Mick Hall with his views on last month's huge Paris rally in the wake of the killings at Charlie Hebdo. Mick Hall is a veteran Marxist activist and trade unionist who blogs at Organized Rage.
 
What can you say about the bunch of neoliberal political satraps who appeared in Paris on  Sunday last to share their 'solidarity and  grief' with the French people's trauma over the Charlie Hebdo affair?

If ever a bunch of provocateurs, political rascals, and war criminals deserved to be lampooned in one of Charlie's cartoons this bunch were it. Indeed it is not an exaggeration to claim the wicked crimes committed by the Kouachi brothers and their co-conspirator Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four innocent hostages in a Paris kosher supermarket and a policewoman, were small beer compared to the crimes ordered by some of those who joined the French people on their day of great sorry.

Included in this bunch of international villains were representatives of the Saudi Government, which only days earlier had overseen the sentencing of Raif Badawia, a Saudi blogger to ten years imprisonment, paraded him through the streets of  Jeddah and had him flogged him with a cane 20 times in front of a local mosque, with 950 strokes to follow at a later date.

According to Amnesty International:
Raif was escorted from a bus and placed in the middle of the crowd, guarded by eight or nine officers ... He was handcuffed and shackled but his face was not covered. A security officer approached him from behind with a huge cane and started beating him ... Raif raised his head towards the sky, closing his eyes and arching his back. He was silent, but you could tell from his face and his body that he was in real pain.
Hollande welcoming Davutoglu before
the march of the governing elites.
This is the type of government representative Mr. Hollande is happy to invite to France in support of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Much has been made over the last few days about the freedom of the press and rightly so. So why would anyone who believes in it link arms alongside Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish prime minister, when over the last decade his government has imprisoned more than 200 journalist and broadcasters some of them cartoonists? As one blogger wrote "have we reached peak hypocrisy?"


As Reporters without Borders pointed out, it was not only the representative from Turkey who has a responsibility for clamping down on press freedoms. Also present in Paris were Representatives from Egypt, Russia, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), all nations which have particularly harsh environments for working journalists. These countries along with Turkey, rank respectively 159th, 154th, 148th, 121st and 118th out of 180 countries in terms of press freedom in a league table compiled by the group.
We should show solidarity with Charlie Hebdo without forgetting the world’s other ‘Charlies’,” said Christophe Deloire, secretary general of the campaign group. “It would be intolerable [if] representatives from countries that reduce their journalists to silence profit from this emotional outpouring to … improve their international image … We should not allow the predators of the press to spit on the graves of Charlie Hebdo.
 
Deloire continued:
François Hollande, the British prime minister, David Cameron and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, walked arm in arm with other leaders at the start of the march including Sheikh Abdallah ben Zayed al-Nahyan of the UAE and the foreign ministers of Egypt, Russia and Algeria: Sameh Choukry, Sergei Lavrov, and Ramtane Lamamra ... Nearly 70 journalists are being prosecuted in Turkey for referring to corruption allegations against close associates of the former prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is now the president ... In Egypt 16 journalists, including three from al-Jazeera, are in jail. The al-Jazeera journalists have been held since December 2013 for “spreading false news” and “membership of a terrorist organisation.” ... The al-Jazeera journalists include Peter Greste, formerly of the BBC, who has lodged paperwork with the Egyptian government seeking his own deportation. But his release from prison could be weeks or months away, as the new presidential power to deport foreign prisoners is tested for the first time ... A member of Greste’s Australian legal team said the jailed journalist’s application was “among the first” to petition the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, for deportation ... Several Russian journalists have been imprisoned, often in Siberia, and two NGOs that support the media have been added to an official list of “foreign agents”, a term used to stigmatise bodies that receive foreign funding and are suspected of “political activity”. In December, 20 activists including Masha Alyokhina from Pussy Riot were arrested in Moscow, after staging an all-night protest against the conviction of Alexei Navalny, a critic of the Kremlin, and his brother Oleg ... Algeria bans marches and public protests, prompting the Algérie-Focus website to say: “Marches and public protests are banned in Algeria, but Algerian ministers have the right to march in the streets of … Paris!”
 
Thankfully, as was first mentioned on Twitter none of these satraps and quisling ever actually joined the main march, they simply made out they did, as can be seen from the photo below. As far as they're concerned the whole event was nothing more than a PR exercise to deceive and enhance their reputations back home for fairness, equality, and democratic freedoms, when in practice the reverse is true. They flew into Paris joined a cast of extras, had their photo opp and were back home before the actual march had finished. 

Talk about rent a mob!

But then perhaps that is how it should have been for these political satraps and quislings would only have contaminated the massive genuine displays of Je suis Charlie. When millions of people came together in Paris and elsewhere to cry out enough of this senseless carnage, we demand Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité for all.

 

What a Lousy Bunch of Neoliberal Political Satraps Turned up in Paris on Sunday.

