Top International Banker Arrested

But not for fraud or corruption.

I.M.F. Head Is Arrested and Accused of Sexual Attack – NYTimes.com:

The managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was taken off an Air France plane at Kennedy International Airport minutes before it was to take off for Paris on Saturday and arrested in connection with the sexual attack of a maid at a Midtown Manhattan hotel, the authorities said.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, who was widely expected to become the Socialist candidate for the French presidency, was apprehended by detectives of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in the first-class section of the jetliner, and immediately turned over to detectives from the Midtown South Precinct, officials said.

The New York Police Department took Mr. Strauss-Kahn into custody, where he was “being questioned in connection with the sexual assault of a hotel chambermaid earlier this afternoon,” Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said Saturday night. “He is being arrested for a criminal sex act, attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment.”

The link in the text above is to an article from February 18 which provides some background on Strauss-Kahn, painting him as a victim of French nationalists. Strauss-Kahn Has France Talking About a Presidential Run – NYTimes.com:

He has been called a member of “the caviar left,” out of touch with his own more left-leaning party. Some wonder if he might lose in party primaries despite his high poll numbers, which they say are based partly on name recognition and unhappiness with the current choices.

But there have been other, uglier notes in the right’s reaction, circling around the fact that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is Jewish. Christian Jacob, a legislator and farmer, described him as an urban intellectual — a “bobo,” short for “bourgeois-bohemian.” Mr. Jacob said that Mr. Strauss-Kahn did not represent “the image of France, the image of rural France, the image of the France of terroirs and territories.” This notion of rootless cosmopolitanism, of being out of touch with the soil and the mystery of “la France profonde,” is an old trope for foreign and Jewish influence.

Even the president of France’s main Jewish organization, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, called Mr. Jacob’s comments “a very great clumsiness.” The group’s leader, Richard Prasquier, said that as a farmer, Mr. Jacob may have “a particular feeling for the soil,” but that it was not “an essential criterion for leading the nation.” He added that he hoped “the political debate will become more elevated.”

Pierre Moscovici, an ally of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, was blunter. “The attack resembles a little the rhetoric of the far right between the two world wars,” Mr. Moscovici said. “There is something unhealthy here,” he said, and while Mr. Jacob “is not a bad guy, I ask him to pull back his statement and change his song.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Jacob denied any anti-Semitic feeling, saying that “as a farmer, I can’t recognize myself or identify with him.”

“He doesn’t incarnate the rural world, that’s all,” he continued. “I reacted with my peasant core, as a farmer.”

Of course Mr. Sarkozy is also seen as an urban figure, a lawyer with no roots in rural France, and, although Roman Catholic, of Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side.

The right’s reaction was perceived as a shot across the bow of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who has also had a reputation for womanizing, and had to admit to an affair with an economist at the fund, who later left. He was cleared of harassment or abuse of power, but was criticized by the board in 2008 for “a serious error of judgment.”

More sordid details of Strauss-Kahn’s present predicament can be found in Top French politician, International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn held investigation of sodomy charge – NYPOST.com:

The married Strauss-Kahn was in his bathroom, said sources. He emerged naked, grabbed her and “he jumps her,” a source said.

Then, Strauss-Kahn allegedly threw the housekeeper on the room’s bed and forced her to perform oral sex on him, said the sources.

The maid managed to break free and ran to a hotel worker to tell what happened, said a source. Soon afterward, Strauss-Kahn got dressed and headed off to Kennedy Airport for his flight to Paris.

When he was approached on the plane by Port Authority cops, he said, “What is this about?” sources said. He was then taken off without handcuffs.

Two law enforcement sources said Strauss-Kahn was trying to flee the US. Police said he left his cellphone and other personal items in the room.

A high-profile jew accused of a sex crime tries to flee to France? I’ve seen this movie before.

Based on the outrageous defense of Roman Polanski we can expect to see some familiar patterns emerge as this controversy develops:

– The mainstream media and blogosphere will quickly offer a number of op-eds in defense of Strauss-Kahn.

