French Rabbi Warns of Ant-Semitism

Duni, Samstag, 06. Dezember 2003, 21:23 (vor 7832 Tagen) @ Smadar

French dip

By Daniel Ben Simon

Something is happening to the French. Their
national mood is on the decline, the voice of
their usually talkative president has fallen
silent, social solidarity has died and the coming
expansion of the European Union threatens what
remains of their hegemony on the continent. First
in a series.

PARIS - The French have a feeling that something
negative is happening to their country. Recently
almost nothing has been going well for them. A
survey that was published midweek shows their
morale is on the verge of collapse.




Even President Jacques Chirac
is on the wane. Despite his
advanced age, he has always
come across as a kind of
fountain of youth, a
vibrantly energetic person
and someone with an
incorrigible urge to put his
country at the center of the
world. But lately he has sunk

into an unexplained lethargy. The French have
clearly noticed that his hearing has been
affected, that his mood has been swinging
between euphoria and depression, that at
important meetings his gaze suddenly wanders
off. And the voice of this leader who has never
been able to keep quiet for a single day has
gone silent. People in the know at the Elys?e
Palace relate that his relentless urge to
chatter has recently been replaced by an
unexplained silence. As if he has nothing to
say. As if he has no interest in anything.

And there is more. Chirac also no longer walks
through the streets as he used to, to rub
shoulders with the masses, embrace young
people, whisper affectionate words to women,
kiss babies and shake hands. When he does leave
his palace, he looks tired and lifeless. At the
beginning of the week he celebrated his 71st
birthday in an uncharacteristically modest way.
His friends gathered and praised him vocally,
as if he were Napoleon´s heir. The refreshments
were modest.

Rumors about partial deafness in his left ear
led many of the guests to practice deceptive
maneuvers in the attempt to get themselves on
his right side. The sharp-eyed noticed an
obsessive tendency on his part to tilt his head
toward his interlocutors. Sometimes the
president left the impression that remarks
being made to him fell on deaf ears. Government
ministers and party members who were asked
about this kept mum. Some said they didn´t know
anything and some said they hadn´t been near
the president and some thought this whole
subject was none of the public´s business.

But the public found it hard to contain itself.
Where had the president disappeared to? - cried
newspaper headlines. Is he fed up? Is he
depressed? - asked other headlines. "I am
worried about the president´s disappearance
from the arena," Socialist Party leader
Francois Holland declared this week. One of the
president´s aides explained, with utter
seriousness, that the presidential role
requires keeping a distance so that the
president can observe the reality from on high.


To the French, who have been left without
answers, it is clear that something that isn´t
good is happening to their country.

Death plague

Perhaps the clearest sign of the illness that
has attacked France from within was revealed
last summer. It was not so much the fate of the
15,000 elderly people who died in the heat wave
then that troubled the French, but rather the
unbearable ease with which they died. This mass
"slaughter" took place during les vacances, the
summer vacation when the French flee the big
cities to recreational sites in the country and
abroad. Many people were in no hurry to cut
their vacations short even after they heard
about the deaths of their relatives. President
Chirac, who was on vacation on the plenteous
beaches of Canada, also did not see fit to
hurry back to France despite the headlines
about the death plague.

"This is a natural disaster unique in human
history," declared Prof. Lucien Abenhaim, the
director general of the French health ministry.
Abenhaim, a noted epidemiologist, had to
resign from his position and thus atone for the
scandalous neglect that spread through the
French administration this summer. In a book he
wrote that was published last week, he says
that the death of the elderly people is
symptomatic of a profound illness in French
society and it raises acute questions about the
state´s commitment to its weakest links.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/368609.html#to
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