Mick Hall with his views on last month's huge Paris rally in the wake of the killings at Charlie Hebdo. Mick Hall is a veteran Marxist activist and trade unionist who blogs at Organized Rage.
 
What can you say about the bunch of neoliberal political satraps who appeared in Paris on  Sunday last to share their 'solidarity and  grief' with the French people's trauma over the Charlie Hebdo affair?

If ever a bunch of provocateurs, political rascals, and war criminals deserved to be lampooned in one of Charlie's cartoons this bunch were it. Indeed it is not an exaggeration to claim the wicked crimes committed by the Kouachi brothers and their co-conspirator Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four innocent hostages in a Paris kosher supermarket and a policewoman, were small beer compared to the crimes ordered by some of those who joined the French people on their day of great sorry.

Included in this bunch of international villains were representatives of the Saudi Government, which only days earlier had overseen the sentencing of Raif Badawia, a Saudi blogger to ten years imprisonment, paraded him through the streets of  Jeddah and had him flogged him with a cane 20 times in front of a local mosque, with 950 strokes to follow at a later date.

According to Amnesty International:
Raif was escorted from a bus and placed in the middle of the crowd, guarded by eight or nine officers ... He was handcuffed and shackled but his face was not covered. A security officer approached him from behind with a huge cane and started beating him ... Raif raised his head towards the sky, closing his eyes and arching his back. He was silent, but you could tell from his face and his body that he was in real pain.
Hollande welcoming Davutoglu before
the march of the governing elites.
This is the type of government representative Mr. Hollande is happy to invite to France in support of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Much has been made over the last few days about the freedom of the press and rightly so. So why would anyone who believes in it link arms alongside Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish prime minister, when over the last decade his government has imprisoned more than 200 journalist and broadcasters some of them cartoonists? As one blogger wrote "have we reached peak hypocrisy?"


As Reporters without Borders pointed out, it was not only the representative from Turkey who has a responsibility for clamping down on press freedoms. Also present in Paris were Representatives from Egypt, Russia, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), all nations which have particularly harsh environments for working journalists. These countries along with Turkey, rank respectively 159th, 154th, 148th, 121st and 118th out of 180 countries in terms of press freedom in a league table compiled by the group.
We should show solidarity with Charlie Hebdo without forgetting the world’s other ‘Charlies’,” said Christophe Deloire, secretary general of the campaign group. “It would be intolerable [if] representatives from countries that reduce their journalists to silence profit from this emotional outpouring to … improve their international image … We should not allow the predators of the press to spit on the graves of Charlie Hebdo.
 
Deloire continued:
François Hollande, the British prime minister, David Cameron and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, walked arm in arm with other leaders at the start of the march including Sheikh Abdallah ben Zayed al-Nahyan of the UAE and the foreign ministers of Egypt, Russia and Algeria: Sameh Choukry, Sergei Lavrov, and Ramtane Lamamra ... Nearly 70 journalists are being prosecuted in Turkey for referring to corruption allegations against close associates of the former prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is now the president ... In Egypt 16 journalists, including three from al-Jazeera, are in jail. The al-Jazeera journalists have been held since December 2013 for “spreading false news” and “membership of a terrorist organisation.” ... The al-Jazeera journalists include Peter Greste, formerly of the BBC, who has lodged paperwork with the Egyptian government seeking his own deportation. But his release from prison could be weeks or months away, as the new presidential power to deport foreign prisoners is tested for the first time ... A member of Greste’s Australian legal team said the jailed journalist’s application was “among the first” to petition the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, for deportation ... Several Russian journalists have been imprisoned, often in Siberia, and two NGOs that support the media have been added to an official list of “foreign agents”, a term used to stigmatise bodies that receive foreign funding and are suspected of “political activity”. In December, 20 activists including Masha Alyokhina from Pussy Riot were arrested in Moscow, after staging an all-night protest against the conviction of Alexei Navalny, a critic of the Kremlin, and his brother Oleg ... Algeria bans marches and public protests, prompting the Algérie-Focus website to say: “Marches and public protests are banned in Algeria, but Algerian ministers have the right to march in the streets of … Paris!”
 
Thankfully, as was first mentioned on Twitter none of these satraps and quisling ever actually joined the main march, they simply made out they did, as can be seen from the photo below. As far as they're concerned the whole event was nothing more than a PR exercise to deceive and enhance their reputations back home for fairness, equality, and democratic freedoms, when in practice the reverse is true. They flew into Paris joined a cast of extras, had their photo opp and were back home before the actual march had finished. 

Talk about rent a mob!

But then perhaps that is how it should have been for these political satraps and quislings would only have contaminated the massive genuine displays of Je suis Charlie. When millions of people came together in Paris and elsewhere to cry out enough of this senseless carnage, we demand Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité for all.

 

1 comment:

  1. Blogs like this one give these leeches the breath of life they crave. Wise up,turn your back on them.

    ReplyDelete