– A few pundits, especially jews, will make the most outrageous arguments, twisting facts and logic to excuse Strauss-Kahn and blame others.

– Strauss-Kahn’s jewishness will be part of the defense, insinuations will be made that he is persecuted because he’s jewish.

– Few mainstream pundits will openly condemn Strauss-Kahn, but reader responses to the defenders will lean against him, based on the expectation that he be prosecuted like anyone else would.

– As this public opinion becomes obvious and a direct defense of Strauss-Kahn becomes more obviously at odds with it narratives will be offerred which shift blame elsewhere – to the victim, “Puritans”, “Americans”, or some other scapegoat.

Like Polanski, Strauss-Kahn is rich and famous. Unlike Polanski, Strauss-Kahn wields substantial political power. His friends won’t need to petition the government for his release. His friends are the government. Thus he could very well be cleared and released more quickly and with less media fanfare than Polanski was. On the other hand Strauss-Kahn doesn’t need to be extradicted. The crime he’s accused of is fresh, not decades old. His accuser has not recanted. Yet.

Can he claim diplomatic immunity?

As a last resort, if the accuser can’t be discredited or bought off and the government won’t just spring him, Strauss-Kahn might indulge the public and the court, get convicted, and then escape justice by absconding to France.

100 thoughts on “Top International Banker Arrested”

  1. Mary provided the following link in the previous post. It regards a 2008 scandal where DSK was “embroiled in a fling with a subordinate”.

    How Jewish is Dominique Strauss-Kahn? | The Jewish Chronicle:

    Sacre bleu – according to our team of halachic researchers, Strauss-Kahn is half-Ashkenazi, half-Sephardi, but completely Jewish by birth. He has associated himself with the fight against antisemitism – he was MP for Sarcelles, an area with France’s highest density of Jews, and said: “Antisemitism in our country is growing and it would be wrong not to see it.” His wife, Ann Sinclair, is also Jewish. Strauss-Kahn follows in a tradition of Jewish bosses of international financial institutions becoming embroiled in scandal… No, stop, we’re really not going to go there. Not helpful to the Jews. So we won’t even mention the trouble Paul Wolfowitz had at the World Bank last year.

  2. The French anti-immigration blog FdeSouche has a video claiming that a writer and journalist, called Tristane Banon, had already publically complained about Strauss-Kahn nearly raping her. It is surprising that he was still able to pursue his political career.

    New-York Times: “But there have been other, uglier notes in the right’s reaction, circling around the fact that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is Jewish. Christian Jacob, a legislator and farmer, described him as an urban intellectual”

    Not only is Dominique Strauss-Kahn Jewish, but he seems to be somewhat of a Jewish nationalist as well as an advocate of immigration to France.

    A DSK quote (during his 1993 election campaign in Sarcelles) :
    “Je mets mon engagement de Juif avant toute autre préoccupation politique”
    = “I put my commitment as a Jew before any other political consideration.”

    Another DSK quote, reported by the weekly magazine La Vie – April 1991 :
    “Quand je me lève le matin, ma première pensée va à Israël”
    = When I get up in the morning, my first thought is for Israel.

    Another one, in 1991 :
    “I believe that every Jew in the diaspora, and therefore it is true in France, must help Israel wherever he can. In fact, that’s why it is important that Jews should assume political responsibilities. Not everyone in the Jewish community has the same opinion, but I think it is still necessary. Because we can not at the same time complain that a country like France, for example, has in the past and maybe still today, had an overly pro-Arab policy, and not try to have it altered by individuals who think differently, by allowing them to assume as many responsibilities as they can. In other words, in my duties and in my everyday life, through all my actions, I try to contribute my modest stone to build the land of Israel.” (his original words in French)

    As for Christian Jacob, who calls DSK an urban intellectual, he doesn’t look very French to me. If he wasn’t a farmer and his first name wasn’t Christian, I would have thought he was Jewish.

