to understand?
Le chef de la diplomatie jordanienne affirme à CNN que les frappes aériennes ne sont que le début des représailles contre le groupe Etat islamique après l’assassinat de Maaz al-Kassasbeh.
La Jordanie veut frapper fort contre le groupe Etat islamique. Le chef de la diplomatie du pays, Nasser Joudeh, a affirmé à CNN que les frappes aériennes ne sont que le début de sa « vengeance » pour l’exécution de son pilote. Il promet « d’éradiquer » les djihadistes.
« La Jordanie pourchassera avec toutes ses forces l’organisation (EI) n’importe où », a déclaré Nasser Joudeh . « Tout membre de Daech (acronyme en arabe de l’EI) est une cible pour nous. Nous les pourchasserons et nous les éradiquerons (…) Nous sommes en première ligne, c’est notre bataille », a ajouté le ministre dont le pays participe aux frappes en Syrie contre l’EI dans le cadre de la coalition internationale dirigée par les Etats-Unis.
Il a affirmé que son pays avait tenté de sauver le pilote Maaz al-Kassasbeh, capturé en décembre par l’EI en Syrie après le crash de son avion, mais sans fournir d’autres détails.
Opération « Martyr Maaz »
L’armée jordanienne a annoncé que des dizaines d’avions de chasse avaient mené jeudi des frappes contre des bastions de l’EI, dans le cadre de l’opération « Martyr Maaz », du nom du pilote brûlé vif par l’EI. « Toutes les cibles ont été détruites. Des camps d’entraînement et des dépôts d’armes et de munitions ont été touchés ». Ces frappes « ne sont que le début de notre vengeance pour le meurtre du pilote », a encore assuré le ministre jordanien.
L’armée n’a pas précisé le lieu des frappes, mais elles ont habituellement lieu en Syrie voisine, pays en guerre depuis près de quatre ans où la montée en puissance de l’EI a éclipsé la rébellion syrienne contre le régime de Bachar al-Assad.
Alors qu’on lui demandait si la Jordanie était disposée à lancer une opération terrestre contre l’EI, Nasser Joudeh est resté évasif: « Il faut tenir compte de plusieurs facteurs, les opérations militaires en cours, garantir la sécurité dans la région en plus d’objectifs sur le long terme incluant la lutte contre l’idéologie de ce groupe ».
Des manifestations de solidarité avec la famille du pilote sont prévues vendredi en début d’après-midi à travers la Jordanie après la prière hebdomadaire.
Winston Churchill.org.
Abstract: Contrary to much of the literature that depicts him first and foremost as a lifelong foe of communism, Winston Churchill was actually quite pragmatic regarding his opposition to various forms of totalitarianism, a worldview which explains his near-rabid anti-communism following the First World War and also his gradually softening change as he began to see fascist Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to a stable world order in the years before the Second World War. It is this pragmatism and a basic hostility to tyranny, then, that best explains Churchill’s approach to all forms of totalitarianism.
Antoine Capet, FRHistS, is Professor of British Studies at the University of Rouen (France). He has edited a number of collections on Britain’s diplomatic and military policy in the 20th century, the latest being Britain, France and the Entente Cordiale since 1904 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He has been Editor of the “Britain since 1914” section of the Royal Historical Society Bibliography since 2001 and he sits on the International Board of Twentieth Century British History.
Last March, I was invited to deliver a keynote lecture on “Churchill, Fascism and the Fascists” at the University of Lille (France),1 and when Dr Michael Kandiah2 asked if I were interested in giving a paper at the Cold War Conference which he was organizing,3 I immediately thought of “Churchill and Bolshevism”4 as the obverse of the same coin.5
The prevailing image of Churchill is that of the “bulldog,” relentlessly resisting and finally defeating the fascist dictators, including of course by their archetype Hitler.6 But David Carlton, who has devoted a monograph to the study of Churchill’s attitude to Soviet Communism7—or “Bolshevism” as it was better known before the Second World War—argues that Churchill’s real relentless struggle was against the Bolsheviks and Soviet Communists: a protracted one, in fact almost a lifelong task from the 1917 Revolution until his retirement from active politics, with the period from 1941 to 1945 not even constituting the lull which mainstream historians and biographers like to emphasise.
Carlton summed up the gist of his book in a paper which he gave at the Institute of Historical Research in January 2001 and published in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Concluding the paper on a minute sent to Eden on 6 December 1953, in which Churchill addressed the Soviet threat in no uncertain terms, Carlton concludes:
These are not the words of a serious pioneer of détente. For with great certitude they depict the Soviets as unreformable creatures of tireless aggression. In fact they represent the convictions of the visceral anti-Soviet that Churchill had never ceased to be since the first days of the Bolshevik Revolution. In short, his anti-Nazi phase, for which ironically he will always be principally remembered, was for him something of a digression, however necessary, in his extraordinarily long career. Thus, once the Battle of Britain had been won and the Americans had entered the war, the struggle to defeat Germany became for him no more than a second-order crusade. For in his own eyes at least the contest with Soviet Bolshevism was what gave his political life the greatest continuity and meaning.8
In this, Carlton more or less follows the “revisionist” theories put forward by Clive Ponting in his highly critical—and highly controversial—1994 biography of Churchill.9 Carlton quotes at length from the animal and medical imagery used by Churchill against the Bolsheviks after 1917, as documented by Ponting. The revision in question bears on the conventional picture of Churchill given by “traditionalist historian[s].”10 Kinvig also indirectly indicts them when he writes in his Introduction: “Churchill’s Russian policy during the twenty-five months he spent at the War Office has received little attention from most of his biographers.” A note indeed gives full statistical details:
Roy Jenkins gave but seven paragraphs to [Russian policy] in the 900-odd pages of his major biography Churchill (2001); Geoffrey Best gave it five paragraphs in his 300-page reflective work A Study in Greatness (2001). John Keegan’s 170-page introductory biography Churchill (2002) and Richard Holmes’s 300-page work, In the Footsteps of Churchill (2005),11 each allot it a single paragraph.12
One favourite target is Roland Quinault, who suggested in 1991 that Churchill was not the hot-headed interventionist in post-revolutionary Russia which his critics denounced, since he considerably reduced the British military presence there when he was Secretary of State for War and Air in 1919.13 For his part, Kinvig refutes this thesis by emphasizing Churchill’s equivocation during his term of office:
Churchill claimed correctly that the key intervention decisions had been taken by the Cabinet and Supreme War Council before he came into office. There is no doubt, however, that he strove, and managed at times, to extend, revise or circumvent them.14
Sir Martin Gilbert and William Manchester are also specifically named among those who perpetuate the Churchill “mythology,” notably the argument that his increasing denunciations of Chamberlain’s refusal to initiate a rapprochement with the Soviet Union from 1938 showed a toning down of his former uncompromising anti-Bolshevik stance.15
Anyone who has read Churchill’s abundant pronouncements on Soviet Communism and relations with the USSR in the inter-war years knows that things are not as simple as that. Surely, an author like Geoffrey Best would be seen as a “traditionalist historian” by Carlton—yet Best adheres to the conception of Churchill as anti-Bolshevik hothead in the years following the First World War, pointing out that “no other person of highest political stature publicised and went on about his dislike of it [Bolshevism] as much as he did.” For Geoffrey Best, Churchill “became worked up and histrionic in much the same way as Edmund Burke had become worked up about the French Revolution.”
As evidence of these histrionics, Geoffrey Best adduces what Churchill wrote in The Aftermath, the fourth volume16 of The World Crisis, looking back in 1929 on the situation in Eastern Europe after the Russian Revolution:
[To the East of Poland] lay the huge mass of Russia—not a wounded Russia only, but a poisoned Russia, an infected Russia, a plague-bearing Russia, a Russia of armed hordes not only smiting with bayonet and with cannon, but accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin which slew the bodies of men, and political doctrines which destroyed the health and even the souls of nations.17
In fact, Churchill was only “recycling” almost verbatim an article which contained the stark sub-headings “Shall the Red Flood of Bolshevism Swamp all Europe?” and “The Poison Peril from the East,” which he had published in The Evening News on 28 July 1920.18 Interestingly, this offensive language did not pass unnoticed, even in the Conservative press. Ronald Cohen, who also reproduces the text, notes that it “led to a critical article in The Times of the following day.”19 And this was not the end of the story: Churchill wrote to Lord Northcliffe to complain:
[I]n undertaking to do this, I did not expect to encounter the hostile criticism of the Times. I can quite understand that the Times might not agree with any particular phrase or argument….Criticism of policy is one thing. Criticism on the propriety of my writing an article for the Evening News is another. I confess I feel myself unfairly treated in this respect. No other morning paper that I have read has found it necessary to make any adverse comment, yet the leading paper in your group of papers goes out of its way to attack the propriety of my writing an article which I was strongly pressed to write by another paper in the same group.20
This exchange with Lord Northcliffe shows, if need be, that Churchill’s anti-Bolshevik “histrionics” did not necessarily ingratiate him with senior representatives of the British Right—and that Churchill took no notice of their reservations. It is probably impossible to say when the image of the “maverick” was born, but Churchill’s lone unrelenting anti-Bolshevik campaign in 1918-1919-1920 must have played a significant part in its creation.
*****
For a possible explanation, one should perhaps start with the trauma of the Bolshevik Revolution. “Bolshevism is not a policy; it is a disease,” Churchill said in the House of Commons on 29 May 1919, adding, “it is not a creed; it is a pestilence,”21 thus starting a long series of highly offensive medical metaphors in his attacks on the Bolsheviks. In June, he described them with the suggestion of mental illness as a “league of failures, the criminals, the morbid, the deranged and the distraught.”22 A variant was “the vampire which sucks the blood from his victims,” used in the House of Commons on 26 March.23 Later in the year, on 6 November, he took up again his extreme vocabulary of insidious epidemics in his description of Lenin’s journey back from Switzerland in the House of Commons:
Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.24
Slightly modifying his choice of words, he took up the same idea in The Aftermath ten years later, remarking that the Germans “transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.”25 Paul Addison also notes after Norman Rose26 that Churchill spoke of Bolshevism as a “cancer,” and a “horrible form of mental and moral disease.”27 With another version of what must have been his favourite description of Bolshevism in the 1920s, Churchill applied the phrase once again to Trotsky, baptised “The Ogre of Europe” in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine (December 1929): “Like the cancer bacillus, he grew, he fed, he tortured, he slew in fulfilment of his nature.”28
Churchill was Minister of Munitions from 18 July 1917 to 9 January 1919. His perception of the “stab in the back” syndrome was not that of the German Left forcing defeat on an unvanquished army; it was that of the Bolsheviks betraying their Western allies by accepting a separate peace with the Central Powers (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 3 March 1918).
In a speech given at the Connaught Rooms on 11 April 1919, he arraigned them as traitors:
Every British and French soldier killed last year was really done to death by Lenin and Trotsky, not in fair war, but by the treacherous desertion of an ally without parallel in the history of the world.29
This was taking up in much stronger terms the regrets expressed when he spoke of the Russian withdrawal from the war in a speech at Bedford on 11 December 1917:
It is this melancholy event which has prolonged the war, that has robbed the French, the British and the Italian armies of the prize that was perhaps almost within their reach this summer; it is this event, and this event alone, that has exposed us to perils and sorrows and sufferings which we have not deserved, which we cannot avoid, but under which we shall not bend.30
Two of the things Churchill most hated were at work in this troubled period: betrayal and the break-up of the social order. Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, famously added a more personal consideration: “His ducal blood revolted against the wholesale elimination of Grand Dukes in Russia.”31 In his diary, Sir George Riddell noted that Lloyd George had commented upon Churchill’s Connaught Rooms speech in no uncertain terms: “He has Bolshevism on the brain…he is mad for operations in Russia.”32 A few weeks earlier, on 17 February, using the same word “mad,” Lloyd George had personally wired Churchill to warn him against a “purely mad enterprise out of hatred of Bolshevik principles.”33
Still, as Secretary of State for War until 14 February 1921, Churchill embarked on a policy of eradication of what he called “the foul baboonery of Bolshevism” during an official luncheon at the Mansion House on 19 February 1919,34 a policy soon dubbed “Mr. Churchill’s Private War” by the press,35 though with some exaggeration, since Kinvig’s examination of the Parliamentary debates following Churchill’s presentation of the Army Estimates on 3 March show that some Members were equally ready to use abusive language against the Bolsheviks and enthusiastically supported him.36
The fact remains that Churchill’s assimilation of the Bolsheviks to animals became a constant in the inter-war years. Of the Russian revolutionaries a few months earlier, at his Dundee seat on 26 November 1918, during the General Election campaign, Churchill said:
Russia is being rapidly reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of Barbarism….Civilization is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while the Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.37
“Baboons” reappeared in a conversation with H.A.L. Fisher on 8 April 191938 and three days later, in the Connaught Rooms speech, he denounced “that foul combination of criminality and animalism which constitutes the Bolshevik regime.”39 The criminal/animal analogy was again used in “Trotsky: The Ogre of Europe”:
He had raised the poor against the rich. He had raised the penniless against the poor. He had raised the criminal against the penniless….Nothing lower than the Communist criminal class could be found. In vain he turned his gaze upon the wild beasts. The apes could not appreciate his eloquence. He could not mobilize the wolves, whose numbers had so notably increased during his administration. So the criminals he had installed stood together, and put him outside.40
Churchill did not only use the imagery of wolves and baboons. In “Mass Effects in Modern Life” (1931), he rhetorically considered what other animal metaphors would be appropriate:
Sub-human goals and ideals are set before these Asiatic millions. The Beehive? No, for there must be no queen and honey, or at least no honey for others. In Soviet Russia we have a society which seeks to model itself upon the Ant. There is not one single social or economic principle or concept in the philosophy of the Russian Bolshevik which has not been realized, carried into action, and enshrined in immutable laws a million years ago by the White Ant.41
The allusion to “sub-human goals” and “these Asiatic millions”—also found in the Trotsky article, in which Churchill speaks of “a vast process of Asiatic liquefaction”42—naturally remind us of the worst excesses of Hitler’s “Aryan” vocabulary.
Indeed, at some stage, Churchill was very near to speaking, like the German Nazis a few years later, of Judaeo-Bolshevism. Not that Churchill was a rabid antisemite—on the contrary, it can be argued that he was a philosemite all his life43—but in a remarkable article entitled “Zionism versus Bolshevism,” published in 1920, he distinguished between the good Jews, the “National Jews” like those of Britain who were perfectly assimilated, or the Zionist Jews prepared to re-people their “home” in Palestine, and the evil “International Jews”:
Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.
The link between Jewry and Bolshevism—the Judaeo-Bolshevism of Hitler—is provided by the leadership of the Russian Revolution:
With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek—all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.
Even worse, the leadership of World Revolution as fomented by the Bolsheviks is also provided by these “International Jews”:
The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.44
But Kinvig fails to notice the ambiguities in Churchill’s vocabulary when he wrote about the “International Jews”: when Kinvig argues that “there was no trace of anti-Semitism in Churchill’s make-up,” rightly adducing the example of his opposition to the pogroms and wholesale executions on the part of the White45 Russians,46 he seems to neglect Churchill’s notorious “Zionism versus Bolshevism” 1920 article. Conversely, Carlton has a case when he writes that the “extent to which Churchill “lost his balance” on the subject of the early Soviet Union is, then, too little recognised.”47
Churchill also seems to have “lost his balance” in his evaluation of the comparative demerits of Germany (from which it was widely considered that Prussian militarism had not been eradicated by the defeat of 1918) and Russia (now in the hands of the Bolsheviks). In a remarkable letter to Lloyd George, written on 24 March 1920, he notably wrote: “Since the armistice my policy w[oul]d have been ‘Peace with the German people, war on the Bolshevik tyranny.’ Willingly or unavoidably, you have followed something vy near the reverse.”48
This hypothetical policy may have been derived from his assessment of the two dangers—a sort of “first things first” line of conduct which we will have occasion to discuss later. Already, in the Connaught Rooms speech of 11 April 1919, Churchill compared the two threats—to the Soviets’ disadvantage:
Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading. It is sheer humbug to pretend that it is not far worse than German militarism. [Its atrocities are] incomparably more hideous, on a larger scale, and more numerous than any for which the Kaiser is responsible.49
Considering the list of atrocities then attributed to the Germans during the Great War (the rape of Belgian nuns, etc.), this was no small accusation at the time. In fact, in the secrecy of the War Cabinet, he had adumbrated a reversal, if not of alliances, at least of the policy followed since the conclusion of the Entente Cordiale in the 1900s, on the eve of the 1918 Armistice, declaring that “[W]e might have to build up the German army, as it was important to get Germany on its legs again for fear of the spread of Bolshevism.”50
Whatever the scepticism which may be attached to the reliabilty of reminiscences published fifty years after the event, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, in conversation with Sir Martin Gilbert, said that Churchill had explained his policy to her in terms of “Kill the Bolshie, Kiss the Hun.”51 Coming as it did after the Armistice, this has the ring of truth. This is borne out by WSC’s slightly more careful words to Lloyd George in April 1919: “Feed Germany; fight Bolshevism; make Germany fight Bolshevism.”52
*****
It is only with the utmost reluctance that Churchill bowed to reality and accepted the Bolshevik take-over of Russia as accomplished fact in 1920. Kinvig also argues, with some plausibility, that “Churchill’s attention became increasingly diverted to Ireland, where the first IRA campaign was gathering intensity.”53 Initially, of course, the war against Bolshevism had not been a “cold” one but a “hot” one, with British troops aiding the White Russians to fight the Reds.54
Sir Martin Gilbert has given us a superbly documented account of “Mr. Churchill’s Private War” against Bolshevism—a war which he lost in the Cabinet as much as in Eastern Europe.55 But as Quinault pointedly reminds us, “Churchill was not personally responsible for the British military intervention in Russia, which was part of a collective Allied military strategy.”56 The fact remains that the British intervention gave rise to at least two unfortunate episodes in Churchill’s long career: his dubious phraseology over the “International Jews” and his imprudent prescription of gas as “the right medicine for the Bolshevist.” Kinvig in fact explains that the gas in question was not of a lethal nature, only temporarily incapacitating the enemy57—but of course the harm was done, and the phrase has stuck,58 much to Churchill’s disrepute.59
By the early 1920s it was clear that “there was something almost visceral about Churchill’s hatred,”60 and his reputation as the arch-enemy of “the enemies of the human race,” who “must be put down at any cost,”61 was therefore well established, and Ramsay MacDonald, the Leader, declared in connection with Churchill’s anti-Bolshevik campaigns, “If the Labour Party can’t fight this, it can fight nothing.”62
Technically, however, Churchill was still a Liberal. He only crossed the Floor of the House again in 1924, standing as an Independent Anti-Socialist candidate at a by-election in March, in which he was narrowly defeated by the official Conservative candidate, and as a Constitutionalist candidate at the October General Election, with official Conservative backing. He won the seat of Epping, which he kept until 1964. In November 1924, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative Government led by Baldwin. The following year he officially rejoined the Conservative Party.
In May 1926 he was at the forefront of the Government’s efforts to defeat the General Strike, notably editing the British Gazette, the official Government newspaper in the absence of the usual commercial newspapers. Churchill emerged from the episode with a reinforced reputation as the enemy of the working man, the more so as he initially opposed the distribution of welfare payments to the coalminers who continued with the strike until the autumn. He was presented as the extremist of the General Strike, not without justification.63
His image as a man of the authoritarian Right was made even worse by his disastrous public pronouncements following his trip to Rome in January 1927, when he met the Pope and Mussolini. In fact he had already expressed his admiration for Mussolini in January 1926, in a speech before Treasury officials :
Italy is a country which is prepared to face the realities of post-war reconstruction. It possesses a Government under the commanding leadership of Signor Mussolini which does not shrink from the logical consequences of economic facts and which has the courage to impose the financial remedies required to secure and to stabilise the national recovery.64
This is what we could call the “classic” defence of Fascism—its economic efficiency at a time when the democracies were at a loss to find a coherent economic policy. Oswald Mosley was to put it more concisely later when he repeated that he and his fellow British Fascists wanted to turn Parliament “from a talk-shop to a work-shop.” When Churchill praised Mussolini’s Italy for its economic realism, it was of course the British Chancellor of the Exchequer envying the Fascist dictator for the room for manoeuvre which the absence of an effective opposition gave him.
The offensive declarations of January 1927 were of a different nature, in that they clearly justified the introduction of Fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism: “If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.”65
This argument was to be repeated ten years later, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, in a slightly different form—though the old assimilation with animals was not taken up: I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism.66
But then one must introduce a capital factor into the equation. In all these cases, Churchill was talking from the point of view of the Italians, the Spanish and the Germans. Thanks to Britain’s superior institutions and traditions, summed up by the well-known popular phrase, “it could not happen here,” the British were fortunately protected from these impossible choices.
In his approval of the Italian Fascists” in January 1927, Churchill was careful to distance himself from any advocacy of replication in Britain, immediately adding: But in Great Britain we have not yet had to face this danger in the same form. We have our own particular method of doing things.67 Ten years later, in “The Ebbing Tide of Socialism,” published in July 1937, Churchill continued to argue that Britain was above these Continental errors:
So also have been reduced to impotence and ridicule the Nazi conceptions of Sir Oswald Mosley.68 He had built his hopes upon the Socialist or Communist menace, and in all probability he would have risen in opposition to it. But at the present time it does not exist. The failure of the red-hot men of the Left has involved a simultaneous failure of the white-hot men of the Right.69
This is of course an extremely interesting argument coming from a man of the Right, as Churchill then undoubtedly was. If we follow WSC, it is precisely because “the Socialist or Communist menace” was warded off in Britain that Fascism was unable to take root in the country. Closely following French affairs as he always did, he perfectly knew of the cries from the Fascist or crypto-Fascist ligues heard all over France at the time: “Plutôt Hitler que Blum” or the “clever” rhyming phrase (in French) “Plutôt Hitler que le Front populaire.”
The easy point which Churchill would then have been able to make was that it was thanks to men of the “moderate” Right, like him, that the “menace” had not materialised into anything serious. But Churchill being Churchill, he chose instead to attribute the merit to the democratic maturity of the British people:
The massive common sense of the only long-trained democracy—apart from the United States—has established a spacious and predominant middle zone within which the class adjustments of the nation can be fought out, and from which the extremists at both ends are excluded.70
More than that, in his Commons speech of 14 April 1937 he suggested that a self-respecting Briton would face death rather than accept “to choose between Communism and Nazism: I hope not to be called upon to survive in a world under a government of either of these dispensations.”
A third reason may perhaps be adduced for Churchill’s praise of Mussolini in the 1920s: it appeared that at a time when the affairs of Continental Europe continued to preoccupy Churchill, he was reassured that Britain could count on Italy as a reliable partner under his rule, contrary to what he had initially feared. “What a swine this Mussolini is,” he wrote to his wife on 5 September 1923 after Mussolini decided to occupy Fiume.71
Thus three elements were clear in Churchill’s attitude to the Fascists and Communists—the two faces of the same coin in his eyes—around 1931-32. He feared the Bolshevik threat far more than the Fascist threat. Founding his reasoning on Churchill’s speeches in Parliament, Quinault argues that “As late as 1931, Churchill still considered Soviet Russia the main threat to peace in Europe and the principal obstacle to disarmament.”72
If Fascism did not encroach upon British interests there was no reason in his eyes not to praise its perceived economic efficiency. Fascism was all very well for the Continentals, with their shaky and often recent adoption of democratic institutions; but Britain did not need it to ward off the Communist danger. Although there is evidence that the early British Fascists, Rotha Lintorn-Orman’s British Fascisti (founded in 1923) and the splinter-group created in 1924, the National Fascisti (later the British National Fascisti), had occasionally given a hand in breaking the General Strike, for instance in Liverpool, it was obvious that the strike would have failed even without their intervention.73
In the 1930s, there was a complex evolution of Churchill’s attitude on the first two points, even though he never varied in his absolute disdain for the home-made version of Fascism. This did not mean that he did not share the Fascists’ extreme views on the intellectual Left. As Paul Addison puts it, “in the early 1930s Churchill sounded reactionary about England,”74 and he quotes from a speech delivered on 24 April 1933 before the staunchly patriotic Royal Society of St. George. A more extensive excerpt makes the point even clearer:
The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.
Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?75
What made him change his approach—pace Carlton—was clearly the emergence of the radical National-Socialist movement in Germany.76 Even before he acceeded to the Chancellorship of Germany on 30 January 1933, Churchill “viewed the rise of Hitler with disquiet,” as Wrigley mildly puts it.77
In Rome in January 1927, Churchill had met Mussolini twice, in informal or semi-formal circumstances, at a ball and after a dinner at the British Embassy. The same scenario of informality almost repeated itself for the only occasion which he ever had of meeting Hitler, in September 1932. Churchill had been traveling to Germany, notably to Blenheim78 where his famous ancestor the Duke of Marlborough had defeated the French-led coalition in 1704. He was staying in Munich before going back to England, in a hotel which Hitler also frequently patronised, and he was approached by a very cheerful Herr Hanfstaengl who befriended him, saying that he could easily arrange a meeting with Hitler, whom he knew well and who he felt sure would be very glad to see him. We know this because Churchill recounted the episode in the first volume of his War Memoirs, The Gathering Storm, and Hanfstaengl confirmed it to the letter in his own memoirs. Writing immediately after the Second World War, this is how Churchill describes his state of mind in the late summer of 1932 :
I had no national prejudices against Hitler at this time. I knew little of his doctrine or record and nothing of his character. I admire men who stand up for their country in defeat, even though I am on the other side. He had a perfect right to be a patriotic German if he chose. I always wanted England, Germany and France to be friends.79
This is all the more plausible as Churchill had not lost his crusading spirit against Bolshevism. In November 1931, when the fifth and final volume of his narrative of the First World War, The World Crisis, was published, he dedicated it to “Our Faithful Allies and Comrades in the Russian Imperial Armies” because it dealt with The Eastern Front.80 We can agree in retrospect with John Young’s opinion:
Where the USSR was concerned Churchill’s realism led him to accept, by the 1930s, that it would exist for some time and was an essential component in any anti-German balance of power.81
But the real question is when exactly “by the 1930s” Churchill came to realise that—to invert Carlton’s phrase—the Bolshevik peril was now of “second order” compared with the Nazi menace? There is probably no answer, if only because there was a long period of uncertainty over Hitler’s capacity for starting another war. Churchill never doubted Hitler’s evil nature, just as he never doubted Stalin’s—but it took some time before it became certain that the Nazi danger was the worser of the two.
In a speech before the House of Commons on 11 July 1932, Churchill had described Hitler as “the moving impulse behind the German Government.” He “may be more than that very soon,”82 he percipiently added—it must be remembered that Hitler’s party, the NSDAP, received just over 37 percent of the popular vote in the Reichstag elections of 31 July 1932. So a meeting would have made sense.
But then Churchill mentioned to Hanfstaengl Hitler’s attitude to the Jews. It is not clear whether this was a deliberate provocation or an incidental remark in their conversation. According to Hanfstaengl,83 Churchill’s exact words were “Tell your boss from me that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker.”84
The result was decisive: the proposed meeting was called off. “Thus Hitler lost his only chance of meeting me,” Churchill concludes in his memoirs. “Later on, when he was all-powerful, I was to receive several invitations from him. But by that time a lot had happened, and I excused myself.”85
Hanfstaengl makes it clear that there was in fact mutual suspicion, a distrust on both sides which gradually turned into absolute hatred and it is impossible to know whether Hitler was later shown the secret memorandum which one of the Counsellors at the German Embassy in London had sent to his Foreign Ministry, reporting a conversation with Churchill on 18 October 1930, over a year therefore before Hitler became Chancellor:
Hitler had admittedly declared that he had no intention of waging a war of aggression; he, Churchill, however, was convinced that Hitler or his followers would seize the first available opportunity to resort to armed force.86
This secret memorandum also contains evidence that Churchill had read at least passages from Mein Kampf, published in Germany in 1925-1926, privately translated for his own edification, because in the conversation he alluded to a cynical remark by Hitler, “the great masses of the people … will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one,” which did not even figure in the official English translation published in 1933.87
The private Foreign Office translation88 of the expurgated passage, later forwarded to Churchill, read: “if one tells big lies, people will always believe a part” and “something always remains of the most impudent lies.”89
There is also indirect evidence that Churchill immediately understood the significance of Hitler’s incitements to racial and national hatred long before their aborted meeting. In an article entitled “Shall We All commit Suicide?” published in September 1924 in Pall Mall Magazine and reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures in 1932, Churchill assumed the role of the prophet of doom which was to gradually estrange him from his fellow-citizens, who did not want to hear his apocalyptic predictions. It was not a welcome warning when he wrote, “Let it not be thought for a moment that the danger of another explosion in Europe is passed.” There were two reasons for that. For one, Russia bemoaned the loss of “her Baltic Provinces.” But there was worse:
From one end of Germany to the other an intense hatred of France unites the whole population. The enormous contingents of German youth growing to military manhood year by year are inspired by the fiercest sentiments, and the soul of Germany smoulders with dreams of a War of Liberation or Revenge. These ideas are restrained at the present moment only by physical impotence.
Now, even though Hitler as such is not named as such, it is permissible to see him as the archetype of aggressive man in the most blood-curdling passage in Churchill’s article—and if the readers of Pall Mall did not all perceive the allusion in 1924, it is most likely that those of 1932 did, when they read the reprinted piece in Thoughts and Adventures:
Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverise, without hope of repair, what is left of civilisation. He awaits only the word of command, He awaits it from a frail, bewildered being, long his victim, now—for one occasion only—his Master.90
Considering all this, why Churchill wrote a long portrait, “The Truth about Hitler” (published in November 1935 in The Strand Magazine, and reprinted in 1937 in Great Contemporaries as “Hitler and his Choice”) remains one of the more puzzling aspects of this complex relationship-by- proxy. In any case it is a typical exercise in damning with faint praise. The German Foreign Ministry lodged an official complaint, and the magazine was banned in Germany.91
The gist of the article is that the “former Austrian house-painter,” the “Austrian-born corporal,” had by 1935 “succeeded in restoring Germany to the most powerful position in Europe.” Before Hitler, “Germany lay prostrate at the feet of the Allies,” Churchill argued. “He may yet see the day when what is left of Europe will be prostrate at the feet of Germany.”
The great question was whether what Churchill called “the mellowing influences of success” would eventually make Hitler “a gentler figure in a happier age.” The article was not well balanced, because Churchill obviously devoted far more space to the discussion of the negative and pessimistic arguments, notably the idea that if past behaviour was anything to go by, there was serious cause for worry.
Churchill bore down on Hitler’s relentless persecution of the German Jews, “a community numbered by hundred of thousands” and on the arrest of all opponents, including “Trade Unionists and the liberal intelligentsia,” with “an attack upon the historical basis of Christianity.” In a forceful image, he linked this repression to the military effort: ‘side by side with the training grounds of the new armies and the great aerodromes, the concentration camps pock-mark the German soil.”
One remarkable aspect of his argument is that Churchill indicts Hitler for proscribing “socialists and communists of every hue.”92 Carlton curiously glosses over this imbalance and interprets the language of the text as showing a partiality towards Hitler which Churchill had never shown towards the Bolsheviks.93 But overall Churchill’s article makes it clear that by 1935 his visceral anti-Communism was relegated to the background in the face of the mounting danger from Nazi Germany. Given the choice between Godless Communism and Godless Nazism,94 he found the latter the most obnoxious.
This does not mean that he now rejected Fascist Italy. On the contrary, by a curious twist in the reasoning, largely founded on considerations of British defence priorities, Churchill courted Mussolini more assiduously than ever after Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship.
One of the most important sources for our subject is the impassioned speech which Churchill delivered at the 25th anniversary meeting of the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union, on 17 February 1933, less than three weeks after Hitler came to power—the context is obviously of capital importance. There is of course a great deal of irony in Churchill addressing this organisation, because it had been founded as the Anti-Socialist Union in 1908 precisely to fight the welfare measures which Lloyd George was drafting with the help of Churchill, then at the height of his anti-Conservative “progressive” phase.95 Though adopting a militant Anti-Communist position, as the postwar addition to its name indicated, it clearly distanced itself from British Fascist groups—indeed these Fascist groups were now much more attractive for people with far-right inclinations. But it is a measure of Churchill’s evolution that he was now its guest speaker.
The speech contains the first public allusions to another perceived menace: militarist Japan. Context is again all-important: Japan had attacked Manchuria on 18 September 1931 and proclaimed the “independence” of the puppet state of Manchukuo on 15 September 1932. When the League of Nations expressed a protest, Japan withdrew from it immediately, on 24 February 1933. Also, only a week before Churchill’s speech, on 9 February, the Oxford Union had passed the extraordinary resolution that “This House refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country.”
Starting with a denunciation of the “abject, squalid, shameless avowal” of the Oxford students, Churchill offered a bleak panorama of the world situation, which dictated British rearmament, not pacifism. The first passage of that vast survey must have displeased his audience, since many members probably shared the common belief among the Right that Nazi Germany was the best bulwark against Soviet contagion. When thinking of the Oxford Union resolution, he argued,
I think of Germany, with its splendid clear-eyed youth marching forward on all the roads of the Reich singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into the army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland.
It was obvious here that Churchill did not primarily have the Soviet Union in mind as the potential target of Germany’s “splendid clear-eyed youth.” This is what made him differ so sharply with the Appeasers and the activists of the British Right and extreme Right: he never believed that the supporters of German Nazism could be the objective allies of British Conservatives against Bolshevism. This is all the more remarkable as he shared their belief—at least in 1933, at the time of his speech—in the Far East:
I must say something to you which is very unfashionable. I am going to say one word of sympathy for Japan… I hope we should try in England to understand a little the position of Japan, an ancient state with the highest sense of national honour, and patriotism and with a teeming population and a remarkable energy. On the one side they see the dark menace of Soviet Russia. On the other the chaos of China, four or five provinces of which are actually now being tortured under Communist rule.
As if this did not make it sufficiently evident that he judged the militarist and Fascist Right on the merits of the case, he had most surprising words of praise to pour on Italy “with her ardent Fascisti, her renowned Chief, and stern sense of national duty,” and even more so on Mussolini, whom he saw as “the Roman genius…the greatest lawgiver among living men.”96
In his biography of Churchill, Roy Jenkins calls this “an altogether unfortunate speech”97: admittedly, with the benefit of hindsight, knowing that Japan was to associate with Germany in the Anti-Comintern Pact three years later, with Italy soon joining them—eventually forming the so-called “Axis.” Churchill’s partiality towards Japan and Italy now seems little founded, and cannot be explained by his desire to please his audience, since he knew that he was probably affronting most of them with his uncompromising rejection of Nazism; but that did not stop him.
So we have to go back to psychological explanations founded on the complexity of Churchill’s personality. No doubt he was a man of principle—but like all virtuous men, only up to a point. He was an opportunist in the sense that he always chose what was the lesser of two evils in his eyes. Here his guiding principle seems to have been no less than the preservation of civilisation. For him, this meant first and foremost the liberal values of Western culture—as most cherished in England. Churchill was “Liberal” in the economic sense—he wrote in a letter sent shortly before he became Chancellor of the Exchequer that “the existing capitalist system is the foundation of civilisation”98—but perhaps even more so in the democratic sense.
The lesser of the two evils approach is illustrated by his speech to the Commons on 7 February 1934 :
We…are left exposed to a mortal thrust, and are deprived of that old sense of security and independence upon which the civilization99 of our island has been built.100
It was clear to him that with Hitler now the unchallenged Leader of Germany, the foundations of British and Western civilisation—and therefore of all civilisation in his eyes, as he was to say four years later in so many words101—were mortally threatened.
The lesser evil was therefore to accept to have some truck with those whom he then perceived as lesser Fascists and Militarists—the Italians and Japanese—the better to ward off the only truly dangerous menace, Nazi Germany, intent on enslaving the “rotten plutocracies.” There was nothing new in this priority. As early as February 1919, Churchill had expressed before the Cabinet his fear of “a great combination from Yokohama to Cologne in hostility to France, Britain and America.”102 He had expressed this fear with special reference to the possible spreading of Bolshevism; but he reactivated it in the 1930s with the spectre of a Nazified Europe.
It is not easy to determine when Churchill lost his illusions about continued Japanese goodwill or at least neutrality. In a speech to the House of Commons on 31 May 1935, he laconically alluded to the potential danger of a rapprochement between Germany and Japan:
There is the question of the relations between Germany and Japan. It seems to me that that is a matter which must be in the thoughts of everyone who attempts to make an appreciation of the foreign situation.103
Extant published sources, however, include a disabused letter to his wife dated 17 January 1936, in which he wrote that “One must consider these two predatory military dictatorship nations, Germany and Japan, as working in accord,”104 and an important article, “Germany and Japan,” following their signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact, published in November 1936 and reprinted in Step by Step (1939).
This article is important because in it Churchill stresses (pace Carlton again) that all forms of anti-Communism are not virtuous—something of course which he would never have admitted fifteen years before:
Communism in Japan as in Germany is held fast in the grip of a highly efficient, all-pervading police force, eagerly waiting to smite the smallest manifestation. Yet these two great powers in opposite quarters of the globe use the pretext of their fears of Communism to proclaim an association the purpose of which, and the consequences of which, can only be the furtherance of their national designs.105
But unfortunately, one has to take the complexity of Churchill’s character into account. His position of advocating a strict neutrality during the Spanish Civil War—a neutrality which in fact favoured the Fascist camp—showed that he still believed that the Right, even the extreme Right, had a duty to fight what he saw as Communist infiltration:
[I]t seems certain that a majority of Spaniards are on the rebel side.106 Four and a half millions of them voted only last spring107 for the various Conservative parties of the Right and Centre against four and a quarter millions who voted for the parties of the Left. One must suppose that those people who were then opposed to constitutional Socialism, are to-day all the more hostile to the Communist, Anarchist and Syndicalist forces which are now openly warring for absolute dominance in Spain.108
Not disguising his continued anti-Communism, Churchill had written a fortnight before:
All the national and martial forces in Spain have been profoundly stirred by the rise of Italy under Mussolini to Imperial power in the Mediterranean. Italian methods are a guide. Italian achievements are a spur. Shall Spain, the greatest empire in the world when Italy was a mere bunch of disunited petty princedoms, now sink into the equalitarian squalor of a Communist State, or shall it resume its place among the great Powers of the world?109
Likewise, Churchill adopted a benevolent attitude towards the Fascist dictatorship in Portugal established by Salazar in 1932, probably this time for strategic considerations, since, contrary to Spain, the threat of a Communist takeover seemed remote.110 Salazar had two invaluable assets: his lack of aggressiveness111 and the possession of the Azores, a capital position to hold in any battle for the Atlantic. Churchill had remained obsessed by the devastation wreaked by the U-boat war in 1914-18, and there is little doubt that strategic considerations entered into his complacent treatment of Salazar, who indeed delivered his side of the bargain by allowing Britain to occupy the Azores for the duration of the war—somewhat belatedly in October 1943—after the Germans had been driven from North Africa and decisively beaten by the Soviets in the gigantic tank battle at Kursk.
There is no reason to believe that Churchill entertained any illusions towards Salazar, and even less that he had any empathy for him and his régime. Simply, Churchill evidently believed that he had played a good trick on Hitler by turning the tables on him, with a Fascist dictator indirectly participating in the British struggle against the U-boats. Churchill never let slip a chance to outwit his opponents, but in his speech to the House of Commons announcing this splendid diplomatic victory on 12 October 1943, Churchill had another reason to rejoice: the deal with Salazar was naturally presented as a deal with “Britain’s oldest ally,” as Portugal was always presented.
Churchill could not resist to enter into the historical minutiae which he enjoyed so much, starting his speech with a carefully-crafted theatrical effect:
I have an announcement to make to the House arising out of the Treaty signed between this country and Portugal in the year 1373 between His Majesty King Edward III and King Ferdinand and Queen Eleanor of Portugal….This engagement has lasted now for over [sic] 600 years, and is without parallel in world history. I have now to announce its latest application.112
Historical considerations also probably dictated Churchill’s attitude to Franco, though in an indirect way, once the rebellious general had become the Caudillo of Spain—the continued existence of the historical anomaly of Gibraltar was now entirely dependent on his goodwill, or rather on his avoidance of a formal military alliance with Germany and Italy. It was clear that the Rock could not be long defended against a combined attack of German, Italian and Spanish forces.
