Saturday, June 28, 2008
French journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet has an excellent piece on the Al-Dura matter with particular focus on the petition circulated in French media circles in defense of Charles Enderlin, here, at The Weekly Standard: L'Affaire Enderlin. She picks up the phone and starts talking to some of the signatories to the petition. Remarkable.
Richard Landes calls it "the single best piece on the French dimension of the al Durah affair." He comments here: Rating Facts far below Reputation: Insights into the French Intellectual Scene and the al Durah Affair
He also has a translation of some of Enerlin's comments on his own blog, here: Enderlin Defends Himself: What Planet is he on?
That's a superb summary and piece of reportage by Moutet. Incisive, highly illuminating at critical junctures, lends color, adds new and particularly revealing detail, highly readable, cogently rendered throughout.
Enderlin is criminal, substantively criminal on a notable scale, on a momentous scale. And yet? The entrenched hierarchies and establishmentarians and nobility do not so much as wince while aiding and abetting Enderlin's criminal malice, mendacity and malevolence - all of it coupled with a concupiscent self-regard reminiscent of some of the worst aspects of the era of pre-Revolutionary France and the French Revolution both.
The ironies are both manifold and manifest, yet the self-blinkered and self-blinded remain, supremely, self-enamored and self-content.
Well, why let facts get in the way of a good blood libel?
BHG
it is interesting, as Michael B points out, that we have on the one hand a self-enamored, privileged elite, reminiscent of the ancien reegime, and on the other, a deeply insecure elite that deeply resents and envies the Americans for being more successful than they. hard to find a better illustration of the difficulties facing prime divider elites when competing with cultures that really do follow the basic rules of meritocracy.