  3. The good part of this news is that another political rival of Marine Le Pen will be compromised (let’s hope so!), since DSK intended to be the Socialist candidate in the next presidential elections.

  4. I.M.F. Chief’s Arrest Throws French Politics Into Disarray – NYTimes.com:

    Ségolène Royal, a leading member of the party who also lost to Mr. Sarkozy in France’s last presidential election, called the charges “staggering” but said he was innocent until proven guilty. She cautioned against turning the situation “into a political soap opera.” The Socialist party leader, Martine Aubry, said she was “stupefied” by the news and called for an emergency meeting of party leaders for Monday.

    The head of France’s Christian Democratic party, Christine Boutin, went further, suggesting that amid the atmosphere of France’s presidential campaign, Mr. Strauss-Kahn may have been set up. “I really believe that somebody set a trap for Dominique Strauss-Kahn to fall into,” she told French television. “That he could be taken in like that seems astounding, so he must have been trapped.”

    The political soap opera is just beginning.

  5. Factbox: French reaction to Strauss-Kahn arrest | Reuters:

    HERVE MORIN, FORMER Defense MINISTER, PRESIDENT NEW Center

    PARTY

    “I’m not a socialist, he is not my political friend, but despite that I call for the presumption of innocence. I will not take part in the witch hunt, with the dogs that are barking and those spreading rumors and saying ‘I told you so’.”

    . . .

    MICHEL TAUBMANN, STRAUSS-KAHN BIOGRAPHER

    “Evidently, it could harm his career if it proves true that he has committed these acts, but if he manages to clear himself of this then it could be beneficial to him.

    “If he’s falsely accused, that could benefit him because the French don’t like someone being wrongly accused.”

  6. Could Dominique Strauss-Kahn Run France? – Newsweek, October 31, 2010:

    Now DSK, as he’s called, finds himself not only at the top of the international financial system, but at the top of France’s opinion polls. And that presents him with a problem: should he try to stay on at the IMF in this pivotal role on the world scene when his first term there expires in late 2012? Or should he resign and return to France next year to run for president in early 2012? The clock’s ticking.

    . . .

    The least of Strauss-Kahn’s worries in the French context is likely to be his well-established reputation as a skirt-chaser. Before DSK went to Washington, a columnist for the Paris daily Libération cautioned that his “only real problem” there could be “the way he relates to women.” The IMF’s morals are “Anglo-Saxon,” Jean Quatremer wrote on his blog, and “an out of place gesture, an allusion that’s a little too precise” could lead to a media circus. Sure enough, in 2008 the IMF looked into an alleged one-night stand DSK had with a Hungarian economist at the fund. The brief investigation concluded the affair was regrettable and reflected poor judgment, but DSK kept his job. He also kept his wife of 20 years (his third), the celebrated French television interviewer Anne Sinclair, who subsequently told reporters she’d known about the Hungarian woman a year before the story broke. Back in France, few voters would find such stories scandalous, and Sarkozy, one might note, also has been married three times among multiple liaisons.

  7. The Front Row: Dominique Strauss-Kahn: The Accusation : The New Yorker, Richard Brody:

    Strauss-Kahn, a Socialist, lost his party’s nomination in 2007 to Ségolène Royal, who was then defeated by the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, of the center-right Union for a Popular Movement. What has changed in the French political landscape since then is the resurgence of the far right, the Front National; its founder and longtime presidential candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen (who, it should be recalled, came in second in 2002 behind the conservative Jacques Chirac), has given way to his daughter, Marine. She is a less contentious and more media-savvy presence than her father, but has taken advantage of xenophobic currents and a sense of populist disgruntlement in French society to take second place, in polls, ahead of Sarkozy and behind Strauss-Kahn.

    . . .

    In effect, Marine Le Pen is the spoiler: any candidate she faces in the second round is sure to win (because voters and parties will unify to keep the far-right out of power); she will either eliminate the moderate right or the moderate left.