It is now known that the British secret services, with Churchill’s approval, “bought” a number of Spanish generals and high officials. In exchange for British gold, they were expected to use their influence to persuade Franco and his associates to remain neutral.113 Churchill also encouraged the Spanish authorities in the belief that if they remained neutral towards Britain—that is, of course, if they left Gibraltar alone—the British Government would find no objection to their acquisition of territory in Morocco to the detriment of the French. He had no qualms explaining his position to Lord Halifax in September 1940:
I do not mind if the Spaniards go into French Morocco. The letters exchanged with de Gaulle do not commit us to any exact restoration of the territories of France, and the attitude of the Vichy Government towards us and towards him has undoubtedly justified a harder feeling towards France than existed at the time of her collapse.114
We have discussed elsewhere115 the highly complicated relations between the British Government and the Vichy régime after June 1940. It is clear that Churchill never saw in Pétain the bulwark against Bolshevism which he pretended to be—but he hoped that he could somehow be useful against the Germans. In his memoirs, Churchill published a passage of a remarkable memorandum sent to his Cabinet colleagues on 14 November 1940, in which it is clear that he distinguishes between his contempt of Pétain and Vichy, and the British Government’s interest in refusing to break with them:
Pétain has always been an anti-British defeatist, and is now a dotard. The idea that we can build on such men is vain. They may, however, be forced by rising opinion in France and by German severities to change their line in our favour. Certainly we should have contacts with them.116
As we now know, these hopes were unfounded. Just as the gamble that Mussolini would remain neutral if carefully nursed by British diplomacy proved wrong in the event, Pétain did not hesitate to order French troops in North Africa to shoot at the Anglo-American “invaders” in November 1942.
But in 1936, in the first months of the Spanish Civil War, he continued to make scathing comments upon “the evangelists of the Third International”—in an article published on the occasion of the Moscow Trials, in which by the way he made the point that the victims “were nearly all Jews,”117 as if he now saw those “International Jews” whom he formally denounced in a favourable light—and in one devoted to “The Communist Schism” between Stalinists and Trostkyists, in which he took up the religious metaphor:
What Rome is to Catholics, Moscow is to the Communists of every country: with the important difference that whereas devout Catholics contribute to the centre of their faith, it is Moscow which distributes money to its adherents in foreign lands….On the other hand, the Trostkyites, now almost entirely cut off from the Moscow finance, are emerging as a separate force. Even in the Spanish welter we discern their appearance as the P.O.U.M., a sect achieving the quintessence of fœtidity, and surpassing all others in hate.118
Sometimes, silence speaks volumes : In Arms and the Covenant, a selection of speeches published in June 1938,119 Churchill denounces German rearmament and British appeasement in every page—but there is not a single word on the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1938, when the book appeared, it would have been impolitic to remind the reading public of Churchill’s pronouncements on “the evangelists of the Third International” at the time of the Spanish Civil War.
By contrast, Step by Step , whose Preface was written almost exactly one year later120, contains both anti-Soviet writings (like “The Communist Schism” quoted above) and his most recent advocacy of at least a tacit alliance with the USSR, “The Russian Counterpoise,” published in May 1939, in which he openly said that “a definite association between Poland and Russia becomes indispensable.” One can of course notice that he speaks of Russia, not the Soviet Union—but for the Poles, “eternal Russia” was of course no more reassuring than the Soviet Union. That this policy should be considered as the lesser of the two evils is made quite explicit:
These are days when acts of faith must be performed by Governments and peoples who are striving to resist the spread of Nazidom….This is no time to dawdle. Peace may yet be saved by the assembly of superior forces against aggression. Grave risks have to be run by all the anti-Nazi countries if war is to be prevented.121
By including both his more reticent and his (reluctantly) “realistic” writings, did Churchill not want to show his public, notably on the Right, that in the spring of 1939, even an arch-enemy of Communism like himself had to come round to the idea of an alliance with the Soviet Union? By suggesting that he did not pursue this evolution wholeheartedly, he increased its exemplary value for those who continued to nurture violently anti-Communist sentiments.122
Thus in 1945-46, when he resumed his anti-Communist crusade in the context of the “Cold War,” he was able to claim that he had always remained consistent at least deep in his heart, even if reason pleaded in favour of an alliance with the Soviets in the months preceding the outbreak of war in 1939—and even more so after Germany’s attack on Russia in June 1941.
Indeed, even Churchill’s magnificently combative speech on the BBC on the day of that surprise attack was balanced in such a way that he did not appear as an enthusiastic convert of Communism. He was careful not to use the word “Bolshevik” and its derivatives, now only part of the vocabulary of Hitler and the various quisling régimes in Occupied Europe, but to speak of Russia: “At four o”clock this morning Hitler attacked and invaded Russia… [at a pinch “Soviet Russia”]: We have offered the Government of Soviet Russia any technical or economic assistance which is in our power” [avoiding “the Soviet Union” or “USSR].” And there were of course the carefully-chosen sentences which justified his past and present conduct—but also preserved the future, though it is impossible to know whether, as Carlton suggests, he was already thinking about it:
No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies, flashes away.123
*****
What are we to conclude from all this? The first reflection that springs to mind is the diversity of the situations. Ironically, the first Fascist dictator, whose rise to power Churchill largely approved in the name of the containment of Bolshevism in the 1920s, was the first to fall. “The keystone of the Fascist arch has crumbled,” Churchill declared in the House of Commons, after the Fascist Grand Council repudiated Mussolini on 25 July 1943.124
But things were not as simple as that. Admittedly, the Vichy puppets also crumbled when their German masters were no longer in a position to impose their presence. But Churchill’s attitude in the spring of 1945, when it was the turn of the German version of Fascism to crumble, has always remained veiled in ambiguity. His constant belief in “the lesser of two evils” led him to toy with the idea of using at least some of the German armed forces as a countervailing power against the irresistible Red Army. In his superbly researched book on The Second World War, David Reynolds demonstrates how Churchill kept silent in his memoirs about the secret plans which he ordered for “Operation Unthinkable”—a surprise Anglo-American attack on the Soviet Union with the help of ten German divisions to be launched on 1 July 1945. The existence of these plans at the former Public Record Office, now called British National Archives, was only made official in 1998.125
Although the report mentioned that it would take some time before German troops could be used, it did not say whether the delay was due to the necessary phase of “denazification”: It is estimated that 10 German divisions might be reformed and re-equipped in the early stages. These could not, however, in any event be available by 1st July.126
As it turned out, nazified or de-nazified German forces were not used—but it is significant that Churchill did not baulk at the thought of employing them in yet another anti-Soviet campaign.
On the other hand, since it did not mean confronting the Soviets militarily, he allowed the Portuguese and Spanish dictators to die a natural death—which took some time, since Salazar only died in 1970 and Franco in 1975, respectively five and ten years after Churchill’s own death.
The reason is not far to see. David Reynolds once more points out how Churchill left out from The Second World War a minute to the Cabinet dated 10 November 1944 in which he wrote, taking up once again his medical vocabulary of 1918-20: “should the communists become masters of Spain we must expect the infection to spread very fast both through Italy and France.”127
In 1945 Churchill had evidently not forgotten his earlier fear of “the foul baboonery of Bolshevism.” Given the choice between the authoritarian extreme Left and the authoritarian extreme Right, it was clear that he remained faithful to his phrase of 1937, “I hope not to be called upon to survive in a world under a government of either of these dispensations,” and that he believed that the dictatorships of Portugal and Spain, contrary to the totalitarian régimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, were no threat to British freedom.
Still, there is no substantial evidence to contradict Quinault’s view that Churchill “initially opposed the Bolsheviks, but once they had won the civil war Churchill sought a settlement with them in the interests of international stability.”128 Broadly speaking, if we take his anti-Bolshevik language between the wars as a discourse for internal consumption, his “Cold War rhetoric” was precisely that—behind the offensive language,129 behind the “war of words,” Churchill had become reconciled to the continued existence of Soviet Russia—as opposed to that of Nazi Germany. For Churchill, Hitler not Stalin was the real “warmonger” in the late 1930s. Nevertheless, Kinvig is right when he says:
The language in which he chose publicly to denounce the Russian regime was eloquent of the depth of his detestation and more than rivalled that which he directed at his adversaries in the Second World War.130
One may approve or denounce Churchill’s eminently pragmatic position towards the various forms of the extreme Right and extreme Left. But one cannot deny his remarkable consistency if one accepts that his constant overriding aim was the preservation of “bourgeois” liberties—the key, in his eyes, to the survival of civilisation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY (Sources quoted)
Books by Winston S. Churchill
The World Crisis, 6 vols., (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923-31. Abridged Edition, London : Penguin, 2007). Volumes quoted here: vol. IV, The Aftermath (1929); vol. V, The Eastern Front (1931).
Thoughts and Adventures (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1932; revised edition (London: Odhams, 1947); new annotated edition, James W. Muller, editor, with contributions by Paul H. Courtenay & Alana L. Barton (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2009).
Great Contemporaries (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1937; revised and extended edition,1938: subsequent revised editions (London: Macmillan, 1942, London: Odhams, 1947).
Arms and the Covenant: Speeches by the Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill, compiled by Randolph S. Churchill (London: G.G. Harrap & Co., 1938).
Step By Step: Speeches 1936-1939 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939; new edition (London: Odhams, 1947).
Into Battle: War Speeches by the Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill [1938-1940], compiled by Charles Eade (London: Cassell, 1941).
The Unrelenting Struggle: War Speeches by the Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill [1940-1941], compiled by Charles Eade (London: Cassell, 1942).
Onwards to Victory: War Speeches by the Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill, 1943, compiled by Charles Eade (London: Cassell, 1944).
The Second World War, 6 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948-1954). Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm (1948); vol. 2, Their Finest Hour (1949).
The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, edited by Michael Wolff, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975). Vol. 1, Churchill and War; vol.2: Churchill and Politics; vol.4: Churchill at Large.
Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963, edited by Robert Rhodes James, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974). Vol. IV, 1922-1928; vol.V, 1928-1935.
Articles by Winston S. Churchill
“Zionism versus Bolshevism.” Illustrated Sunday Herald, 8 February 1920. Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill (see below), IV: 26-31.
“Shall we All commit Suicide?” Pall Mall Magazine, 24 September 1924. Reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures.
“Trotsky: The Ogre of Europe.” Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, December 1929; Reprinted in Cosmopolitan, March 1930 and Great Contemporaries.
“Mass Effects in Modern Life.” The Strand Magazine, May 1931. Reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures.
“The Spanish Tragedy.” Evening Standard, 10 August 1936. Reprinted in Step By Step.
“Keep out of Spain.” Evening Standard, 21 August 1936. Reprinted in Step By Step.
“Enemies to the Left.” Evening Standard, 4 September 1936. Reprinted in Step By Step.
“The Communist Schism.” Evening Standard, 16 October 1936. Reprinted in Step By Step.
“Germany and Japan.” Evening Standard, 27 November 1936. Reprinted in Step by Step.
“The Creeds of the Devil.” The Sunday Chronicle, 27 June 1937. Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, vol.2: Churchill and Politics.
“The Russian Counterpoise.” Daily Telegraph (4 May 1939). Reprinted in Step by Step.
Works by Other Authors
Addison, Paul. Churchill on the Home Front (London : Jonathan Cape, 1992; reprinted with a new preface by the author (London: Pimlico, 1993).
Paul Addison. Churchill : The Unexpected Hero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
David Carlton. Churchill and the Soviet Union (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
David Carlton. “Churchill and the Two ‘Evil Empires.’” Churchill in the Twenty-first Century: A Conference held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 11-13 January 2001. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series 11 (2001): 331-352.
Ronald I. Cohen. Bibliography of the Works by Sir Winston Churchill, 3 vols. (London & New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2006).
Anthony Eden (Lord Avon). The Eden Memoirs, vol. I1, Facing the Dictators (London: Cassel, 1962).
Martin Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill (London: Heinemann, 1976-88); Vol. 4, 1917-1922; vol. 5, Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939; vol. 6: Finest Hour, 1939-1941; Companion to vol. 4, Part 1.
Roy Jenkins. Churchill. (London: Macmillan, 2001; London: Pan Books, 2002).
Clifford Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: The British Invasion of Russia (London: Hambledon, 2006).
Richard M. Langworth, editor. Churchill by Himself: The Life, Times and Opinions of Winston Churchill in His Own Words (London: Ebury Press, 2008).
David Lloyd George. The Truth about the Peace Treaties, 2 vols. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938).
William Manchester. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, 2 vols. (London: Michael Joseph, 1983, 1988). Vol. 1, Visions of Glory 1874-1932; vol. 2, The Caged Lion 1932-1940.
Charles L. Mowat, Britain Between the Wars 1918-1940 (London: Methuen, 1955; London: University Paperbacks, 1968).
Henry Pelling. Winston Churchill (London: Macmillan, 1974; new edition with new introduction (Ware, Dorset: Wordsworth, 1999).
Roland Quinault, “Churchill and Russia.” War & Society 9-1 (May 1991): 99-120.
David Reynolds. In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004). See Paul Addison’s review on
Norman Rose. Churchill: An Unruly Life (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Churchill: Unruly Giant (New York: Free Press, 1995).
Denis Smyth. “«Les chevaliers de Saint-George» : la Grande-Bretagne et la corruption des généraux espagnols (1940-1942).” Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 162 (April 1991): 29-54.
Mary Soames, editor. Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill. (London: Doubleday, 1998).
Young, John W. “Churchill and the East-West Détente.” Churchill in the Twenty-first Century: A Conference held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 11-13 January 2001. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series 11 (2001): 373-392.
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1 “The radical rights in France and Britain in the 20th century: comparisons, transfers, crossed perspectives / Les droites radicales en France et en Grande-Bretagne au XXe siècle : comparaisons, transferts, regards croisés.” Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille III, 20-21 March 2009.
2 The author also wants to express his gratitude to Simon Baker, Assistant Project Editor, Royal Historical Society British and Irish History Bibliographies, Institute of Historical Research, London, and two mainstays of the Churchill Centre, James R. Lancaster and Richard M. Langworth, for their invaluable help in locating and checking the original sources and supplying other essential material for many points in the following discussion.
3 “Britain and the Cold War.” 23rd CCBH Annual Conference, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, University of London, 22-25 June 2009.
4 The actual title of the short paper given at the CCBH Conference was “Revisiting the archaeology of the Cold War: “The foul baboonery of Bolshevism” as fought by Churchill, 1917-1941.” The present article merges and expands the arguments put forward at Lille and London.
5 As suggested for instance by Churchill’s own phrase, “The Creeds of the Devil” (see below, note 72) and such titles as David Carlton’s “Churchill and the two “Evil Empires” .” Referring to an even earlier period, Roland Quinault speaks of Churchill’s “joint opposition to “Kaiserism” and “Bolshevism” .” (“Churchill and Russia”: 102-103).
6 Many people tend to make a distinction between the Fascists and the Nazis, but most of our German colleagues generally prefer to speak of “the Fascists” as a blanket term and we will follow their practice here.
7 Carlton, David. Churchill and the Soviet Union. Manchester: University Press, 2000.
8 Carlton. “Churchill and the two “Evil Empires” “: 351.
9 Ponting, Clive. Winston Churchill. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994.
10 Carlton. “Churchill and the two “Evil Empires” “: 333.
11 See my review on http://www.cercles.com/review/r23/holmes.htm
12 Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: xiv and Note 1, p. 335
13 Quinault argued that Churchill had a “persistent belief that Russia was a major and essential element in the international community” (“Churchill and Russia”: 99).
14 Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: 322.
15 Carlton. “Churchill and the two “Evil Empires” “: 333, 336.
16 Volume Three: 1916-1918 was in fact in two parts—hence the common confusion, since The Aftermath is sometimes described as the fifth volume of The World Crisis. To make the confusion even worse, Best calls The Aftermath the “conclusion” of The World Crisis, possibly because of Churchill’s indication in the Preface, “This volume completes the task I undertook nearly ten years ago of making a contemporary contribution to the history of the Great War.” In fact, he was to publish a final volume in 1931, The Eastern Front (The Unknown War in the United States).
17 Best. A Study in Greatness: 96. Churchill’s text is in The Aftermath, Chapter XIII, “The Miracle of the Vistula,” pp. 262-263.
18 “POLAND: / The Choice that Germany May Have to Face / Shall the Red Flood of Bolshevism Swamp All Europe? / Poland—Lynch-pin of Peace / The Poison Peril from the East.” The (very minor) differences seem to consist in a different location of the second “only,” in the plural for ‘souls” and in the use of tenses: “[To the East of Poland] lay the huge mass of Russia—not a wounded Russia only, but a poisoned Russia, an infected Russia, a plague-bearing Russia; a Russia of armed hordes smiting not only with bayonet and with cannon, but accompanied and preceded by the swarms of typhus-bearing vermin which slay the bodies of men, and political doctrines which destroy the health and even the soul of nations.” The Evening News, 28 July 1920. Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, vol. I: 235.
19 Cohen. Bibliography of the Works by Sir Winston Churchill, vol. II: 1328-1329.
20 Ibid.
21 “Army Estimates (Russia).” A speech in the House of Commons on 29 May 1919. Complete Speeches, vol.3: 2798. Thirty years later, in the House of Commons on 3 September 1939, Churchill took up the word pestilence and declared: “We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man.” Churchill. Into Battle : 128a.
22 Weekly Dispatch (22 June 1919). In Ponting. Winston Churchill, p. 229.
23 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. IV: 1917-1922: 270. Kinvig notes that “Churchill was denouncing the Bolsheviks in the most dehumanising language.” Churchill’s Crusade: 321.
24 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. IV: 1917-1922: 355.
25 Churchill. The Aftermath: 76.
26 Rose. Churchill: An Unruly Life: 146.
27 Addison. Churchill: The unexpected Hero: 93.
28 Churchill. “Trotsky: The Ogre of Europe.” (Great Contemporaries, 1947 ed.: 154).
29 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. IV: 1917-1922: 278.
30 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. IV: 1917-1922: 219.
31 Different sources and variants are given in the Churchill literature. Pelling has established that it comes from The Truth about the Peace Treaties, p. 325. (Pelling. Winston Churchill. [1999]: 258). For a discussion of his “ducal blood” as a source for his anti-Bolshevism, see Best, A Study in Greatness: 97.
32 Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: 164.
33 Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: 104. Further extracts from the telegram are given in Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. IV: 1917-1922: 251-252.
34 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. IV: 1917-1922: 257.
35 See cartoon on the remarkable British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent:
http://opal.kent.ac.uk/cartoonx-cgi/ccc.py?mode=single&start=61&search=secretaries
36 Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: 153.
37 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. IV: 1917-1922: 227.
38 Sir Martin Gilbert gives two versions (which are not contradictory). In the Official Biography, he writes that Fisher noted the phrase in his diary: “After conquering all the huns—tigers of the world—I will not submit to be beaten by the baboons!” (Winston S. Churchill. Vol. IV: 1917-1922: 275-276). In the Companion, he reproduces slightly different words, from a letter by Fisher to his wife on the same day: “I had a long talk with Winston to-day. He is very anti-Bolshevik: “After having defeated all the tigers & lions I don”t like to be beaten by baboons” .” Companion to Vol. 4, Part 1: 609.
39 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. IV: 1917-1922: 278.
40 Churchill. “Trotsky: The Ogre of Europe.” (Great Contemporaries, 1947 ed.: 152).
41 Churchill. “Mass Effects in Modern Life.” (Thoughts and Adventures, 1947 ed.: 195).
42 Churchill. “Trotsky: The Ogre of Europe.” (Great Contemporaries, 1947 ed.: 157).
43 See my review of Michael Makovsky. Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism And Statecraft (Yale University Press, 2007) on the Cercles site: http://www.cercles.com/review/r35/makovsky.html
44 Churchill. “Zionism versus Bolshevism.” Reprinted in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill. Vol.4: Churchill at Large: 26-31, passim.
45 The official language seems to have been “the National Russians.” See Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: 250.
46 Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: 321.
47 Carlton. “Churchill and the two “Evil Empires” “: 334.
48 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. IV: 1917-1922: 384.
49 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. IV: 1917-1922: 278. Also Carlton. “Churchill and the two “Evil Empires” ”: 333, quoting The Times, 12 April 1919.
50 10 november 1918. Carlton. Churchill and the Soviet Union: 5.
51 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. IV: 1917-1922: 277-278.
52 Letter to Lloyd George, 9 April 1919. Gilbert. Companion to Vol. IV, Part 1: 613.
53 Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: 325.
54 For a full account of the military operations, see Ullman, Richard H. Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917-1921. 3 vol. Princeton: University Press, 1961-72.
55 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. IV: 1917-1922: 219-442.
56 Quinault. “Churchill and Russia”: 103.
57 Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: 128-129 and 183.
58 Eighty years later, the Imperial War Museum Review (now defunct) contained an article with that very same title: Jones, Simon. “ “The right medicine for the Bolshevist”: British air-dropped chemical weapons in north Russia, 1919.” Imperial War Museum Review 12 (1999): 78-88.
59 One could draw an analogy with the contemporary “Iraq accusation” or “uncivilised tribes accusation,” which is discussed on the Churchill Centre site. See 4) on
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/images/pdfs/spectator_article.pdf
60 Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: 85.
61 In a letter dated 15 February 1919, Philip Kerr wrote to Lloyd George after meeting Churchill, notably telling him: “He is perfectly logical in his policy, because he declares that the Bolsheviks are the enemies of the human race and must be put down at any cost.” Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. IV: 1917-1922: 246.
62 Pelling, Winston Churchill (1999): 257.
63 Addison. Churchill on the Home Front, 1900-1955: 264.
64 “Italian Debt Settlement (Signing).” A speech at the Treasury, London, on 27 January 1926. Reprinted in Winston S. Churchill : His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963. Vol.IV: 1922-1928: 3824.
65 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. V: Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939: 226.
66 Speech in the House of Commons, 14 April 1937. Reprinted in Arms and the Covenant: 409.
67 “Anglo-Italian Relations.” A press statement in Rome on 20 January 1927. Reprinted in Winston S. Churchill : His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963. Vol.IV: 1922-1928: 4126.
68 In Langworth’s substantial volume of Churchill quotations, Churchill by Himself, Mosley is mentioned only once, in 1920: “I can well understand the Hon. Member speaking for practice, which he badly needs.. This would tend to suggest that Churchill saw Mosley as a negligible opponent, not worth attacking in his speeches and writings.
69 Churchill and the British authorities were no longer sure of the lasting character of that failure in the panic atmosphere of May-June 1940, when Mosley was seen as a high security risk.
Churchill of course never believed in the principle “no freedom for the enemies of freedom,” adopted by the Bolsheviks among others. The memo which he sent to the Home Secretary on 22 December 1940 over Mosley’s internment shows his embarrassment at having had to follow that policy: “Naturally I feel distressed at having to be responsible for action so utterly at variance with all the fundamental principles of British liberty, habeas corpus, and the like. The public danger justifies the action taken, but that danger is now receding.” Mosley was interned under Regulation 18B from 23 May 1940 until November 1943—by then the danger of German invasion had become nil.
In the light of the Guantanamo controversy, Churchill’s preoccupation in the same memo over Mosley’s conditions of detention makes fascinating reading—and reflects on his innate sense of what concurs to the dignity of man (e.g. “Does a bath every week mean a hot bath, and would it be very wrong to allow a bath every day?”). See Their Finest Hour: Appendix A, p. 703.
Sir Oswald Mosley makes no mention of Churchill’s personal role in detaining or releasing him in his memoirs (My Life. London: Nelson, 1968). He only quotes the passage in the memo where Churchill says “In the case of Mosley and his wife there is much pressure from the Left, in the case of Pandit Nehru from the Right.”
70 “The Ebbing Tide of Socialism.” Evening Standard (9 July 1937). Reprinted in Step by Step (1947 ed.: 135).
71 Soames. Speaking for Themselves: 275.
72 Quinault. “Churchill and Russia”: 106.
73 Mowat. Britain Between the Wars 1918-1940. (1968): 294.
74 Addison. Churchill on the Home Front: 315
75 Winston S. Churchill : His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963. Vol.V: 1928-1935: 5268.
76 In common with most of his contemporaries, Churchill variously said and wrote Nazism or Nazi-ism when using the abbreviation. The spelling found in the sources and records will be kept here.
77 Wrigley. Winston Churchill: A Biographical Companion: 218.
78 Blindheim in German, in Bavaria.
79 Churchill. The Gathering Storm: 83.
80 Churchill. The World Crisis—The Eastern Front: Dedication.
81 Young. “Churchill and the East-West détente”: 374.
82 Speech in the House of Commons, 11 July 1932. Reprinted in Arms and the Covenant: 29.
83 Hanfstaengl, Ernst. Hitler: The Missing Years. In collaboration with Brian Connell. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1957.
84 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. V: Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939: 448.
85 Churchill. The Gathering Storm: 84.
86 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. V: Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939: 407.
87 Manchester. Visions of Glory: 874-875.
88 For a full discussion of the National Government members” supposed reluctance to see the publication of a full and faithful version of Hitler’s book, see Stone, Dan. “ “The Mein Kampf Ramp”: Emily Overend Lorimer and Hitler Translations in Britain.” German History 26:4 (2008): 504-519.
89 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. V: Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939: 738.
90 Churchill. ‘shall we All commit Suicide?” Thoughts and Adventures (1947 ed.): 187, 188.
91 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. V: Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939: 680.
92 Churchill. “Hitler and his Choice.” Reprinted in Great Contemporaries (1937): 261-269 passim. (Odhams, 1947: 203-210 passim). Whatever conclusions may be drawn from this, the photograph of Hitler is curiously different in the two editions. In 1937 he is smiling.
93 Carlton. “Churchill and the two “Evil Empires” ”: 336
94 See his very seductive comparison between the two in “The Creeds of the Devil” (The Sunday Chronicle, 27 June, 1937), notably: “There are two strange facts about these non-God religions. The first is their extraordinary resemblance to one another. Nazism and Communism imagine themselves as exact opposites. They are at each other’s throats wherever they exist all over the world. They actually breed each other; for the reaction against Communism is Nazism, and beneath Nazism or Fascism Communism stirs convulsively. Yet they are similar in all essentials. First of all, their simplicity is remarkable. You leave out God and put in the Devil; you leave out love and put in hate; and everything thereafter works quite straightforwardly and logically. They are, in fact, as alike as two peas. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are two quite distinctive personalities compared to these two rival religions.”
95 Cf. The People’s Rights. By the Right Hon. W.S. Churchill, President of the Board of Trade. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909.
96 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. V: Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939: 456-457.
97 Jenkins. Churchill (2002): 469.
98 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol V: Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939: 73.
99 The sources sometimes have “civilisation,” sometimes “civilization.” The original spelling is kept here in the quotations.
100 Reprinted in Arms and the Covenant: 112
101 “We should lay aside every hindrance and endeavour by uniting the whole force and spirit of our people to raise again a great British nation standing up before all the world; for such a nation, rising in its ancient vigour, can even at this hour save civilization.” Speech in the House of Commons, 24 March 1938. Reprinted in Arms and the Covenant: 466.
102 Cabinet Papers. 13 February 1919. In Pelling. Winston Churchill (1999): 258.
103 Reprinted in Arms and the Covenant: 236.
104 Soames. Speaking for Themselves: 411.
105 Churchill. “Germany and Japan.” Reprinted in Step By Step (1947 ed.): 71-72.
106 I.e. the Francoist side.
107 The article was published on 21 August 1936.
108 Churchill. “Keep out of Spain.” Evening Standard (21 August 1936). Reprinted in Step By Step (1947): 42-43.
109 Churchill. “The Spanish Tragedy.” Evening Standard (10 August 1936). Reprinted in Step By Step (1947): 40.
110 This may explain why Franco features repeatedly in Churchill’s published speeches and writings of the 1930s, as opposed to Salazar, who is never mentioned.
111 “Well-informed at all points that were of concern to him, Stalin was prudent but not slow. Seldom raising his voice, a good listener, prone to doodling, he was the quietest dictator I have ever known, with the exception of Dr. Salazar.” Eden. The Eden Memoirs. Vol. I : Facing the Dictators: 153.
112 Churchill. Onwards to Victory: 235.
113 The story is notably recounted in Smyth. “ « Les chevaliers de Saint-George » : la Grande-Bretagne et la corruption des généraux espagnols (1940-1942).”
114 Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. VI: Finest Hour, 1939-1941: 816
115 During the Lille Conference of March 2009, whose Proceedings are under way.
116 Churchill. Their Finest Hour: 527
117 “Enemies to the Left.” Evening Standard (4 September 1936). Reprinted in Step By Step (1947): 49, 48.
118 “The Communist Schism.” Evening Standard (16 October 1936). Reprinted in Step By Step (1947): 58, 60.
119 The Preface is dated 28 May 1938.
120 21 May 1939. The book was published on 27 June 1939.
121 “The Russian Counterpoise.” Daily Telegraph (4 May 1939). Reprinted in Step By Step (1947): 344.
122 In Winston S. Churchill. Vol.V: Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939, Sir Martin Gilbert gives a revealing list, drawn by Lord Halifax following Churchill’s article, of the obstacles to an alliance with Russia (p. 1068). He also neatly documents Churchill’s private and public pleas in favour of a revival of the pre-1914 alliance between Britain, France and Russia (e.g. pp. 1073 & 1088).
123 “The Fourth Climacteric: A Broadcast Address on the German Invasion of Russia, June 22, 1941.” Churchill. The Unrelenting Struggle: 178, 179.
124 Churchill. “Mussolini’s Downfall.” A speech to the House of Commons, July 27, 1943. Onwards to Victory: 142.
125 A scan is available on http://www.history.neu.edu/PRO2/
It was left to a Russian historian to provide the first scholarly article on this “revelation.” Rzeševskij, Oleg. ‘sekretnye voennye plany U. Xercillja protiv SSSR v mae 1945 g.” [W. Churchill’s secret war plans against the USSR in May 1945] Novaja i novejšaja storia 3 (1999): 98-123. « Operation Unthinkable: “Russia: Threat to Western Civilization,” » British War Cabinet, Joint Planning Staff [Draft and Final Reports: 22 May, 8 June, and 11 July 1945], Public Record Office, CAB 120/691/109040 / 001: p.10.
127 Reynolds. In Command of History: 463.
128 Quinault. “Churchill and Russia”: 115.
129 Kinvig speaks of his “extravagant language” and of his “extreme language.” Churchill’s Crusade: xiii and 85.
130 Kinvig. Churchill’s Crusade: 85.
Germany’s Invasion of Russia: Broadcast, London, 22 June 1941
« The Fourth Climacteric »
I have taken occasion to speak to you to-night because we have reached one of the climacterics of the war. The first of these intense turning-points was a year ago when France fell prostrate under the German hammer, and when we had to face the storm alone. The second was when the Royal Air Force beat the Hun raiders out of the daylight air, and thus warded off the Nazi invasion of our island while we were still ill-armed and ill-prepared. The third turning-point was when the President and Congress of the United States passed the Lease-and-Lend enactment, devoting nearly 2,000 millions sterling of the wealth of the New World to help us to defend our liberties and their own. Those were the three climacterics.
The fourth is now upon us.
At four o’clock this morning Hitler attacked and invaded Russia. All his usual formalities of perfidy were observed with scrupulous technique. A non-aggression treaty had been solemnly signed and was in force between the two countries. No complaint had been made by Germany of its non-fulfilment. Under its cloak of false confidence, the German armies drew up in immense strength along a line which stretches from the White Sea to the Black Sea; and their air fleets and armoured divisions slowly and methodically took their stations. Then, suddenly without declaration of war, without even an ultimatum, German bombs rained down from the air upon the Russian cities, the German troops violated the frontiers; and an hour later the German Ambassador, who till the night before was lavishing his assurances of friendship, almost of alliance, upon the Russians, called upon the Russian Foreign Minister to tell him that a state of war existed between Germany and Russia.
Thus was repeated on a far larger scale the same kind of outrage against every form of signed compact and international faith which we have witnessed in Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium, and which Hitler’s accomplice and jackal Mussolini so faithfully imitated in the case of Greece.
All this was no surprise to me. In fact I gave clear and precise warnings to Stalin of what was coming. I gave him warning as I have given warning to others before. I can only hope that this warning did not fall unheeded. All we know at present is that the Russian people are defending their native soil and that their leaders have called upon them to resist to the utmost.
Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel, or else terrorized into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine, which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing, cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. It must be in continual motion, grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men. Moreover it must be fed, not only with flesh but with oil.
So now this bloodthirsty guttersnipe must launch his mechanized armies upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation. Poor as are the Russian peasants, workmen and soldiers, he must steal from them their daily bread; he must devour their harvests; he must rob them of the oil which drives their ploughs; and thus produce a famine without example in human history. And even the carnage and ruin which his victory, should he gain it – he has not gained it yet – will bring upon the Russian people, will itself be only a stepping-stone to the attempt to plunge the four or five hundred millions who live in China, and the three hundred and fifty millions who live in India, into that bottomless pit of human degradation over which the diabolic emblem of the Swastika flaunts itself. It is not too much to say here this summer evening that the lives and happiness of a thousand million additional people are now menaced with brutal Nazi violence. That is enough to make us hold our breath. But presently I shall show you something else that lies behind, and something that touches very nearly the life of Britain and of the United States.
The Nazi régime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. It excels all forms of human wickedness in the efficiency of its cruelty and ferocious aggression. No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies, flashes away. I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray – ah yes, for there are times when all pray – for the safety of their loved ones, the return of the breadwinner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents fresh from the cowing and tying-down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey.
Behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I see that small group of villainous men who plan, organize and launch this cataract of horrors upon mankind. And then my mind goes back across the years to the days when the Russian armies were our allies against the same deadly foe; when they fought with so much valour and constancy, and helped to gain a victory from all share in which, alas, they were – through no fault of ours – utterly cut off. I have lived through all this, and you will pardon me if I express my feelings and the stir of old memories. But now I have to declare the decision of His Majesty’s Government – and I feel sure it is a decision in which the great Dominions will, in due course, concur – for we must speak out now at once, without a day’s delay. I have to make the declaration, but can you doubt what our policy will be? We have but one aim and one single, irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi r?gime. From this nothing will turn us – nothing. We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until with God’s help we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke. Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe. This applies not only to organized states but to all representatives of that vile race of quislings who make themselves the tools and agents of the Nazi régime against their fellow-countrymen and the lands of their birth. They – these quislings – like the Nazi leaders themselves, if not disposed of by their fellow-countrymen, which would save trouble, will be delivered by us on the morrow of victory to the justice of the Allied tribunals. That is our policy and that is our declaration. It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and allies in every part of the world to take the same course and pursue it, as we shall, faithfully and steadfastly to the end.
We have offered the Government of Soviet Russia any technical or economic assistance which is in our power, and which is likely to be of service to them. We shall bomb Germany by day as well as by night in ever-increasing measure, casting upon them month by month a heavier discharge of bombs, and making the German people taste and gulp each month a sharper dose of the miseries they have showered upon mankind. It is noteworthy that only yesterday the Royal Air Force, fighting inland over French territory, cut down with very small loss to themselves 28 of the Hun fighting machines in the air above the French soil they have invaded, defiled and profess to hold. But this is only a beginning. From now forward the main expansion of our Air Force proceeds with gathering speed. In another six months the weight of the help we are receiving from the United States in war materials of all kinds, and especially in heavy bombers, will begin to tell.
This is no class war, but a war in which the whole British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations is engaged without distinction of race, creed or party. It is not for me to speak of the action of the United States, but this I will say: if Hitler imagines that his attack on Soviet Russia will cause the slightest division of aims or slackening of effort in the great Democracies who are resolved upon his doom, he is woefully mistaken. On the contrary, we shall be fortified and encouraged in our efforts to rescue mankind from his tyranny. We shall be strengthened and not weakened in determination and in resources.
This is no time to moralize on the follies of countries and governments which have allowed themselves to be struck down one by one, when by united action they could have saved themselves and saved the world from this catastrophe. But when I spoke a few minutes ago of Hitler’s blood-lust and the hateful appetites which have impelled or lured him on his Russian adventure, I said there was one deeper motive behind his outrage. He wishes to destroy the Russian power because he hopes that if he succeeds in this, he will be able to bring back the main strength of his army and air force from the East and hurl it upon this Island, which he knows he must conquer or suffer the penalty of his crimes. His invasion of Russia is no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles. He hopes, no doubt, that all this may be accomplished before the winter comes, and that he can overwhelm Great Britain before the fleet and air power of the United States may intervene. He hopes that he may once again repeat, upon a greater scale than ever before, that process of destroying his enemies one by one, by which he has so long thrived and prospered, and that then the scene will be clear for the final act, without which all his conquests would be in vain – namely, the subjugation of the Western Hemisphere to his will and to his system.
The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe. Let us learn the lessons already taught by such cruel experience. Let us redouble our exertions, and strike with united strength while life and power remain.
Car ainsi m’a parlé le Seigneur: Va, place la sentinelle; Qu’elle annonce ce qu’elle verra. (…) Sentinelle, que dis-tu de la nuit? Sentinelle, que dis-tu de la nuit? La sentinelle répond: Le matin vient, et la nuit aussi. Si vous voulez interroger, interrogez; Convertissez-vous, et revenez. Esaïe 21: 6-12
S’ils disent la même chose que le Coran, ils sont inutiles; s’ils le contredisent, ils sont nuisibles; dans les deux cas, il faut les détruire. Calife Omar Al-Farouk (642)
Ceux qui brûlent des livres finissent tôt ou tard par brûler des hommes. Heinrich Heine
On ne se débarrasse jamais vraiment de l’odeur de chair brûlée. Quelque soit le temps qu’on vive.Salinger
I’m really Boo. Harper Lee (conversation with Oprah)
La seule chose qui ne doive pas céder à la loi de la majorité est la conscience de l’individu.
Tu ne comprendras jamais aucune personne tant que tu n’envisageras pas la situation de son point de vue (…) tant que tu ne te glisseras pas dans sa peau et que tu n’essaieras pas de te mettre à sa place.
Je voulais que tu comprennes quelque chose, que tu voies ce qu’est le vrai courage, au lieu de t’imaginer que c’est un homme avec un fusil à la main. Le courage, c’est de savoir que tu pars battu, mais d’agir quand même sans s’arrêter. Tu gagnes rarement mais cela peut arriver.
Tu es trop petite pour comprendre, mais parfois, la Bible est plus dangereuse entre les mains d’un homme qu’une bouteille de whisky entre celles de ton père.
– Je préfererais que vous ne tiriez que sur des boîtes de conserves, dans le jardin, mais je sais que vous allez vous en prendre aux oiseaux. Tirez sur tous les geais bleus que vous voudrez, si vous arrivez à les toucher, mais souvenez-vous que c’est un péché que de tuer un oiseau moqueur.
Ce fut la seule fois où j’entendis Atticus dire qu’une chose était un péché et j’en parlai à Miss Maudie.
– Ton père a raison, dit-elle. Les moqueurs ne font rien d’autre que de la musique pour notre plaisir. Ils ne viennent pas picorer dans les jardins des gens, ils ne font pas leurs nids dans les séchoirs à maïs, ils ne font que chanter pour nous de tout leur coeur. Voilà pourquoi c’est un péché de tuer un oiseau moqueur. Ne tirez pas sur l’oiseau moqueur
In my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often — movies weren’t for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We’re talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression. Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store’s books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another’s entire stock. There were long dry spells broken by the new Christmas books, which started the rounds again. As we grew older, we began to realize what our books were worth: Anne of Green Gables was worth two Bobbsey Twins; two Rover Boys were an even swap for two Tom Swifts. Aesthetic frissons ran a poor second to the thrills of acquisition. The goal, a full set of a series, was attained only once by an individual of exceptional greed — he swapped his sister’s doll buggy. We were privileged. There were children, mostly from rural areas, who had never looked into a book until they went to school. They had to be taught to read in the first grade, and we were impatient with them for having to catch up. We ignored them. And it wasn’t until we were grown, some of us, that we discovered what had befallen the children of our African-American servants. In some of their schools, pupils learned to read three-to-one — three children to one book, which was more than likely a cast-off primer from a white grammar school. We seldom saw them until, older, they came to work for us. Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal. Harper Lee (2006)
Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they’re quite different from people who must write. Harper Lee (1964)
A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird. The Washington Post
Penguin has announced that Harper Lee, 88, has written a sequel to the universally loved, Pulitzer prize-winning, and much studied-at-school To Kill a Mockingbird – 55 years after it was first published. Lee’s second book, Go Set a Watchman, was written first, and To Kill a Mockingbird was born from its flashback sequences. The sequel, whose title is taken from a biblical quote, tells the story of the same characters from Mockingbird, featuring a grown-up Scout now living in New York. Instant reaction to the announcement has been mixed. While many fans of such a seminal novel are delighted, others, who have treasured the tale of the charismatic lawyer Atticus Finch fighting racial injustice in the American deep south, are not best pleased by the thought of a sequel. The Guardian
Back to the future ?
