Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Here's an interview with Georges Malbrunot, one of the French journalists kidnapped in Iraq and held for several months, from FrontPage. Go read it all for an inside look at the way the European media thinks and how it presents the news to us.

Note Malbrunot's continued insistence that the Americans are incompetent uncultured cowboys and the French know better because they have more experience and are more subtle. He can't give any concrete examples, of course, except maybe that the French are a lot better at torture and massacre because they learned it in Algeria. Note Malbrunot's opinion that the real cause of all problems in the Middle East is Israel, and that there is a moral equivalence between Israel and its enemies. Also note Malbrunot's emphasis on the importance of humiliation as a motivation, and even a justification, for terrorism. Finally, note Malbrunot's harsh criticism of the performance of the US military in Iraq.

One point he makes that's worth making is that there seem to be several different factions making up the Iraqi terrorist insurgency. Some of them are leftover Baathists and Arab nationalist/fascists from the Saddam days, and some are Al Qaeda extremist Muslims, both foreigners and native Iraqis. Malbrunot says that the nativist Iraqi extremist Muslims were held down under Saddam and that they have only now emerged since Saddam's repression stopped.

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