    Whatever happens with DSK, Marine Le Pen and the French are in for even more surreal demonization than they’ve already been subjected to.

  8. A Former JPMorgan Guy Just Took Over For Dominique Strauss-Kahn:

    John Lipsky will step in as acting managing director of the IMF for chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is under investigation for sodomy in New York.

    As a reminder, this says nothing about DSK’s alleged guilt. It’s simply not possible to run a huge organization while you’re involved in a serious investigation.

    In fact, Lipsky said that he would step down at the end of his term in August just 2 days ago. So his post appears to be quite temporary.

    In a shocking development, Lipsky turns out to be jewish. I have seen no signs of anti-“anti-semitism”. The mainstream media is so far sticking with the dissimulation that DSK is a Frenchman and international banking is firmly in the hands of Whites.

    FT.com / Global Economy – Crisis threatens influence of Europe at IMF:

    If Mr Strauss-Kahn steps down soon, it will bring forward the question of the managing directorship of the IMF, which has traditionally gone to a European, in the light of its rescue lending to Greece, Ireland and now Portugal.

    Mr Strauss-Kahn was believed to be planning to resign in the coming months but Mr Johnson said a premature departure would complicate any plan to install another European head.

    “The prevailing belief was that the Europeans would pull one of their clever diplomatic moves and nominate one of their own as managing director, in consultation with the Americans who want to hang on to the presidency of the World Bank,” he said. “This process is now much harder for the Europeans and the Americans to control.”

  9. Dominique Straus-Kahn Is Jewish. So? | Bloggish | Jewish Journal, by Rob Eshman:

    If you couldn’t tell by the last name, numerous sources will confirm that Dominique Straus-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, is Jewish.

    “Dominique Strauss-Kahn was born on 25 April 1949 in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine. He is the son of Gilbert Strauss-Kahn, a legal and tax advisor and member of the Grand Orient de France, and Russian/Tunisian journalist Jacqueline Fellus. His family is of mixed Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewish origin,” writes Wikipedia.

    Strauss-Kahn has been an outspoken supporter of Israel, a sharp critic of French anti-semitism, the founder of the Socialisme et Judaisme movement and the Leon Blum circle within FRench socialist circles. He is married to the French journalist Anne Sinclair, whose maiden name is Anne-Élise Schwartz. Her father was one of the country’s major art dealers.

    . . .

    What does it matter that he’s Jewish.

    If you’re an unhinged neo-Nazi (sorry, redundant), the fact is additional proof that depraved Jews are running and ruining the economy, preventing you from getting that big house and pretty life you otherwise deserve because, well, you are white, and Christian.

    . . .

    If you’re a Jew, it depends. Some Jews are naturally embarrassed or appalled when a co-religionist is implicated in scandal, just as they are proud when one of their own wins a Nobel Prize or, say, gets picked to head the International Monetary Fund. Other Jews pass it off with a shrug. What does he have to do with me. People are people. He didn’t rape (or not) on behalf of the Jewish people. I never game him permission.

    The truth is, most Jews fall into the former category. We feel something when one of us is elevated, or implicated. We can’t help us. It’s a reflex of the minority, partly because we have to worry what larger and more powerful groups think of us, and we recognize it is the rare human who doesn’t occasionally think it terms of “them,” rather than just “him.”

    So what? Where to begin?

    Eshman’s aggressive attitude flies in the face of his claim that jews are supposedly worried about “what larger and more powerful groups think”.

    His is the first arrest-related article I’ve seen that explicitly identifies Strauss-Kahn as a jew, as well as attaching significance to this fact. But even so it is aimed at jews. Dozens of mainstream articles have already identified DSK as French or European, completely neglecting to address this special in-group “minority” (non-French, non-European, non-White) identity Eshman finds so significant.

    Eshman regards it as normal and natural that jews see the rest of us as “them”. Yet he pathologizes as unhinged those who reciprocate. Who is more powerful, the non-group in whose interests no one dares speak for fear of retribution, or the group consciously pursuing their interests, whose arrogant advocates say, “We’re in charge, so what?”