A l’heure où l’on apprend qu’après avoir brûlé vif un pilote jordanien, l’Etat islamique aurait, au nom de la religion d’amour et de paix, détruit à Mossoul des oeuvres datant de plus de 7 000 ans …
Et qu’avec le déni de la réalité du mal, le retour de la rougeole au pays chef de file du Monde libre …
Comment ne pas se réjouir après l’annonce de la parution future de la suite de Catcher in the rye de Salinger il y a deux ans …
De celle de la publication pour l’été prochain après plus d’un demi-siècle de silence elle aussi mais déjà controversée (aurait-on abusé du grand âge d’une amie d’enfance de Truman Capote déjà traumatisée par un succès trop précoce ?) …
Du deuxième roman (Go set a watchman »: « Va, place la sentinelle », tiré d’un verset du prophète Esaïe) de l’auteur-culte d’un livre …
Qui sans compter – « Quand meurt le rossignol », « Alouette, je te plumerai », « Ne tirez pas sur l’oiseau moqueur », « Du silence et des ombres » pour le film – ses multiples titres français …
Se trouve être son premier puisque, rejeté par les éditeurs, il relatait la vie de la même héroïne mais 20 ans plus tard …
L’oiseau moqueur n’en étant en fait au départ qu’un des nombreux flashbacks ?
Cinquante-cinq ans après « Ne tirez pas sur l’oiseau moqueur », un très grand classique de la littérature américaine, son auteure Harper Lee va publier en juillet un deuxième roman, une sorte de suite du premier, qui s’appellera « Go Set a Watchman ».
Le manuscrit de ce livre, « Go Set a Watchman », écrit dans les années 1950, dormait depuis des années dans des cartons. Harper Lee l’a exhumé cinquante-cinq ans après « Ne tirez pas sur l’oiseau moqueur », son unique roman au succès planétaire.
« Je ne savais pas qu’il avait survécu » a-t-elle confié mardi 2 février, en se disant « émue et stupéfaite qu’il soit publié après toutes ces années », dans un communiqué de l’éditeur HarperCollins.
Il met en scène de nombreux personnages qui figuraient dans « Ne tirez pas sur l’oiseau moqueur », mais 20 ans plus tard.
Ce roman, le seul jamais publié par Harper Lee, aujourd’hui âgée de 88 ans, a marqué des générations d’Américains. Il avait valu à son auteure un prix Pulitzer en 1961, un an après sa sortie. Il a été vendu à plus de 30 millions d’exemplaires, traduit en plus de 40 langues, et est étudié dans de très nombreuses écoles et lycées américains.
Plaidoyer pour la justice, il raconte l’histoire d’un avocat blanc, Atticus Finch, défendant un Noir accusé de viol pendant la Grande Dépression des années 1930, dans une ville fictive et raciste d’Alabama, l’État du sud des États-Unis où vit toujours l’écrivaine. La narratrice du roman est la fille d’Atticus Finch, Scout. L’histoire est directement inspirée de l’enfance de l’auteure : son père était en effet avocat et éditeur d’un journal local dans l’Alabama.
« Go Set a Watchman » avait été écrit avant ce premier roman, par une jeune Harper Lee alors débutante. « J’ai terminé « Go Set a Watchman »dans le milieu des années 50. Il met en scène le personnage de Scout, en tant que femme adulte, et je pensais que c’était une réussite assez convenable », a expliqué Harper Lee.
« Mon éditeur, qui était fasciné par les flashbacks sur l’enfance de Scout, m’a persuadée d’écrire un roman sur le point de vue de la jeune Scout. C’était mon premier livre, j’ai fait ce qu’on me demandait », a-t-elle ajouté.
De là naît deux ans et demi plus tard « Ne tirez pas sur l’oiseau moqueur », écrit après « Go Set a Watchman ».
Auteure discrète
Harper Lee, qui parle très rarement aux médias, a précisé qu’une amie avocate avait retrouvé à l’automne dernier le manuscrit de « Go Set a Watchman », et qu’après avoir « beaucoup réfléchi et hésité », elle en avait parlé avec quelques personnes, et été ravie d’entendre qu’ils pensaient qu’il était digne de publication.
L’auteure avait dans le passé déclaré qu’elle n’avait jamais écrit d’autre roman après « Ne tirez pas sur l’oiseau moqueur », estimant qu’il ne pourrait jamais surpasser son succès.
« Nous sommes ravis » d’avoir acquis les droits nord-américains pour ce roman récemment redécouvert », a annoncé la maison d’édition Harper, filiale d’HarperCollins, à propos de « Go Set a Watchman », en précisant qu’il sortirait le 14 juillet.
La nouvelle est en une du New York Times et du Washington Post ce 4 février. Cinquante-cinq ans après sa publication, To Kill a Mockingbird (Ne tirez pas sur l’oiseau moqueur, éditions de Fallois, 2005) aura bientôt une suite, écrite dans les années 1950 mais jamais parue. L’unique roman de Harper Lee, 88 ans, « a une place à part : chef-d’œuvre singulier de la littérature américaine, éternel best-seller, il a provoqué d’innombrables discussions dans les salles de classe sur l’injustice sociale et raciale », rappelle The New York Times.
Se déroulant dans une ville fictive d’Alabama, le récit met en scène le procès d’un Noir accusé à tort d’avoir violé une femme blanche et néanmoins condamné. Il a valu à la romancière un prix Pulitzer et une célébrité immédiate, qu’elle a cherché à éviter en se retirant dans sa ville natale de Monroeville, en Alabama.
Son éditeur a annoncé mardi 3 février la parution prochaine de Go Set a Watchman, un roman où l’on retrouve l’héroïne de To Kill a Mockingbird vingt ans plus tard, et dont le titre est inspiré d’une citation biblique : « Va et place la sentinelle. » Abandonné par Harper Lee avant la publication de son premier livre, le manuscrit, qu’on croyait perdu, a été retrouvé par hasard l’an dernier par l’une de ses amies.
Dans un article titré « La tristesse d’une suite », le site du magazine The Atlantic s’interroge sur les raisons qui ont pu pousser l’écrivaine à publier cet ouvrage aujourd’hui, rappelant qu’elle avait laissé entendre à plusieurs reprises par le passé qu’elle ne souhaitait pas faire paraître d’autre roman. « J’ai dit tout ce que j’avais à dire », avait-elle ainsi déclaré. The Atlantic se demande si la romancière a simplement changé d’avis ou si « elle [n’]a [pas] été traitée comme le sont tant d’auteurs décédés : comme des idées plus que comme des personnes, comme des marques et des affaires commerciales. »
Harper Lee quand George W Bush lui a remis la Presidential Medal of Freedom, le 5 novembre 2007. REUTERS/Larry Downing
Un nouveau roman de l’Américaine Harper Lee, Go set a Watchman (Partez établir une sentinelle), est annoncé pour cet été, 55 ans après le succès de To Kill a mockingbird (Ne tirez pas sur l’oiseau moqueur), qui lui a valu le prix Pulitzer en 1961. Mais si le livre peut à son tour devenir un best-seller, beaucoup se demandent si sa publication est réellement une volonté de l’auteur, comme le souligne le site Jezebel.
Seulement trois mois après le décès d’Alice Lee, qui protégeait les intérêts d’Harper Lee en tant que sœur et avocate, voilà qu’un manuscrit écrit il y a plus de 55 ans réapparaît entre les mains de la maison d’édition de l’auteure à succès. Pourtant, Harper Lee, dépassée par le succès de son unique roman, semblait déterminée à ne pas publier d’autres livres. De quoi rendre sceptique ses plus grands fans.
D’après le New York Times, Tonjia Carter, amie et avocate de l’écrivain, aurait découvert cet automne le manuscript de Go set a Watchman. Un récit qui se déroule vingt ans après To Kill a mockingbird mais aurait été écrit en premier. Marja Mills, une amie des sœurs Lee, est sceptique:
«J’ai quelques inquiétudes concernant les déclarations qui lui ont été attribuées.»
Marja Mills a elle-même eu des problèmes quand elle a voulu publier les mémoires d’Harper Lee en juillet 2014, The Mockingbird Next Door. L’auteure de 88 ans aurait dénoncé le livre de Marja Mills comme n’étant «pas autorisé», rappelle Gawker. Pourtant, Harper Lee avait bien signé une lettre dans laquelle elle déclarait donner son accord pour la publication de cet ouvrage.
En réalité, Harper Lee a souvent été confrontée à ce type de problèmes ces dernières années, toujours selon Gawker. L’auteure a souffert d’une attaque en 2007 et vit depuis dans un centre où elle est prise en charge. En 2011, Alice Lee avait écrit à Marja Mills:
«[Ma sœur] ne peut ni voir, ni entendre, et est susceptible de signer n’importe quel papier qui lui serait présenté par une personne en qui elle a confiance.»
Quant à Jonathan Burnham, vice-président des éditions Harper et éditeur de l’écrivain, il dit n’avoir jamais parlé directement à Harper Lee au sujet du nouveau livre et n’a communiqué qu’avec son avocate, Tanja Carter, et son agent littéraire, Andrew Nurnberg. La publication de Go set a Watchman, qui sortira en juillet à 2 millions d’exemplaires, n’est donc peut-être pas une volonté de son auteure.
Nelle Harper Lee, born in Monroeville, Alabama in the spring of 1926, was named, in a roundabout way, after her grandmother: “Nelle” is “Ellen” spelled backward. The writer’s father, A.C. Lee—the inspiration for Atticus Finch—called her “Nelle.” So did her friend from childhood, Truman Capote. So do the small group of people, past and present, who move in her intimate orbit.
To the rest of us, however, she is Harper. That’s because, when Nelle Lee published her first and (as yet) only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird—leading to, in short order, a Pulitzer, an Oscar-winning film, and a fame she didn’t ask for—the young writer didn’t trust the media not to mispronounce the name she’d spent her life with, the one she’d gotten from her grandmother, as “Nellie.”
So Harper Lee it was. And Harper, for most of us, it remains.
Lee, today, finds herself in a place she traditionally has not enjoyed occupying: the news. That’s because of the surprise announcement that To Kill a Mockingbirdwill have its long-awaited sequel: Go Set a Watchman, about the adventures of a grown-up Scout as she returns to Maycomb, Alabama, to visit Atticus. That a novel more than 60 years in the making would finally be published was the result, Lee said in a statement delivered through her publisher, HarperCollins, of some crazy serendipity: The book’s long-lost manuscript was discovered by her lawyer, the statement says, “in a secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.”*
Which is all, almost needless to say, a very big deal. (When the new novel was announced earlier today, apparently, “a series of screams” could be heard in the offices of Penguin Random House, Lee’s U.K. publisher.) To Kill a Mockingbird is beloved in ways few of its fellow curricular staples are. More than half a century after its original publication, it continues to sell more than a million copies a year; it’s been translated into more than 40 languages. Not only has it proven itself, repeatedly, to be on the right side of history; it also captures, in a way few books are able to, that particular feeling, smallness straining against bigness, that comes with being a kid. For many American children—myself, and possibly you, very much included—Mockingbird offered an early, easy exposure to justice and the lack of it. It eased us, through the charming person of Scout, into a truth we were alternately warned about and protected from: that life can be, without at all meaning to be, cruelly unfair.
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Mockingbird’s author is now 88 years old. She spent much of her adult life in New York City, living with the kind of strategic privacy that tends to get one labelled as “reclusive.” Recently forced to sell her Upper East Side apartment, she now lives in an assisted-living facility back in Monroeville—a 2007 stroke, a friend says, having left her “95 percent blind, profoundly deaf,” and bound to a wheelchair. « Her short-term memory, » he says, « is completely shot, and poor in general. »
Perhaps he is overstating Lee’s condition. Perhaps not. But it’s worth considering, either way, something that is both inconvenient and also indicative of the expectations we place on the small cadre of people we have elevated to the status of Author: that Harper Lee, née and known to those close to her as Nelle, spent the majority of her life not wanting Go Set a Watchman to be published. Or, at least, she has spent the majority of her life telling the media that she didn’t want Go Set a Watchman to be published. (She has had many opportunities to do so: In 2006, The New York Timeswrote a piece about her specifying “the three most frequently asked questions” associated with her name: “Is she dead? Is she gay? What ever happened to Book No. 2?”)
« Will success spoil Harper Lee? » a reporter asked.
« She’s too old, » Harper Lee replied.
« How do you feel about your second novel? » another asked.
« I’m scared,” Harper Lee replied.
At one point, Lee’s sister (and companion and caretaker and sometime legal adviser), known publicly as Miss Alice, claimed that a burglar had stolen the manuscript of Mockingbird’s spectral sequel. But Lee had many other explanations for why the anticipated novel failed to materialize. To a cousin: “When you’re at the top, there’s only one way to go.” To a bookseller: « I said what I had to say. » To a friend: “I wouldn’t go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill A Mockingbird for any amount of money.”
All that, human nature and media systems being what they are, only served to stoke the curiosity that swirled around a Second Novel From Harper Lee. As did Lee’s own reluctance to situate herself within fame’s familiar infrastructures. As The New York Timessummed it up: “Unmanageable success made her determined to vanish.” Lee’s repeated response to the interview requests of Charles Shields, who published an (unauthorized) biography of her in 2006, was « not just no, but hell no. » Lee once told Oprah Winfrey, over a (private) lunch, why she’d never appear on her show: While people tended to compare her to Scout, she explained, “I’m really Boo.” Lee did not, in the manner of some other literary “recluses,” fully withdraw from public view—she occasionally accepts awards and honorary degrees and the like—but she has insisted that her participation in her own publicity be mostly of a silent nature. In 2007, at a ceremony inducting four new members into the Alabama Academy of Honor, Lee declined a request to address the audience, explaining, “Well, it’s better to be silent than to be a fool.”
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Given all that, you have to wonder: Why end the silence? And why do it now?
Perhaps it really was as simple as a manuscript lost and recovered, serendipitously for all involved. Perhaps all those doubts Lee had previously expressed about the publication of a second novel were merely the results of the natural, but not invincible, anxiety that comes with that infamously fraught project. Perhaps Lee regretted having signed over her copyright of Mockingbird, and wanted something else she could call, in the fullest sense, truly hers. Perhaps Lee, approaching her 90s, figured that age will afford her what her attempts at a sheltered life could not: the easy relief of silence.
Perhaps she decided that she has not, after all, said all she has to say.
Or perhaps, having witnessed the rise of what Boris Kachka calls the “Mockingbird industrial complex” from afar, the writer wanted to bring a renewed kind of intimacy to her work. « I think it very undignified for any serious artist to allow themselves to be exploited in this fashion, » Truman Capote, in full frenemy mode, once sniffed of Lee’s work to promote the film version of her novel. Lee’s silence, after the initial heat of her fame dissipated, might indicate that she agrees.
Or perhaps Lee, alive but ill, is being treated the way so many deceased authors are: as ideas rather than people, as brands and businesses rather than messy collections of doubts and desires.
We won’t know. We can’t know. All we will have, in the end, is a book, a thing that will raise as many questions as it answers. And, for better or for worse, that is probably just how Harper Lee—Nelle to the small collection of people who really know her—would prefer things.
Have the standards for ‘Go Set a Watchman’ been set too high by the legend of Harper Lee?
‘Interstellar’ and other Hollywood movies fall into the same trap of expectation that could trip up Harper Lee
In news that delighted anyone who ever went to school, read a book or walked outside, “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee revealed Tuesday via her publisher that she had written another novel featuring Scout and Atticus Finch. “Go Set a Watchman,” penned in the 1950s, was recently discovered by the ailing writer’s attorney, would be published this year. It focuses on the main characters decades after the powder-keg events of “Mockingbird.”
As a rule, we don’t like seeing our favorite fictional characters grow up. Comparatively few remember “Jo’s Boys” (Louisa May Alcott’s follow-up to “Little Women” nearly two decades later) and most people might wish they could forget “Heidi Grows Up,” and that includes author Joanna Spyri, who was long dead when the translator “discovered” manuscripts on which to base the new book.
But the Lee news played differently. She and the book title jumped to the top of Twitter and stayed there all day. Fans and many in the book community gushed excitement. Even some of those who were skeptical — and given the timing of the discovery by the attorney, Tonja Carter, just a few months after the death of Lee’s sister and protector Alice Lee, there was plenty of reason to be — were still excited. “And yet, and yet. A new Harper Lee novel!” wrote Katy Waldman in Slate’s Browbeat blog. “May the Atticus Finch in our souls help us fashion our feelings into the right and appropriate response.”
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It was easy to understand the enthusiasm. There are two things that have been eternally true about Lee. Her writing about Scout Finch’s escapades is great, and there isn’t enough of it. This news spoke to both points. Here was an icon whose well was long thought dry now saying, essentially, “There’s more where that came from.”
That statement, of course, is common in another realm of pop culture. Hollywood often takes work from decades before and fashions new elaborations from it. And we’re usually duly skeptical.
What are authors saying about the upcoming Harper Lee novel?
That’s in part because such elaborations are the product of studio cynicism or laziness, not the result of there necessarily being something new to say. But it’s even true when a creator himself or herself revisits beloved characters. Oliver Stone’s return to Gordon Gekko decades later in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” didn’t exactly become a zeitgeist-burner, and there’s already a wary eye on “Mad Max: Fury Road,” in which George Miller returns to the Aussie action franchise 30 years after Tina Turner told us we didn’t need another hero.
Do we just cut writers more slack than filmmakers? Perhaps, but then that wouldn’t explain all the lukewarm receptions to all those literary sequels (toss Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer, Detective” into that category too).
Or is there something more specific going on with Lee?
The author has always been revered for her book, but she’s also been revered for another reason: She didn’t write another. The fact of one book and nothing more have lent her an air of mystery. More important, they allowed her to live in that rare space in which she, and we, never know the shoulder-slump of a follow-up.
That’s an especially potent phenomenon in the world of modern media, where the joy of anticipation is almost always preferable to the reality of consumption. Teased into a frenzy by the carefully doled out promotions of new movies and TV shows — and given just enough raw materials to build from them our own fantasy version — we can’t but be let down by the final product. A film trailer is often better than that which it is intended to promote. “Interstellar” is the best movie of the year until it comes out.
The way to avoid that trap is to not offer anything concrete, ever. That’s not easy to do for prolific, ambitious artists, but it’s essentially what Lee has done (possibly for other reasons — or possibly not, given that she’s reputed to have once said she didn’t publish another novel because there was nowhere to go but down). Lee has, in effect, given us the joys of absence , letting us remember how much we liked “Mockingird” so we can draw between the lines without any new colors to spoil the picture.
The announcement of a second book with only scant details of what it’s about actually plays right into this, since it gives us a few more crayons with which to keep coloring. Whatever we imagined Scout could be, would be, might be, will now be served up, and by the woman who gave us the pleasure of the character in the first place.
But much of what gets us excited will be lost when the new book actually comes out this summer. As exciting as it is to imagine that a work of “Mockingbird’s” lineage, and even quality, awaits, there’s also a precedent, in our movie theaters and on the page, that the adventures of beloved characters aren’t quite as good the next time around, in part because they’re never as good as the way we experienced them the first time.
True, “Watchman” was actually written during the same period as « Mockingbird. » In fact, Lee wrote it before “Mockingbird” (the latter was an attempt to satisfy the publisher who liked the flashbacks but didn’t care much for the adult Scout). That actually makes “Mockingbird,” in Hollywood terms, a prequel, just one that happened to be published 55 years before the original.
But it may not matter. A new Lee work comes into this world, after nearly six decades of fond memories, cultivated and grown unfettered. « To Kill a Mockingbird » as we experience is a great book, but it’s also a near-bulletproof fantasy of what a book and its author should be. And now it must be matched.
After the « Watchman » news broke, Time writer Anne Strauss wrote on Twitter: “Can Harper Lee’s second book outdo one of the best books ever? »
That’s a very high bar to set for any novel, and perhaps an even more fraught standard for someone who already sits on such a great perch. It’s possible “Go Set a Watchman” may turn out to be a great work of literature. But it will have some awfully stiff competition. Few books can outdo the one we’ve written in our minds.
Voir également:
Why Harper Lee remained silent for so many years
Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and then remained silent for 55 years, Philip Hensher examines the trouble with being a literary heavyweight
The Telegraph
Philip Hensher
03 Feb 2015
The professional lives of most novelists closely resemble each other. They write a novel; it is published; they embark on a round of publicity. They appear at literary festivals, where they garner a quarter of the audience of some television chef in the tent next door, and at signings in bookshops, with the aim of signing as much stock as possible.
Through it all, the novelist attempts to remain amusing, affable and patient. Three years later, he will publish another novel, and the whole experience repeats itself. As Samuel Beckett wrote in Worstward Ho: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
For some writers, however, the need to try again, to fail again, hardly arises. The extraordinary career – or perhaps non-career – of Harper Lee bears witness to a quite different way of conducting a writing life. She wrote one novel, an immediate classic and perhaps the best-selling novel of the 20th century, To Kill a Mockingbird. Since its publication in 1960, Lee has published no other book. A second novel, entitled The Long Goodbye, apparently came to an abrupt end on the day her agent, JP Lippincott, expressed an interest in her first. “Her pen froze,” he said.
Lee, who turned 85 in 2011, has not been entirely absent from the public record since, and her neighbours in Monroeville, Alabama, wouldn’t agree that she is a recluse, either. Politely refusing to talk to journalists since 1964 is not the same thing as withdrawing from society. Since that has been her policy, her agreeing to co-operate with a new literary biographer, Marja Mills, who claims to tell the true story behind her years of silence, is important and surprising news. Will this biography tell the whole truth? Can anyone ever really know why an author falls silent – even the author herself?
Lee came from one of the 20th century’s richest literary schools, the American South. Work by Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor examined the South’s flavour of intense, self-regarding decorum and passionately defended injustice and violence.
It is sometimes regarded as extraordinary that Nelle Harper Lee came from the same small town as another great Southern writer, Truman Capote – that, indeed, they were neighbours as children. Some have gone as far as to speculate wildly that To Kill a Mockingbird might actually have been a near-collaboration between the pair, as Capote’s documentary study In Cold Blood seems to have been.
The idea that a coincidence of implausible proportions would be needed to explain the emergence of two such gifted writers from a small place ignores how different their style is. It also ignores the way in which writers encourage, criticise, develop each other by proximity. That is true not just of Lee and Capote, but of Lee and the whole Southern school of novelists. She could hardly have predicted that she would quickly come to be seen as the epitome and climax of the grand Southern tradition.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a great novel and, unusually, was quickly made into a great film (Gregory Peck and his family subsequently became close friends with Lee). But then, everything stopped for Lee’s writing. She spoke in an early Sixties interview, the last she ever gave, of wanting “to leave some record of small-town, middle-class Southern life”, apparently thinking of the novels she wanted to write in the future.
What stays in the memory of To Kill a Mockingbird are the grand coups – Scout unknowingly deflecting a lynching, or the great moment when the Reverend Sykes, after the verdict, says to Scout: “Miss Jean Louise, stand up: your father’s passing.” But the rich texture of the novel comes from its loving delineation of the relationships and tensions in a small town. That is the direction she would have gone in, and what we have lost in her subsequent silence.
The novelist of social texture, of the quiet relationships between people, is perhaps one peculiarly vulnerable to the impact of fame. We have plenty of witnesses to Jane Austen’s personal modesty, the way in which she would hide her writing at anyone’s approach. A novelist who had become a celebrity would find it almost impossible to pursue their task of listening, of modest disappearance into the background, of observation. Some writers manage to tough it out; others find the weight of expectation impossible to manage.
The cynic would say that Harper Lee, with a novel which still sells millions every year, over half a century after its publication, hardly needed to go on writing anyway. Would she have wanted her career to work out like this? But writing is not like hedge-fund trading. The author who voluntarily retires from writing, after having made a pile, is a rare creature; it is the strangest of facts about Shakespeare that he stopped writing, apparently of his free will, at the height of his artistic powers after The Tempest, and retired to Stratford.
Much more common is the writer who is effectively destroyed by a single huge success. The burden of fame and acclaim weighs down particularly on the creative faculties. Ian McEwan has spoken of feeling, when he embarks on promotion of his books, like “an employee of his own former self”.
The task of balancing the awareness of past success with the necessary task of producing new work is not one that every writer can achieve. And, perhaps, these single huge successes are much harder to deal with when they come early on in a writer’s career, before they have learnt to, in Kipling’s words, “treat the two impostors” of triumph and disaster “just the same”. It’s striking that out of the four novelists, for instance, who have won the Booker Prize in the last 40 years with a first novel, none has so far managed to write a successful follow-up.
Lee has succeeded in protecting herself over the last half-century, and living a life which is of her choosing. In a rare statement recently, a letter to Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, she suggested how out-of-touch with modern life she has become: “In an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.” That detachment is, clearly, necessary to her. It is the paradox of the novel that it could not have been written by someone in love with literary fame; that the fame it achieved and deserved killed off any prospect of a succeeding masterpiece.
This piece was originally published in 2011. On February 3 2015, Harper announced that Go Set a Watchman, a novel the Pulitzer Prize-winning author completed in the Fifties and put aside, will be released July 14. Rediscovered last autumn, Go Set a Watchman is essentially a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, although it was finished earlier. The 304-page book will be Lee’s second, and the first new work in more than 50 years.
Voir encore:
Anne Boyd Rioux on The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee and J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist
Writers’ Private Lives
September 30th, 2014 reset – +
LITERARY BIOGRAPHERS POSSESS a position in our culture at once respectable and ignoble. If they are successful, they illuminate an author’s work, amplifying rather than diminishing it. If not, they can seem to reduce art to history, piggybacking on the creativity of more ambitious authors. They can be called parasites, vultures, or, in Henry James’s words, “publishing scoundrel[s].”
No wonder so many authors have gone to great lengths to hinder their would-be biographers, creating great bonfires of their correspondence or prohibiting quotations from their private papers. None of this has stopped the biographical industry, of course. The genre continues to thrive, even when confronted with paltry documentary evidence.
The bravest of biographers surely must be those who take on the lives of the undocumented. One thinks of Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra or Jill Lepore’s of Jane Franklin, Ben’s nearly vanished sister. In such cases, one expects the long-gone subjects wouldn’t mind being more fully understood — or simply remembered.
But what of those unwilling celebrities who wish simply to be left alone? Two new books tackle the lives of two of the most famous and, not coincidentally, most reclusive authors of the 20th century — J. D. Salinger and Harper Lee. The authors of the young adult classics The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird, respectively, both deliberately courted obscurity, retreating into what many have felt was an almost perverse silence. Their right to privacy has never been fully acceded by an American public hungry for not only their books but also their personalities.
The two quasi-biographies — Marja Mills’s The Mockingbird Next Door and Thomas Beller’s J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist — raise, for their readers, compelling questions about what we seek in the lives of authors, what relationship their lives have to their works, and what connections readers can claim not only to their famous novels but also to the authors themselves.
Mills calls her book a memoir and Beller’s is part of Amazon’s Icon series of short biographies, yet both exist somewhere in between. They might be called quest biographies (Leon Edel’s term), in which the writers’ search for their subjects, rather than the subjects themselves, takes center stage. Such an approach is usually born out of frustration with a lack of material. And although more traditional biographies have been written of both Lee and Salinger, with mixed results, it would seem that anyone approaching the lives of these two exiles from public life has little choice but to abandon a conventional approach to the form altogether. Unfortunately, after reading these two books, one feels less sure that a new form has been created than that the old one (biography) has simply been avoided. Mills, especially, seems so concerned about being considered an irresponsible biographer that she tries to avoid being a biographer at all.
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Mills’s book begins with what appears to be a bombshell. The author claims to have been a friend and neighbor of Lee and to have written the book under the “guidance” of Harper and her sister Alice Lee. Concerned about the imminent publication of Charles Shields’s unauthorized biography (published in 2006), Harper Lee “open[ed] up” to her, Mills writes. This is a promising beginning, indeed, signaling that the book perhaps could avoid the ethical questions of an unwilling subject.
But even before Mills’s book appeared on bookstore shelves, the story became more complicated. A signed statement from Harper Lee, now 88, was released denying any involvement with Mills’s project. For some, if Goodreads reviews are any indication, that alone makes it a deeply unsettling, and even unethical, book to read. Mills has suggested that the stroke Lee suffered in 2007 has something to do with her lack of memory about cooperating with the project. Alice, now 102, supports the project — she came out in support of Mills when the book deal with Penguin was first announced in 2011.
Alice ran interference for Harper throughout her years of seclusion. But it seems that by the time Marja Mills arrived on her doorstop in 2001, she had grown weary of silence. Alice invited the Chicago Tribune reporter in for a long chat, during which Mills’s reporter’s notebook got a workout, judged by the wealth of details she includes. But Mills wasn’t the only one Alice talked to. She also communicated with Shields, until Harper’s agent interceded, and allowed herself to be interviewed on camera for the 2011 documentary Harper Lee: Hey, Boo, which ran on PBS as part of its American Masters series.
A few chapters into The Mockingbird Next Door, it becomes clear that Alice was the driving force behind the family’s cooperation with Mills. She didn’t want to die without getting their family’s story out there. Harper met with Mills after her sister encouraged her to do so. Harper — or Nelle, as she is known — may have become friends with Mills, doing laundry with her and inviting herself over for cups of coffee after Mills moved in next door (with the sisters’ blessing, Mills says), but she kept most of what she said to Mills off the record. While Alice sat for hours of taped interviews over a period of many months, Harper became testy when Mills tried to pull out her notebook during their talks. At other times, when Mills’s questions got too personal, Lee would snap, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
Throughout, Mills was so concerned about offending Lee that she refrained from asking sensitive questions. Thus the most mysterious parts of Lee’s life — her sexuality, her relationship with her mother, her friendship with Truman Capote, her seeming lack of interest in writing another book after Mockingbird — remain fodder for speculation. Mills’s scrupulous attention to the Lee sisters’ wishes and her allegiance first of all to their friendship, while noble, make her a poor biographer. The one insightful quote from Harper Lee in the book (and there are very few direct quotes from her at all) is: “Truman was a psychopath, honey. […] He thought the rules that apply to everybody else didn’t apply to him.” This is a tantalizing statement that makes us miss, even more keenly, the inside story this book doesn’t offer.
What the book more than amply provides are the details of the ordinary life Harper Lee preferred to literary celebrity. Mills’s book picks up where Shields’s scrupulously researched biography left off, with the most recent years of Lee’s life, which one can’t help but feel didn’t really need to be so painstakingly documented.
Mills paints a portrait of the author that surely proves the adage that a writer’s life is generally pretty boring — but not because she spent her days at her typewriter. We see Lee feeding the ducks from a Cool Whip container, becoming puzzled by Super Bowl ads for erectile dysfunction, and ordering a salad at Burger King to try to lose weight. The banality of such details has been dismaying to some, who feel they diminish the author. To others, it is refreshing to see Lee as simply an ordinary person. But even taking the book on its own terms — Mills has described it as a glimpse into her brush with the great author — it is a pretty uneventful book. Nor do these details generate any illuminating insights about Mills herself. As a result, it disappoints as both memoir and biography.
A typical passage about Mills’s attendance with the Lee sisters at a Super Bowl party reads:
Before the game got under way, I grabbed another Diet Coke from the kitchen and took my place near the Crofts’ son Kenny. […] Kenny looked up at Nelle as she began to read aloud from Doris Jay’s “Rocky Hill News” column in that week’s Monroe Journal. This was, hands down, Nelle’s favorite part of the paper. The column detailed the comings and goings of an extended family who lived in the area known as Rocky Hill, southwest of Monroeville.
Mills then quotes Lee reading from the column at length, a series of uneventful events (dinners, visits, and doctor appointments) that sounds very much like the book Mills has written about Lee. All of this leads to Nelle breaking out in laughter that Mills describes as “the kind of affectionate amusement I’d come to recognize, an appreciation of what was both absurd and deeply human about this kind of thing.” But when the record of the ordinary is about someone as respected as Lee we don’t laugh; rather, we feel more like looking away.
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Banality is hardly the problem with J. D. Salinger’s life. The biography J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, written by Thomas Beller, a former New Yorker staff writer and creative writing professor, is full of interesting anecdotes that largely satisfy the reader’s appetite for an encounter with the man behind Holden Caulfield and the Glass family. The problem instead is Beller’s reticence to fully explore his subject’s life.
Beller’s biography begins, in fact, with the queasiness he felt about prying into Salinger’s private life. He nevertheless decides that Salinger’s death in 2010 loosened his moral grip on the letters he guarded so closely in life. The man is gone, but the letters and our “curiosity” remain. Somehow, the fact of Salinger’s death makes us feel less invasive than in the case of Harper Lee, but is that simply because he is no longer around to voice his objections?
Beller justifies his invasion of Salinger’s privacy by insisting that he is not simply one of the “Biography Corps, who speculate on why Salinger was up in the woods with all the nuance and insight of a two-year-old having a temper tantrum.” His quest is loftier than that. He is in search of the source of the elusive, “alchemical mix” that draws us to Salinger’s writing. But what exactly is the connection between the slippery fish of lived experience and the works that grow from it? It’s an admittedly difficult question, but in a biography as contemplative as Beller’s one would hope to see the issue at least explored if not fully answered. Unfortunately, Beller seems unwilling to go so far.
In his search for the Salinger behind his favorite works, Beller says he often felt as if he were “trailing a suspect through crowded streets and into a strange room, where all of a sudden I see someone I know.” That someone turns out to be at first his father, who was roaming the streets of Vienna at the same time (1937) as Salinger, and then himself. Although of a later generation, Beller feels his life intersecting with Salinger’s and that of his most famous creation, Holden Caulfield, in the landscape of New York and at The New Yorker magazine. Beller’s quest also takes him to Salinger’s summer camp (still in existence), to the Park Avenue apartment in which Salinger grew up, and to the Princeton Library to read some of his letters.
All of these excursions are narrated from Beller’s point of view, yielding not much more than his impressions and experiences. We are even further from Salinger when Beller visits his own eighth grade teacher, who once taught him The Catcher in the Rye. Readers will naturally grow impatient with such passages as well as the copious footnotes and asides, not to mention a strange bulleted list of reasons why someone might be mad at their neighbor. We are left feeling frustrated, as if a biographer’s shell game has led us not so much to the elusive object of our fascination but to Beller himself.
There are plenty of enticing vignettes to engage the reader along the way, however, such as the tidbit about how Carol Marcus, a friend of Salinger’s girlfriend Oona O’Neill, raided his letters to Oona for her own love letters to William Saroyan. All is revealed one day on Charlie Chaplin’s yacht when Saroyan starts raving about The Catcher in the Rye and “how this Salinger kid could really write.” Or there is the chapter about the author’s World War II experiences. Beller devotes considerable space to how Salinger, who helped to liberate Paris and as a Counter Intelligence agent was probably involved in the Nuremberg trials, brought home from the war a wife who happened to have been a low-level Nazi. This is all fascinating, until Beller later mentions only in passing that Salinger was also part of the landing on D-Day. Why Beller has chosen to ignore Salinger’s combat experience and its effect on his writing is a mystery. As elsewhere, his ad hoc and impressionistic approach leaves the reader yearning for a fuller, if not complete, treatment of the author’s life.
Thoroughness is also lacking in Beller’s approach to some of the more disturbing aspects of Salinger’s life. There are, for instance, his daughter’s allegations of his utter neglect of his family, his seduction of younger women, and his apparent inability to see women as more than sexual objects. But Beller doesn’t address the quandary he or any fan of Salinger’s fiction must feel. Can we simply ignore the unsavory parts of his personality that naturally induce queasiness of another kind? Beller, to his credit, doesn’t ignore them, but he cannot bring himself to comment on the sadism Salinger expressed toward women in a story he wrote around the same time he was dating (and losing) the beauty Oona O’Neill (daughter of the famous playwright Eugene). “My most generous assessment,” Beller writes, “is that this is the anguish, and rage, a guy feels when he is besotted with a beautiful woman who is already slipping away even when she is in your arms.” Yet what are we to do with the repulsion we feel upon learning that Salinger probably would have liked to burn Oona with a cigarette, as he has his character do in “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett”? By raising the possibility and then backing off from the disturbing questions it raises, Beller holds back from fully encountering the author of other works that have inspired almost hyperbolic devotion (including his own).
Here is the trouble with looking for ourselves in the writers whose works we admire, at least if we are proposing to be their biographers. For if we are in search of ourselves, or in this case our own troubled teenaged selves roaming New York, then we are apt to downplay those parts of the life that don’t correspond with that need for recognition.
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In the end, neither Beller nor Mills deserves the title of “publishing scoundrel.” They have been too respectful of their subjects for that. Perhaps that is why both of these writers leave us wanting more. Would we have them be what Salinger called the “shitty literary kids,” who elicited his wrath for prying into his life and the sources of his fiction? Yes and no. We would not have them cross the line into irresponsible gossip. Yet their guilt about being biographers at all has prevented them from truly engaging with their subjects and has left them — and us — stranded in some kind of no man’s land somewhere between biography and memoir without the satisfactions of either.
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Anne Boyd Rioux is a professor of English and author of a forthcoming biography of the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson.
This piece originally ran in July 2014. We are rerunning it with the announcement that Harper Lee is releasing a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird.
For Monroeville, Alabama, population 6,400 and shrinking, the summer of 2010 was momentous. Over a long July weekend, locals reenacted historical vignettes, held a silent auction, cooked a southern feast, and led tours of local landmarks. There was a documentary screening, two lawn parties, and a marathon reading of the novel whose 50th anniversary was the grand occasion. To Kill a Mockingbird, which needs no introduction — because it is the introduction, for most American children, to civil rights, literature, and the justice system — had sold nearly a million copies for each year in print. There were at least 50 other celebrations nationwide, but the epicenter was Monroeville, a place whose only real industry (the lingerie plant having recently shuttered) was Mockingbird-related tourism. It was not only the model for the novel’s fictional Maycomb but the home of its author, Harper Lee. She lived less than a mile from the festival, but she never came.
If our country had a formalized process for anointing literary saints, Harper Lee might be first in line, and one of the miracles held up as proof would be her choice to live out her final years in the small town that became the blueprint for our collective ideal of the Small Town. But at 88, the author finds her life and legacy in disarray, a sad state of litigious chaos brought on by ill health and, in no small part, the very community she always believed, for all its flaws, would ultimately protect her. Maycomb was a town where love and neighborly decency could overcome prejudice. To the woman who immortalized it and retreated to it for stability and safety, Monroeville is something very different: suffocating, predatory, and treacherous.
For much of her life, Nelle Harper Lee (known to friends as Nelle) spent more time in the comforting anonymity of New York than in the Monroeville redbrick ranch house her family had occupied since 1952. Then, in 2007, a stroke left her wheelchair-bound, forgetful, and largely deaf and blind — forced to sell her Upper East Side apartment and move into a Monroeville assisted-living facility. It was a loss but also a homecoming: For decades she’d relied on another local living legend, Alice Lee — her older sister, part-time housemate, and lawyer — to maintain her uneasy armistice with her hometown and her fame.
Alice, who retired two years ago at the age of 100, had inherited her partnership in the family firm from their father, A.C. Lee, the model for Mockingbird’s righteous lawyer, Atticus Finch. (Nelle calls her “Atticus in a skirt.”) The same family practice whose modest virtues are inculcated, via Mockingbird, to generation after generation of schoolchildren was charged with protecting the legacy of its author — a job that one of the best-selling novelists of all time wanted nothing to do with. Yet as both women passed into very old age, what should have been a peaceful and prosperous decline became a surprisingly turbulent decade, robbing Nelle of not just her health but old friends, her dearly held privacy, the town’s good will, and, for a time, the copyright to the book she sometimes wishes she hadn’t written.
It wasn’t just infirmity that kept Nelle from basking in those 2010 celebrations; it was disillusion. Allergic to both attention and commerce, she’d always found the Mockingbird industrial complex tacky and intrusive, but had managed to carve out a separate existence in its shadow. Now too many “well wishers” were stopping by her new apartment — including her literary agent, whom she eventually barred from the facility. (He’d already had her sign over her copyright.) Just a month before the anniversary, a family friend entered her room with a Daily Mail reporter in tow. The journalist flew back to London with an unflattering photo and a cruel 2,000-word profile to match. Monroeville had finally confirmed her fear that there really was nowhere to hide. She’d once explained to Oprah Winfrey, over lunch in a private suite at the Four Seasons, why she’d never appear on her show: Everyone compares her to Scout, the sweetly pugnacious tomboy who narrates Mockingbird. But as she told Oprah, “I’m really Boo” — Boo Radley, the young recluse in the creepy house who winds up saving the day.
Lee at a 2005 awards dinner in her honor. (Photo by Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images) Photo: Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images
By the time of Mockingbird’s golden anniversary, Nelle’s agent was denying in court that he represented her. The courthouse gift shop, “The Bird’s Nest,” was selling To Kill a Mockingbird onesies and car decals. A former next-door neighbor, Marja Mills, was working on a memoir called The Mockingbird Next Door — which came out this week, lifting the veil of Nelle’s privacy amid a confounding volley of statements between lawyers, sisters, and friends over whether and when she approved of the project. It was left to Alice’s successor in the family firm, Tonja Carter, to sort things out. Carter restricted Lee’s visitors and instituted lawsuits against not just the literary agent but also the courthouse museum. She nearly sued Marja Mills, too, and released a letter last week reaffirming Nelle’s objections — objections that her own sister, Alice, had claimed Carter had ginned up on her behalf. “It’s a terrible thing to happen toward the end of a person’s life,” says Thomas Lane Butts, a preacher who was among Lee’s best friends but hasn’t seen her in a year. Whatever Nelle’s intentions, Carter has upended the town’s delicate status quo, making as many enemies as headlines. Nelle never did like making headlines, even for the right reasons, but she did once love Monroeville.
* * *
In 1964, in one of her last interviews, Lee laid out her mission as a writer. “This is a small-town middle-class southern life as opposed to the Gothic,” she said. “I believe there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.” She concluded, joking, “All I want to be is the Jane Austen of South Alabama.”
Mockingbird plays on Southern Gothic, only to demystify it and mythologize the ordinary instead. Amasa Coleman Lee may have been, as his daughter said, “one of the most beloved men in this part of the state,” but he wasn’t Atticus Finch; he was a tax lawyer. He left his childhood farm in Florida, married a prominent village daughter (Frances Finch of Finchburg), and moved to Monroeville in order to manage the finances of the law firm of Barnett, Bugg & Lee, as it shortly became, a partnership of businessmen-attorneys who owned half the town. A.C. did try one criminal case, at age 29, defending two black men on a murder charge. He lost and they were hanged, pieces of their scalps mailed to the son of the victim.
Though Atticus defends a black man wrongly accused — and ultimately convicted — of rape, nothing quite so brutal happens in Mockingbird. And by making Atticus a widower, Lee also omitted a much more personal experience: her mother’s instability. According to Mills, Frances suffered a nervous breakdown after her daughter Louise failed to thrive. (The Lees had five children in five-year increments.) Dr. William Harper came to the rescue of both mother and baby, and Harper became their next child’s middle name. Truman Capote, Nelle’s best childhood friend, later described her upbringing as “Southern grotesque.” He claimed Frances had tried to drown Nelle in the bathtub. Lee denied it vehemently, and for all her rebelliousness — Butts once said she had “hell and pepper in her” — she never said a word against her family, in fiction or otherwise. In her work and life, madness is banished in the light of reason and authority.
A.C. passed his august authority on to Alice. During the Depression, she had to leave college but was quickly brought under her father’s wing and into his law firm. Nelle tried to follow the same path — attending the same girls’ college as Alice and then transferring to the University of Alabama, where she loved writing but hated her sorority and law classes. After a summer at Oxford University, she dropped out. She wanted to make a go, like her friend Truman, of living and writing in New York. A.C., who’d been paying for school, said she’d have to make it on her own.
In New York, Lee found a tight-knit replacement family. Capote introduced her to Broadway lyricist Michael Martin Brown and his wife, Joy. They hooked her up with an agent, Maurice Crain, and on Christmas, 1956, they gave her the gift her father wouldn’t: enough money to do nothing but write for a year. She remembered it later as “a full, fair chance for a new life.” Within five months, she had a draft of Atticus out on submission, and was already partway into a second novel when a Lippincott editor took it on.
Most of Mockingbird’s characters have real-life antecedents, and Scout’s delicate friend Dill is clearly Capote. He was Nelle’s first writing partner and her social fixer in New York, and Lee helped him research his true-crime classic, In Cold Blood. But Capote eventually spurned her. Rebutting his vicious gossip seems to have been one of Lee’s motivations for talking to Marja Mills. “They fled from the truth like Dracula from the cross,” Lee told Mills, meaning him and his aunt, whose memoir Lee claimed to have thrown into a bonfire. “Truman was a psychopath, honey.” Capote drifted away in a miasma of drugs and self-hatred — a cautionary tale of frustrated fame. His former best friend tacked fiercely in the opposite direction.
A.C. Lee was shocked by his daughter’s success. “It’s very rare indeed when a thing like this happens to a country girl going to New York,” he told a reporter. “She will have to do a good job next time.” He died in 1962, after meeting Gregory Peck but before seeing him play Atticus in Alan Pakula’s film. Nelle spent the next couple of years trying to write, but couldn’t shake the fear that there was, as her father had worried, nowhere to go but down. At one press conference to promote the movie, Lee’s humor was edged with tension. “Will success spoil Harper Lee?” asked a reporter. “She’s too old,” Lee said. “How do you feel about your second novel?” asked another. “I’m scared,” she said.
In the Monroeville courtroom she made famous. (Photo by Donald Uhrbrock/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images) Photo: Donald Uhrbrock/Donald Uhrbrock
In his unauthorized 2006 biography, Mockingbird, Charles J. Shields quotes Lee telling a friend, “I wouldn’t go into downtown Manhattan for the world.” Mills once made Lee a gift of E.B. White’s Here Is New York. Nelle “wept at the first sentence.” It reads, “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. » White later pictures “a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors.” After Mockingbird won acclaim and a Pulitzer, Lee felt observed by everyone — the whole world a small town. At least when she stayed in Monroeville, she had Alice.
By 1970, when her beloved agent died, there was no one else left — not Capote, not her parents. “The close circle she was relying on fell away over the course of a decade, and her tight Monroeville clique was practically all that remained,” says Charles Shields, who wrote the 2006 unauthorized biography, Mockingbird. “I think the Lees have kind of an old-fashioned notion,” he adds. “Keep your friends close to your breast with hoops of iron and rely on them. And the novel, being one of the most popular of the 20th century, makes tremendous demands that go well beyond their abilities.”
* * *
Maybe it wasn’t just Nelle’s insecurity that held her back from becoming “the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” but also the dismaying decline of the “small-town middle-class” idyll she’d staked her career on documenting. She had, after all, written a historical novel. To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed not in Monroeville but on an L.A. lot. There were — still are — remnants of Depression-era Monroeville, not least the old Federal-style courthouse. But even as the film came out, a drab new courthouse was being built next door. Downtown’s only movie theater burned down not long after Mockingbird had its first run, and was never rebuilt. In 1997, the city was dubbed “The Literary Capital of Alabama,” prompting Lee, who wasn’t consulted on the nickname, to remark, “The literary capital of Alabama doesn’t read.”
Harper Lee’s assisted-living apartment is on Highway Bypass 21, just a couple of blocks from the town’s real commercial center, a series of malls. There’s a place called Radley’s Fountain Grill down that way, and an old stone wall that once separated Lee’s childhood home from Capote’s — both long gone, replaced by a takeout shack called Mel’s Dairy Dream. Lee prefers the more generic places by the lingerie factory outlet (a remnant of the old Vanity Fair plant). Before her stroke, she could be found at Hardee’s, or better yet at McDonald’s, gulping down coffee during long chats with friends. (There were higher-end expeditions to the local golf club and to casinos on the Gulf coast.) When she watched an advance screening of the biopic Capote at a neighbor’s house — the Lees had no television — she opted for Burger King.
The site of Lee’s childhood home and the wall that once separated it from Truman Capote’s. (Photo by Maude Schuyler Clay) Photo: Maude Schuyler Clay
In 1961, Lee told Life that, unlike Thomas Wolfe, “I can go home again.” That’s debatable, as is the question of why Harper Lee chose to spend so much of her life in a town whose only claim to fame was her fame — a fame she claimed to despise. The Mockingbird Next Door dwells on rural trips out of town, fishing and duck watching and off-the-record country drives. (Romantic inquiries were “not up for discussion.”) Lee seemed to prefer the countryside to her hometown. “I was surprised that she was living here, to tell you the truth,” says Butts, who was often on those drives. “It’s like being in a fishbowl.”
Marja Mills’s astonishing access to Lee was the product of luck, both good and bad. Sent to Monroeville by the Chicago Tribune to find out what Harper Lee thought of Mockingbird being chosen for “One Book, One Chicago,” she expected to strike out. But, after a polite introductory letter, Alice not only answered the ranch house door but also secured her an audience with Nelle. On Mills’s second visit to town, Butts gave her his rationale for the sisters’ openness: “When she and Alice go, people are going to start ‘remembering’ things as they didn’t happen, or outright making things up, and they won’t be here to set the record straight. So keep taking notes, girl.” Mills suffers from lupus, and she had a flare-up just before leaving Monroeville again. Nelle claimed to be her mother-in-law so she could stay with her in the local hospital. Mills became an honorary member of “the old in a nation geared toward the young.”
In 2004, sapped by her illness, Mills decided to leave her job and try to write a book. She wound up moving in next door to the Lees, securing a $450 rental with the sisters’ help. Over endless coffees and drives, Nelle opened up enough to give a solid sense of herself: unconfident in her looks and therefore unconcerned; witty and garulous within the strict limits she sets for talk; conservative by northern standards; cranky and principled; moody but predictable.
Mills makes it clear in the book that she intended at first to write a broader Alabama history. Monroeville was confused, years later, by the news of a memoir. “I think that lady kind of pulled wool over their eyes,” George Jones, the 91-year-old town historian and gossip, told me. Mills says only very few friends knew just how much time she and the sisters spent together. The Lees, she says, “managed to have a parallel existence” within Monroeville — a smaller bubble within the bubble of a hard-to-reach county seat, apart from tourists and nosy locals alike.
One of Nelle’s friends, retired Auburn history professor Wayne Flynt, is skeptical of Nelle’s participation — but not Alice’s. “Alice wanted the family story told and Alice has an agenda, and I think Marja Mills fits that agenda quite well,” he says. “Nelle is afraid that telling the family story will be telling her story, and I can’t believe she cooperated.” He adds that, around that time, he tried to persuade Nelle to record a sealed oral history, and she flatly refused. Last Monday’s letter, signed by Lee, seems to confirm his impressions: “I was hurt, angry and saddened, but not surprised,” upon learning of Mills’s “true mission: another book about Harper Lee.” She concludes, “rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.” Butts says she may well feel that way now, but didn’t at the time. “There was no break,” he says — contrary to the letter’s claim — “until somebody talked to her, said she should oppose the book.” He says he witnessed Nelle insisting on putting personal things on the record.
Mills’s portrait is gentle almost to a fault, but her mission was to humanize Lee, not to lionize her. Butts warned Mills she might get angry late-night phone calls from Nelle: “She accuses people, chews them out. The alcohol fuels it.” Mills repeats speculation that drinking contributed to Lee’s abandoning a true-crime book in the ’80s. Overall, Lee comes off both plain and complicated. She can be paranoid, but often for good reason. In Monroeville, Mills writes, “information about Nelle was currency. It could be spent, traded, or saved for the right moment.” On Nelle’s earliest meeting with Mills, in a sweltering room at the Best Western, one of the first things she told the reporter was, “This is not the Monroeville in which I grew up. I don’t like it one bit.” Mills writes of Lee looking over a ravine. “Nelle suggested that perhaps she could toss all her belongings in there and burn them, preferably shortly before she died, so she wouldn’t have to worry about her personal things falling into the wrong hands. She was only half kidding.”
The case of Samuel Pinkus would make any writer paranoid. Pinkus had briefly run McIntosh & Otis on behalf of his ailing father-in-law — and Nelle’s longtime agent — Eugene Winick, but then suddenly left and took with him the estate-heavy firm’s most lucrative living authors, Mary Higgins Clark and Harper Lee. (No one knows exactly how he persuaded Lee to leave.) “It was an absolute betrayal,” Winick told me last year, “not only as an employee, but also as a family member.” The Winicks sought relief in mediation. Over the years, Pinkus set up a succession of corporations that, M&O’s and Lee’s lawyers claimed, were designed to avoid those debts. In the process of shifting around millions in royalties, Pinkus managed to take over Harper Lee’s copyright.
Lee’s 2013 complaint against Pinkus begins by describing her close ties to the agency: “Both Harper Lee and her sister trusted and relied on M&O virtually all the time since the publication of her famous novel.” That account elides a lot of drift. After Maurice Crain died, Lee was passed along to his wife, but by the time Pinkus was brought into the company, it was Alice whom Nelle counted on most of all. When Nelle heard the courthouse-museum was putting out a book called Calpurnia’s Cookbook, using the name of Mockingbird’s maid, Alice sent the letter that took it off the shelves. M&O never even heard of it.
While working on his biography, Charles Shields called M&O and couldn’t get any real answers about their prized client. Maybe they were just being protective, but Shields found a willing correspondent in Alice Lee. They had a few written exchanges about Lee family history, and things seemed to be opening up — until, one day in 2006, he received “an imperious letter” from Pinkus, by then her exclusive agent, warning him off any further contact with the Lee sisters.
* * *
In June of 2007, Lee had a lunch appointment with friends in New York. When she didn’t show up, they went to her apartment, and found her lying on the floor. She’d been there for more than a day. Even before the debilitating stroke, she’d had hearing problems and macular degeneration — been forced to accessorize her khakis and sneakers with glasses fitted with side panels. Now she went through months of rehab, gave up her New York apartment, and moved straight from the hospital into assisted living.
Around this time, she signed an assignment of copyright to Sam Pinkus — an act she later forgot. Her lawyer during this period was still officially her sister Alice, 94. Eventually, Tonja Carter began pressing Pinkus to give up his copyright. (She had, however, notarized a reaffirmation of Pinkus’s copyright — something she’s never explained.) Finally, in 2012, Nelle got her copyright back, but according to the lawsuit, Pinkus continued to instruct publishers foreign and domestic to pay royalties into one of several companies. It wasn’t until a New York litigation firm filed suit — a move that put the elusive Harper Lee all over the news — that Nelle was finally able to free herself of Pinkus. The case was settled last September.
In 2011, while Carter and Pinkus haggled, Penguin Press acquired The Mockingbird Next Door after a heated auction. The day after it was announced, Carter released a statement from Harper Lee: “Contrary to recent news reports, I have not willingly participated in any book written or to be written by Marja Mills.” Penguin Press responded by producing a statement, signed by Alice Lee, agreeing to participate. Few people paid attention when, a month later, the AP reported that Alice Lee now claimed that Carter’s statement was made without the sisters’ consent. That story concluded, “A woman who answered the phone at Barnett, Bugg declined comment and hung up on a reporter seeking comment.”
Carter, who reportedly has power of attorney over Lee, replied to one email — “I can correspond by email when and if I become available” — but never answered my questions. It isn’t clear exactly what spurred Lee — or Carter — to file for a trademark to Lee’s name and the title of her book early last year. The Monroe County Heritage Museum fought the trademark, and Lee’s lawyers responded last October by suing them. Like the Pinkus suit, this complaint alleged that the defendant was taking advantage of Lee’s ill health — in this case, by ramping up gift shop operations and naming their website tokillamockingbird.com. (Both the shop and the website are more than 15 years old.)
The complaint begins immediately with a dig at Monroeville: “Although the story was set in the 1930’s, her realistic and highly critical portrayal of Maycomb’s residents shone a harsh light on the attitudes of communities that were the focal point of the civil rights movement in the 1960s … The town’s desire to capitalize upon the fame of To Kill a Mockingbird is unmistakable: Monroeville’s town logo features an image of a mockingbird and the cupola of the Old County Courthouse.”
In May 1961, shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. (Photo: Bettmann/Corbis) Photo: Bettmann/Corbis
Seeking unspecified damages, the suit listed all the Mockingbird-branded items in the gift shop, including clothes for adults and children, tote bags, towels, “glass ware, plastic/acrylic tumbler glasses, seat cushions, car decals, coasters,” and a dozen other tchotchkes. It estimated 2011 museum revenue at more than $500,000, without mentioning that expenses were almost as high — the difference being just a bit more than the roughly $30,000 the gift shop earns annually. Nor did the suit mention that the museum is a nonprofit, or that Tonja Carter and her husband, a distant cousin of Truman Capote, own a tourist-filled restaurant across from the courthouse.
Museum attorney Matthew Goforth released a statement in October firing back: “It is sad that Harper Lee’s greedy handlers have seen fit to attack the non-profit museum in her hometown that has been honoring her legacy.” Whatever the merit of Goforth’s argument, it brought to mind something Lee told Mills: “Greed is the coldest of deadly sins, don’t you think?”
“I was shocked,” says Stephanie Rogers, executive director of the museum. “I tried to talk to the family and say, ‘let’s stop this.’” After that 50th-anniversary commemoration in 2010, she’d sent Nelle leftover cake (shaped like Mockingbird’s iconic knot-holed tree), and Nelle had written back thanking her “friends.” After last month’s settlement, the website URL has been changed, but all the Mockingbird knickknacks are still for sale. Once the trademark goes through, they’ll be licensed through Lee. The Mockingbird Next Door will be sold there, too.
Friends were hurt by both the lawsuit and notes from Carter informing them they could no longer visit Nelle. One of them, Sam Therrell, owns Radley’s Fountain Grill and recently resigned as a member of the museum’s board. “I don’t think Miss Nelle or Alice had anything to do with it,” he says. “It’s her agent and her local lawyer [Tonja Carter]. I don’t know what kind of relationship they entered into, how she ever became of counsel, and I don’t give a rat’s ass, to tell you the truth. It was stupid to let it happen, I can tell you that.”
Other friends do emphasize her lifelong ambivalence over Monroeville. “She never has liked the museum,” says Butts. “But a lot of her attitudes about things changed after the stroke. She becomes excitable in all sorts of ways.” It’s perfectly plausible for Lee to be against the book, against the town — even against her own sister — without being fully accountable. “Nelle Harper’s at this stage in her life,” says Butts, “at which she’s readily influenced about anybody who’s around her.” He doesn’t fault Alice for failing to safeguard Lee’s rights; he faults Nelle for never relying on anyone else. “She lived as if Alice would never die.”
In Monroeville, a chance to pose as Scout, Dill, and Jem. (Photo by Maude Schuyler Clay) (Photo by Maude Schuyler Clay) Photo: Maude Schuyler Clay
Wayne Flynt, the Auburn professor, trusts Carter and believes she’s just honoring Nelle’s sense of being fed up. “Monroeville is like most small towns in the South,” says Flynt, whose work focused on Alabama and poverty. “It’s wonderful because of its tremendous sense of curiosity and community, but it’s also nosy and intrusive. The world she wrote about is the world she now inhabits, with all the good stuff and the bad stuff.”
In responding to Lee’s new letter last week, Penguin Press released a handwritten letter Alice Lee wrote to Marja Mills in 2011. It read, in part: “When I questioned Tonja” — her onetime protégé, inheritor of A.C. Lee’s firm — “I learned that without my knowledge she had typed out the statement, carried it to [Nelle’s apartment], and had Nelle Harper sign it … Poor Nelle Harper can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence. Now she has no memory of the incident … I am humiliated, embarrassed, and upset about the suggestion of lack of integrity at my office.”
The letter signed by Nelle last week points out that “my sister would have been 100 years old” when she wrote those words. Butts insists Alice was “bright as a penny” — at least back then. Around the time of that letter, Alice stopped visiting the office regularly. She had a fall, then contracted pneumonia and began to decline. She moved out of the Lees’ redbrick ranch house and into a different assisted-living facility. Whatever Wayne Flynt’s suspicions about Marja Mills, he agrees with Nelle’s latest biographer on one point: Silence has not served Nelle Harper Lee. “In the absence of her being willing to talk, the only versions we’ll ever have are other people’s versions.”
The publisher of the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird has announced that the book’s reclusive author Harper Lee will publish her second novel 55 years after the first was released to global acclaim, reports the Associated Press. Harper, a subsidiary of the publisher HarperCollins, said in an announcement seen by the Associated Press that the 304-page novel Go Set a Watchman will be published July 14. The question now is whether fans of the original novel should actually read the new book, or if it could color their perception of Mockingbird in ways they might not appreciate.
The book is essentially a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird but was technically written first. Lee completed the book during the 1950s and when she shopped it around to publishers, it was suggested that she start over focusing on the childhood memories of the narrator Scout. Go Set a Watchman sees an adult Scout returning to her hometown of Maycomb, Ala., roughly 20 years after the events in Mockingbird.
“Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus,” the publisher’s announcement reads, per the AP. “She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.”
Lee won a Pulitzer Prize and adoration from generations of readers for Mockingbird, but the author hasn’t published another book since 1960 and has only done a handful of interviews in the interim. Harper made it clear it is unlikely Lee will do press to promote the new book.
Fans are looking at this announcement with some mixed feelings. At first, of course, it’s exciting to hear that this beloved author is releasing new writing about the characters millions of readers have come to know and love. Mockingbird is not just a classic work of literature, it’s also the book that teaches many about civil rights, the court system, the South, and morality when it’s assigned in elementary or middle school. It’s one of those books that can be enjoyed by anyone at any age, from a grade-school student to a college literature professor, and each time you read it, you get something different from the story. The book is so meaningful to so many people that news of more information, more stories about the beloved Scout and Atticus might seem like a cause for celebration, but is it?
Some are already questioning the motives behind the decision to publish this supposedly lost work now. An article from New York Magazine explains how Lee’s later years have been marked by ill health and being taken advantage of by her attorneys and others that are supposed to be helping her. Lee’s sister Alice served as her protector and adviser for many years until Alice passed away late last year. Jezebel has pointed out, as others surely will, that it seems suspicious that such an announcement would be made so soon after Alice’s passing. It seems fairly likely that Harper Lee didn’t want this book published just as she didn’t want any more of her other writing published, and now that Alice is gone, lawyers and literary agents can take advantage of Harper’s weak mind and ill health.
In addition to the questions surrounding the circumstances of the book’s publication, Go Set a Watchman has a lot to live up to as a work of literature. Even though it was technically written first, this book will have to live in the shadow of Mockingbird, a shadow so dark that it prevented Lee from writing another book in her lifetime. New York Magazine quotes Lee at the press conference to promote the classic film adaptation of Mockingbird starring Gregory Peck as saying, “I’m scared,” when asked how she feels about writing another book. That fear, in addition to her own eccentricities, has kept her from releasing any other writing despite publishers, fans, family, and friends all hounding her for it. And maybe the memory of Mockingbird was better served that way.
If Go Set a Watchman is subpar — and what wouldn’t be subpar in comparison to Mockingbird? — then it could be a huge disappointment for fans. Reading Go Set a Watchman will change the reader’s interpretation of Mockingbird by telling us about what Scout and Atticus are like 20 years later. Perhaps readers have their own ideas about what ended up happening to the Finch clan, or maybe you think part of the book’s perfection is how it’s encapsulated in those few years of Scout’s childhood. Either way, bleeding outside the boundaries of Mockingbird will make the new book change the reader’s perception of the original, whether they want it to or not.
The fact that this is sort of an original draft of Mockingbird and not a later attempt on Lee’s part to write a prequel that just never got published is encouraging when considering its potential literary value. Watchman was good enough that publishers saw the promise in it even from an unknown young writer back in the 1950s, another sign that the book is actually quality writing and not just something that’s being published because it has Lee’s name on it. Given Lee’s highly reclusive nature, we really don’t know if she was a true literary one-hit wonder and only had one great book in her, or if she’s had volumes of wonderful stories in her mind that she’s been unwilling to share, publish, or maybe even write down. This is a chance to finally find some answers to a few of the greatest literary questions of the past century, but with reading this new work comes taking a chance on changing our understanding of the original, for better or for worse.
Two and a half months after the death of Harper Lee’s sister (and lawyer) and 55 years since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, HarperCollins has announced the summer release of Go Set a Watchman, the elusive author’s second novel.
According to the New York Times, Go Set a Watchman « takes place 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird:
Though it’s effectively a sequel, Ms. Lee actually wrote » Go Set a Watchman » first. The 304-page novel takes place in the same fictional town, Maycomb, Ala., and unfolds as Scout Finch, the feisty child heroine of « To Kill a Mockingbird, » returns to visit her father, Atticus.
Sadly, this news is not without controversy or complications. Harper Lee’s sister Alice Lee, who ferociously protected Harper Lee’s estate (and person) from unwanted outside attention as a lawyer and advocate for decades, passed away late last year, leaving the intensely private author (who herself is reportedly in ill health) vulnerable to people who may not have her best interests at heart.
Tonja Carter, Harper Lee’s attorney since Alice Lee retired at the age of 100, acknowledges that the author—who was left forgetful and nearly blind and deaf after a stroke in 2007—often doesn’t understand the contracts that she signs. « Lee has a history of signing whatever’s put in front of her, apparently sometimes with Carter’s advice, » Gawker’s Michelle Dean reported last July.
« The existence of ‘Go Set a Watchman’ was unknown until recently, and its discovery is an extraordinary gift, » said HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham in a statement.
But was the gift willingly given?
« After much thought and hesitation I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication, » Lee said in a statement of her own. « I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years. »
That might seem like confirmation of Lee’s willing involvement in Go Set a Watchman’s publication, except for the fact that we know about Lee’s messy relationship with her attorney (who, again, often gets her to sign things that she doesn’t understand) and Lee’s own publicity-shy character.
Lee once told Oprah over (a non-televised) lunch that she hated being compared to To Kill a Mockingbird’s spunky protagonist Scout Finch. « I’m really Boo, » she said, referring to the reclusive hero whose actions—by the grace of Atticus Finch (and the benevolent Heck Tate)—were allowed to go unpublicized.
In the past, Lee affectionately referred to her sister Alice as « Atticus in a skirt. » Not just because she was an amazing lawyer, but because she was the protector who shielded Harper Lee from the publishing world and press attention that she was so adamantly repelled by. But now Alice—her Atticus—is gone and an unhealthy and unstable Lee must alone face the publishers, interviewers and literary agents that she’s spent her entire life avoiding.
December 25th, 2014
BOOKS ARE EVERYWHERE in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, beginning with the opening shot. The camera, gliding slowly across the length of the bookshelf, lingers over several titles, and lingers as well over a toy space shuttle, also sitting on the bookshelf, gathering dust.
The dust is of course no ordinary dust, but shorthand for everything that is wrong with the planet. Nolan admires Ken Burn’s documentary about the 1930s, The Dust Bowl, and uses the same interview format, lining up eyewitnesses to testify to a succession of crop failures. This is not the 1930s, though, but a Dust Bowl redux, happening in the near future. Even though climate change isn’t explicitly mentioned, the cough-inducing and crops-destroying dust storms do a good job giving us a taste of the extreme weather and severe infectious diseases projected by climate scientists. Wheat and rice are gone at this point. The last crop of okra ever grown on the planet has already been harvested. The only thing left is corn, but even this is on its way out, threatened by blight that replaces the earth’s oxygen with nitrogen. Probably one more generation of humans will survive; after that, mass extinction.
The secretly operating NASA hopes to transport the earth’s population to a different home, in a different galaxy — by way of a wormhole, suddenly detected near Saturn and apparently put there by intelligent aliens. The Lazarus mission has already used that opening and gotten out and found three promising planets, so NASA is now sending the Endurance, led by ex-pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), to decide which one is habitable. As the spaceship lifts off, mission head Professor Brand recites these lines from Dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
These lines will be recited three more times before the ending shakes off that “good night” once and for all, so it is fair to say that, as much as Interstellar has touted its grounding in science — the Caltech astrophysicist Kip Thorne was on board as consultant and executive producer — the film is grounded perhaps more fundamentally in literature, underwritten by a poetic license that might turn out to have mathematics as one of its scripts.
Interstellar is bookish to a fault. More than one critic has railed against its wooden, at times excruciating dialogue (lines such as the by now notorious “Love is the one thing that transcends dimensions of time and space,” spoken by Anne Hathaway playing Amelia Brand, daughter of Professor Brand; or “Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face,” spoken by Dr. Mann when he is roused from his deep sleep on the forbidding planet where he has been stranded). That is one form of bookishness: the characters here are simply the conduits for the printed words that must have been in the heads of the two screenwriters, Chris Nolan and his brother Jonathan; treatises on mysticism and psychology that they seem bent on injecting into the film, on the same footing as the mathematical equations, which are also very much in evidence.
Those very equations, however, point to another sense in which Interstellar might be said to be bookish. These are actual, astrophysical equations, but as seen on screen, line after line, covering the entire blackboard, they actually look like an exotic script, an alien language hardly anyone can read. This is what math is to 99.99 percent of moviegoers: mysterious and never to be understood. Data from the black hole might indeed be the thing needed to unify relativity and quantum mechanics, and allow humans to exit the earth’s gravitational field, but we wouldn’t know just by looking at those arcane squiggles. Math is akin to magic in this sense: it is a universe unto itself, embedded in the quotidian one we know but not accessible to most of us. It is also a lot weirder, with a lot more room for otherwise inexplicable phenomena. What is unthinkable elsewhere is entirely thinkable here.
Such as reverse time travel, the ability of future generations to reach back and engineer events of the past. Those intelligent aliens who planted the wormhole turn out to be none other than our own highly evolved human descendants, existing in five dimensions, and giving rise to narrative time lines equally convoluted. In one sense this is familiar Nolan territory: flashbacks and obsessive crosscutting are nothing new; they have always been his signature style. Beginning with his first film, Following (1998), and continuing through Memento (2000) and Inception (2010), the human mind for Nolan has always been a labile, multidimensional space, rotatable at 90, 180, and 360 degrees. This shape-shifting and ever-receding labyrinth is the logical backdrop for time that flips over, or goes backward. Nolan says that his fondness for reverse chronologies comes from growing up in the age of VHS and being able to watch movies over and over again, taking them apart differently each time. “You’re making films that are going to be watched more than once,” he says. “People are going to watch them in a different way. They’re going to have a different relationship to that narrative.” Films like Memento and Inception internalize these serial disorientations and turn them into a Möbius strip of the mind.
Interstellar is a little different. Reverse chronology here is not housed in the mind, as the labyrinth of memory, but projected outward into the vastness of the cosmos, as the weird, seemingly nonsensical, but entirely mathematical space-time of relativity and quantum mechanics. This kind of math has an objective correlative: the tesseract, a four-dimensional analogue to the three-dimensional cube. The word, from the Greek τέσσερεις ακτίνες (“four rays”), was first coined and used in 1888 by Charles Howard Hinton in A New Era of Thought, a nonfictional work about the fourth dimension. In its later incarnations, the term would sometimes morph into a more graspable form — in the Marvel Universe, for example, it is simply an Infinity Stone, an object of extraordinary power. Nolan goes back to the earlier, weirder version, giving us a four-dimensional continuum that physicalizes time as vehicular space. It is this that allows Cooper to go back several decades and haunt his own house as a ghost, sending cryptic messages written first in dust, and then in Morse code, providing his now-grown daughter Murph (Jessica Chastain) with the necessary data to create a unified theory of physics. Humanity is saved, and Cooper himself gets to go home in the flesh, 124 years old in earth-time but not aged at all, having spent only a few hours on the time-dilated planet. His daughter, 10 years old when he left, is now on her deathbed, an old woman over 90.
According to Wired, Nolan’s tesseract is a visualization of the equations of Kip Thorne, “the product of a year of work by 30 people and thousands of computers.” It is telling, though, that this high-tech, high-concept cosmic marvel should have more than a passing resemblance to the internal mental architecture of Inception. It is telling, as well, that the “bootstrap paradox” that results, by which a chicken sends an egg back in time to be hatched into the chicken that it becomes, is not at all unique to this film but a staple of the science fiction genre, beginning with Robert Heinlein’s story “By His Bootstraps” (1941), and used to great effect by Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, before showing up in The Terminator series and Doctor Who.
There’s a reason why that toy space shuttle is sitting on a bookshelf. Mathematics might be the movie’s operating system, but what powers it is a poetic license of a fairly old-fashioned kind, often running a parallel program of allegory, perhaps to match the director’s equally old-fashioned commitment to shooting on 35 mm and 70 mm film. The film “is about human nature, what it means to be human,” Nolan says. And so the villain is named Dr. Mann, while one of the legible titles on the bookshelf is Ted Morgan’s biography of Somerset Maugham, best known for his best-selling, human-nature-probing novel Of Human Bondage. The other books are not so clearly allegorical; still, their plots tell us something — Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, Isabel Wolff’s Out of the Blue, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, Curtis Oberhansly and Dianne Oberhansly’s Downwinders — all back-trekking narratives with a past that is malleable, visitable, and changeable. And presiding over them all is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, that circular, multigenerational, and counterintuitive novel that gives magical realism its classic definition.
Interstellar is not quite magical in that sense, although there is considerable magical thinking here as well, making it almost an anti-cli-fi film, holding out hope that the end of the planet is not the end of everything. It reverses itself, however, when that magic falls short, when the poetic license is naked and plain for all to see. In those moments, it suddenly dawns upon us that the ocean that rises up 90 degrees and comes at us like a wall is not just a special effect on some faraway planet, but a scenario all too close to home.
¤
Wai Chee Dimock is the William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University.
Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn’t know how? I must have learned from having been read to by my family. My sisters and brother, much older, read aloud to keep me from pestering them; my mother read me a story every day, usually a children’s classic, and my father read from the four newspapers he got through every evening. Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggily at bedtime.
So I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and The Mobile Press. Early signs of genius? Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often — movies weren’t for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We’re talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression.
Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store’s books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another’s entire stock. There were long dry spells broken by the new Christmas books, which started the rounds again.
As we grew older, we began to realize what our books were worth: Anne of Green Gables was worth two Bobbsey Twins; two Rover Boys were an even swap for two Tom Swifts. Aesthetic frissons ran a poor second to the thrills of acquisition. The goal, a full set of a series, was attained only once by an individual of exceptional greed — he swapped his sister’s doll buggy.
We were privileged. There were children, mostly from rural areas, who had never looked into a book until they went to school. They had to be taught to read in the first grade, and we were impatient with them for having to catch up. We ignored them.
And it wasn’t until we were grown, some of us, that we discovered what had befallen the children of our African-American servants. In some of their schools, pupils learned to read three-to-one — three children to one book, which was more than likely a cast-off primer from a white grammar school. We seldom saw them until, older, they came to work for us.
Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.
And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.
The village of my childhood is gone, with it most of the book collectors, including the dodgy one who swapped his complete set of Seckatary Hawkinses for a shotgun and kept it until it was retrieved by an irate parent.
Now we are three in number and live hundreds of miles away from each other. We still keep in touch by telephone conversations of recurrent theme: « What is your name again? » followed by « What are you reading? » We don’t always remember.
L’autodafé géant est passé totalement inaperçu. Les combattants de l’organisation Etat islamique auraient envahi la Bibliothèque centrale de Mossoul et le Musée. Bilan: des centaines de manuscrits, des œuvres antiques et des vieux journaux détruits et incendiés.
C’est une information d’Alarabtv (lien en arabe), qui relate avec force détails ce qui pourrait être le plus grand autodafé de l’Histoire. Cette information Associated Press mise en ligne le 1er février n’a pas été encore confirmée par les autorités. Selon Alarabtv, courant janvier, des combattants de Daech auraient pris possession de la Bibliothèque centrale pour «assainir» les fonds documentaires. Selon les habitants, ils auraient emmené avec eux dans six pickups plus de deux milles livres pour les détruire. Etaient concernés, les livres pour enfants, de poésie, de philosophie, de santé, de sport et de sciences, ainsi que les journaux datant du début du XXe siècle, des cartes ottomanes et des collections privées offertes par les vieilles familles de Mossoul. Seuls les livres traitant de l’islam auraient été épargnés.
Désobéissance à Dieu
Un homme en tenue afghane aurait harangué la foule : «Ces livres appellent à la désobéissance à Dieu, ils doivent être brûlés.» Les assaillants auraient ensuite mis le feu aux documents devant les étudiants. «Les extrémistes ont déjà commencé à détruire les livres dans les autres bibliothèques publiques de Mossoul le mois dernier (janvier, NDLR) », témoigne un professeur d’histoire de l’Université de Mossoul. Selon lui, les préjudices touchent les archives d’une bibliothèque sunnite, celle de l’Eglise latine et le monastère des Dominicains.
Les combattants de Daech s’en sont ensuite pris à la bibliothèque du Musée de Mossoul et ont détruit des œuvres datant de 5.000 ans avant Jésus Christ. Daech «perçoit la culture, la civilisation et la science comme des ennemis féroces», remarque le député irakien Hakim Al Zamili.
Les bibliothèques de Mossoul avaient déjà subi deux pillages : en 2003 avec la chute de Saddam Hussein et en juin 2014 lorsque les djihadistes ont pris le contrôle de la ville. De nombreux manuscrits ont été exportés clandestinement. Les Dominicains, eux, avaient commencé à numériser les manuscrits dans les années 90.
VACCIN. Les autorités sanitaires américaines et le président Barack Obama ont lancé ces derniers jours un vibrant appel à la vaccination face à la crainte d’une épidémie étendue de rougeole dans le pays, certains parents estimant toujours que ce vaccin est dangereux. La maladie, censée être éradiquée aux États-Unis depuis 2000, est réapparue en décembre 2014 en Californie. Le foyer de l’épidémie a été localisé dans le parc d’attractions de Disneyland.
102 cas de rougeole
Depuis, 102 cas de rougeole ont été recensés dans 14 États américains, selon les Centres de contrôle et de prévention des maladies (CDC) fin janvier 2015. Les CDC ont précisé que la plupart des malades n’avaient pas été vaccinés. « Nous sommes très inquiets du nombre croissant de personnes qui pourraient être infectées par le virus de la rougeole et de la possibilité d’une importante épidémie dans le pays », a déclaré ce week-end le directeur des CDC, le Dr Tom Frieden, insistant pour que tous les parents fassent vacciner leurs enfants.
Le retour en force de cette infection aux États-Unis coïncide avec la tendance de certains parents de refuser de faire vacciner leurs enfants car ils craignent que ce triple-vaccin (rougeole, oreillons et rubéole) ne soit responsable de l’augmentation des cas d’autisme. D’autres personnes refusent la vaccination, en général pour des raisons religieuses ou politiques. Cette controverse remonte à la publication d’un article biaisé dans la très sérieuse revue médicale britannique le Lancet en 1998, qui ne s’est rétractée sur le sujet qu’en 2010. Les médias ont également été critiqués pour s’être largement fait l’écho de cette recherche frauduleuse.
TRANSMISSION. La rougeole est très contagieuse car elle se transmet par voie aérienne. Elle provoque des accès de fièvre et des éruptions cutanées. Les cas les plus graves peuvent entraîner une pneumonie ou une encéphalite et être mortels. Les États-Unis ont enregistré 644 cas de rougeole dans le pays en 2014, un nombre sans précédent depuis 2000. Il y avait eu 173 cas en 2013, et une petite soixantaine par an dans les années précédentes.
Des croyances infondées
DÉMENTI. Pourtant de nombreuses études scientifiques très sérieuses ont clairement démenti tout lien avec l’autisme ou tout autre risque sanitaire. Selon le Dr Anne Schuchat, responsable de la vaccination aux CDC en 2014, les parents de 79 % des enfants non-vaccinés avaient demandé aux autorités de leur État d’être exemptés de la vaccination sur la base de leurs convictions. Cette situation explique que le taux de vaccination contre la rougeole aux États-Unis ne dépasse pas 92 %.
Le président Barack Obama a fait peser toute son autorité dimanche 31 janvier 2015 pour convaincre les parents sceptiques d’ignorer ces croyances infondées. « Je sais qu’il y a des familles qui sont parfois inquiètes des effets de la vaccination mais vous devez savoir que la science est vraiment indiscutable », a-t-il déclaré sur la chaîne de télévision NBC. « Nous avons examiné cela de nombreuses fois et il n’y a aucune raison de ne pas se faire vacciner », a insisté M. Obama. La question de la vaccination contre la rougeole a agité la sphère politique, surtout parmi les candidats républicains potentiels à la présidentielle de 2016. Pour ces prétendants, l’exercice est délicat car ils ne veulent pas s’aliéner la frange de leur électorat ultra-conservateur qui pour des raisons religieuses ou par pure conviction politique rejettent l’obligation de la vaccination.