    Why would anyone in their right mind, even an individualist, want members of an alienated, self-concerned group in positions of power over them?

  10. Strauss-Kahn’s Jew lawyer is an expert at arranging star-struck juries; he’s the one who got pedophile Michael Jackson off the hook. So the worst this Hebrew bankster faces is a mistrial and then some kind of bargain. I’d guess he’s probably through at the IMF, but as to his future in that wad of corporate-Zionist corruption that is French politics…I smell a comeback.

  11. Jews are in a dominant position in the two main French political parties (DSK’s Socialist Party + Sarko’s UMP). It shows there is something wrong in the way those parties work. This is even more blatant now that we know that the French politicians and journalists knew about DSK’s tendency to commit sexual attacks.

    For example, Marine Le Pen replied to an interviewer that she didn’t fall off her chair on hearing what had happened, as it was well known that DSK had a pathological problem with women.

    In 2007, on a TV station, the journalist Tristane Banon told of her encounter with DSK. Here is the video with English subtitles.

    Johnson: “The prevailing belief was that the Europeans would pull one of their clever diplomatic moves and nominate one of their own as managing director, in consultation with the Americans who want to hang on to the presidency of the World Bank”

    If they choose a Jew, who cares if he happens to hold European or American citizenship? A clever diplomatic move would be to nominate white people, both at the IMF and at the World Bank.

  12. When Larry is right, he is right.

    “The Libyan intervention: another bell that tolls the death of America
    I haven’t written lately about the Libyan intervention because it’s so insane it makes me feel insane. NATO and the U.S. have long since dropped the limited mission, as lawless as that was, of “protecting civilians.” They are openly waging war against the Libyan government and are seeking to kill Kaddafi. It has to be repeated that the U.S. in 2003 made a settlement with Kaddafi over the Lockerbie bombing. It included his payment of financial restitution to victims’ families. Sure, it would have been better if we had punished him for Lockerbie back in the ‘80s. But we didn’t do that. We let 15 years pass and then we made peace with him. As a practical matter, Lockerbie as of 2003 became a dead issue. The same neoconservatives who now are calling for Kaddafi’s head were lauding him as a new-found ally and friend of the U.S. in 2003 and 2004. And since then, Kaddafi hasn’t done anything against the U.S. or against anyone. He has not been backing anti-Western jihadists and terrorists. The NATO campaign to kill him or drive him from power is criminal. The Western alliance has become a criminal alliance.

    And not only is it criminal, it is whimsical. Why did the U.S., France, and Britain choose to make war against Kaddafi, and not against some other Mideast dictator? Whim. And whimsicality is the mark of tyranny.

    And what does the absence of any real debate in the U.S. about the Libyan intervention say about us? It says that we are slaves to that tyranny.

    Posted by Lawrence Auster at 05:36 PM

    BTW, he is hard D.S-K/

    Robert in Arabia

  13. LOL let’s praise every jew who condemns the Libyan War. But this jew is never right without mixing in a lot of wrong. If we attack Iran alongside his nation, will he be bitching? so he shouldn’t bitching hear either. “Libya is whimsical” ?? really do we know that?

  14. FdeSouche.com also has an interview with Banon’s mother, who is a socialist in the regional assembly of Normandy. DSK’s aggression against her daughter dates back to 2002. The mother explains that she thought DSK was a warm, friendly man. Going to court would have been hard on him and his family. She thought he had slipped and lost his mind, but didn’t realize there was a deeper problem with him. So, for this and other reasons, the daughter didn’t press charges. But what happened next is that she discovered that her career as a journalist was over! And because of the connections between the world of journalism and publishing, her projects as a writer also were derailed.

  15. It’s worth reiterating that Eshman’s “so what” piece was preemptive, an announcement of DSK’s jewishness issued before anyone in the mainstream has made anything of it. The main intent was to send a clear signal that anyone who may try to make something of it will be painted as morally or mentally defective.

    Michael Kinsley’s How to Think About: Jewish Bankers piece in The Atlantic made a similar point: Don’t bother.

    As if everyone needs to be reminded of this every few months.

    Joe Sobran noticed this years ago:

    Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralyzing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you. It’s a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism.

    Likewise jewish influence in finance, politics and law. The DSK scandal touches them all.

  16. DSK cited jewishness as a defense three weeks ago.

    Dominique Strauss-Kahn to face fresh sex assault complaint | World news | The Guardian:

    Tristane Banon previously described the attack, which happened when she was in her early 20s, in a television programme in 2007, when she called Strauss-Kahn, whose name was bleeped out, a “rutting chimpanzee.”

    She says she consulted a lawyer at the time, but was persuaded not to take action by her mother, a regional councillor in the Socialist party and friend of the Strauss-Kahn family. Banon is goddaughter to Strauss-Kahn’s second wife.

    . . .

    For some, the story of Strauss-Kahn’s fall from presidential hopeful to prison cell was a combination of sordid tale and Shakespearean tragedy. For others the story was so extraordinary it smacked of a set-up.

    Only three weeks ago, Strauss-Kahn evoked such a possibility in an interview with French newspaper Libération when he said he thought he was under surveillance and named the three principal difficulties he foresaw if he was to stand for the presidential elections.

    “Money, women and the fact I am Jewish.” He added: “Yes, I like women … so what?” He said he could see himself becoming the victim of a honey trap: “a woman raped in a car park and who’s been promised 500,000 or a million euros to invent such a story …”

    There’s that passive-agressive “so what” attitude again.

  17. SHOCKING STRAUSS-KAHN INTERVIEW: I Could See Myself Becoming The Victim Of A “Honey Trap”:

    Finally, about his “judaicity”, he expects that one of his quotes, already viral online, be used against him. According to Jewish Tribune, he had said years ago that “he gets up every morning wondering how (he can) be useful to Israel.” “Stupid,” he now says, “but I hadn’t refuted it at the time”

    He says it was stupid, not refuting it.

    Why shouldn’t he be judged negatively for this? He and the media are playing coy with his identity. Suppose there was an IMF head of Morrocan heritage, but born in France, who everybody is supposed to pretend is a loyal Frenchman who is considering asking the French to make him leader of France. Imagine he had said “I get up wondering how I can be useful to Morroco”. How is it wrong (never mind anti-Morrocan) to take issue with that? The only people who would try to paint it as such would be those trying to distract attention from the negative consequences for the French of having someone in power over them who thinks first about what’s best for non-French.

  18. Felix Salmon regarding the potential for Stanley Fischer to replace DSK, Why Lagarde will be the next IMF managing director:

    there would be something a bit weird about the first African managing director of the IMF being a white Jew

    Weird how? He’s being ambiguous.

    The men who have run the IMF to date are the heirs to Europe’s colonizers

    Ahhh, what a surprise. Salmon’s anti-White, not anti-jew.

  19. Rabbi Joe Black: Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Shades of Dreyfus?

    Another preemptive, prophylactic broaching of DSK’s jewishness. Black implicitly excuses DSK by comparing him to jewish saint Dreyfus. Black fears the DSK affair will be bad for jews. One silver lining:

    A young journalist named Theodore Herzl was covering the [Dreyfus] trial for an Austrian newspaper and, as a result of what he saw in France, decided to dedicate his life to the creation of a Jewish State. Herzl, of course, is now known as the Father of Modern Zionism.

    Zionism is the idea that it’s best for jews that they rule themselves. The idea that it’s best for Whites, like the French, to rule ourselves is pathologized (just look at the media reports regarding Le Pen) as “hate”, “far-right”, “xenophobia”, and of course if it amounts to rejecting rule by jews or Israel-firsters then it’s also “anti-semitic” – in other words we’re supposedly morally or mentally defective if we think about what’s best for us.