La carte des théories révisionnistes épouse parfaitement celle de l’antiaméricanisme dans le monde.Claude Moniquet
Il existe – et c’est éclairant – une thèse opposée, que j’appellerai la thèse du complot, selon laquelle il suffirait, pour expliquer un phénomène social, de découvrir ceux qui ont intérêt à ce qu’il se produise. Elle part de l’idée erronée que tout ce qui se passe dans une société, guerre, chômage, pénurie, pauvreté, etc., résulte directement des desseins d’individus ou de groupes puissants. Idée très répandue et fort ancienne, dont découle l’historicisme ; c’est, sous sa forme moderne, la sécularisation des superstitions religieuses. Les dieux d’Homère, dont les complots expliquent la guerre de Troie, y sont remplacés par les monopoles, les capitalistes ou les impérialistes. Je ne nie évidemment pas l’existence de complots. Ceux-ci se multiplient même chaque fois que des gens croyant à leur efficacité accèdent au pouvoir. Cependant, il est rare que ces complots réussissent à atteindre le but recherché, car la vie sociale n’est pas une simple épreuve de force entre groupes opposés, mais une action qui se déroule dans le cadre plus ou moins rigide d’institutions et de coutumes, et qui produit maintes réactions inattendues. (…) Or, selon la théorie de la conspiration, tout ce qui arrive a été voulu par ceux à qui cela profite.Karl Popper
Vigipirate, en lui-même, c’est une énorme blague. (…) Les règles d’engagement de vigipirate ne nous permettent pas d’avoir de réelles possibilités d’action en cas d’attaque terroriste (…) parce que si on est attaqué avec un couteau, on doit avoir une réponse proportionnée, donc on peut pas utiliser nos armes. (…) Les munitions sont sous cadenas. Et si jamais quelqu’un tire, donc il faut qu’on demande l’autorisation au lieutenant pour ouvrir le feu. Et il faut qu’on déplombe nos armes. (…) parce que les armes sont plombées. Et qu’on charge l’arme. (…) Parce qu’il n’y a que le chef de patrouille qui a le droit d’avoir l’arme chargée. (…) Il n’y en a qu’un qui a son arme chargée. Et ça dépend du niveau d’alerte. Et on n’a pas les armes chargées. (…) Donc le temps qu’on charge, qu’on arme notre arme, nous, on est mort. (…) C’est juste pour un effet de presse, un coup de pub. (… ) On se faisait insulter, on se faisait cracher dessus, on n’avait pas le droit de bouger le petit doigt. Nicolas (ancien militaire)
The heavily armed soldiers who protect Jewish institutions (…) are soldiers, not police, and so not trained to be alert to street problems. They tend to get distracted by their smartphones or pretty girls passing by. They clutch their assault rifles across their bodies, which leaves them vulnerable to someone driving by and shooting at them. As confirmed by today’s attack, the ostensible protection they offer actually provokes Islamists and other antisemites. They are only posted temporarily to the Jewish institutions in the aftermath of the Hyper Cacher attack a month ago and before long will leave. They protect only the institutions themselves, not the people who come and go to them, who remain as vulnerable as ever. In short, the soldiers are sitting ducks whose deployment does little to protect the Jewish community or solve the larger problem of Islamist violence. But it does offer another instance of emotionally satisfying « security theater » which temporarily gives everyone a constructive sense of doing something. Daniel Pipes
Just a few hours after the massacre at the offices of satirical French paper Charlie Hebdo, members of the far-right and far-left in Europe and America quickly decided who was responsible: the Mossad. Writing on her Facebook page, Greta Berlin, organizer of the 2010 Gaza flotilla and co-founder of the Free Gaza movement, argued that the attack was Israeli retribution for France’s recognition of a Palestinian state (…) The idea that Israel carried out the massacre became so widespread that it was picked up by a more reputable publication, the International Business Times, which gave a respectful airing to the possibility in a piece titled “Charlie Hebdo Attack and Mossad Link: Is Israel Venting Its Fury For France’s Recognition of Palestine State?” After public outcry from readers and journalists, the article was taken down and replaced with a forthright apology deeming the piece “beneath our standards” and a “basic lapse in judgement.”Tablet
En ce qui nous concerne, nous autres Arabes, nous pouvons dire : « Bienvenue au club ! » Car les théories du complot sont presque une marque de fabrique de nos cultures nationales. Bienvenue dans un monde où à peu près tous les régimes et à peu près tous les acteurs politiques en ont usé pour assurer leur longévité. Ce qui a engendré la tyrannie. Le principal intérêt de cette façon de présenter le monde est que, finalement, personne n’est jamais responsable de ce qui arrive, si ce n’est une « cinquième colonne » ou les « mains du sionisme et de l’impérialisme » ou encore des « Croisés ». Bref, nous n’exportons pas seulement notre terrorisme mais aussi la théorie qui va avec ! Dala Al-Bizri
L’image correspondait à la réalité de la situation, non seulement à Gaza, mais en Cisjordanie. Charles Enderlin (Le Figaro, 27/01/05)
Nous avons commis une terrible erreur, un texte malencontreux sur l’une de nos photos du jour du 18 avril dernier (à gauche), mal traduit de la légende, tout ce qu’il y a de plus circonstanciée, elle, que nous avait fournie l’AFP*: sur la « reconstitution », dans un camp de réfugiés au Liban, de l’arrestation par de faux militaires israéliens d’un Palestinien, nous avons omis d’indiquer qu’il s’agissait d’une mise en scène, que ces « soldats » jouaient un rôle et que tout ça relevait de la pure et simple propagande. C’est une faute – qu’atténuent à peine la précipitation et la mauvaise relecture qui l’ont provoquée. C’en serait une dans tous les cas, ça l’est plus encore dans celui-là: laisser planer la moindre ambiguïté sur un sujet aussi sensible, quand on sait que les images peuvent être utilisées comme des armes de guerre, donner du crédit à un stratagème aussi grossier, qui peut contribuer à alimenter l’exaspération antisioniste là où elle s’enflamme sans besoin de combustible, n’appelle aucun excuse. Nous avons déconné, gravement. J’ai déconné, gravement: je suis responsable du site de L’Express, et donc du dérapage. A ce titre, je fais amende honorable, la queue basse, auprès des internautes qui ont été abusés, de tous ceux que cette supercherie a pu blesser et de l’AFP, qui n’est EN AUCUN CAS comptable de nos propres bêtises.Eric Mettout (L’Express)
Comment expliquer qu’une légende en anglais qui dit clairement qu’il s’agit d’une mise en scène (la légende, en anglais, de la photo fournie par l’AFP: « LEBANON, AIN EL-HELWEH: Palestinian refugees pose as Israeli soldiers arresting and beating a Palestinian activist during celebrations of Prisoners’ Day at the refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh near the coastal Lebanese city of Sidon on April 17, 2012 in solidarity with the 4,700 Palestinian inmates of Israeli jails. Some 1,200 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails have begun a hunger strike and another 2,300 are refusing food for one day, a spokeswoman for the Israel Prisons Service (IPS) said. »), soit devenue chez vous « Prisonnier palestinien 18/04/2012. Mardi, lors de la Journée des prisonniers, des centaines de détenus palestiniens ont entamé une grève de la faim pour protester contre leurs conditions de détention », étonnant non ?David Goldstein
Ce sont les récents événements de la Guerre de Gaza, ou plutôt leur réfraction dans l’opinion publiée, dans les médias, chez les hommes politiques, les diplomates, les universitaires et les classes bavardeuses, qui suscitent cette réflexion : la guimauve sentimentaliste dégouline de tous côtés pour décrire la « souffrance des Palestiniens ». A la bourse victimologique, le « Palestinien » vaut bien plus que le Darfourien massacré par les Arabes du Nord-Soudan, l’Iranien lapidé ou pendu par les mollahs, la fillette pakistanaise ou afghane décapitée ou défigurée à l’acide par les Talibans, l’Indien de Bombay ou du Cachemire assassiné par les moudjahidines islamistes. Divisez le nombre de palestiniens par les centimètres de journal (ou les minutes télévisées) qui leur sont consacrés, vous obtiendrez un ratio qui défie toute concurrence, une proportion disproportionnée. Ce demi-monde de trop volubiles discoureurs sélectionne soigneusement ce qu’il « voit », à l’exclusion du reste. (…)Chacun devrait le savoir et y penser : dans la mesure où la photo n’est pas purement et simplement truquée ou le fruit d’un montage ou d’une mise en scène, qu’y a-t-il avant la photo, en amont pour ainsi dire ? Y a-t-il un Hamas qui a de propos délibéré rompu la trêve ? Un Hamas qui vole l’aide internationale pour la revendre au prix fort et faire dire par ses perroquets préférés du Monde et de Reuters qu’Israël a monté un blocus qui cause une crise humanitaire ? Un Hamas qui a lancé des attaques de terreur sans nombre contre les points de transit où passait le commerce entre Israel et Gaza, forçant Israel à les fermer ou à les restreindre ? Un Hamas qui a balancé plusieurs milliers de roquettes sur les villes du sud d’Israël ? Un Hamas, dont la Charte exige inconditionnellement la destruction d’Israël et le massacre des Juifs ? Un Hamas qui place ses lanceurs de projectiles dans les hôpitaux, les écoles, les mosquées – sachant que les Israéliens hésiteront à les frapper, que les médias se jetteront comme des prédateurs sur les morts éventuelles de boucliers humains ? Un Hamas qui préfère sacrifier la population (« martyre »), chair à canon, parce que les chairs sanguinolentes valent cher sur la BBC, France 2 et autres professionnels du trompe-l’œil ? Le Hamas promeut ce Grand-Guignol parce que le théâtre vivant permet à ses propagandistes de stigmatiser le Satan, en occultant le contexte, l’amont, l’histoire et le contenu, pour ne présenter que les horreurs de la guerre. Il n’y a pas de cause – hormis Satan – il n’y a que des effets ! Tel est l’effet d’une acceptation inconditionnelle du fabliau-fiction arabo-palestinien, qui est devenu, qu’on me pardonne l’expression, vérité d’Evangile pour la victimophilie pro-palestinienne d’esprits dérangés, quoique nombreux. J’y vois la confluence de deux phénomènes : d’un côté, l’effacement progressif de la honte postérieure à la Shoah. « Y’en a marre de ces histoires de génocide. On ne va pas passer l’éternité là-dessus, quand même ! ». Les arbitres des élégances du politiquement correct répètent, sans le savoir, à la virgule près, ce que l’extrême-droite négationniste martelait dans les années soixante et soixante-dix (elle imite également le monde stalinien qui niait en bloc que le Nazisme ait visé les Juifs en tant que tels). D’un autre côté, l’époque contemporaine est caractérisée par ce que le philosophe allemand Friedrich Nietzsche avait appelé « l’inversion de toutes les valeurs». Expliquons-nous : Comment peut-il se faire qu’une organisation-filiale des Frères musulmans, qui prêche la haine et la destruction de l’Occident, la soumission manu militari des dhimmi, l’instauration universelle de la charia, crucifixion, lapidation, amputation comprises ; qui, à de nombreuses reprises, a procédé à des massacres à grande échelle d’opposants palestiniens (sans parler des Israéliens, on s’en fiche, voir plus haut), qui terrorise sa propre société, bannissant, interdisant, fulminant ; qu’une organisation qui démontre sans cesse qu’elle se contrefiche du bien-être de ses compatriotes, que seul compte le djihad ; qu’un Palestinien ne vaut que « martyr » mort : comment se fait-il donc que le Hamas ait recruté comme valets de plume et d’image, qui cachent soigneusement ce qui ne peut être montré ni avoué, qui opèrent comme les appendices médiatiques de la propagande du Hamas, qui acceptent d’opérer sous son contrôle et sa censure, une grande partie des médias occidentaux ? On ne s’étonne pas de l’abjection des goebbelsiades qui font l’ordinaire d’Al-Jazeera, dans le lointain Qatar. On a la faiblesse de s’interroger sur celle des radios, télévisions et journaux occidentaux. Comment expliquer leur inversion des valeurs ? Souvenez-vous, ce que je décris à propos de Gaza valut également, en Août 2006 au Liban, quand il ne fut pas d’énorme mensonge proféré par les metteurs en scène du Hezbollah, qui ne fut avalé et resservi par cette trop docile presse occidentale. Toujours consentante à écrire sous la dictée des barbus de l’Islam, tant qu’elle peut publier des photos (truquées) qui accablent les ennemis israéliens des tueurs chiites. La pratique devenue normale et habituelle des médias occidentaux, à quelques exceptions près, c’est de titrer : « Pearl Harbour : attaque des Américains contre des avions japonais » en ne mentionnant qu’en petit et à la fin l’attaque nippone. Cette inversion du réel aura été permanente au cours du XXème siècle. Le putsch bolchévique d’Octobre 1917, nervis et bas-fonds lancés à l’assaut des bâtiments publics de Saint Petersburg par un doctrinaire cherchant l’occasion de mettre en application ses utopies sanglantes ouvrit le bal. Les appels hypocrites de Lénine à donner « la terre aux paysans » et «tout le pouvoir aux Soviets » – avant de confisquer l’une et l’autre –donnèrent l’impression, avec ses exhortations à l’Apocalypse révolutionnaire universelle, que le Soleil s’était levé pour la première fois, que la Fin de l’Histoire, prédite par Marx et tous les Utopistes, étaient proche. Chez les peuples européens, secoués par les horreurs du premier conflit mondial, l’écho fut retentissant : on voulait que cela fût vrai afin que prenne fin l’épouvante et que commence l’Ere nouvelle. Pour les intellectuels, l’Homme nouveau ferait table rase de la «société bourgeoisie ». La « bourgeoisie », cette fiction idiote, réunissait le mépris aristocratique des classes moyennes et la détestation bohème d’une société réglée et ordonnée. Elle idéalisait l’héroïsme aux dépens des vertus qui furent baptisées « victoriennes ». Elle appelait de ses vœux l’Apocalypse où le Héros renverserait la « société marchande », et nommait le Prolétariat Rédempteur messianique de substitution. L’inversion du réel est fondée sur une inversion des valeurs. Le rejet des valeurs « bourgeoises » (alors que l’Europe de 1914 n’est qu’au sens le plus minime du terme « capitaliste » et était, en vérité, très largement soumise aux forces littéralement féodales, (comme l’Empire allemand de Guillaume II) exigeait que l’on idolâtre ses ennemis. Tout ce qui s’opposait, ou prétendait s’opposer, à la société «bourgeoise » devint bon ; tout ce qui voulait la renforcer devint mauvais (d’où les intéressants va-et-vient entre nazis et communistes). Moscou, où affluaient les escrocs et les fanatiques, les charlatans et les aventuriers, les idéologues et les désaxés, devint le centre de redistribution intellectuel de ces valeurs inverties qui exaltaient la destruction radicale de l’Occident : Musulmans devenus « rouges », anarchistes communisés, officiers reconvertis de l’Armée et de la police secrète du Tsar, démagogues assoiffés de pouvoir, mystiques et pornographes-tueurs à la Raspoutine. Cela s’appelait l’Internationale communiste. C’est elle, et c’est eux, qui donnèrent le « la » aux versions délirantes de la politique du XXème siècle, qui, par la grâce des positions importantes occupées par l’intelligentsia politico-ambitieuse, enivrée de son propre romantisme, devinrent souvent les versions acceptées, à l’école et à l’université, dans la presse et la littérature. (…) Pour que réussissent les aventuriers de l’horreur, Il fallait que les intelligentsias et les diplomates, les journalistes et les professeurs les bénissent et prononcent avec génuflexions admiratives leurs messes et leurs sermons approbateurs. C’est ainsi que Michel Foucault se fit le chantre de l’Ayatollah Khomeiny et de la révolution islamique iranienne ! Il n’est pas de tyran de gauche ou d’extrême-gauche, de national-socialiste du tiers-monde, qui n’ait trouvé pour l’encenser quelques intellectuels de la Rive Gauche, de Bloomsbury, de Harvard Square, de Kreutzberg ou de l’Università statale. (…) L’inversion des valeurs conduit à l’essor d’un faux réel où, répété indéfiniment, le mensonge devient officiel, obligatoire, universel. Je propose donc de comprendre l’étrange lubie qui possède une partie si importante de l’Occident comme le résultat de la grande inversion des valeurs qui plaça la destruction de l’Occident « bourgeois » en tête de ses priorités, et fit de tout ce qui se parait de l’étiquette de « révolutionnaire » le fin du fin. Que cette lubie ait retrouvé le plus familier des Satan de son histoire, et s’allie en ceci avec un monde islamique si violemment porté à l’espérance du génocide, n’est malheureusement pas très étonnant. Laurent Murawiec
C’est un mystère pourquoi tant de médias acceptent comme parole d’évangile les chiffres du Hamas sur le nombre de civils tués dans la récente guerre. Le Hamas proclame que 90% des 1800 Palestiniens tués sont des civils. Israël dit que la moitié des tués sont des combattants. Les faits objectifs sont plus proches de ce que dit Israël que du Hamas. Même des organisations de droits de l’homme anti-israéliennes reconnaissent, selon le New York Times, que le Hamas compte probablement parmi ces « civils tués par Israël », les groupes suivants : les Palestiniens tués comme collaborateurs, ceux tués de violences domestiques (crimes d’honneur), les Palestiniens tués par des roquettes ou obus de mortier du Hamas et les Palestiniens qui sont morts de mort naturelle durant le conflit. Je me demande si le Hamas compte aussi les 162 enfants qui sont morts en travaillant comme esclaves pour construire les tunnels. Le Hamas ne comptabilise pas comme combattants, ceux qui construisent les tunnels, ni ceux qui permettent à leurs maisons d’être utilisées comme cache d’armes et lancement de roquettes, ni les policiers du Hamas, ni les membres de la branche politique et ni les autres qui travaillent main dans la main avec les terroristes armés. Il y a plusieurs années, j’ai forgé un concept pour essayer de montrer que la distance entre un civil et un combattant n’est souvent qu’une question de degré, je l’ai appelé « continuum of civilianality ». Il est clair qu’un enfant dont l’âge ne lui permet pas encore d’aider les combattants du Hamas est un civil et qu’un combattant du Hamas qui tire des roquettes, porte des armes ou opère dans les tunnels est un combattant. Entre ces deux extrêmes, se trouve une grande variété de gens, dont certains sont plus proches des civils et certains sont plus proches des combattants. La loi de la guerre n’a pas établi de distinction claire entre combattants et civils, en particulier dans un contexte de guerre urbaine où des gens peuvent transporter des armes la nuit et être boulangers durant la journée, ou tirer des roquettes durant la journée et aller dormir avec leurs familles la nuit. (…) Les données publiées par le New York Times suggèrent fortement qu’un très grand nombre, peut-être la majorité des gens tués sont plus proches du combattant de l’extrêmité de l’échelle que du civil de l’extrémité de l’échelle. Premièrement, la vaste majorité des tués sont plutôt des hommes que des femmes, deuxièmement la majorité ont entre 15 et 40 ans, le nombre de personnes âgés de plus de 60 ans sont rarissimes, le nombre d’enfants en dessous de 15 ans est aussi relativement petit, bien que leurs images aient été prépondérantes ! En d’autres termes, les genres et âges des tués ne sont pas représentatifs de la population générale de Gaza mais plus représentatifs du genre et de l’âge des combattants. Ces données suggèrent qu’un très grand pourcentage de Palestiniens tués sont du coté des combattants de l’échelle (continuum). Elles prouvent également, comme si des preuves étaient nécessaires à des yeux impartiaux, qu’Israël n’a pas ciblé des civils au hasard. Si cela était le cas, les tués seraient représentatifs de la population générale de Gaza plutôt que de sous-groupes étroitement associées à des combattants. Les médias devraient cesser immédiatement d’utiliser les statistiques approuvées par le Hamas qui déjà dans le passé se sont révélés être très peu fiables (…) Les médias font preuve de paresse en s’appuyant sur les chiffres de la propagande du Hamas et mettent en danger la profession. Lorsque l’infâme rapport Goldstone a faussement affirmé que la grande majorité des personnes tuées dans l’Opération Plomb Durci étaient des civils et non des combattants du Hamas, beaucoup d’habitants de Gaza se sont plaints, ils ont accusé le Hamas de lâcheté puisque tant de civils avaient été tués alors que les combattants avaient été épargnés. À la suite de ces plaintes, le Hamas a été forcé de dire la vérité : il a reconnu le nombre de combattants et policiers armés tués. Il est probable que le Hamas fera une « correction » similaire à l’égard de ce conflit. Mais cette correction ne sera pas diffusée dans les médias, comme la correction précédente ne l’avait pas été. Les gros titres du genre « La plupart des personnes tuées par Israël sont des enfants, des femmes et des personnes âgées » vont continuer à être diffusés malgré la fausseté des faits. Tant que les médias ne démentiront pas, le Hamas poursuivra sa « stratégie de bébés morts » et plus de gens des deux côtés vont mourir. Alan Dershowitz
Le Hamas a lancé une guerre sophistiquée et même brillante de propagande médiatique. « Toute personne tuée ou morte en martyr doit être appelée un civil de Gaza ou de Palestine », a annoncé le mouvement aux Gazaouis dans une annonce publique, « avant même que l’on parle de son statut dans le djihad ou de son rang militaire ». Le Hamas a enjoint la population à utiliser l’élément de langage « civils innocents » autant que possible lorsqu’ils s’adressent aux journalistes. Le Hamas lance des roquettes depuis les zones les plus densément peuplées de la Bande de Gaza – soit la ville de Gaza, Beit Hanoun dans le Nord et Khan Younis dans le Sud – et dit aux combattants de tirer depuis des sites sensibles comme les écoles, les églises, les mosquées, les infrastructures des Nations-Unies et les hôpitaux. C’est une stratégie gagnant-gagnant : si Israël est dissuadé, les infrastructures et les soldats du Hamas sont préservés ; si Israël tire malgré tout, les pertes civiles seront une victoire pour la propagande du Hamas. La stratégie médiatique du Hamas a été illustrée par son utilisation de l’hôpital Al-Shifa dans la ville de Gaza. Là, au vu et su de tous, les chefs ont commandité leur offensive depuis un bunker souterrain caché sous l’hôpital. Les reporters étaient interdits d’accès au bunker et étaient invités à la place à un point presse dans la cour de l’hôpital. Ici, les journalistes qui cherchaient à interviewer le Hamas devaient faire la queue, un poste idéal pour prendre des photos de civils et de combattants blessés (ces derniers étant inévitablement habillés en civils) qui étaient amenés à toute vitesse à l’intérieur de l’hôpital.Oren Kessler
Si vous n’avez pas d’arme, nos frères vous ont montré le chemin (…) Tuez donc à l’aide d’un couteau un policier. Prenez son pistolet. Avec ce pistolet, tuez un militaire. Prenez son fusil et lancez vous dans le chemin de votre seigneur. Ce n’est qu’un paradis qui vous attend et la chaada est sans douleur.Vidéo de propagande de l’Etat islamique
Nous sommes face à un phénomène nouveau, le terrorisme en libre-accès. Cela implique la mobilisation de moyens exceptionnels. 1.200 ressortissants Français sont allés en Irak et en Syrie, 580 y sont allés et en sont revenus, 200 veulent y aller. Et 185 sont quelque part en Europe sur le chemin pour y aller.Bernard Cazeneuve
L’image et la vidéo de l’exécution du policier ont été largement diffusées sur les réseaux sociaux. Et régulièrement, la question de l’absence de sang revient. Selon certains internautes, ce serait une nouvelle preuve d’un coup monté et l’agent ne serait peut-être même pas mort. Les réponses n’ont pas tardé à venir d’elles-mêmes. Plusieurs dizaines de témoignages d’habitants et de secouristes vont dans le même sens. Ahmed Merabet a bel et bien été tué, dans l’exercice de ses fonctions, par des tirs d’arme automatique. Le sang a bel et bien coulé sur ce trottoir du boulevard Richard-Lenoir. [La carte d’identité oubliée] Un oubli qui avait effectivement de quoi intriguer les internautes, quand les terroristes font preuve d’une importante maîtrise des armes sur les différentes vidéo. Pourtant, les enquêteurs le rappellent : plusieurs éléments de leur action semblent avoir été mal préparés. L’entrée au mauvais numéro de la rue, l’abandon de la première voiture après en avoir perdu le contrôle et avoir percuté des poteaux, la fuite sans nourriture… Reste la piste d’un abandon volontaire de la carte d’identité pour brouiller les pistes. Mais les prélèvements génétiques réalisés dans la voiture ont confirmé cette même identité, selont FTVI. Libération évoque également des chargeurs de kalachnikovs « oubliés dans la Citroën » qui permettent là aussi de remonter la même piste. Enfin, il ne faut pas écarter la possibilité d’un acte volontaire. Les frères Kouachi aurait pu, avec cet acte, revendiquer clairement leur attaque.France bleu
Des examens ont prouvé que les tirs d’armes qui sont censés avoir tué le petit Mohammed ne pouvaient pas provenir du côté israélien. Dans ce cas, de quel côté provenaient-ils ? L’enfant – après avoir été déclaré mort – semble avoir bougé tout seul de place à plusieurs reprises. Comment cela fut-il possible ? Des images tournées quelques secondes après le drame ne montrent aucune trace de sang à l’endroit où l’enfant aurait été tué. Plus tard, lorsque les journalistes furent invités pour filmer les lieux, on aperçoit une grosse flaque de sang. D’où venait-elle ? Que signifient les différentes scènes dans lesquelles on voit des Palestiniens soit-disant blessés, mais qui selon toutes probabilités semblent avoir joué la comédie ? Que faisaient tous les spectateurs que l’on aperçoit sur les lieux et qui n’ont manifestement pas l’attitude de personnes en situation de danger – prises sous le feu israélien – mais plutôt celle d’individu qui assistent à un tournage de film ? Que signifie le signe « deux » que fait avec une main le caméraman palestinien et qui semble indiquer qu’il s’agit de la deuxième prise de vue, comme le font les caméramen lors d’un tournage d’un film ? Lucas Martin
Et si la carte des théories conspirationnistes épousait tout simplement, comme le rappelait récemment Claude Moniquet pour le révisionnisme antiaméricain, celle de l’antisémitisme dans le monde ?
Au moment même où sortait une nouvelle vidéo de l’Etat islamique appelant les musulmans français à « faire exploser la France » en prenant les armes des forces de l’ordre …
Pendant que, tant sur les réseaux sociaux que dans les cerveaux de nombre de nos concitoyens, continuent à fleurir les théories du complot sur les attentats de Charlie hebdo et de l’Hypercacher …
Comment ne pas repenser à ces appelés qui expliquaient il y a quelques temps sur RMC que la plupart des armes des appelés du Plan vigipirate étaient en fait non chargées ?
Et comment aussi ne pas s’émerveiller, entre deux manifestations anti-israéliennes y compris avec le drapeau noir dudit Etat islamique, de l’incroyable esprit critique et sagacité de nos nouveaux maitres du soupçon …
Quant à toutes ces images bidonnées, dont nous abreuvent nos médias depuis des années, sur les femmes et les enfants de Gaza …
Et notamment concernant cette autre victime dont, il y a bientôt quinze ans, on n’a pas non plus vu le sang …
Mais dont on a si vite et si catégoriquement attribué la mort délibérée …
Au mois de septembre 2000, lors d’un échange de feu entre l’armée israélienne et des palestiniens, des images difficiles ont été filmées à propos du jeune Mohammed Al Dura et de son père. Sous les balles, le père demandait un arrêt des tirs, tandis que son enfant tentait de se protéger sur ses genoux.
Quelques instants plus tard, on aperçoit le jeune Mohammed et une voix qui crie : « L’enfant et mort ! L’enfant est mort ! » Que s’est-il passé exactement ce jour-là ?
Pour le journaliste d’Antenne 2 – Charles Enderlin – le doute n’existe pas : ce sont les tirs de l’armée israélienne qui ont tué l’enfant. Selon Philippe Karsenty, il s’agit plutôt d’une imposture : l’enfant n’a jamais été tué, les tirs provenaient des Palestiniens et le tout devait servir à démontrer l’agression israélienne. Ni Charles Enderlin, ni Philippe Karsenty n’étaient sur les lieux de l’incident. Comment savoir ce qui s’est passé réellement ?
Le documentaire (en deux parties) présenté ci-dessous dresse le tableau des points obscurs de cette affaire. Sans prendre position, ses auteurs relèvent les contradictions que nous pouvons apprécier à leur juste valeur. Il est important de regarder ce documentaire afin de se faire une idée précise de l’affaire.
En résumé, les questions les plus importantes à se poser sont les suivantes :
Des examens ont prouvé que les tirs d’armes qui sont censés avoir tué le petit Mohammed ne pouvaient pas provenir du côté israélien. Dans ce cas, de quel côté provenaient-ils ?
L’enfant – après avoir été déclaré mort – semble avoir bougé tout seul de place à plusieurs reprises. Comment cela fut-il possible ?
Des images tournée quelques secondes après le drame ne montrent aucune trace de sang à l’endroit où l’enfant aurait été tué. Plus tard, lorsque les journalistes furent invités pour filmer les lieux, on aperçoit une grosse flaque de sang. D’où venait-elle ?
Que signifient les différentes scènes dans lesquelles on voit des Palestiniens soit-disant blessés, mais qui selon toutes probabilités semblent avoir joué la comédie ?
Que faisaient tous les spectateurs que l’on aperçoit sur les lieux et qui n’ont manifestement pas l’attitude de personnes en situation de danger – prises sous le feu israélien – mais plutôt celle d’individu qui assistent à un tournage de film ?
Que signifie le signe « deux » que fait avec une main le caméraman palestinien et qui semble indiquer qu’il s’agit de la deuxième prise de vue, comme le font les caméramen lors d’un tournage d’un film ?
Nous n’avons pas les réponses à ces questions. De nombreux journalistes (danois, allemands, israéliens…) doutent sérieusement de la véracité de la version palestinienne. Le caméraman palestinien lui-même affirme que l’enfant n’a pas été tué. Alors ?
(On pourra consulter avec intérêt le résumé de l’affaire sur Wikipedia.)
Le gouvernement affirme que l’enfant palestinien n’est pas mort en 2000 dans les bras de son père sur la base d’images non montées dans le reportage.
Le gouvernement israélien a affirmé dimanche dans un rapport qu’un reportage de France 2 sur la mort d’un enfant palestinien dans les bras de son père en 2000 était « infondé », affirmant s’appuyer sur des images non montées du reportage. Ce document, qui réitère des positions de dirigeants politiques et militaires israéliens, est publié à quelques jours d’une décision de justice à Paris sur une affaire de diffamation entre l’auteur du reportage datant du 30 septembre 2000, le journaliste Charles Enderlin, contre Philippe Karsenty, directeur d’un site d’analyse des médias.
Le Premier ministre Benyamin Netanyahou a lui-même salué la conclusion du rapport d’une quarantaine de pages qu’il avait commandité en septembre. « La version répandue par le reportage a servi d’inspiration et de justification au terrorisme, à l’antisémitisme et à la délégitimation d’Israël », a-t-il estimé. « Il n’y a qu’une seule façon de contrer les mensonges, c’est par la vérité », a insisté Benyamin Netanyahou, cité dans un communiqué accompagnant la publication du rapport.
« On voit l’enfant vivant »
« Les accusations et affirmations centrales du reportage de France 2 sont infondées dans le matériau que la chaîne de télévision avait en sa possession au moment du reportage », assure ce rapport. « Contrairement à l’affirmation du reportage selon lequel l’enfant a été tué, le visionnage par la commission (gouvernementale) des images non montées montre que dans les scènes finales, qui n’ont pas été diffusées par France 2, on voit l’enfant vivant », selon le texte. La chaîne a refusé de fournir les images non montées du reportage aux autorités israéliennes, a indiqué l’auteur du rapport, Yossi Kuperwasser, directeur général du ministère des Relations internationales, sans préciser comment la commission israélienne s’était néanmoins procuré les images sur lesquelles elle fonde ses conclusions.
Le reportage montrait un Palestinien de 12 ans, Mohammad al-Dura, protégé par son père Jamal alors que tous deux sont pris sous les tirs croisés entre l’armée israélienne et des combattants palestiniens, au tout début de la deuxième Intifada (2000-2005). Selon le rapport israélien, il n’y a pas de « preuve que Jamal ou l’enfant aient été blessés de la manière présentée par le reportage (…). Au contraire, il y a de nombreuses indications selon lesquelles aucun des deux n’a été touché. » Selon le document, l’examen balistique des impacts de balles à proximité du père et de l’enfant « montre qu’il est extrêmement douteux que les balles puissent avoir été tirées depuis la position israélienne comme l’implique le reportage de France 2 ».
Rapport « fabriqué de toutes pièces »
« Nous avons toujours dit, y compris à la Cour suprême israélienne, que nous étions prêts à une enquête publique indépendante selon les standards internationaux », a répondu Charles Enderlin. « Nous n’avons jamais été contactés pour une enquête israélienne quelconque. Kuperwasser n’a jamais contacté France 2. S’il l’avait fait, nous aurions demandé de quelle enquête il s’agissait et s’il était question d’une commission indépendante », a-t-il souligné. « Nous avions aussi annoncé que nous étions prêts à aider Jamal, le père de l’enfant, pour un test ADN du corps de son fils si nécessaire », a ajouté le journaliste.
Sur twitter le journaliste s’étonne des conclusions du rapport
Rapport israélien : Jamal al dura n’a pas été blessé les chirurgiens qui l’ont opéré à Amman jouaient ils la comédie?
– Charles Enderlin (@Charles1045) 19 mai 2013
selon le rapport israélien Jamal al Dura n’a pas été blessé. le roi de Jordanie le savait-il en lui rendant visite à l’hôpital à Amman?
– Charles Enderlin (@Charles1045) 19 mai 2013
À Gaza, le père de Mohammad, Jamal al-Dura, a quant à lui déclaré que le rapport était « fabriqué de toutes pièces ». « Les Israéliens mentent et tentent de couvrir la vérité », a-t-il ajouté, précisant qu’il avait réclamé une commission d’enquête internationale avec la participation de sa famille et des autorités israéliennes. Les images de l’agonie de Mohammad al-Dura dans les bras de son père à un carrefour près de la ville de Gaza avaient fait le tour du monde et constituent un épisode marquant de la guerre médiatique entre Israël et les Palestiniens. En France, la cour d’appel de Paris doit se prononcer le 22 mai sur la plainte en diffamation déposée par Charles Enderlin contre Philippe Karsenty, qui avait affirmé que le reportage était truqué.
Just a few hours after the massacre at the offices of satirical French paper Charlie Hebdo, members of the far-right and far-left in Europe and America quickly decided who was responsible: the Mossad. Writing on her Facebook page, Greta Berlin, organizer of the 2010 Gaza flotilla and co-founder of the Free Gaza movement, argued that the attack was Israeli retribution for France’s recognition of a Palestinian state:
Berlin has a long record of promoting Holocaust denial and other anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the Jews, to the extent that she has been ostracized even by some in the Palestinian solidarity movement that she once captained. But she wasn’t the only flotilla leader and Free Gaza founder to attempt to pin the Paris murders on the Jews. Mary Hughes-Thompson, an activist who remains in good standing, used her Twitter feed to cast suspicion on the Jewish state, using the hashtag #JSIL, an epithet coined to liken Israel to the Islamic State:
“Bibi is furious over French vote for Palestinian state. What better way to get even?” a later Hughes-Thompson tweet read.
The Free Gaza movement of Berlin and Hughes-Thompson boasts endorsements from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and MIT professor Noam Chomsky, even as prominent commentators have called for Tutu in particular to disassociate himself from the movement since Berlin’s anti-Semitism came to light.
Meanwhile, the same conspiracy theories about the Charlie Hebdo killings began circulating in other popular radical forums. Anonymous Kollektiv, a German spin-off of the online hacking group, told its more than 660,000 Facebook followers that “The precision with which the perpetrators acted brings to mind Mossad hit squads from the recent past,” and offered evidence of a joint CIA-Mossad “false flag” operation. In case this wasn’t clear enough, Anonymous then posted a picture of a smiling Benjamin Netanyahu, alongside a quotation of him criticizing France’s recognition of Palestine.
The idea that Israel carried out the massacre became so widespread that it was picked up by a more reputable publication, the International Business Times, which gave a respectful airing to the possibility in a piece titled “Charlie Hebdo Attack and Mossad Link: Is Israel Venting Its Fury For France’s Recognition of Palestine State?” After public outcry from readers and journalists, the article was taken down and replaced with a forthright apology deeming the piece “beneath our standards” and a “basic lapse in judgement.”
But although serious publications are unlikely to promulgate the story in the future, such anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are unlikely to die down anytime soon. Indeed, even after the deadly Friday attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris, none of the sources mentioned above retracted their accusations against the Jewish state. In the end, for the bigot, the point is not to plausibly explain events, but to impugn the object of one’s hateful obsession.
La couleur des rétroviseurs d’une voiture, l’absence de taches de sang à côté du corps d’un policier assassiné, des images de journaliste en gilet pare-balles : après les tueries de Charlie Hebdo et de l’hypermarché casher, les doutes sur les versions policières et médiatiques sur les événements ont surgi sur les réseaux sociaux avec une rapidité et une vigueur inattendues. Comment internet et les réseaux sociaux ont-ils changé le mode de propagation et peut-être le contenu de ce qu’on appelle les théories du complot et comment identifier ces sources d’information sur internet pour essayer de trier le vraisemblable du peu probable ?
Nous avons invité Martine Sanz, professeure de Lettres-Histoire à Créteil, qui s’est trouvée confrontée en classe, à la propagation des théories du complot ; Guillaume Brossard, fondateur du site Hoaxbuster.com qui démonte toutes les rumeurs du web ; Pascal Froissart, spécialiste en Sciences de l’information et de la communication et plus particulièrement des rumeurs. Enfin, par Skype, Emmanuelle Danblon, linguiste et professeure à l’Université libre de Bruxelles, nous expliquera pourquoi ces théories circulent aussi vite.
L’émission est présentée par Daniel Schneidermann, préparée par Adèle Bellot, Robin Andraca et Sébastien Rochat
et déco-réalisée par Axel Everarts de Velp et François Rose.
La vidéo dure 1 heure et 36 minutes.
Si la lecture des vidéos est saccadée, reportez-vous à nos conseils.
Le making of, par Sébastien Rochat
Comme par hasard… Pour préparer notre émission sur le complotisme de l’après Charlie, nous n’étions pas trop de deux pour recueillir les justifications de tous ceux qui ont décliné notre invitation. Et ils étaient nombreux. Avec toujours de bonnes excuses : « Pas disponible, mais on peut en parler », « Je ne suis pas libre vendredi », « Je suis dans le Sud », « J’ai un colloque sur le sujet », « Je suis débordé ». Comme par hasard…
Avec Robin Andraca, nous avons notamment contacté le sociologue Gérald Bronner (déjà invité lors d’une précédente émission), Bruno Fay (auteur d’un livre sur la « complocratie »), Pierre-Henri Tavoillot (philosophe), Rudy Reichstadt (fondateur de Conspiracy Watch), Guilhem Fouetillou (fondateur d’une start up qui analyse, entre autres, les réseaux sociaux). Tous ont décliné notre invitation. Même le journaliste de Rue89, auteur d’un observatoire des sites complotistes, a refusé de venir. Il n’a d’ailleurs pas signé son article. Comme par…
Comment expliquer la rapidité avec laquelle les thèses complotistes ont circulé sur les réseaux sociaux après les attentats contre Charlie Hebdo et le magasin Hyper Casher de Vincennes ? Comment répondre à ces thèses complotistes ? Les médias mainstream sont-ils complices de la diffusion de ces théories en les décryptant ? Les enseignants sont-ils armés pour répondre aux doutes de leurs élèves ? L’humour peut-il être un moyen de déconstruire ces thèses ?
Quatre invités ont bien voulu débattre de tous ces sujets. Martine Sanz, enseignante en Lettres-Histoire dans un lycée professionnel de Créteil, nous raconte comment ses élèves avaient, dès le lendemain, mis en doute le récit de l’attaque contre Charlie Hebdo, après avoir vu « passer l’info » sur les réseaux sociaux. Et ce n’est pas un petit phénomène : elle estime que plus de la moitié de ses élèves croient aux théories du complot. En classe, elle a par exemple été confrontée aux Illumaniti de Bavière, une théorie relayée par ses élèves et selon laquelle cette société secrète du XVIIIe existerait encore et souhaiterait gouverner le monde. Des thèses qui circulent sur le web, et notamment sur des sites que les élèves n’ont pas appris à identifier. Le travail sur les sources est une des pistes de réflexion pour apprendre aux élèves à utiliser les réseaux sociaux.
Mais pourquoi ces théories complotistes peuvent-elles paraître si séduisantes pour certains ? Comment expliquer leur succès ? Emmanuelle Danblon, linguiste et professeure à l’Université libre de Bruxelles, nous explique, par Skype, tous les ressorts de ces théories. Selon elle, il y a « un besoin vital de donner du sens à des événements qui provoquent des brèches dans la compréhension que l’on a du monde ». D’où la nécessité de rechercher des indices et de construire un récit. Et ces théories circulent d’autant plus vite « qu’avec l’image, l’indice fait tout de suite preuve », explique-t-elle.
Pour notre troisième invité, le sociologue Pascal Froissart, il ne faut pas forcément s’alarmer. Il est même bon de voir que les élèves s’interrogent et exercent leur esprit critique. Car pour lui, il ne faut pas confondre les faits et les informations, le constat et l’interprétation. Exemple ? Oui, il y a un triangle sur un billet de 1 dollar. Et alors ? C’est avec ce « et alors » que peut commencer la déconstruction des thèses complotistes.
Mais il n’y a pas de recettes miracles pour répondre aux théories conspirationnistes ou aux rumeurs. Et notre dernier invité, Guillaume Brossard, en sait quelque chose : depuis près de quinze ans, il déconstruit toutes les rumeurs du web sur son site Hoaxbuster.com. Certaines reviennent même tous les ans : une éclipse de soleil de trois jours en France ? Cela fait des années que cette rumeur circule. En décembre dernier, elle est même arrivée aux oreilles des élèves de Martine Sanz, qui étaient vraiment persuadés qu’une éclipse allait avoir lieu. Et elle n’a pas eu lieu. Comme chaque année. Une rumeur pas bien difficile à déconstruire donc. Mais comment faire avec les autres rumeurs ? Les médias traditionnels doivent-ils s’en emparer, pour démontrer qu’elles sont infondées, quitte à leur donner une audience qu’elle n’auraient pas ? Sur le plateau, les avis divergent.
Mise à jour du 2 février par Adèle Bellot (la documentaliste) : Un tweet de Zouhair, sur l’absence de sang près du policier, est présenté au début de l’émission comme complotiste. Il s’agit d’une erreur, ce tweet renvoyant en fait vers un post Facebook visant à démonter les théories du complot à propos de la tuerie de Charlie Hebdo.
Vous pouvez aussi utiliser le découpage en actes.
Si la lecture des vidéos est saccadée, reportez-vous à nos conseils.
Acte 1
Une carte d’identité oubliée, des images d’un policier abattu mais qui ne saigne pas : les rumeurs ont circulé sur Facebook le jour-même de l’attentat contre Charlie Hebdo. Et dès le lendemain, des élèves de Martine Sanz croyaient à la théorie du complot. Ce n’est pas une nouveauté : ces élèves ont déjà relayé des théories conspirationnistes en classe. Exemple ? les Illumaniti de Bavière. Ou le triangle sur le billet de 1 dollar.
Acte 2
Qui véhicule toutes les rumeurs ? Après les attentats contre Charlie, un certain Karim a publié plusieurs vidéos sur Youtube pour exprimer ses doutes sur les versions policières. « C’est pas un peu bizarre ? », répète-t-il sans cesse. Comment expliquer le succès de ces vidéos ? Pour Emmanuelle Danblon, c’est la nécessité de donner du sens à des événements qui explique la propagation de ces théories. Car dans la rhétorique du complot, il n’existe pas de coïncidences.
Acte 3
Entre parents et enfants, ou enseignants et élèves, il y a souvent un décalage : les uns s’informent sur les réseaux sociaux, quand les autres consultent la presse. Faut-il mieux former les enseignants à l’usage des réseaux sociaux ? Un enseignant a-t-il les moyens et le temps d’apprendre aux élèves de prendre du recul face aux contenus qui circulent sur Facebook ? Quel réflexe doit-on avoir pour identifier les sources ou déterminer le profil d’un blog anonyme ? Exemple avec le site Stopmensonges.com et Medias-presse.info
Acte 4
Faut-il démentir les rumeurs, au risque de leur donner de l’importance ? Froissart estime que les médias mainstream ont une responsabilité dans la diffusion des rumeurs. Même pour les démentir ? Martine Sanz assure que les articles de décryptage, même sur des détails comme les rétroviseurs des Kouachi, l’aident en classe pour répondre à ses élèves. Peut-être. Mais Brossard considère qu’il faudrait surtout insister sur les idéologues qui récupèrent et/ou propagent ces rumeurs comme Thierry Meyssan, Dieudonné et Alain Soral. Et pour les déconstruire ? L’humour peut être une solution.
Au programme du matinaute, au réveil, trois vidéos. Version grand spectacle, le crash d’un avion taiwanais dans une rivière, filmé comme si on y était depuis une voiture. Version insoutenable, le pilote jordanien brûlé vif dans une cage par l’Etat islamique. Celle-là, toute ma time line de Twitter m’exhorte, avec des cris d’épouvante, de ne pas la regarder. Elle a été effacée de YouTube, ce qui n’empêche qu’il est possible, en quelques clics, de la trouver. Mais sur sa chaîne pour CSP+, l’Etat Islamique nous propose sa nouvelle production, à destination exclusive des francophones : elle est explicitement titrée « Faites exploser la France. »
C’est le deuxième épisode. L’éditocrate de l’EI qui s’y exprime se réjouit de l’impact du premier (Joué-lès-Tours, Dijon, Charlie, joli résultat), mais y témoigne aussi d’une fine connaissance du débat français, allant chercher par exemple, comme signe flagrant de l’hypocrisie française sur la liberté d’expression, le licenciement de Siné par Charlie Hebdo, en 2008 (tout notre dossier est ici). Autrement dit -effet collatéral des recrutements en France-, l’EI nous écoute, nous regarde, s’immisce dans nos discussions de cour de récré, de machine à café. L’EI écoute en direct notre débat national, tel qu’il se déroule dans des forums comme les nôtres, par exemple. L’EI lira peut-être cette chronique, dès sa mise en ligne. Cette immixtion est évidemment d’une grande efficacité.
Si vous voulez regarder « Faites exploser la France », épisode 2, la vidéo est là. Je vous donne le lien intentionnellement : je suis peut-être un koufar hypocrite, mais je me soigne. Regardez la. Commentez la. Regarder ailleurs n’est pas, n’est plus une solution. Que vous le vouliez ou non, ces vidéos seront vues par ceux qu’elles doivent atteindre. Supprimez-les, elles réapparaîtront aussitôt. Pas d’autre choix, donc, que de les regarder en face. Koufars ministres qui me lisez, regardez la vidéo. Koufars profs, regardez-la aussi, comme tous ces contenus complotistes que nous évoquions dans notre dernière émission, pour savoir répondre aux élèves qui les auront vues. Les journalistes doivent les regarder en face. Les détourneurs du Web, les Guignols, les gagmen de Canal+, doivent la regarder en face et s’en emparer. Il faut les critiquer, les démonter, les remonter, les détourner, les moquer, les incorporer à la production médiatique et intellectuelle nationale. Comme le gouvernement a commencé de le faire, dans sa fameuse vidéo Stop Djihad, et si possible plus adroitement que lui. Rien de tout cela ne sera évidemment suffisant, mais rien ne serait plus inefficace que de regarder ailleurs.
04.02.2015
Le profil de l’agresseur de trois militaires en faction devant un centre communautaire juif de Nice, mardi 3 février, illustre la nouvelle menace à laquelle sont confrontés les services de renseignement. Un petit délinquant comme il y en a tant, au parcours erratique sans être inquiétant, sans connexion connue avec les cercles djihadistes, qui décide un jour de brandir un couteau de cuisine.
Peu après 14 heures, mardi, un jeune homme s’est approché d’un trio de soldats positionné place Massena dans le cadre du plan Vigipirate. Il a sorti une lame de son sac et a blessé légèrement deux militaires à la joue, à la main et au bras. Aussitôt interpellé, l’agresseur a été identifié par sa carte d’identité comme étant Moussa Coulibaly, 30 ans, originaire de Mantes-la-Jolie (Yvelines). La section antiterroriste du parquet de Paris s’est saisie de l’enquête, confiée à la sous-direction antiterroriste et à la Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure (DGSI).
Moussa Coulibaly est connu depuis plus de dix ans des services de police pour des faits de petite délinquance : vol, usage de stupéfiants, outrage à agents… Rien de bien méchant. Il a été condamné à six reprises entre 2003 et 2012 à des peines d’amende ou de prison avec sursis, la plupart du temps à Mulhouse, où il a vécu quelques années, selon une source judiciaire.
TENTATIVE DE VOYAGE VERS LA TURQUIE
Il y a peu, le jeune homme est apparu dans le viseur des services de renseignement pour des signes de radicalisation. Remarqué pour son « prosélytisme agressif » dans la salle de sport qu’il fréquente à Mantes-la-Jolie, il était devenu peu aimable avec les femmes, explique une source policière. Il aurait par ailleurs eu une altercation dans les douches avec un homme au motif que ce dernier se lavait nu. Le 18 décembre, le service du renseignement territorial (SDRT) le signale à la DGSI. Pas de quoi mettre le jeune homme sur écoutes, estime la sécurité intérieure, qui laisse tout de même le soin au SDRT de garder un œil sur lui.
Lire aussi : Quels sont les moyens de l’antiterrorisme en France ?
Au début de 2014, Moussa Coulibaly disparaît brièvement des radars. Il réapparaît le 27 janvier à Ajaccio, en Corse, dans une agence de voyages. Il demande un aller simple pour Ankara, en Turquie. L’employé lui explique qu’il serait plus économique de prendre un aller-retour pour Istanbul. Le jeune homme en convient. Il prend donc un billet pour cette destination, le lendemain à 13 h 40, et fixe sans grande conviction une date de retour au 21 février. Mais il insiste pour que son vol comprenne de brèves escales à Nice et Rome.
Intrigué par ses exigences, sa destination et quelques aspects douteux de son passeport, l’employé appelle Air France, qui prévient la police aux frontières, laquelle alerte la DGSI. Le renseignement intérieur ressort de ses dossiers le signalement de Mantes-la-Jolie et fait le lien avec l’épisode de la douche. Faute de pouvoir l’empêcher légalement de prendre son vol, la DGSI prévient les Turcs de le renvoyer en France dès réception. Une surveillance physique est mise en place pour sa seule nuit à Ajaccio avant l’embarquement : l’homme a pris une chambre avec vue sur le golfe à l’hôtel Dauphin, ne voit personne, lave son linge, fait sa prière, puis prend l’avion.
A peine arrivé à l’aéroport d’Istanbul le 29, il est réexpédié à Nice, où les enquêteurs de la direction régionale de la sécurité intérieure l’interrogent sur ses motivations. Le jeune homme assure qu’il entendait faire du tourisme en Turquie, et demande qu’on le laisse rentrer à Ajaccio pour y retrouver sa petite amie, dont il n’est pas capable de fournir le nom ni l’adresse. Faute d’éléments suffisants pour ouvrir une procédure judiciaire, les policiers le relâchent, et mettent en place une surveillance à Ajaccio.
Mais le jeune Mantais ne retourne pas en Corse. Il prend une chambre dans un hôtel niçois. Intrigués par son soudain intérêt pour la Côte d’Azur, les services de renseignement mettent en place un dispositif de « surveillance d’environnement », afin de déterminer s’il a des relations dans la région. Peine perdue : le jeune homme erre pendant quelques jours, « picole un peu, tape des clopes dans la rue, discute avec des SDF », explique une source proche du dossier. Intrigant, mais toujours rien d’alarmant.
UNE AGRESSION « RÉVÉLATRICE D’UN CLIMAT »
Mardi, place Massena, Moussa Coulibaly a fait tomber un sac devant un militaire, qui s’est empressé de le ramasser. Ce dernier a eu la joue transpercée. Le jeune homme n’a pas crié « Allah Akbar ». Il n’a rien dit. Le parquet antiterroriste s’est saisi de l’enquête en raison de ses cibles et de sa volonté de rejoindre la Turquie. Le ministre de l’intérieur, Bernard Cazeneuve, s’est gardé d’évoquer une attaque « terroriste », préférant parler d’« acte criminel ».
« C’est une agression d’une gravité relative, mais elle est révélatrice d’un climat, explique une source proche des services de renseignement. Un type un peu paumé, difficile à détecter, qui passe subitement à l’acte. On s’attend à ce que ce phénomène se répète. » La question se posera peut-être du suivi de ces velléitaires du djihad qui, frustrés de n’avoir pu rejoindre la Syrie, se lancent dans des opérations désespérées sur le sol français.
L’agression de Moussa Coulibaly n’est pas sans rappeler celle commise le 20 décembre par Bertrand Nzohabonayo, qui avait attaqué trois policiers au couteau de cuisine au commissariat de Joué-lès-Tours. Il s’agissait déjà d’un profil « signalé » à la DGSI pour des signes de radicalisation religieuse, mais pas assez inquiétant pour justifier la mise en place d’une surveillance physique.
Le jour de l’attaque de Nice, l’Etat islamique a diffusé une vidéo intitulée « Faites exploser la France (2) ». Un homme masqué, armé d’une kalachnikov et entouré de ses « frères » d’armes, exhorte en français ceux qui sont « dans l’incapacité » de partir pour la Syrie à « passer à l’action ». « Tuez à l’aide d’un couteau un policier (…) ou un militaire », lance-t-il. Le premier épisode de ce film avait été mis en ligne la veille de l’attaque de Joué-lès-Tours.
L’agresseur des trois militaires en faction devant un centre juif à Nice était connu de la DGSI. La France est confrontée à un « terrorisme libre-accès », s’inquiète Bernard Cazeneuve.
Plutôt inquiétant, si l’on en croit les première déclarations de Bernard Cazeneuve. Le ministre de l’Intérieur a expliqué mardi que la France était confrontée « à un phénomène nouveau, le terrorisme libre-accès », impliquant des moyens exceptionnels.
Auditionné par la DGSi
« Nous sommes face à un phénomène nouveau, le terrorisme en libre-accès. Cela implique la mobilisation de moyens exceptionnels », a-t-il commenté devant la presse. « 1.200 ressortissants Français sont allés en Irak et en Syrie, 580 y sont allés et en sont revenus, 200 veulent y aller. Et 185 sont quelque part en Europe sur le chemin pour y aller », a-t-il estimé.
« Ce personnage avait donné des signes de radicalisation, le renseignement territorial l’avait détecté, ses déplacements vers le Turquie avaient été suivis et nous avions demandé son retour en France. À son retour en France il a été auditionné par la DGSI mais il n’avait montré aucun signe de passage à l’acte. Cependant la surveillance de son environnement se poursuivait pour comprendre ce qu’il faisait à Nice, alors qu’il y était ici sans racines et sans contacts », a précisé le ministre de l’Intérieur.
La question des moyens est donc immédiatement posée, mais aussi de l’appréhension d’une forme nouvelle de terrorisme, qui laisse pour l’instant les services spécialisés relativement démunis : le passage inopiné de la délinquance, voire de la petite délinquance dans le cas de Moussa Couilibaly, à la radicalisation puis au passage à l’acte terroriste. Glissement progressif dans le cas d’ Amedy Coulibaly, le tueur de la porte de Vincennes et de Montrouge . Dérive peut-être plus brutale dans le cas de l’affaire de Moussa Coulibaly, à Nice ? L’enquête le dira.
Une cellule de contre-propagande sur le Net d’une cinquantaine de spécialistes militaires
Le gouvernement a réagi, depuis les attentats parisiens, en actionnant les leviers dont il dispose : augmenter d’un cran le plan Vigipirate. Mais aussi en tentant un travail en amont, avec la mise en place d’une contre-propagande anti-jihad . Le gouvernement a d’abord mis en ligne stop-djihadisme.gouv.fr, un site spécialisé destiné à lutter contre la propagande jihadiste sur Internet. C’est le Centre interarmées d’actions dans l’environnement (CIAE), créé en 2012 à Lyon, qui abriterait cette nouvelle arme.
La question des moyens globaux affectés à la lutte contre le terrorisme sur le territoire français reste néanmoins posée. On ne peut pas, avec les effectifs actuels, suivre 24H sur 24 les quelque 3.000 personnes soupçonnées de près ou de loin de présenter un danger, avait avoué Manuel Valls lors de son discours solennel après les attentats à Charlie Hebdo…
Comes the news that another Islamist immigrant from Mali named Coulibaly has attacked another Jewish institution in France. The first one, Amedy Coulibaly, murdered four Jews at a kosher store in Paris on Jan. 9; this second one injured three soldiers yesterday as they protected a Jewish community center in Nice.
Two soldiers on Jan. 20 stand outside the Jewish museum in Brussels where an Islamist killed four people in May 2014.
Police say Moussa Coulibaly, about 30 years old, with a record of theft and violence, and apparently not related to Amedy, pulled a knife about 8 inches long out of a bag, injuring one soldier in the chin, one in the cheek, and one in the forearm.
Coincidentally, I left Nice about four hours before this attack and had passed by that Jewish center a few days earlier, in the course of a tour of Muslim-majority areas in ten cities across France and Belgium. Those travels brought me repeatedly in proximity to the heavily armed soldiers who protect Jewish institutions and prompted several skeptical conclusions on my part about their presence:
They are soldiers, not police, and so not trained to be alert to street problems.
They tend to get distracted by their smartphones or pretty girls passing by.
They clutch their assault rifles across their bodies, which leaves them vulnerable to someone driving by and shooting at them.
As confirmed by today’s attack, the ostensible protection they offer actually provokes Islamists and other antisemites.
They are only posted temporarily to the Jewish institutions in the aftermath of the Hyper Cacher attack a month ago and before long will leave.
They protect only the institutions themselves, not the people who come and go to them, who remain as vulnerable as ever.
In short, the soldiers are sitting ducks whose deployment does little to protect the Jewish community or solve the larger problem of Islamist violence. But it does offer another instance of emotionally satisfying « security theater » which temporarily gives everyone a constructive sense of doing something.
In contrast, the Kabbalah Center in Montpellier, France, did not have visible protection on Feb. 1.
A real solution will require much deeper and longer-range steps that concern national identity, immigration policy, integration efforts, and effective policing.
Depuis que l’ordre religieux est ébranlé – comme le christianisme le fut sous la Réforme – les vices ne sont pas seuls à se trouver libérés. Certes les vices sont libérés et ils errent à l’aventure et ils font des ravages. Mais les vertus aussi sont libérées et elles errent, plus farouches encore, et elles font des ravages plus terribles encore. Le monde moderne est envahi des veilles vertus chrétiennes devenues folles. Les vertus sont devenues folles pour avoir été isolées les unes des autres, contraintes à errer chacune en sa solitude. G.K. Chesterton
Parfois, ce sont les gens dont on attend le moins qui font des choses auxquelles personne ne s’attendait. Joan Clarke (The Imitation game)
Personne n’auraitpufaireça.Tu sais,cematin…J’étaisdansuntrainqui a traverséunevillequi sans toin’existerait pas.J’aiachetéunbilletd’unhommequi sans toiseraitprobablementmort. Au travail, j’ailu…toutunchampderecherchescientifiquequin’existe que grâce àtoi.Maintenant,tu peux regretter de ne pas avoir éténormal… Moi, jamais jele regretterais.Lemondeestunendroitinfinimentmeilleur, justementparce quetu ne l‘étais pas. Joan Clarke (The Imitation game)
Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game? (…) We now ask the question, « What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game? » Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, « Can machines think? Alan Turing
Le test a été inspiré d’un jeu d’imitation dans lequel un homme et une femme vont dans des pièces séparées et les invités tentent de discuter avec les deux protagonistes en écrivant des questions et en lisant les réponses qui leur sont renvoyées. Dans ce jeu l’homme et la femme essaient de convaincre les invités qu’ils sont tous deux des femmes. À l’origine Turing a imaginé ce test pour répondre à sa question existentielle : « une machine peut-elle penser ? », en donnant une interprétation plus concrète de sa question. Une idée intéressante de sa proposition de test est que les réponses doivent être données dans des intervalles de temps définis. Il imagine que cela est nécessaire pour que l’observateur ne puisse pas établir une conclusion qui soit fondée sur le fait qu’un ordinateur puisse répondre plus rapidement qu’un homme, surtout sur des questions de mathématiques. (…) Dans la publication de Turing, le terme « Jeu d’imitation » est utilisé pour sa proposition de test. Le nom de « Test de Turing » semble avoir été inventé en 1968 par Arthur C. Clarke dans ses nouvelles de science-fiction dont a été tiré le film 2001, l’Odyssée de l’espace. Wikipedia
La science est ici vue comme un résultat personnel, une activité autiste, plutôt que comme une longue déduction collective, un dialogue avec des penseurs contemporains et passés. Jamais le nom de John von Neumann, rival et autre père de l’informatique, n’est ici mentionné. Imitation Game passe à côté d’une histoire ahurissante et réelle, esquive les relations de pouvoir inhérentes à l’invention technologique, comme le fit brillamment David Fincher avec The Social Network. Le grand film d’archéologie de l’informatique reste à faire. Clément Ghys
Overall, the movie works: It’s fun, it’s gripping and it features a brilliant performance from Cumberbatch. But like so many other Hollywood biopics, it takes some major artistic license — which is disappointing, because Turing’s actual story is so compelling.(…) The biggest real-life drama is unmentioned in the film, Hodges says. In February 1942, the Germans adopted a more complex Enigma machine for naval communications, again putting the Allies in the dark. “It was a major crisis,” Hodges says. In desperation, Turing and American partners ran multiple bombes in parallel and used electronic components to speed up the code-breaking process. Finally, in early 1943, the Allies succeeded in cracking the code. The consequences of the 1942 Enigma upgrade went far beyond the war. The introduction to electronics, Hodges says, offered Turing a practical means for incorporating his 1936 conceptual ideas into a revolutionary machine — the digital computer. “The scientific story is much bigger than just the Enigma problem,” Hodges says. “It was a great movement in which ideas and new technology came together.” The Imitation Game ignores much of this history, and it also includes an egregious, historically inaccurate storyline in which Turing fails to report a Soviet spy to avoid being outed as gay. Nonetheless, the acting, suspense and a surprising amount of humor make it a movie worth seeing. Just take some time after the movie to read up on Turing’s actual immense contributions to the war and modern computing.(…) In reality, Turing had already outlined the concept of a computing machine in a 1936 paper and had built a cipher machine while at Princeton in the late 1930s, says Turing biographer Andrew Hodges. By mid-1940, Hodges says, Turing and his team at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, England, were routinely decoding German Air Force messages with code-breaking machines, or bombes. Within another year the cryptanalysts, which included Joan Clarke (played in the movie by Keira Knightley), had deciphered the all-important naval messages that strategized U-boat attacks. The biggest real-life drama is unmentioned in the film, Hodges says. In February 1942, the Germans adopted a more complex Enigma machine for naval communications, again putting the Allies in the dark. “It was a major crisis,” Hodges says. In desperation, Turing and American partners ran multiple bombes in parallel and used electronic components to speed up the code-breaking process. Finally, in early 1943, the Allies succeeded in cracking the code. The consequences of the 1942 Enigma upgrade went far beyond the war. The introduction to electronics, Hodges says, offered Turing a practical means for incorporating his 1936 conceptual ideas into a revolutionary machine — the digital computer. “The scientific story is much bigger than just the Enigma problem,” Hodges says. “It was a great movement in which ideas and new technology came together.” The Imitation Game ignores much of this history, and it also includes an egregious, historically inaccurate storyline in which Turing fails to report a Soviet spy to avoid being outed as gay. Andrew Grant
It’s the script which may prevent this hitting the Oscars jackpot. It’s too formulaic, too efficient at simply whisking you through and making sure you’ve clocked the diversity message.: without square pegs – like those played by Cumberbatch and Knightley – the world would be by far the poorer. « Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of that do the things no one can imagine, » runs the movie’s mouthful tagline. It leaves a strange taste. Turing’s treatment was terrible. Perhaps his achievement, in the end, should not be tainted by association. Catherine Shoard
The Imitation Game jumps around three time periods – Turing’s schooldays in 1928, his cryptographic work at Bletchley Park from 1939-45, and his arrest for gross indecency in Manchester in 1952. It isn’t accurate about any of them, but the least wrong bits are the 1928 ones. Young Turing (played strikingly well by Alex Lawther) is a lonely, awkward boy, whose only friend is a kid called Christopher Morcom. Turing nurtures a youthful passion for Morcom, and is about to declare his love when Morcom mysteriously fails to return after a holiday. Turing is summoned into the headmaster’s office, and is told coldly that the object of his affection has died of bovine tuberculosis. The film is right that this awful event had a formative impact on Turing’s life. In reality, though, Turing had been warned before his friend died that he should prepare for the worst. The housemaster’s speech (to all the boys, not just him) announcing Morcom’s death was kind and comforting. (…) In the 1939-45 strand of the story, Turing has grown up physically – though not, the film implies, emotionally. He is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who is always good and puts in a strong performance despite the clunkiness of the screenplay. The film gives him a quasi-romantic foil in cryptanalyst Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), dubiously fictionalised as the key emotional figure of Turing’s adult life. The real Turing was engaged to her for a while, but he told her upfront that he had homosexual tendencies. According to him, she was “unfazed” by this. Turing builds an Enigma-code-cracking machine, which he calls Christopher. It’s understandable that films about complicated science usually simplify the facts. This one has sentimentalised them, too: fusing A Beautiful Mind with Frankenstein to portray Turing as the ultimate misunderstood boffin, and the Christopher machine as his beloved creation. In real life, the machine that cracked Enigma was called the Bombe, and the first operating version of it was named Victory. The digital computer Turing invented was known as the Universal Turing Machine. Colossus, the first programmable digital electronic computer, was built at Bletchley Park by engineer Tommy Flowers, incorporating Turing’s ideas. The Imitation Game puts John Cairncross, a Soviet spy and possible “Fifth Man” of the Cambridge spy ring, on Turing’s cryptography team. Cairncross was at Bletchley Park, but he was in a different unit from Turing. As Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges, on whose book this film is based, has said, it is “ludicrous” to imagine that two people working separately at Bletchley would even have met. Security was far too tight to allow it. In his own autobiography, Cairncross wrote: “The rigid separation of the different units made contact with other staff members almost impossible, so I never got to know anyone apart from my direct operational colleagues.” In the film, Turing works out that Cairncross is a spy; but Cairncross threatens to expose his sexuality. “If you tell him my secret, I’ll tell him yours,” he says. The blackmail works. Turing covers up for the spy, for a while at least. This is wholly imaginary and deeply offensive – for concealing a spy would have been an extremely serious matter. Were the makers of The Imitation Game intending to accuse Alan Turing, one of Britain’s greatest war heroes, of cowardice and treason? Creative licence is one thing, but slandering a great man’s reputation – while buying into the nasty 1950s prejudice that gay men automatically constituted a security risk – is quite another. The final section of the film, set in 1951, may be the silliest, and not only because the film might have bothered to check that Turing’s arrest actually happened in 1952. Nor only because a key plot point rests on the fictional Detective Nock (Rory Kinnear) using Tipp-Ex, which didn’t exist until 1959 (similar products were marketed from 1956, but that’s still not early enough for anyone to be using it in the film). Nock pursues Turing because he suspects him of being another Soviet spy, and accidentally uncovers his homosexuality in the process. This is not how it happened, and the whole film should really get over its irrelevant obsession with Soviet spies. In real life, Turing himself reported a petty theft to the police – but changed details of his story to cover up the relationship he was having with the possible culprit, Arnold Murray. The police did not suspect him of espionage. They pursued him with regard to the homophobic law of gross indecency. He submitted a five-page statement admitting to his affair with Murray – evidence which helped convict him. (…) Historically, The Imitation Game is as much of a garbled mess as a heap of unbroken code. For its appalling suggestion that Alan Turing might have covered up for a Soviet spy, it must be sent straight to the bottom of the class. Alex von Tunzelmann
To anyone trying to turn this story into a movie, the choice seems clear: either you embrace the richness of Turing as a character and trust the audience to follow you there, or you simply capitulate, by reducing him to a caricature of the tortured genius. The latter, I’m afraid, is the path chosen by director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore in The Imitation Game, their new, multiplex-friendly rendering of the story. In their version, Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) conforms to the familiar stereotype of the otherworldly nerd: he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t even understand an invitation to lunch. This places him at odds not only with the other codebreakers in his unit, but also, equally predictably, positions him as a natural rebel. Just to make sure we get the point, his recruitment to the British wartime codebreaking organization at Bletchley Park is rendered as a ridiculous confrontation with Alastair Denniston (Charles Dance, of Game of Thrones fame), the Royal Navy officer then in charge of British signals intelligence: “How the bloody hell are you supposed to decrypt German communications if you don’t, oh, I don’t know, speak German?” thunders Denniston. “I’m quite excellent at crossword puzzles,” responds Turing. On various occasions throughout the film, Denniston tries to fire Turing or have him arrested for espionage, which is resisted by those who have belatedly recognized his redemptive brilliance. “If you fire Alan, you’ll have to fire me, too,” says one of his (formerly hostile) coworkers. There’s no question that the real-life Turing was decidedly eccentric, and that he didn’t suffer fools gladly. As his biographers vividly relate, though, he could also be a wonderfully engaging character when he felt like it, notably popular with children and thoroughly charming to anyone for whom he developed a fondness. All of this stands sharply at odds with his characterization in the film, which depicts him as a dour Mr. Spock who is disliked by all of his coworkers—with the possible exception of Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley). The film spares no opportunity to drive home his robotic oddness. He uses the word “logical” a lot and can’t grasp even the most modest of jokes. This despite the fact that he had a sprightly sense of humor, something that comes through vividly in the accounts of his friends, many of whom shared their stories with both Hodges and Copeland. (For the record, the real Turing was also a bit of a slob, with a chronic disregard for personal hygiene. The glamorous Cumberbatch, by contrast, looks like he’s just stepped out of a Burberry catalog.) Now, one might easily dismiss such distortions as trivial. But actually they point to a much broader and deeply regrettable pattern. Tyldum and Moore are determined to suggest maximum dramatic tension between their tragic outsider and a blinkered society. (“You will never understand the importance of what I am creating here,” he wails when Denniston’s minions try to destroy his machine.) But this not only fatally miscasts Turing as a character—it also completely destroys any coherent telling of what he and his colleagues were trying to do. In reality, Turing was an entirely willing participant in a collective enterprise that featured a host of other outstanding intellects who happily coexisted to extraordinary effect. The actual Denniston, for example, was an experienced cryptanalyst and was among those who, in 1939, debriefed the three Polish experts who had already spent years figuring out how to attack the Enigma, the state-of-the-art cipher machine the German military used for virtually all of their communications. It was their work that provided the template for the machines Turing would later create to revolutionize the British signals intelligence effort. So Turing and his colleagues were encouraged in their work by a military leadership that actually had a pretty sound understanding of cryptological principles and operational security. As Copeland notes, the Nazis would have never allowed a bunch of frivolous eggheads to engage in such highly sensitive work, and they suffered the consequences. The film misses this entirely. In Tyldum and Moore’s version of events, Turing and his small group of fellow codebreakers spend the first two years of the war in fruitless isolation; only in 1941 does Turing’s crazy machine finally show any results. This is a highly stylized version of Turing’s epic struggle to crack the hardest German cipher, the one used by the German navy, whose ravaging submarines nearly brought Britain to its knees during the early years of the war. What this account neglects to mention is that Turing’s “bombes”—electromechanical calculating devices designed to reconstruct the settings of the Enigma—were already helping to decipher German army and air force codes from early on. The movie version, in short, represents a bizarre departure from the historical record. In fact, Bletchley Park—and not only Turing’s legendary Hut 8—was doing productive work from the very beginning of the war. Within a few years its motley assortment of codebreakers, linguists, stenographers, and communications experts were operating on a near-industrial scale. By the end of the war there were some 9,000 people working on the project, processing thousands of intercepts per day. A bit like one of those smartphones that bristles with unneeded features, the film does its best to ladle in extra doses of intrigue where none existed. Tyldum and Moore conjure up an entirely superfluous subplot involving John Cairncross, who was spying for the Soviet Union during his service at Bletchley Park. There’s no evidence that he ever crossed paths with Turing—Bletchley, contrary to the film, was much bigger than a single hut—but The Imitation Game includes him among Turing’s coworkers. When Turing discovers his true allegiance, Cairncross turns the tables on him, saying that he’ll reveal Turing’s homosexuality if his secret is divulged. Turing backs off, leaving the spy in place. Not many of the critics seem to have paid attention to this detail—except for historian Alex von Tunzelmann, who pointed out that the filmmakers have thus managed, almost as an afterthought, to turn their hero into a traitor. The movie tries to soften this by revealing that Stewart Menzies, the head of the Special Intelligence Service, has known about Cairncross’s treachery from the start—a jury-rigged solution to a gratuitous plot problem. (In fact, Cairncross, “the fifth man,” was never prosecuted.) These errors are not random; there is a method to the muddle. The filmmakers see their hero above all as a martyr of a homophobic Establishment, and they are determined to lay emphasis on his victimhood. The Imitation Game ends with the following title: “After a year of government-mandated hormonal therapy, Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954.” This is in itself something of a distortion. Turing was convicted on homosexuality charges in 1952, and chose the “therapy” involving female hormones—aimed, in the twisted thinking of the times, at suppressing his “unnatural” desires—as an alternative to jail time. It was barbarous treatment, and Turing complained that the pills gave him breasts. But the whole miserable episode ended in 1953—a full year before his death, something not made clear to the filmgoer. Copeland, who has taken a fresh look at the record and spoken with many members of Turing’s circle, disputes that the experience sent Turing into a downward spiral of depression. By the accounts of those who knew him, he bore the injustice with fortitude, then spent the next year enthusiastically pursuing projects. Copeland cites a number of close friends (and Turing’s mother) who saw no evidence that he was depressed in the days before his death, and notes that the coroner who concluded that Turing had died by biting a cyanide-laced apple never examined the fruit. Copeland offers sound evidence that the death might have actually been accidental, the result of a self-rigged laboratory where Turing was conducting experiments with cyanide. He left no suicide letter. Copeland also leaves open the possibility of foul play, which can’t be dismissed out of hand, when you consider that all of this happened during the period of McCarthyite hysteria, an era when homosexuality was regarded as an inherent “security risk.” Turing’s government work meant that he knew a lot of secrets, in the postwar period as well. It’s likely we’ll never know the whole story. One thing is certain: Turing could be remarkably naive about his own homosexuality. It was Turing himself who reported the fateful 1952 burglary, probably involving a working-class boyfriend, that brought his gay lifestyle to the attention to the police, thus setting off the legal proceedings against him. In The Imitation Game he holds this information back from the cops, who then cleverly wheedle it out. It’s another indication of the filmmakers’ determination to show Turing as an essentially passive figure. He’s never the master of his own destiny. But even if you believe that Turing was driven to his death, The Imitation Game’s treatment of his fate borders on the ridiculous. In one of the film’s most egregious scenes, his wartime friend Joan pays him a visit in 1952 or so, while he’s still taking his hormones. She finds him shuffling around the house in his bathrobe, barely capable of putting together a coherent sentence. He tells her that he’s terrified that the powers that be will take away “Christopher”—his latest computer, which he’s named after the dead friend of his childhood (just as he did with his machine at Bletchley Park). As near as I can tell, there is no basis for any of this in the historical record; it’s monstrous hogwash, a conceit entirely cooked up by Moore. The real Turing certainly paid periodic and dignified respects to the memory of his first love, Christopher Morcom, but I doubt very much that he ever confused his computers with people. In perhaps the most bitter irony of all, the filmmakers have managed to transform the real Turing, vivacious and forceful, into just the sort of mythological gay man, whiney and weak, that homophobes love to hate. This is indicative of the bad faith underlying the whole enterprise, which is desperate to put Turing in the role of a gay liberation totem but can’t bring itself to show him kissing another man—something he did frequently, and with gusto. And it most definitely doesn’t show him cruising New York’s gay bars, or popping off on a saucy vacation to one of the less reputable of the Greek islands. The Imitation Game is a film that prefers its gay men decorously disembodied. To be honest, I’m a bit surprised that there hasn’t been more pushback against The Imitation Game by intelligence professionals, historians, and survivors of Turing’s circle. But I think I understand why. After so many years in which Turing failed to get his due, no one wants to be seen as spoiling the party. I strongly doubt, though, that many of those in the know are recommending this film to their friends. (For his part, Andrew Hodges is apparently opting to avoid talking about the movie during his current book tour—it’s easy to imagine why he might choose to do so, and I don’t fault him for it.) Christian Caryl
The Imitation Game takes major liberties with its source material, injecting conflict where none existed, inventing entirely fictional characters, rearranging the chronology of events, and misrepresenting the very nature of Turing’s work at Bletchley Park. At the same time, the film might paint Turing as being more unlovable than he actually was.(…) However, the central conceit of The Imitation Game—that Turing singlehandedly invented and physically built the machine that broke the Germans’ Enigma code—is simply untrue. A predecessor of the “Bombe”—the name given to the large, ticking machine that used rotors to test different letter combinations—was invented by Polish cryptanalysts before Turing even began working as a cryptologist for the British government. Turing’s great innovation was to design a new machine that broke the Enigma code faster by looking for likely letter combinations and ruling out combinations that were unlikely to yield results. Turing didn’t develop the new, improved machine by dint of his own singular genius—the mathematician Gordon Welchman, who is not even mentioned in the film, collaborated with Turing on the design. (…) The Imitation Game also somewhat alters Turing’s personality. The film strongly implies that Alan is somewhere on the autism spectrum: Cumberbatch’s character doesn’t understand jokes, takes common expressions literally, and seems indifferent to the suffering and annoyance he causes in others. This characterization is rooted in Hodge’s biography but is also largely exaggerated: Hodges never suggests that Turing was autistic, and though he refers to Turing’s tendency to take contracts and other bureaucratic red tape literally, he also describes Turing as a man with a keen sense of humor and close friends. To be sure, Hodges paints Turing as shy, eccentric, and impatient with irrationality, but Cumberbatch’s narcissistic, detached Alan has more in common with the actor’s title character in Sherlock than with the Turing of Hodges’ biography. One of Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park later recalled him as “a very easily approachable man” and said “we were very very fond of him”; none of this is reflected in the film.(…) In The Imitation Game, Commander Denniston is a rigid naval officer who resents Alan’s indifference to the military hierarchy and attempts to fire him when his decryption machine fails to deliver fast results. This characterization is mostly fictional, and Denniston’s family has taken issue with the film’s negative portrayal of him. The real-life Alastair Denniston, who spent most of his career as the director of the Government Code and Cypher School, was eager to expand his staff to help break the Germans’ Enigma code in the late 1930s. He recruited Turing, on the basis of his work at Cambridge and his writing on hypothetical computation machines, in 1938, and he hired Turing to work full time at Bletchley Park when Britain entered World War II in September 1939. There’s no record of a contentious interview between Turing and Denniston, and Denniston never tried to fire Turing from the Government Code and Cypher School—rather, given his innovations, Turing was a star of Bletchley Park. (…) Even if most of the details of the conflict between Commander Denniston and Alan are made up, they do stand in for a real-life power struggle between the military brass and the cryptologists. Turing’s colleagues there recalled that Turing “was always impatient of pompousness or officialdom of any kind,” which made him ill-suited for work in a military context, and Hodges writes that he “had little time for Denniston.” One of the most memorable clashes between Commander Denniston and Alan in the movie occurs when Alan goes over Denniston’s head to write a letter to Winston Churchill, who immediately puts Alan in charge of the Enigma-breaking operation and grants him the 100,000 pounds he needs to build his machine. This never happened, but Alan and three colleagues at Bletchley Park—including Hugh Alexander—did write a letter to Churchill requesting more staff and resources in 1941, and Churchill quickly granted them their requests. L.V. Anderson
In The Imitation Game, Hugh Alexander is a suave ladykiller who spends much of the film battling with Alan for control of the codebreaking operations; Hugh eventually recognizes Alan’s genius and falls in line behind him. Hugh Alexander—who went professionally by Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander or C.H.O’D. Alexander—was a real person, but the film’s Hugh character seems intended to serve as a contrast to Alan’s antisocial personality.(…) Alexander was a chess champion, and he was much better at managing people than Turing was. However, Alexander was not initially assigned to be Turing’s superior at Bletchley Park. Alexander began working there several months after Turing arrived, and the two didn’t begin working together for another year or so, when Alexander was transferred to Turing’s team to work on breaking Germany’s naval Enigma code. Hodges writes, “Hugh Alexander soon proved the all-round organiser and diplomat that Alan could never be.” Alexander eventually took over naval Enigma decryption after Turing began pursuing a speech decryption project, but by all accounts, their relationship was friendly and mutually respectful. In fact, when Turing was tried for indecency in 1952, Alexander served as a character witness for the defense.(…) Clarke was recruited to Bletchley Park by her former academic supervisor (and Turing’s partner in improving the Bombe) Gordon Welchman; she didn’t win the role by excelling in a crossword competition. (Bletchley recruiters did use crosswords to find talented codebreakers, but neither Turing nor Clarke was involved in this effort.) And Turing proposed to Clarke not to help her escape from overbearing parents, but because they liked each other. He “told her that he was glad he could talk to her ‘as to a man,’ ” writes Hodges, and they shared an interest in chess and botany. She even accepted Turing’s homosexuality; their engagement continued after he confessed his attraction to men. But after some months, Turing ended the engagement. “It was neither a happy nor an easy decision,” writes Hodges, but it wasn’t the ultimately violent confrontation depicted in The Imitation Game, either. “There had been several times when he had come out with ‘I do love you.’ Lack of love was not Alan’s problem.” Turing and Clarke kept in touch after their engagement ended, and Turing even tried to rekindle their relationship after a couple of years, but Clarke rebuffed him. Turing also wrote a letter to Clarke in 1952 to inform her of his impending trial for indecency, but the final scene of The Imitation Game, in which Joan visits Alan during his probation, is invented. Stewart Menzies, the chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, and John Cairncross, a Soviet spy, are two historical figures who appear in The Imitation Game despite the fact that neither worked closely with Turing. Menzies was, as the film suggests, responsible for passing decrypted Nazi strategies to Winston Churchill, but it’s highly unlikely he interacted individually with Turing (or most of the thousands of other codebreakers who worked at Bletchley Park over the years). Cairncross did pass intelligence from Bletchley Park to the Soviet Union, but he worked in a different unit from Turing’s, and there’s no evidence the two knew each other. Similarly, the filmmakers’ conceit that Menzies knew about and tolerated Cairncross’ duplicity isn’t supported by the historical record. In the film, Peter and Jack are more or less interchangeable background characters, distinguished primarily by the fact that Peter has a brother who is serving in the armed forces on a ship that the code-breaking team discover is targeted by the Germans. The ensuing dramatic scene, in which Alan reminds Peter and the rest of the team that they have to keep the Germans from learning that they’ve broken Enigma, is entirely invented; Hilton had no such brother, and in fact he began working at Bletchley Park long after Turing’s Bombe had been built. And while it was crucial for the British to use their intelligence wisely, Hodges writes that their success had less to do with their tactical shrewdness and more to do with the Germans’ a priori conviction that Enigma was unbreakable, despite ample evidence to the contrary. The Imitation Game’s framing device depicts one Detective Nock’s investigation into Alan’s life, following a mysterious burglary at Alan’s home. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this framing device isn’t quite true to life: There was no Detective Nock, and the detectives who did book Turing for indecency (who were named Mr. Wills and Mr. Rimmer) were under no illusions about his mysterious circumstances. Turing was burglarized by an acquaintance of 19-year-old Arnold Murray, who had slept with Turing a few times. The burglar had heard Murray talk about his trysts with Turing, and when the police interrogated the burglar, he revealed the illicit nature of Murray and Turing’s relationship. When the police interviewed Turing, he made no attempt to hide his homosexuality from them. Turing eventually pled guilty to indecency, and he was placed on probation and agreed to submit to estrogen treatment—intended to destroy his sex drive—for more than a year. The Imitation Game implies that the estrogen treatment sent Alan into an emotional tailspin, but Turing seems to have continued his work and social relationships normally during his year of probation. The film also implies that the estrogen treatment triggered Alan’s suicide, but in fact the treatment ended in April 1953, fourteen months before Turing killed himself. Although some modern scholars believe that his death from cyanide poisoning was an accident, Hodges believes that Turing made his suicide deliberately ambiguous so as to spare his mother the pain of believing that her son had killed himself on purpose. L.V. Anderson
Où l’on redécouvre que l’informatique, comme tant d’inventions avant elle, a d’abord servi à faire la guerre …
Oubli des précurseurs, partenaires ou concurrents (Marian Rejewsky, John von Neuman, Gordon Welchman, Wittgenstein), silence sur le plus important épisode de l’histoire (la complexification, en cours de route, d’Enigma par les Allemands), ajout de rencontres ou personnages fictifs et inutiles (John Cairncross, inspecteur de police), fausse accusation d’espionnage, erreurs importantes de dates (il avait suspendu son traitement depuis plus d’un an et travaillait sur toutes sortes de projets au moment d’une mort peut-être accidentelle), excessive individualisation d’un travail collectif qui a compté jusqu’à près de 10 000 personnes, exagération extrême de l’asociabilité du héros comme de l’opposition de son entourage …
Au sortir du passionnant film du norvégien Morten Tyldum (The Imitation game, du nom d’un jeu de société, que proposait Turing comme test d’intelligence artificielle, où un homme tente de se faire passer pour une femme) …
Sur la vie d’Alan Turing, le mathématicien britannique auquel on ne doit rien de moins avec le décodage, réputé inviolable car changé quoitidiennement, du fameux système de cryptage Enigma …
Au moment où en pleine de guerre de l’Atlantique les sous-marins allemands étaient passés bien près de couper l’Angleterre de son cordon ombilical américain …
Que la victoire sur l’Allemagne nazie mais aussi, excusez du peu, la (co-)invention de l’ordinateur …
Comment ne pas être frustré lorsque l’on découvre qu’Hollywood a encore réussi …
Emporté par son combat si tendance contre l’homophobie et ne reculant pour ce faire devant aucun anachronisme …
A passer à côté d’une histoire réelle encore plus ahurissante ?
A savoir celle d’un véritable héros …
Qui après avoir largement contribué à la victoire alliée (deux ans de guerre gagnées et peut-être 14 millions de victimes supplémentaires sauvées selon les estimations des historiens) …
Et pour préserver des recherches dont le secret militaire ne fut levé qu’en l’an 2000 …
Poussa l’abnégation jusqu’à endurer l’indignité et les désagréments d’une année de castration chimique …
Et surtout l’impossibilité, pour lui comme pour ses amis, de ne jamais révéler au monde …
Toute l’étendue de son inestimable contribution …
Tant à sa propre patrie qu’à l’humanité et à la Science avec un grand S ?
CRITIQUE
Codes . «Imitation Game», biopic d’Alan Turing, perd le fil de l’invention de l’ordinateur dans un numéro académique.
Après la sortie la semaine dernière d’Une merveilleuse histoire du temps, film consacré à Stephen Hawking, débarque en salles Imitation Game, biopic d’un autre scientifique, Alan Turing. Aux yeux des producteurs, les professeurs Tournesol seraient aimables du grand public, mais il conviendrait avant tout de montrer que, derrière chaque théorie – toute révolutionnaire soit-elle -, il y a un petit cœur qui bat.
Alan Turing, donc. L’Anglais est né en 1912 et mort en 1954, empoisonné au cyanure dans des circonstances jamais clairement établies. Dans sa courte vie, il aura inventé l’informatique, rien de moins. Il était asocial et homosexuel, deux qualités mal vues par la société d’alors. Le réalisateur norvégien Morten Tyldum s’est attaché à décrire la courte période au cours de laquelle le calcul de probabilités trouvera une matérialité, en cette chose que l’on appellera un ordinateur. En 1938, Turing, fraîchement sorti de Cambridge, est embauché par le gouvernement britannique pour décrypter Enigma, système de codes utilisé par les nazis. A Bletchley Park, zone où se croisent militaires et scientifiques et femmes réduites à être de simples «codeuses», le jeune homme passe ses heures à préparer son grand œuvre, une machine à analyser les messages allemands.
Asocial. Le réel auteur du film est sans doute l’équipe de décorateurs qui a fabriqué une (belle) réplique du premier ordinateur. Comme une machine, Imitation Game est calculé dans chacun de ses rouages. La narration se veut logique, s’enchaîne à la recherche d’un événement fondateur. Ici, il est même filmé : le jour où Turing, écolier, se vit offrir un livre de maths par le garçon dont il était amoureux. Le genre du biopic est habitué aux effets mécaniques, mais dans le cas de Turing, personnage si complexe, cela devient un écueil majeur. Il consiste à oublier le cheminement d’un intellectuel, à louper la force que prennent les ratés d’une pensée. La ligne droite que suit Imitation Game est le corollaire de son classicisme formel.
Autiste. Le film est auréolé de huit nominations aux oscars, et notamment son acteur principal, Benedict Cumberbatch. Le jeu de l’Anglais rappelle le rôle qui l’a rendu célèbre, Sherlock Holmes, dans la série de BBC One. La science est ici vue comme un résultat personnel, une activité autiste, plutôt que comme une longue déduction collective, un dialogue avec des penseurs contemporains et passés. Jamais le nom de John von Neumann, rival et autre père de l’informatique, n’est ici mentionné. Imitation Game passe à côté d’une histoire ahurissante et réelle, esquive les relations de pouvoir inhérentes à l’invention technologique, comme le fit brillamment David Fincher avec The Social Network. Le grand film d’archéologie de l’informatique reste à faire.
Imitation Game de Morten Tyldum avec Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley… 1 h 54.
L’avis du « Monde » : à voir
Le pardon royal fut accordé à Alan Turing (1912-1954) le 24 décembre 2013 par la reine Elizabeth. La souveraine britannique en finissait ainsi avec l’une des injustices les plus flagrantes du XXe siècle : la condamnation pour « indécence manifeste », en 1952, du mathématicien, héros méconnu de la seconde guerre mondiale. Son crime ? Il était homosexuel. Il avait réussi à casser le code Enigma utilisé par l’armée allemande pour ses communications secrètes et, ce faisant, contribué à la victoire des Alliés dans la bataille de l’Atlantique.
En 1952, la justice britannique avait donné à Turing le choix entre deux ans d’emprisonnement et un traitement aux hormones féminines revenant à une castration chimique. Le mathématicien choisit les injections, qui le rendirent impuissant. Le lundi de Pentecôte 1954, il croqua une pomme avant de se coucher. Le fruit ayant macéré dans du cyanure, le scientifique mettait fin à ses jours en s’inspirant de Blanche-Neige et les sept nains, le dessin animé de Walt Disney qu’il aimait tant.
Personnage étrange
Imitation Game, le film de Morten Tyldum, revient sur l’extraordinaire histoire de cet homme souvent présenté comme le co-inventeur de l’ordinateur. Benedict Cumberbatch, qui l’interprète, retrouve certaines facettes de ce personnage étrange, volontiers extravagant avec ses pantalons qui ne tiennent qu’avec des bouts de ficelle, circulant à vélo un masque à gaz sur le visage pour se protéger du rhume des foins… Cependant, pour connaître avec exactitude quelle fut la vie de Turing, mieux vaut lire l’ouvrage d’Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, le génie qui a décrypté les codes secrets nazis et inventé l’ordinateur (Michel Lafon, 704 pages, 21,95 euros).
Turing connaît un premier moment de gloire en 1936, lorsqu’il postule l’existence théorique d’une machine programmable, capable d’effectuer très vite toutes sortes de calculs. Grâce à Turing, l’intelligence artificielle vient de naître. La guerre va lui permettre de mettre en pratique ses théories. A Bletchley Park – un manoir victorien qui abrite les services de décryptage du renseignement anglais –, il s’attaque, dès 1939, à la construction d’une machine capable de percer les mystères du codage Enigma.
Une petite communauté secrète
Avec son équipe, Turing parviendra, deux ans plus tard, à mettre au point les fameuses « bombes Turing », des curieuses machines capables, en quelques heures, de décrypter les communications entre l’état-major allemand et ses sous-marins dans l’Atlantique. Ces deux années, durant lesquelles il est devenu le véritable héros de cette petite communauté secrète, constituent la partie la plus intéressante d’Imitation Game.
La suite, le fait que Turing ne puisse faire état de ses découvertes faites pendant la guerre, mais aussi l’attention soupçonneuse que les services de renseignement portent à sa vie sentimentale, est un peu trop vite expédiée dans le film. Tyldum n’insiste pas suffisamment sur cette période de guerre froide et de maccarthysme triomphant durant laquelle les homosexuels furent souvent considérés comme les « maillons faibles » des systèmes d’espionnage et de défense occidentaux.
Musique oscarisable
En définitive, Imitation Game est le prototype du film anglais destiné à faire carrière aux Etats-Unis en raflant, si possible, quelques Oscars à Hollywood (il est nommé dans la catégorie « meilleur film ») : il est efficace, interprété par quelques acteurs fameux, à commencer par Benedict Cumberbatch, le Sherlock Holmes de la BBC, et doté d’une musique d’Alexandre Desplat elle aussi oscarisable.
Les scénaristes n’ont guère eu de scrupules à agrémenter l’histoire de Turing de quelques ornements qui n’ont pas grand-chose à voir avec la réalité. La mise en scène, classique, n’évite pas les clichés. Pour autant, et c’est tout le paradoxe de ces films spectaculaires, on ne s’ennuie pas devant cet Imitation Game.
A Bletchley Park, l’histoire secrète de l’invention de l’informatique
Le film « The Imitation Game » retrace les années qu’y a passées le mathématicien Alan Turing, spécialiste du décryptage des communications allemandes pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale.
Martin Untersinger (Bletchley, envoyé spécial)
Le Monde
30.01.2015
Lorsqu’on arrive au petit matin près du manoir de Bletchley Park (Angleterre), occupé un temps par le mathématicien Alan Turing, il ne reste aucune trace de Benedict Cumberbatch et du tournage du film Imitiation Game. En revanche, on croise beaucoup de personnes âgées venues visiter ce qui est désormais un musée à la gloire des « casseurs de code », qui ont réussi à décrypter les communications allemandes pendant la seconde guerre mondiale.
Au-delà de la sortie d’un film consacré au sujet, la fréquentation du lieu tient au nouveau statut d’Alan Turing, désormais considéré comme un inventeur génial de l’ordinateur moderne, après les excuses officielles du gouvernement, en 2009, et du pardon royal accordé en 2013 – Turing avait été condamné à un traitement hormonal en 1952 en raison de son homosexualité.
En passant de l’ombre à la lumière, Turing a emmené Bletchley Park dans son sillage. Au tout début de la seconde guerre mondiale, 56 brillants membres des meilleures universités du Royaume-Uni (mathématiciens, linguistes, etc.) avaient été dépêchés, à 80 kilomètres au nord de Londres dans ce manoir victorien au goût architectural douteux pour préparer l’affrontement avec l’Allemagne nazie.
Enigma
Leur but : décrypter la machine utilisée par le IIIe Reich pour ses communications radio, un engin cryptographique sophistiqué baptisé Enigma. Cet appareil, qui ressemble à une grosse machine à écrire dans un étui en bois, comporte trois rotors dotés chacun de 26 circuits électriques, un pour chaque lettre de l’alphabet. A chaque pression sur une touche, un courant électrique parcourt les trois rotors et vient allumer une petite ampoule sur le dessus de la machine qui illumine une lettre, la « transcription » de celle qui vient d’être tapée. Au fil de la saisie du texte, les rotors pivotent à un rythme préétabli, de sorte qu’une même lettre tapée au début et à la fin d’un message ne sera pas traduite de la même manière.
Celui qui reçoit, en morse, le message crypté n’a qu’à configurer la machine de la même manière que son correspondant et à taper le texte qu’il reçoit. En retour s’allument les lettres tapées à l’origine par l’émetteur du message. Le problème pour celui qui tente de décrypter le message est immense : les possibilités de positionnement initial des rotors sont extrêmement nombreuses.
Les Britanniques et les Français la pensent inviolable, jusqu’à ce que trois mathématiciens polonais, à la veille de l’invasion de leur pays par la Wehrmacht, leur dévoilent une technique permettant, en exploitant plusieurs failles de la machine et les erreurs des Allemands, de briser le chiffrement d’une bonne partie des messages.
Dans les mois qui précèdent le début de la guerre, les armées allemandes modifient certaines caractéristiques de leurs machines Enigma qui réduisent à néant les avancées des scientifiques polonais. Alors que la menace allemande se fait de plus en plus sentir, la tâche incombe donc aux « professeurs » de Bletchley Park de percer le secret d’Enigma.
Les plus brillants cerveaux du pays
Ils y parviendront, en grande partie et au prix d’un effort colossal et d’avancées sans précédent dans l’histoire de l’informatique. Les seuls cerveaux réunis à Bletchley Park ne suffisent évidemment pas. Alan Turing s’emploiera donc à démultiplier le cerveau humain avec une machine.
Poursuivant les travaux des Polonais, Alan Turing et les autres mathématiciens construisent donc un appareil destiné à passer en revue extrêmement rapidement les différents paramètres possibles d’Enigma. Son nom ? « La bombe ». Elle est pourtant plus proche du gros réfrigérateur que de l’explosif. Sur son flanc, des dizaines de bobines tournent sur elles-mêmes pour passer en revue les différents paramètres possibles d’Enigma.
Lorsque la machine et son bruit semblable à plusieurs milliers d’aiguilles qui s’entrechoquent s’arrêtent, une opératrice – 75 % des Britanniques présents à Bletchley Park sont des femmes – note la combinaison possible et vérifie si elle permet de déchiffrer les messages du jour. Plusieurs exemplaires de cette « bombe », prototypes des ordinateurs modernes, fonctionneront simultanément à Bletchley Park.
De la « bombe » au « Colosse »
Plus tard pendant la guerre sera même construit à Bletchley Park le premier véritable ordinateur électronique moderne, Colossus. Il s’attaquera avec succès à Lorenz, l’appareil utilisé par Hitler pour communiquer avec ses plus proches généraux, pourtant plus robuste qu’Enigma. Grâce à ces machines révolutionnaires pour l’époque, les Britanniques ont collecté de précieuses informations sur la stratégie et les mouvements des nazis. Les historiens estiment qu’ils ont largement contribué à accélérer la victoire des Alliés et sauvé des millions de vies.
Jusqu’à une date relativement récente, cet épisode, pourtant l’un principaux actes de naissance de l’informatique et une des clés de la seconde guerre mondiale, était totalement inconnu. Lorsqu’on en demande la raison au docteur Joel Greenberg, mathématicien et historien de Bletchley Park, la réponse fuse : « le secret ! »
L’effort entrepris par les mathématiciens de Bletchley était tellement crucial que ce qui s’y passait n’était connu que d’une petite poignée de très hauts responsables britanniques. Tous les renseignements issus des « codebreakers » étaient frappés du sceau « ultra », plus confidentiel encore que « top secret », un niveau de protection créé spécialement pour Bletchley. Tous ceux qui y travaillaient, y compris les responsables de la cantine, étaient soumis à l’Official Secret Act, un texte drastique qui leur interdisait toute allusion à leur activité, et ce, en théorie, jusqu’à leur mort. Le secret était tel que les 8 500 personnes qui y travaillaient au plus fort de la mobilisation ne savaient pas exactement ce que faisaient leurs collègues. Même les plus proches parents des mathématiciens impliqués ne savaient rien, pour certains jusqu’à leur lit de mort.
Et pour cause : il fallait à tout prix que les Allemands ignorent l’existence et les succès de Bletchley Park. Pour ce faire, les Britanniques se sont même efforcés de faire croire que les informations cruciales obtenues via leurs casseurs de codes leur parvenaient par des moyens plus traditionnels, quitte à inventer, dans des messages destinés à tromper les Allemands, de faux réseaux d’espions dans toute l’Europe. Plus tard, avec la guerre froide, c’est la crainte des espions soviétiques qui a contribué à garder le silence sur les activités du manoir – dont l’existence et les premiers succès étaient pourtant connus de Staline.
Ce secret n’a pas empêché les connaissances acquises à Bletchley Park de se diffuser après-guerre. Les Britanniques ont partagé avec les Américains le design des « bombes » et de « Colossus », ce qui leur a permis d’améliorer considérablement ce dernier. A la fin de la guerre, les mathématiciens sont retournés dans leurs universités et, pour certains, ont continué leurs travaux, sans pouvoir dire où et pourquoi ils avaient tant progressé.
Le secret s’effrite un peu en 1974 avec la parution de l’ouvrage de Frederick William Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret, levant quelque peu le voile sur les activités de Bletchley Park. Mais jusqu’à 1982 et la parution de The Hut Six Story, de Gordon Welchman – un mathématicien qui a joué, aux côtés de Turing, un rôle majeur dans le décryptage des codes Allemands –, les informations concernant Bletchley Park sont généralistes et fragmentaires, explique M. Greenberg.
De l’ombre à la lumière
L’obscurité qui recouvre cette période de l’histoire britannique s’est donc dissipée peu à peu. Ces dernières années, c’est même une pleine lumière qui se déverse sur le manoir victorien. Bletchley Park attirait en 2006 moins de 50 000 personnes par an. En 2014, ils ont été cinq fois plus nombreux à venir visiter les installations réhabilitées telles qu’elles existaient au tournant de l’année 1941.
Le temps a passé depuis qu’en 1991, des historiens locaux ont réinvesti les lieux, quasiment délabrés et jusqu’ici vaguement utilisés par le gouvernement. Ce n’est même qu’au mois de mai, à l’issue d’un chantier de rénovation à 8 millions de livres, que le musée s’est doté d’un visage moderne. Créé en 1994, il vivait jusqu’alors de manière « précaire », concède-t-on aujourd’hui. Le retour en grâce, largement justifié, d’Alan Turing n’est pas étranger à son succès. « En décembre, le mois de la sortie de The Imitation Game au Royaume-Uni, le nombre de visiteurs a énormément augmenté », explique Iain Standen, le PDG de Bletchley Trust, l’organisation à but non lucratif qui gère le site.
De quoi se féliciter et se rassurer quant à la pérennité des installations, financées notamment par Google, British Aerospace, le fabricant d’antivirus McAfee ou la loterie britannique. Mais les dirigeants du musée ne veulent pas trop dépendre de l’aura, forcément périssable, d’Alan Turing. « Nous rappelons volontiers qu’Alan Turing n’était qu’une personne sur près de 10 000 et que Bletchley Park ne représente qu’une partie d’un individu aux multiples facettes, explique encore M. Standen. C’était un travail de groupe ». Il s’agit donc de « raconter les histoires des autres héros méconnus » qui ont accompagné celui qu’on présente un peu vite comme le seul inventeur de l’ordinateur moderne. Difficile de lui donner tort : qui connaît Dilly Knox, John Jeffreys, Peter Twinn ou encore Gordon Welchman, qui ont pourtant été aussi importants dans les progrès réalisés à Bletchley que Turing lui-même ?
Les pionniers de l’analyse des métadonnées
Si Alan Turing était responsable du décryptage des messages interceptés de la marine allemande, Bletchley Park ne se limitait pas à cette seule activité, abonde M. Greenberg. Ce dernier explique ainsi que les ingénieurs de Bletchley Park sont des pionniers de l’analyse de trafic. « Pour moi, c’est encore plus important que les avancées en matière de cryptographie », avance l’historien. Chaque utilisateur allemand d’Enigma disposait d’identifiants uniques. Les analystes de Bletchley se sont organisés de manière à pouvoir suivre précisément quel responsable parlait à qui, quand et où. Une excellente manière de surveiller l’armée allemande. « Cela ressemble beaucoup aux métadonnées d’aujourd’hui », explique M. Greenberg.
Autre innovation développée à Bletchley : le stockage de données. A l’aide de petites fiches perforées traitées par des machines automatisées, qui servaient à organiser les informations recueillies dans les messages allemands décryptés, les experts de Bletchley ont pu faire des rapprochements inédits. Ainsi, au cours de la guerre, ils ont décodé un message allemand indiquant qu’un gradé de la Wehrmacht allait se rendre dans une ville du sud de l’Italie. Isolée, cette information ne vaut rien. Mais grâce à leur ingénieux système, ils retrouvent un ancien message, datant de plusieurs mois, qui leur permet de découvrir que ce gradé était en réalité responsable de l’établissement de bases aériennes allemandes. Et que les Allemands s’apprêtent donc à en installer dans le sud de l’Italie.
Bletchley avait donc abouti à construire l’équivalent – très spécialisé – d’un véritable moteur de recherche…
Deux énigmes pour une seule intrigue… D’un côté, une machine, justement baptisée Enigma : permettant d’envoyer des messages cryptés, elle fut l’arme de l’Allemagne nazie pour diriger ses opérations militaires. De l’autre, un homme, le mathématicien britannique Alan Turing (1912-1954). Engagé avec d’autres « cerveaux » pour briser le code des transmissions allemandes, il fut un héros de l’ombre au service de son pays, avant d’être lui-même brisé : condamné en 1952 pour homosexualité, contraint d’accepter une castration chimique pour échapper à la prison, il se suicidera.
Sur fond de tensions dramatiques face à l’avancée de l’armée allemande, la lutte contre Enigma se joue derrière les portes d’un hangar où Alan Turing construit son énorme appareil à décrypter les codes, ancêtre de l’ordinateur. C’est paradoxalement la partie la moins excitante d’Imitation Game : pas assez expliquée, la logique qui permet de trouver la clé des messages demeure vague et abstraite. C’est que le jeu annoncé par le titre désigne autre chose : un test mis au point par Turing pour différencier intelligence artificielle et intelligence humaine, hélas trop vite évoqué.
En revanche, une hypothèse passionnante s’affirme par touches successives, à travers le portrait d’un génie asocial, capable de dialoguer avec les mécanismes les plus complexes mais pas du tout conçu pour les relations humaines : l’homme qui vainquit une machine en était une lui-même. A cette vision, qui pourrait être glaçante, l’interprétation de Benedict Cumberbatch apporte, sans la contredire, beaucoup de nuances. L’acteur parvient à exprimer à la fois l’efficience presque robotisée de Turing et sa solitude, sa souffrance. Sa composition, qui lui vaut une nomination logique à l’oscar, semble éclairer le destin de cet être à part, jamais bien dans son époque : homme du futur, ouvrant la voie aux nouvelles technologies, sacrifié au nom de lois héritées d’un passé archaïque. En 2009, le Premier ministre Gordon Brown présenta des excuses au nom du gouvernement britannique pour la manière dont Alan Turing fut traité. En 2013, la reine lui exprima un pardon posthume. En 2015, c’est un grand acteur qui, en l’incarnant, lui rend hommage.
Ordinarily the life of a mathematician isn’t ideal fodder for a major Hollywood movie. But when that mathematician is Alan Turing — the British genius who inspired the modern computer, protected Allied soldiers from Nazi attacks with his code-breaking prowess and was a closeted gay man — you’ve got yourself a film with Oscar buzz. (Casting Benedict Cumberbatch as the lead doesn’t hurt either.)
Overall, the movie works: It’s fun, it’s gripping and it features a brilliant performance from Cumberbatch. But like so many other Hollywood biopics, it takes some major artistic license — which is disappointing, because Turing’s actual story is so compelling.
The film mainly takes place during the early years of World War II, when the German war machine is overwhelming Britain. Frustratingly, the British can intercept German communications but can’t understand them. The Germans had encoded their communiqués on Enigma machines, encryption devices that could substitute letters in a message using any of about 150 quintillion possible settings. The filmmakers effectively portray a race against the clock as Turing struggles to perfect his crazy idea for a machine that could break the Enigma code.
In reality, Turing had already outlined the concept of a computing machine in a 1936 paper (SN: 6/30/12, p. 26) and had built a cipher machine while at Princeton in the late 1930s, says Turing biographer Andrew Hodges. By mid-1940, Hodges says, Turing and his team at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, England, were routinely decoding German Air Force messages with code-breaking machines, or bombes. Within another year the cryptanalysts, which included Joan Clarke (played in the movie by Keira Knightley), had deciphered the all-important naval messages that strategized U-boat attacks.
The biggest real-life drama is unmentioned in the film, Hodges says. In February 1942, the Germans adopted a more complex Enigma machine for naval communications, again putting the Allies in the dark. “It was a major crisis,” Hodges says. In desperation, Turing and American partners ran multiple bombes in parallel and used electronic components to speed up the code-breaking process. Finally, in early 1943, the Allies succeeded in cracking the code.
The consequences of the 1942 Enigma upgrade went far beyond the war. The introduction to electronics, Hodges says, offered Turing a practical means for incorporating his 1936 conceptual ideas into a revolutionary machine — the digital computer. “The scientific story is much bigger than just the Enigma problem,” Hodges says. “It was a great movement in which ideas and new technology came together.”
The Imitation Game ignores much of this history, and it also includes an egregious, historically inaccurate storyline in which Turing fails to report a Soviet spy to avoid being outed as gay.
Nonetheless, the acting, suspense and a surprising amount of humor make it a movie worth seeing. Just take some time after the movie to read up on Turing’s actual immense contributions to the war and modern computing.
The story of Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker who helped win the second world war and was chemically castrated by the state for his troubles, is a challenging one to make into a movie.
Yes, there’s some high-stakes stuff to work with: sex, spies, surveillance, the invention of computers and the fate of millions of people. But it’s a tale whose key moments have already fallen victim to spoilers. Will Turing’s massive deciphering machine work? It might. Will we beat the Germans? Possibly.
It’s also a story whose hero is both venerated and pitied, but about whom most people know little.
Unlike, say, Stephen Hawking, whose biopic premiered at the Toronto film festival on Sunday, this is not a man whose work we got for Christmas, whose face and voice are immediately familiar. This allows Benedict Cumberbatch more free rein, but the audience less certainty over how to gauge his merits.
What Cumberbatch delivers is an impressively rounded character study of someone variously kind, prickly, aggressive, awkward and supremely confident. But it’s almost too nuanced. Accuracy isn’t all, but fumbling in the dark isn’t always fun.
The film is bookended by scenes of Turing’s interrogation by a Manchester policeman (Rory Kinnear) who smells a rat after investigating a burglary in Turing’s flat. The place is a tip, yet nothing appears to have been taken, and the victim is sniffily dismissive: « What I could use now is not a bobby but a good cleaning lady. »
Kinnear digs a little deeper and unearths … nothing. Turing has no war record. So what really went on at the radio factory where he said he worked?
And so the story proper starts, with Turing’s interview at Bletchley Park, where he fares badly with the bluff sergeant Charles Dance, but is rescued by mysterious Mark Strong.
In an expository scene rich in Sorkin-ish dialogue and light on plausibility, we’re told about the mission and introduced to the rest of the team, including Matthew Goode (cad), Allen Leech (Scot) and Matthew Beard as a little chap who always seems so ill-informed and off-the-pace you wonder if he’s an intern.
New recruits are required if they’re to whip Hitler, so Turing courts candidates through a cryptic crossword: if they solve it they can attend an exam in London. When Keira Knightley shows up and is mistaken for a secretary, you don’t have to be a whiz to guess she’ll not only ace the test but do so miles faster than her male counterparts.
Graham Moore’s script tracks the code-cracking, alongside Turing and Knightley’s burgeoning closeness and the progress of the war (through familiar newsreel). At points, we flash forward to the police investigation (« He’s a poof, not a spy! » exclaims one copper, having a eureka moment) and back to Turing’s schooldays friendship with a boy called Christopher.
Much about The Imitation Game – cast, subject matter, parquet flooring – appears to mimic the 2011 film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with which it also shares Working Title roots and a director making their English language debut (in that case, Tomas Alfredson, in this, Morten Tyldum). But it’s not as chilly or convincing, doesn’t burn with the same intellectual intensity as that film, nor of, say, The Social Network, whose template it apes.
What works is – as with Hawking story The Theory of Everything – the relationship between the central couple. Knightley is miles better than she’s been in a while; sitting on a shelf rather than centre stage seems to suit her. She has fun with her plummy vowels, even when saying lines like « I’m a woman in a man’s job ». Cumberbatch’s Turing is most interesting when at his softest; endlessly bashing up against less brilliant colleagues or military bureaucracy is bruising all round.
But it’s the script which may prevent this hitting the Oscars jackpot. It’s too formulaic, too efficient at simply whisking you through and making sure you’ve clocked the diversity message.: without square pegs – like those played by Cumberbatch and Knightley – the world would be by far the poorer.
« Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of that do the things no one can imagine, » runs the movie’s mouthful tagline. It leaves a strange taste. Turing’s treatment was terrible. Perhaps his achievement, in the end, should not be tainted by association.
The Imitation Game: inventing a new slander to insult Alan Turing
The wartime codebreaker and computing genius was pursued for homosexuality, but nobody – until film-makers came along – accused him of being a traitor
Alex von Tunzelmann
The Guardian
Thursday 20 November 2014
The Imitation Game (2014)
Director: Morten Tyldum
Entertainment grade: C+
History grade: Fail
Childhood
The Imitation Game jumps around three time periods – Turing’s schooldays in 1928, his cryptographic work at Bletchley Park from 1939-45, and his arrest for gross indecency in Manchester in 1952. It isn’t accurate about any of them, but the least wrong bits are the 1928 ones. Young Turing (played strikingly well by Alex Lawther) is a lonely, awkward boy, whose only friend is a kid called Christopher Morcom. Turing nurtures a youthful passion for Morcom, and is about to declare his love when Morcom mysteriously fails to return after a holiday. Turing is summoned into the headmaster’s office, and is told coldly that the object of his affection has died of bovine tuberculosis. The film is right that this awful event had a formative impact on Turing’s life. In reality, though, Turing had been warned before his friend died that he should prepare for the worst. The housemaster’s speech (to all the boys, not just him) announcing Morcom’s death was kind and comforting.
Romance
In the 1939-45 strand of the story, Turing has grown up physically – though not, the film implies, emotionally. He is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who is always good and puts in a strong performance despite the clunkiness of the screenplay. The film gives him a quasi-romantic foil in cryptanalyst Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), dubiously fictionalised as the key emotional figure of Turing’s adult life. The real Turing was engaged to her for a while, but he told her upfront that he had homosexual tendencies. According to him, she was “unfazed” by this.
Technology
Benedict Cumberbatch The Imitation Game Long load times … Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game Photograph: Allstar/Black Bear Pictures/Sportsphoto Ltd
Turing builds an Enigma-code-cracking machine, which he calls Christopher. It’s understandable that films about complicated science usually simplify the facts. This one has sentimentalised them, too: fusing A Beautiful Mind with Frankenstein to portray Turing as the ultimate misunderstood boffin, and the Christopher machine as his beloved creation. In real life, the machine that cracked Enigma was called the Bombe, and the first operating version of it was named Victory. The digital computer Turing invented was known as the Universal Turing Machine. Colossus, the first programmable digital electronic computer, was built at Bletchley Park by engineer Tommy Flowers, incorporating Turing’s ideas.
Espionage
The Imitation Game puts John Cairncross, a Soviet spy and possible “Fifth Man” of the Cambridge spy ring, on Turing’s cryptography team. Cairncross was at Bletchley Park, but he was in a different unit from Turing. As Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges, on whose book this film is based, has said, it is “ludicrous” to imagine that two people working separately at Bletchley would even have met. Security was far too tight to allow it. In his own autobiography, Cairncross wrote: “The rigid separation of the different units made contact with other staff members almost impossible, so I never got to know anyone apart from my direct operational colleagues.” In the film, Turing works out that Cairncross is a spy; but Cairncross threatens to expose his sexuality. “If you tell him my secret, I’ll tell him yours,” he says.
The blackmail works. Turing covers up for the spy, for a while at least. This is wholly imaginary and deeply offensive – for concealing a spy would have been an extremely serious matter. Were the makers of The Imitation Game intending to accuse Alan Turing, one of Britain’s greatest war heroes, of cowardice and treason? Creative licence is one thing, but slandering a great man’s reputation – while buying into the nasty 1950s prejudice that gay men automatically constituted a security risk – is quite another.
Sexuality
The final section of the film, set in 1951, may be the silliest, and not only because the film might have bothered to check that Turing’s arrest actually happened in 1952. Nor only because a key plot point rests on the fictional Detective Nock (Rory Kinnear) using Tipp-Ex, which didn’t exist until 1959 (similar products were marketed from 1956, but that’s still not early enough for anyone to be using it in the film). Nock pursues Turing because he suspects him of being another Soviet spy, and accidentally uncovers his homosexuality in the process. This is not how it happened, and the whole film should really get over its irrelevant obsession with Soviet spies. In real life, Turing himself reported a petty theft to the police – but changed details of his story to cover up the relationship he was having with the possible culprit, Arnold Murray. The police did not suspect him of espionage. They pursued him with regard to the homophobic law of gross indecency. He submitted a five-page statement admitting to his affair with Murray – evidence which helped convict him.
Justice
The film is right that the “chemical castration” Turing underwent after his conviction was unjust and disgusting. Turing was pardoned in 2013, but the pardon was controversial. Many campaigners believe, as Turing himself did, that consensual sex between men should never have constituted an offence at all. Tens of thousands of less famous men were similarly prosecuted between 1885 and 1967, and their convictions stand.
Verdict
Historically, The Imitation Game is as much of a garbled mess as a heap of unbroken code. For its appalling suggestion that Alan Turing might have covered up for a Soviet spy, it must be sent straight to the bottom of the class.
I’ve been fascinated by the computer science pioneer Alan Turing ever since I came across the remarkable account of his life written by the British mathematician and gay rights activist Andrew Hodges in 1983. The moment of publication was no accident, for two reasons. First, by the early 1980s the story of Turing’s wartime efforts to break Nazi codes had receded just far enough in time to overcome the draconian security restrictions that had prevented it from being told. Second, gay rights campaigners in Europe and the US were enjoying some of their first big successes in breaking through long-standing discrimination. Suddenly it became possible not only to celebrate Turing’s enormous contribution to Allied victory in the war but also to tell the story of his 1952 conviction and subsequent punishment on charges of homosexuality (still a criminal offense in Great Britain at the time), followed by his death, at the age of forty-one, two years later. (For Hodges, this death was clearly a suicide; intriguingly, Jack Copeland, his more recent biographer, isn’t so sure. More on that later.)
To anyone trying to turn this story into a movie, the choice seems clear: either you embrace the richness of Turing as a character and trust the audience to follow you there, or you simply capitulate, by reducing him to a caricature of the tortured genius. The latter, I’m afraid, is the path chosen by director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Graham Moore in The Imitation Game, their new, multiplex-friendly rendering of the story. In their version, Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) conforms to the familiar stereotype of the otherworldly nerd: he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t even understand an invitation to lunch. This places him at odds not only with the other codebreakers in his unit, but also, equally predictably, positions him as a natural rebel.
Just to make sure we get the point, his recruitment to the British wartime codebreaking organization at Bletchley Park is rendered as a ridiculous confrontation with Alastair Denniston (Charles Dance, of Game of Thrones fame), the Royal Navy officer then in charge of British signals intelligence: “How the bloody hell are you supposed to decrypt German communications if you don’t, oh, I don’t know, speak German?” thunders Denniston. “I’m quite excellent at crossword puzzles,” responds Turing.
On various occasions throughout the film, Denniston tries to fire Turing or have him arrested for espionage, which is resisted by those who have belatedly recognized his redemptive brilliance. “If you fire Alan, you’ll have to fire me, too,” says one of his (formerly hostile) coworkers. There’s no question that the real-life Turing was decidedly eccentric, and that he didn’t suffer fools gladly. As his biographers vividly relate, though, he could also be a wonderfully engaging character when he felt like it, notably popular with children and thoroughly charming to anyone for whom he developed a fondness.
All of this stands sharply at odds with his characterization in the film, which depicts him as a dour Mr. Spock who is disliked by all of his coworkers—with the possible exception of Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley). The film spares no opportunity to drive home his robotic oddness. He uses the word “logical” a lot and can’t grasp even the most modest of jokes. This despite the fact that he had a sprightly sense of humor, something that comes through vividly in the accounts of his friends, many of whom shared their stories with both Hodges and Copeland. (For the record, the real Turing was also a bit of a slob, with a chronic disregard for personal hygiene. The glamorous Cumberbatch, by contrast, looks like he’s just stepped out of a Burberry catalog.)
Now, one might easily dismiss such distortions as trivial. But actually they point to a much broader and deeply regrettable pattern. Tyldum and Moore are determined to suggest maximum dramatic tension between their tragic outsider and a blinkered society. (“You will never understand the importance of what I am creating here,” he wails when Denniston’s minions try to destroy his machine.) But this not only fatally miscasts Turing as a character—it also completely destroys any coherent telling of what he and his colleagues were trying to do.
In reality, Turing was an entirely willing participant in a collective enterprise that featured a host of other outstanding intellects who happily coexisted to extraordinary effect. The actual Denniston, for example, was an experienced cryptanalyst and was among those who, in 1939, debriefed the three Polish experts who had already spent years figuring out how to attack the Enigma, the state-of-the-art cipher machine the German military used for virtually all of their communications. It was their work that provided the template for the machines Turing would later create to revolutionize the British signals intelligence effort. So Turing and his colleagues were encouraged in their work by a military leadership that actually had a pretty sound understanding of cryptological principles and operational security. As Copeland notes, the Nazis would have never allowed a bunch of frivolous eggheads to engage in such highly sensitive work, and they suffered the consequences. The film misses this entirely.
In Tyldum and Moore’s version of events, Turing and his small group of fellow codebreakers spend the first two years of the war in fruitless isolation; only in 1941 does Turing’s crazy machine finally show any results. This is a highly stylized version of Turing’s epic struggle to crack the hardest German cipher, the one used by the German navy, whose ravaging submarines nearly brought Britain to its knees during the early years of the war. What this account neglects to mention is that Turing’s “bombes”—electromechanical calculating devices designed to reconstruct the settings of the Enigma—were already helping to decipher German army and air force codes from early on.
The movie version, in short, represents a bizarre departure from the historical record. In fact, Bletchley Park—and not only Turing’s legendary Hut 8—was doing productive work from the very beginning of the war. Within a few years its motley assortment of codebreakers, linguists, stenographers, and communications experts were operating on a near-industrial scale. By the end of the war there were some 9,000 people working on the project, processing thousands of intercepts per day.
A bit like one of those smartphones that bristles with unneeded features, the film does its best to ladle in extra doses of intrigue where none existed. Tyldum and Moore conjure up an entirely superfluous subplot involving John Cairncross, who was spying for the Soviet Union during his service at Bletchley Park. There’s no evidence that he ever crossed paths with Turing—Bletchley, contrary to the film, was much bigger than a single hut—but The Imitation Game includes him among Turing’s coworkers. When Turing discovers his true allegiance, Cairncross turns the tables on him, saying that he’ll reveal Turing’s homosexuality if his secret is divulged. Turing backs off, leaving the spy in place.
Not many of the critics seem to have paid attention to this detail—except for historian Alex von Tunzelmann, who pointed out that the filmmakers have thus managed, almost as an afterthought, to turn their hero into a traitor. The movie tries to soften this by revealing that Stewart Menzies, the head of the Special Intelligence Service, has known about Cairncross’s treachery from the start—a jury-rigged solution to a gratuitous plot problem. (In fact, Cairncross, “the fifth man,” was never prosecuted.)
Jack English/Black Bear Pictures
Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, 2014
These errors are not random; there is a method to the muddle. The filmmakers see their hero above all as a martyr of a homophobic Establishment, and they are determined to lay emphasis on his victimhood. The Imitation Game ends with the following title: “After a year of government-mandated hormonal therapy, Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954.” This is in itself something of a distortion. Turing was convicted on homosexuality charges in 1952, and chose the “therapy” involving female hormones—aimed, in the twisted thinking of the times, at suppressing his “unnatural” desires—as an alternative to jail time. It was barbarous treatment, and Turing complained that the pills gave him breasts. But the whole miserable episode ended in 1953—a full year before his death, something not made clear to the filmgoer.
Copeland, who has taken a fresh look at the record and spoken with many members of Turing’s circle, disputes that the experience sent Turing into a downward spiral of depression. By the accounts of those who knew him, he bore the injustice with fortitude, then spent the next year enthusiastically pursuing projects. Copeland cites a number of close friends (and Turing’s mother) who saw no evidence that he was depressed in the days before his death, and notes that the coroner who concluded that Turing had died by biting a cyanide-laced apple never examined the fruit. Copeland offers sound evidence that the death might have actually been accidental, the result of a self-rigged laboratory where Turing was conducting experiments with cyanide. He left no suicide letter.
Copeland also leaves open the possibility of foul play, which can’t be dismissed out of hand, when you consider that all of this happened during the period of McCarthyite hysteria, an era when homosexuality was regarded as an inherent “security risk.” Turing’s government work meant that he knew a lot of secrets, in the postwar period as well. It’s likely we’ll never know the whole story.
One thing is certain: Turing could be remarkably naive about his own homosexuality. It was Turing himself who reported the fateful 1952 burglary, probably involving a working-class boyfriend, that brought his gay lifestyle to the attention to the police, thus setting off the legal proceedings against him. In The Imitation Game he holds this information back from the cops, who then cleverly wheedle it out. It’s another indication of the filmmakers’ determination to show Turing as an essentially passive figure. He’s never the master of his own destiny.
But even if you believe that Turing was driven to his death, The Imitation Game’s treatment of his fate borders on the ridiculous. In one of the film’s most egregious scenes, his wartime friend Joan pays him a visit in 1952 or so, while he’s still taking his hormones. She finds him shuffling around the house in his bathrobe, barely capable of putting together a coherent sentence. He tells her that he’s terrified that the powers that be will take away “Christopher”—his latest computer, which he’s named after the dead friend of his childhood (just as he did with his machine at Bletchley Park).
As near as I can tell, there is no basis for any of this in the historical record; it’s monstrous hogwash, a conceit entirely cooked up by Moore. The real Turing certainly paid periodic and dignified respects to the memory of his first love, Christopher Morcom, but I doubt very much that he ever confused his computers with people. In perhaps the most bitter irony of all, the filmmakers have managed to transform the real Turing, vivacious and forceful, into just the sort of mythological gay man, whiney and weak, that homophobes love to hate.
This is indicative of the bad faith underlying the whole enterprise, which is desperate to put Turing in the role of a gay liberation totem but can’t bring itself to show him kissing another man—something he did frequently, and with gusto. And it most definitely doesn’t show him cruising New York’s gay bars, or popping off on a saucy vacation to one of the less reputable of the Greek islands. The Imitation Game is a film that prefers its gay men decorously disembodied.
To be honest, I’m a bit surprised that there hasn’t been more pushback against The Imitation Game by intelligence professionals, historians, and survivors of Turing’s circle. But I think I understand why. After so many years in which Turing failed to get his due, no one wants to be seen as spoiling the party. I strongly doubt, though, that many of those in the know are recommending this film to their friends. (For his part, Andrew Hodges is apparently opting to avoid talking about the movie during his current book tour—it’s easy to imagine why he might choose to do so, and I don’t fault him for it.)
If you want to see a richly imagined British movie about a fascinating historical character, go see Mike Leigh’s new film about the painter J.M.W. Turner. But if you want to see the real Alan Turing, you’re better off reading the books.
The Oscar-buzzed new movie The Imitation Game is an old-fashioned biopic, crafting a tidy, entertaining narrative from disparate strands of its subject’s life—in this case, British mathematician, codebreaker, and computer pioneer Alan Turing. Slate movie critic Dana Stevens has taken issue with the film’s emotional straightforwardness, writing, “The Imitation Game doesn’t do right by the complex and often unlovable man it purports to be about.” Meanwhile, on Outward, my colleagues J. Bryan Lowder and June Thomas praise the film’s message in spite of its historical inaccuracies.
Just how inaccurate are those inaccuracies? I read the masterful biography that the screenplay is based on, Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma, to find out. I discovered that The Imitation Game takes major liberties with its source material, injecting conflict where none existed, inventing entirely fictional characters, rearranging the chronology of events, and misrepresenting the very nature of Turing’s work at Bletchley Park. At the same time, the film might paint Turing as being more unlovable than he actually was. For details on the film’s flights of fancy, read on. (There will, naturally, be spoilers.)
The Alan Turing played by Benedict Cumberbatch is brusque, humorless, and brilliant. In an early scene where he is interviewed by Commander Denniston (Charles Dance), we learn that he made exceptional achievements in mathematics at a young age. This is a reflection of reality: Turing was elected as a fellow at Cambridge at the age of 22, and he published his most influential paper, “On Computable Numbers,” at 24.
Other aspects of Cumberbatch’s characterization are true to life, as well: Turing was fairly indifferent to politics, both in the interpersonal sense and in the civic sense. He ran marathons. He was also gay, and even more openly than the film implies. Hodges’ biography is filled with instances in which Turing boldly made advances toward other men—mostly without success. Turing also told his friends and colleagues about his homosexuality.
However, the central conceit of The Imitation Game—that Turing singlehandedly invented and physically built the machine that broke the Germans’ Enigma code—is simply untrue. A predecessor of the “Bombe”—the name given to the large, ticking machine that used rotors to test different letter combinations—was invented by Polish cryptanalysts before Turing even began working as a cryptologist for the British government.* Turing’s great innovation was to design a new machine that broke the Enigma code faster by looking for likely letter combinations and ruling out combinations that were unlikely to yield results. Turing didn’t develop the new, improved machine by dint of his own singular genius—the mathematician Gordon Welchman, who is not even mentioned in the film, collaborated with Turing on the design.
Leaving aside Turing’s codebreaking achievements, The Imitation Game also somewhat alters Turing’s personality. The film strongly implies that Alan is somewhere on the autism spectrum: Cumberbatch’s character doesn’t understand jokes, takes common expressions literally, and seems indifferent to the suffering and annoyance he causes in others. This characterization is rooted in Hodge’s biography but is also largely exaggerated: Hodges never suggests that Turing was autistic, and though he refers to Turing’s tendency to take contracts and other bureaucratic red tape literally, he also describes Turing as a man with a keen sense of humor and close friends. To be sure, Hodges paints Turing as shy, eccentric, and impatient with irrationality, but Cumberbatch’s narcissistic, detached Alan has more in common with the actor’s title character in Sherlock than with the Turing of Hodges’ biography. One of Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park later recalled him as “a very easily approachable man” and said “we were very very fond of him”; none of this is reflected in the film.
In addition to the more significant creative liberties that the movie takes, there are small fictions surrounding his character in the movie. Although, in the movie, Alan tells Denniston that he doesn’t know German, Turing did in fact study German and travel to Germany before and after the war. Turing did not, as far as we know, have a compulsion to separate his peas and carrots. (In fact, given his generally unkempt appearance, it’s highly unlikely he gave attention to such details.) And whether or not Turing liked sandwiches—a key plot point in The Imitation Game—goes unmentioned in Hodges’ biography.
In flashbacks to 1928 in The Imitation Game, we learn that Alan’s first love was a classmate at boarding school named Christopher. Christopher rescues Alan after he’s nailed under the floorboards by bullies, teaches Alan to communicate via codes and ciphers, flirts with Alan, and then suddenly dies of bovine tuberculosis.
Although many of the details are invented for the movie, the gist of this storyline is true: Turing really did befriend and develop romantic feelings for a boy named Christopher Morcom at Sherborne School, the boys’ school in Dorset that he attended as a teenager. (He also did get trapped under the floorboards by other boys, according to Alan Turing: The Enigma, but this occurred before he met Morcom.) Morcom died from bovine tuberculosis in 1930, shortly after he’d been accepted to Cambridge and three years after Turing had first met him.
In the movie, it’s implied that Christopher shares Alan’s attraction, but it seems likely that Turing’s affection for Morcom was unrequited—Turing later wrote, “Chris knew I think so well how I liked him, but hated me shewing it.” Several other details of their relationship are different in the movie than in Alan Turing: The Enigma. Although in the movie Christopher is taller than young Alan (Alex Lawther), in reality Turing had a growth spurt at 15, while Morcom was “surprisingly small for his form.” (Morcom was one year ahead of Turing in school.) Turing and Morcom bonded over math and chemistry, not ciphers; Turing began exploring ciphers with another friend at Sherborne after Morcom had died. The biggest departure from reality in the film is the scene where the headmaster informs Alan of Christopher’s death, and Alan denies having known Christopher very well. In real life, Turing was openly devastated by Morcom’s death, and he subsequently developed a relationship with Morcom’s family, going on vacations with them and maintaining a correspondence with Morcom’s mother for years after he’d left Sherborne.
Additionally, Turing did not call any of the early computers he worked on “Christopher”—that is a dramatic flourish invented by screenwriter Graham Moore.
In The Imitation Game, Commander Denniston is a rigid naval officer who resents Alan’s indifference to the military hierarchy and attempts to fire him when his decryption machine fails to deliver fast results. This characterization is mostly fictional, and Denniston’s family has taken issue with the film’s negative portrayal of him. The real-life Alastair Denniston, who spent most of his career as the director of the Government Code and Cypher School, was eager to expand his staff to help break the Germans’ Enigma code in the late 1930s. He recruited Turing, on the basis of his work at Cambridge and his writing on hypothetical computation machines, in 1938, and he hired Turing to work full time at Bletchley Park when Britain entered World War II in September 1939. There’s no record of a contentious interview between Turing and Denniston, and Denniston never tried to fire Turing from the Government Code and Cypher School—rather, given his innovations, Turing was a star of Bletchley Park.
Even if most of the details of the conflict between Commander Denniston and Alan are made up, they do stand in for a real-life power struggle between the military brass and the cryptologists. Turing’s colleagues there recalled that Turing “was always impatient of pompousness or officialdom of any kind,” which made him ill-suited for work in a military context, and Hodges writes that he “had little time for Denniston.” One of the most memorable clashes between Commander Denniston and Alan in the movie occurs when Alan goes over Denniston’s head to write a letter to Winston Churchill, who immediately puts Alan in charge of the Enigma-breaking operation and grants him the 100,000 pounds he needs to build his machine. This never happened, but Alan and three colleagues at Bletchley Park—including Hugh Alexander—did write a letter to Churchill requesting more staff and resources in 1941, and Churchill quickly granted them their requests.
In The Imitation Game, Hugh Alexander is a suave ladykiller who spends much of the film battling with Alan for control of the codebreaking operations; Hugh eventually recognizes Alan’s genius and falls in line behind him. Hugh Alexander—who went professionally by Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander or C.H.O’D. Alexander—was a real person, but the film’s Hugh character seems intended to serve as a contrast to Alan’s antisocial personality.
The film is faithful to the basic facts: Alexander was a chess champion, and he was much better at managing people than Turing was. However, Alexander was not initially assigned to be Turing’s superior at Bletchley Park. Alexander began working there several months after Turing arrived, and the two didn’t begin working together for another year or so, when Alexander was transferred to Turing’s team to work on breaking Germany’s naval Enigma code. Hodges writes, “Hugh Alexander soon proved the all-round organiser and diplomat that Alan could never be.” Alexander eventually took over naval Enigma decryption after Turing began pursuing a speech decryption project, but by all accounts, their relationship was friendly and mutually respectful. In fact, when Turing was tried for indecency in 1952, Alexander served as a character witness for the defense.
Keira Knightley’s character in The Imitation Game is a brilliant, spunky young mathematician whom Alan agrees to marry to get her conservative parents off her back. As with other storylines, the skeleton of this narrative is true, even if the details are not. Clarke was recruited to Bletchley Park by her former academic supervisor (and Turing’s partner in improving the Bombe) Gordon Welchman; she didn’t win the role by excelling in a crossword competition. (Bletchley recruiters did use crosswords to find talented codebreakers, but neither Turing nor Clarke was involved in this effort.) And Turing proposed to Clarke not to help her escape from overbearing parents, but because they liked each other. He “told her that he was glad he could talk to her ‘as to a man,’ ” writes Hodges, and they shared an interest in chess and botany. She even accepted Turing’s homosexuality; their engagement continued after he confessed his attraction to men. But after some months, Turing ended the engagement. “It was neither a happy nor an easy decision,” writes Hodges, but it wasn’t the ultimately violent confrontation depicted in The Imitation Game, either. “There had been several times when he had come out with ‘I do love you.’ Lack of love was not Alan’s problem.”
Turing and Clarke kept in touch after their engagement ended, and Turing even tried to rekindle their relationship after a couple of years, but Clarke rebuffed him. Turing also wrote a letter to Clarke in 1952 to inform her of his impending trial for indecency, but the final scene of The Imitation Game, in which Joan visits Alan during his probation, is invented.
Stewart Menzies, the chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, and John Cairncross, a Soviet spy, are two historical figures who appear in The Imitation Game despite the fact that neither worked closely with Turing. Menzies was, as the film suggests, responsible for passing decrypted Nazi strategies to Winston Churchill, but it’s highly unlikely he interacted individually with Turing (or most of the thousands of other codebreakers who worked at Bletchley Park over the years). Cairncross did pass intelligence from Bletchley Park to the Soviet Union, but he worked in a different unit from Turing’s, and there’s no evidence the two knew each other. Similarly, the filmmakers’ conceit that Menzies knew about and tolerated Cairncross’ duplicity isn’t supported by the historical record.
In the film, Peter and Jack are more or less interchangeable background characters, distinguished primarily by the fact that Peter has a brother who is serving in the armed forces on a ship that the code-breaking team discover is targeted by the Germans. The ensuing dramatic scene, in which Alan reminds Peter and the rest of the team that they have to keep the Germans from learning that they’ve broken Enigma, is entirely invented; Hilton had no such brother, and in fact he began working at Bletchley Park long after Turing’s Bombe had been built. And while it was crucial for the British to use their intelligence wisely, Hodges writes that their success had less to do with their tactical shrewdness and more to do with the Germans’ a priori conviction that Enigma was unbreakable, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
The Imitation Game’s framing device depicts one Detective Nock’s investigation into Alan’s life, following a mysterious burglary at Alan’s home. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this framing device isn’t quite true to life: There was no Detective Nock, and the detectives who did book Turing for indecency (who were named Mr. Wills and Mr. Rimmer) were under no illusions about his mysterious circumstances. Turing was burglarized by an acquaintance of 19-year-old Arnold Murray, who had slept with Turing a few times. The burglar had heard Murray talk about his trysts with Turing, and when the police interrogated the burglar, he revealed the illicit nature of Murray and Turing’s relationship. When the police interviewed Turing, he made no attempt to hide his homosexuality from them. Turing eventually pled guilty to indecency, and he was placed on probation and agreed to submit to estrogen treatment—intended to destroy his sex drive—for more than a year.
The Imitation Game implies that the estrogen treatment sent Alan into an emotional tailspin, but Turing seems to have continued his work and social relationships normally during his year of probation. The film also implies that the estrogen treatment triggered Alan’s suicide, but in fact the treatment ended in April 1953, fourteen months before Turing killed himself. Although some modern scholars believe that his death from cyanide poisoning was an accident, Hodges believes that Turing made his suicide deliberately ambiguous so as to spare his mother the pain of believing that her son had killed himself on purpose.
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley based on the book ‘Alan Turing: The Enigma’ by Andrew Hodges
REEL FACE:
REAL FACE:
Benedict Cumberbatch Born: July 19, 1976 Birthplace:
Hammersmith, London, England, UK
Alan Turing Born: June 23, 1912 Birthplace: Maida Vale, London, England, UK Death: June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire, England (suicide by poison)
Alex Lawther Born: 1995 Birthplace:
Hampshire, England, UK
Young Alan Turing
(age 16)
Keira Knightley Born: March 26, 1985 Birthplace:
Teddington, Middlesex, England, UK
Joan Clarke Born: June 24, 1917 Birthplace: West Norwood, London, UK Death: September 4, 1996, Headington, Oxfordshire, England, UK
Matthew Goode Born: April 3, 1978 Birthplace:
Exeter, Devon, England, UK
Hugh Alexander Born: April 19, 1909 Birthplace: Cork, Ireland Death: February 15, 1974, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England, UK
Charles Dance Born: October 10, 1946 Birthplace:
Redditch, Worcestershire, England, UK
Commander Alastair Denniston Born: December 1, 1881 Birthplace: Greenock, Scotland, UK Death: January 1, 1961, Milford on Sea, Hampshire, England, UK
Mark Strong Born: August 5, 1963 Birthplace:
London, England, UK
Stewart Menzies Born: January 30, 1890 Birthplace: London, England, UK Death: May 29, 1968, London, England, UK
Allen Leech Born: May 18, 1981 Birthplace:
Killiney, Co. Dublin, Ireland
John Cairncross Born: July 25, 1913 Birthplace: Lesmahagow, Scotland, UK Death: October 8, 1995, Herefordshire, UK (stroke)
Matthew Beard Born: March 25, 1989 Birthplace:
London, England, UK
Peter Hilton Born: April 7, 1923 Birthplace: London, England, UK Death: November 6, 2010, Binghamton, New York, USA
James Northcote Born: October 10, 1987 Birthplace:
London, England, UK
Irving John (Jack) Good Born: December 9, 1916 Birthplace: London, England, UK Death: April 5, 2009, Radford, Virginia, USA (natural causes)
I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10 to 1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offenses with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one… but I haven’t got time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out. -Alan Turing, 1952, Letter to Friend and Colleague Norman Routledge
Questioning the Story:
Is Detective Robert Nock based on a real person?No. « Detective Nock is a fake name – he was named after my old roommate, » says screenwriter Graham Moore. « He gives us another perspective … we can see how a normal person, not a bad person, could end up doing this horrible thing to Alan. We didn’t want to create this story of Alan being a sad character that bad things happened to, so we decided to show his final years through the perspective of this fictional detective. … Nock is not a bad person, not an evil person. The terrible thing that happened to Turing was not his fault and was deeply unfair and the injustice of that is something we all have to reckon with. » Robert Nock is the only character in the movie with a fake name. -Tumblr (imitationgamemovie)
Did the police uncover Turing’s homosexuality while investigating him for being a possible Soviet spy?No. Here The Imitation Game deviates significantly from the true story. The real Alan Turing was not investigated for being a possible Soviet spy. Turing himself had reported a petty theft to the police, not a neighbor who heard noises. He changed the details of his story to cover up a relationship he was having with the suspected culprit, 19-year-old Arnold Murray. Instead of first suspecting Turing of espionage like in the movie, the police immediately honed in on Turing for violating the law of gross indecency due to his homosexual relationship with Murray. -The Guardian
Genealogists have discovered that the real Alan Turing (left) and his onscreen counterpart, actor Benedict Cumberbatch (right), are related. They are 17th cousins dating back to John Beaufort, the first Earl of Somerset, who was born in approximately 1373. -Ancestry.com
Was Alan Turing really put on trial for being gay?Yes. The Imitation Game true story confirms that on March 31, 1952, British authorities put Alan Turing on trial for indecency because he had homosexual relations with a 19-year-old man named Arnold Murray, twenty years his junior. Homosexuality was a crime in Great Britain in the early 1950s, falling under gross indecency in Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. To avoid jail time for his indecency conviction, Turing underwent chemical castration in the form of a year’s worth of estrogen (stilboestrol) injections designed to reduce his libido. In addition to rendering him impotent, another side effect of the hormone therapy was that Turing developed gynaecomastia, or an enlarged chest (breasts). On June 7, 1954, approximately a year after his hormone treatments ended, Turing killed himself by eating an apple that he had likely injected with cyanide. We say « likely » because the apple was never tested for cyanide, though it was speculated that this was the delivery method. -Alan Turing: The Enigma
The general public became familiar with the name Alan Turing after learning of his indecency conviction and suicide. It would be years before they learned that he was also largely responsible for outsmarting the Nazis. -Tumblr (imitationgamemovie)
Was Alan Turing’s codebreaking machine really named Christopher?No. The Imitation Game true story reveals that the name of the real codebreaking machine was less personal. Unlike the movie, it was not named Christopher after Turing’s late friend and first love, teenage companion Christopher Morcom (Morcom was a real teenage friend who Alan met at Sherborne School). Instead, Turing’s machine was called the Bombe, named after an earlier Polish version of the codebreaking machine. Like in the movie, Turing created a much improved version of the Polish machine. The U.S. eventually produced its own equivalents, but they were engineered differently than the British Bombe created by Alan Turing and his team. -Empire Magazine
Actor Jack Bannon (left) portrays Alan Turing’s friend Christopher Morcom (right), who died suddenly in 1930.
Did Alan’s friend Christopher really die suddenly of bovine tuberculosis?Yes. The real Alan Turing met Christopher Morcom at Sherborne School, the boys’ school in Dorset, England, which Alan attended as a teenager. The two became good friends, sharing an interest in math and chemistry (not codes and ciphers). Morcom, who was a year older, did die suddenly of bovine tuberculosis, which he had contracted as a small boy from drinking infected cows’ milk. However, the headmaster did not coldly tell Turing of Morcom’s February 13, 1930 death after Morcom had already passed away. In real life, ‘Ben’ Davis, the junior housemaster, had sent Turing a note earlier that day and told him to prepare for the worst. Turing also did not pretend that he had barely known Morcom. In real life, Turing’s friends and family knew that he was devastated, and he even became close to Morcom’s family after his passing. -Alan Turing: The Enigma
Was Alan’s attraction to Christopher a mutual attraction? Not likely. Though The Imitation Game movie implies that Christopher is also attracted to Alan, Andrew Hodges’ biography indicates otherwise. Alan wrote of making it a point to sit next to Christopher in every class, stating that Christopher « made some of the remarks I was afraid of (I know better now) about the coincidence but seemed to welcome me in a passive way. » Hodges again talks of Christopher’s passivity toward Alan, stating that he gradually took Alan seriously, but always with « considerable reserve. » In his writings, Alan indicates that Christopher was aware of his feelings, « Chris knew I think so well how I liked him, but hated me shewing it, » indicating that while Chris liked the attention, Alan’s affection went unrequited. -Alan Turing: The Enigma
Did Turing come up with the design for the codebreaking machine on his own?No. Unlike the movie, Alan Turing didn’t come up with the design for the improved Bombe machine on his own. Gordon Welchman, a mathematician who is not mentioned in the film, collaborated with Turing. -Alan Turing: The Enigma
Did Alan Turing’s codebreaking machine look like the one in the movie?For the most part, yes. However, the real codebreaking machine, the Bombe, was housed in a Bakelite box. Production designer Maria Djurkovic and her team researched the working replica that is on display at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, England. « Our version of the machine had to look convincing, » says Djurkovic. She and director Morten Tyldum decided to reveal the machine’s inner workings. They also added more red cables to give the audience the feeling that blood was pumping through its veins. -Tumblr (imitationgamemovie)
Alan Turing’s real Bombe machine (top) at Bletchley Park in 1943. The machine’s name was changed to Christopher for the movie (bottom) and more red cables were added to mimic veins pumping blood through the machine.
Is there a secret URL hidden in an Imitation Game teaser trailer?Yes. The secret URL is in the form of an IP address and is hidden in the teaser trailer titled « Are You Paying Attention« . The URL can be spotted at the trailer’s 4-second mark when actor Benedict Cumberbatch asks, « Are you paying attention? » Look for the IP 146.148.62.204.
The link challenges you to complete a crossword puzzle based on the one that the real Alan Turing published in the London Daily Telegraph in 1942 in an effort to recruit more codebreakers for his team. Turing invited anyone who could complete the crossword puzzle in 12 minutes or less to apply for a job. In the movie, one of these individuals is Joane Clarke (Keira Knightley), who ends up being the only female applicant in a room full of men. Like Alan Turing’s challenge, you are given a specific amount of time to complete the crossword puzzle found through the URL. Do you have what it takes to be a Turing codebreaker?
Was Joan Clarke really hired at Bletchley Park after solving a crossword puzzle in the newspaper?No. The real Joan Clarke’s introduction to Turing’s team at Bletchley Park was less exciting than Keira Knightley’s character’s experience in the movie. In real life, Joan Clarke was already employed at Bletchley Park performing clerical duties. She had been recruited by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS). A former math wiz at Cambridge, her mathematical talents were again noticed at Bletchley, and she was promoted to work with the group in Hut 8, led by Alan Turing. Andrew Hodges’ biography also states that Joan Clarke had actually already met Alan Turing previously at Cambridge.
Did the Soviet spy, John Cairncross, really work with Alan Turing?No. Our research into The Imitation Game true story exposed the fact that although John Cairncross did work at Bletchley Park and admitted to being a Soviet spy in 1951, he did not work as part of Alan Turing’s group. « Their relationship is invented, » says author Andrew Hodges. It is unlikely that they ever even had contact with one another, since communication between sections at Bletchley was very limited. In the movie, after Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) discovers that John Cairncross (Allen Leech) is a Soviet spy, Cairncross blackmails Turing by threatening to reveal his sexuality. -The Sunday Times
As shown in the movie, Alan Turing (right) was a capable long-distance runner and often used running as a way to get the stress of his job as a codebreaker out of his mind.
Was Alan Turing really engaged to Joan Clarke?Yes. In the movie, we see Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) ask Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) to marry him as a way to keep her at Bletchley Park, since her parents want her to move on with her life and find a husband. Though Turing does tell Joan about his attraction to men, in the film he only breaks off the engagement after John Cairncross, the Soviet spy, threatens to reveal that Turing is gay, which could in turn negatively affect Joan.
In real life, Alan Turing’s marriage proposal in the spring of 1941 wasn’t a ploy to keep Joan at Bletchley Park. He also didn’t break off the engagement as the result of pressure from a Soviet spy. The real Joan Clarke says that the two were interested in one another, despite their relationship lacking a certain physical element. Turing even arranged their shifts so they could work together. They went on dates to the cinema and other places, and despite there not being much physical contact, they did kiss. Turing introduced Joan to his family. Author Andrew Hodges states in his Turing biography that « the idea that marriage should include a mutual sexual satisfaction was still a modern one, which had not yet replaced the older idea of marriage as a social duty. »
During an interview found in the 1992 BBC Horizon episode « The Strange Life and Death of Dr. Turing, » Joan says that Alan told her about his « homosexual tendency » the day after he proposed. « Naturally, that worried me a bit, » admits Joan, « because I did know that was something which was almost certainly permanent, but we carried on. » A fellow member of Turing’s team called their relationship « quite delightful » and said that they were « very sweet together. » Though there was talk of the future, including children, their engagement did not survive past the summer of 1941. Turing used an Oscar Wilde poem to break things off. -BBC Horizon
Gay and Lesbian news outlets criticized an early draft of The Imitation Game script, accusing the filmmakers of « straight-washing » the story. Black Bear Pictures rejected the allegations, issuing a statement that said, « There is not – and never has been – a version of our script where Alan Turing is anything other than homosexual. »
Did Turing’s team only pass along a percentage of the decoded messages?Yes, but the movie’s account of how the group decided which decoded messages to pass along to British forces is fictional. In the film, Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his team crack Enigma but hold off on telling their superiors for fear that the Germans will become suspicious and change the code. After they decide against passing along intercepted information about an impending attack on a British convoy, Turing goes to Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) and together they come up with a system for deciding which cracked messages should be passed along to the British Army, Navy and RAF.
In reality, it was Menzies duty to come up with a method for deciding what percentage of gathered intelligence should be passed along. -The Telegraph
Each letter pressed on the German Enigma machine (pictured above in the movie) caused a corresponding ciphertext letter to light up above the keyboard. Several rotors (usually 3 or 4) could be adjusted to reset the encryption, a process that would determine which letter corresponded to which ciphertext letter.
Was Alan Turing accused of treason and cowardice for not revealing Soviet spy John Cairncross?No. As indicated above, the relationship between Alan Turing and John Cairncross was invented by the filmmakers. During our investigation into The Imitation Game true story, we learned that Turing and Cairncross did not work in the same section at Bletchley Park, and given that the groups at Bletchley were somewhat isolated from one another, it is highly unlikely that these two men ever met in real life, an idea that Turing biographer Andrew Hodges called « ludicrous. » This fictional addition to the film, which finds Turing withholding the fact that Cairncross was a Soviet spy, has generated a significant amount of controversy and criticism, namely in that it places accusations of treason upon Turing. -The Guardian
Did Joan Clarke visit Alan Turing after the war?No. Andrew Hodges’ biography states that Alan wrote to Joan and told her that he had been found out, but there is no mention of Joan coming to visit Alan. At the time of his letter, Joan was engaged to be married, as Keira Knightley’s character is when she visits Alan (Benedict Cumberbatch) in the movie.
Is there a reason why we don’t see Alan Turing’s suicide in the film?On June 7, 1954, roughly a year after he underwent « chemical castration » (estrogen injections) as a way of avoiding prison time for his indecency conviction, Alan Turning ingested an apple that he had likely laced with cyanide (it is speculated that the half-eaten apple was the delivery method, though it was never tested). Biographer Andrew Hodges suggested that he was re-enacting a scene from the 1937 Walt Disney movie Snow White, his favorite fairy tale. The Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum did film the suicide scene, but it did not make the final cut of the film. In real life, Turing’s housekeeper found him dead in his bed, with the half-eaten apple next to him on his bedside table (BBC News).
« We never wanted to see him commit suicide on screen, » says Graham Moore, the film’s screenwriter. « This film was about paying attention to Alan Turing’s tremendous life and his amazing accomplishments. It felt to us more ethical and more responsible to focus on his life and his accomplishments than the nitty-gritty of his suicide. » –Tumblr (imitationgamemovie)
Did Alan Turing take his own life by re-enacting a scene from the film Snow White, his favorite fairy tale?
Is it possible that Alan Turing’s death was not a suicide?Though the investigation and the coroner’s verdict ruled the death a suicide, some believe that the death was caused by the accidental inhalation of cyanide fumes from a device used for electroplating spoons with gold. Turing’s mother, Ethel, also believed his death was accidental (Alan Turing: The Enigma). « His mother wrote to me, » says the real Joan Clarke, « and she said that although it was a verdict of suicide, she believed it an accident, and of course, his method was chosen to make it possible for some at least to believe that. » -BBC Horizon
Was the Apple company logo inspired by the apple associated with poisoning Alan Turing?No. This is just an urban legend. Apple has denied any correlation. -Empire Magazine
Was The Imitation Game movie filmed at the real Bletchley Park?The only scenes that were actually shot at the real Bletchley Park (located in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England) took place at the bar. This includes Turing’s eureka moment, the engagement party scene, and his confession to John Cairncross about being gay. Other parts of the movie were filmed at Alan Turing’s childhood school, where his picture is still on the wall (Tumblr – imitationgamemovie). Members of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) first visited Bletchley Park in 1938 and returned in 1939 to set up their operation. The park has since been converted into a museum, which opened its doors to the public in 1993 (BletchleyPark.org.uk).
Thinking the Uncomputable
Turing then studied at Princeton for two academic years, with a break back at Cambridge in summer 1937. It was a period of intense activity at a world centre of mathematics. Turing was overoptimistic in thinking he could rewrite the foundations of analysis, and added nothing to the remarks about limits and convergence given in On Computable Numbers. (One reason for this might be the following: if x and y are computable numbers, as specified as Turing machines, the truth of the statements x=y, or x=0 cannot tested by a computable process.) But besides wide-ranging research in analysis, topology and algebra, and the ‘laborious’ work of showing the equivalence of his definition of computability with those of Church and Gödel, he extended the exploration of the logic of mental activity with a paper Systems of Logic based on Ordinals [5].This, his most difficult paper, is much less well known than his definition of computability. It is generally regarded as a diversion from his line of thought on computability, computers and the philosophy of mind, and I fell into this assumption in Alan Turing: the Enigma, essentially because I followed Turing’s own later standpoint. But I now consider that at the time, Turing saw himself steaming straight ahead with the analysis of the mind, by studying a question complementary to On Computable Numbers. Turing asked in this paper whether it is possible to formalise those actions of the mind which are not those of following a definite method — mental actions one might call creative or original in nature. In particular, Turing focussed on the action of seeing the truth of one of Gödel’s unprovable assertions.
Gödel had shown that when we see the truth of an unprovable proposition, we cannot be doing so by following given rules. The rules may be augmented so as to bring this particular proposition into their ambit, but then there will be yet another true proposition that is not captured by the new rules of proof, and so on ad infinitum. The question arises as to to whether there is some higher type of rule which can organise this process of ‘Gödelisation.’ An ordinal logic is such a rule, based on the theory of ordinal numbers, the very rich and subtle theory of different ways in which an infinite number of entities may be placed in sequence. An ordinal logic turns the idea of ‘and so on ad infinitum’ into a precise formulation. Turing wrote that: ‘The purpose of introducing ordinal logics is to avoid as far as possible the effects of Gödel’s theorem.’ The uncomputable could not be made computable, but ordinal logics would bring it into as much order as was possible.
Turing’s work, in which he proved important (though somewhat negative) results about such logical schemes, founded a new area of mathematical logic. But the motivation, as he himself stated it, was in mental philosophy. As in On Computable Numbers, he was unafraid of using psychological terms, this time the word ‘intuition’ appearing for the act of recognising the truth of an unprovable Gödel sentence:
Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the combination of two faculties, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgments which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. These judgments are often but by no means invariably correct (leaving aside the question what is meant by ‘correct’). Often it is possible to find some other way of verifying the correctness of an intuitive judgment. We may, for instance, judge that all positive integers are uniquely factorizable into primes; a detailed mathematical argument leads to the same result. This argument will also involve intuitive judgments, but they will be less open to criticism than the original judgment about factorization. I shall not attempt to explain this idea of ‘intuition’ any more explicitly.
The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figure or drawings. It is intended that when these are really well arranged the validity of the intuitive steps which are required cannot seriously be doubted.
Turing then explains how the axiomatization of mathematics was originally intended to eliminate all intuition, but Gödel had shown that to be impossible. The Turing machine construction had shown how to make all formal proofs ‘mechanical’; and in the present paper such mechanical operations were to be taken as trivial, instead putting under the microscope the non-mechanical steps which remained.In consequence of the impossibility of finding a formal logic which wholly eliminates the necessity of using intuition, we naturally turn to ‘non-constructive’ systems of logic with which not all the steps in a proof are mechanical, some being intuitive. An example of a non-constructive logic is afforded by any ordinal logic… What properties do we desire a non-constructive logic to have if we are to make use of it for the expression of mathematical proofs? We want it to show quite clearly when a step makes use of intuition, and when it is purely formal. The strain put on the intuition should be a minimum. Most important of all, it must be beyond doubt that the logic shall be adequate for the expression of number-theoretic theorems…
It is not clear how literally Turing meant the identification with ‘intuition’ to be taken. Probably his ideas were fluid, and he added a cautionary footnote: ‘We are leaving out of account that most important faculty which distinguishes topics of interest from others; in fact we are regarding the function of the mathematician as simply to determine the truth or falsity of propositions.’ But the evidence is that at this time he was open to the idea that in moments of ‘intuition’ the mind appears to do something outside the scope of the Turing machine. If so, he was not alone: Gödel and Post held this view.
Turing and Wittgenstein
As it happened, Turing’s views were probed by the leading philosopher of the time at just this point. Unfortunately their recorded conversations shed no light upon Turing’s view of mind and machine. Turing was introduced to Wittgenstein in summer 1937, and when Turing returned to Cambridge for the autumn term of 1938, he attended Wittgenstein’s lectures — more a Socratic discussion group — on the Foundations of Mathematics. These were noted by the participants and have been reconstructed and published. [6] There is a curious similarity of the style of speech — plain speaking and argument by question and answer — but they were on different wavelengths. In a dialogue at the heart of the sequence they debated the significance of axiomatizing mathematics and the problems that had arisen in doing so:Wittgenstein:… Think of the case of the Liar. It is very queer in a way that this should have puzzled anyone — much more extraordinary than you might think… Because the thing works like this: if a man says ‘I am lying’ we say that it follows that he is not lying, from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what? You can go on like that until you are black in the face. Why not? It doesn’t matter. …it is just a useless language-game, and why should anyone be excited?
Turing: What puzzles one is that one usually uses a contradiction as a criterion for having done something wrong. But in this case one cannot find anything done wrong.
W: Yes — and more: nothing has been done wrong, … where will the harm come?
T: The real harm will not come in unless there is an application, in which a bridge may fall down or something of that sort.
W: … The question is: Why are people afraid of contradictions? It is easy to understand why they should be afraid of contradictions, etc., outside mathematics. The question is: Why should they be afraid of contradictions inside mathematics? Turing says, ‘Because something may go wrong with the application.’ But nothing need go wrong. And if something does go wrong — if the bridge breaks down — then your mistake was of the kind of using a wrong natural law. …
T: You cannot be confident about applying your calculus until you know that there are no hidden contradictions in it.
W: There seems to me an enormous mistake there. … Suppose I convince Rhees of the paradox of the Liar, and he says, ‘I lie, therefore I do not lie, therefore I lie and I do not lie, therefore we have a contradiction, therefore 2 x 2 = 369.’ Well, we should not call this ‘multiplication,’ that is all…
T: Although you do not know that the bridge will fall if there are no contradictions, yet it is almost certain that if there are contradictions it will go wrong somewhere.
W: But nothing has ever gone wrong that way yet…
Turing’s responses reflect mainstream mathematical thought and practice, rather than showing his distinctive characteristics and original ideas. In 1938, it should be noted, he was an untenured research fellow whose first application for a lectureship had failed, and whose chance of a conventional career lay in the mathematics studied and taught at Cambridge. His work in logic was but a part of his output, by no means well known. His Fellowship was for work in probability theory; his papers were in analysis and algebra. That year, he made a significant step in the analysis of the Riemann zeta-function, a topic in complex analysis and number theory at the heart of classical pure mathematics.
Getting statements free from contradictions is the very essence of mathematics. Turing perhaps thought Wittgenstein did not take seriously enough the unobvious and difficult questions that had arisen in the attempt to formalize mathematics; Wittgenstein thought Turing did not take seriously the question of why one should want to formalize mathematics at all.
There are no letters or notes which indicate subsequent contact between Turing and Wittgenstein, and no evidence that Wittgenstein influenced Turing’s concept of machines or mind. If influence in the next ten years is sought, it should be found in the Second World War and Turing’s amazing part in it.
[5] Systems of logic based on ordinals, Proc. Lond. Math. Soc (2) 45 pp 161-228 (1939).
This was also Turing’s Princeton Ph.D. thesis (1938). (See also the Bibliography on this site.)
[6] C. Diamond (ed.) Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (Harvester Prerss, 1976). The quoted dialogue is extracted from lectures 21 and 22.
Publié par jcdurbant 
Quatre Saoudiens condamnés à mort pour meurtre et vol et un Pakistanais jugé pour trafic de drogue ont été décapités jeudi en Arabie saoudite, portant à 26 le nombre de personnes exécutées dans ce royaume ultraconservateur depuis le début de l’année. (…) Viol, meurtre, apostasie, vol à main armée et trafic de drogue sont passibles de la peine capitale en Arabie saoudite, royaume régi par une version rigoriste de la charia, la loi islamique. 
Car ainsi m’a parlé le Seigneur: Va, place la sentinelle; Qu’elle annonce ce qu’elle verra. (…) 
I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10 to 1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offenses with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one… but I haven’t got time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.
-Alan Turing, 1952, Letter to Friend and Colleague Norman Routledge
jcdurbant 