  20. Bernard-Henri Levy (BHL) on DSK (translation by Google):

    Ce que je sais c’est que rien au monde n’autorise à ce qu’un homme soit ainsi jeté aux chiens. [What I know is that nothing on earth does that a man is thus thrown to the dogs.]

    Ce que je sais c’est que rien, aucun soupçon, car je rappelle que l’on ne parle, à l’heure où j’écris ces lignes, que de soupçons, ne permet que le monde entier soit invité à se repaître, ce matin, du spectacle de sa silhouette menottée, brouillée par 30 heures de garde à vue, encore fière. [What I know is that nothing, no hint, as I recall that we speak, at this writing, only suspicions, only allows the world to be invited to feast, This morning, the spectacle of handcuffed her figure, obscured by 30 hours in custody, yet proud.]

    Ce que je sais c’est que rien, aucune loi au monde, ne devrait permettre qu’une autre femme, sa femme, admirable d’amour et de courage, soit, elle aussi, exposée aux salaceries d’une Opinion ivre de storytelling et d’on ne sait quelle obscure vengeance. [What I know is that there is no law in the world should not allow another woman, his wife, a wonderful love and courage, is, it also exposed to a salaceries Opinion drunken storytelling and who knows what dark revenge.]

    Et ce que je sais, encore, c’est que le Strauss-Kahn que je connais, le Strauss-Kahn dont je suis l’ami depuis vingt cinq ans et dont je resterai l’ami, ne ressemble pas au monstre, à la bête insatiable et maléfique, à l’homme des cavernes, que l’on nous décrit désormais un peu partout : séducteur, sûrement ; charmeur, ami des femmes et, d’abord, de la sienne, naturellement ; mais ce personnage brutal et violent, cet animal sauvage, ce primate, bien évidemment non, c’est absurde. [And what I know, again, is that Strauss-Kahn as I know, the Strauss-Kahn which I am a friend for twenty five years and I remain friends, do not resemble the monster, the insatiable beast and evil, the caveman, we describes now everywhere: seducer, surely, charming, friendly to women and, first of hers, of course, but this brutal and violent character this wild animal, this primate, of course not, it’s absurd.]

  21. Doug Schoen on Dominique Strauss-Kahn:

    “bottom line, if this crime happened, and it’s an if, it would be a horrific stain on on him and arguably what he claims to represent”

    So it’s rather important then whether DSK represents jews and Israel or the French and France.

    The video ends with Schoen describing the “very scary” political climate in France.

    “There is a candidate from a right-wing extreme organization, Marine Le Pen … If we had an election between an extreme right-wing candidate in the 2nd round and Sarkozy it could be a very very difficult bad unconstructive process for the French.”

    Schoen, who clearly sympathizes with his friend and fellow jew, regards DSK as innocent until proven guilty. Le Pen, on the other hand, is just guilty.

    Sarkozy’s approval rating in the 30s. France is being colonized by aliens who hate the French. Le Pen is popular with the French. Schoen surely knows all this, so I don’t believe Schoen cares at all about what’s good for the French.

  22. Nouriel Roubini tweets support for DSK:

    “DSK is innocent until proven guilty. One cannot rule out a setup as a smear campaign against him had started in french press close to Sarko”

    Roubini is 100% ethnically Jewish, with the usual internationalist background. He was born in Turkey, moved to Iran as a child, then lived in Italy and Israel, and finally made the aliyah to Manhattan.

  23. “The attack resembles a little the rhetoric of the far right between the two world wars”

    You really have to love this line of attack from people who are literally committing genocide against the French people by hate- motivated racist colonialism, people who turn a blind eye every day to clearly hate-motivated rape and assaults committed against the natives by the invaders these traitors brought.

    Here’s Ben Stein’s take on the case. He goes through all the steps (except mentioning Jewishness) in one fell swoop:

    http://spectator.org/archives/2011/05/17/presumed-innocent-anyone

  24. Stein’s first “humble thought” about DSK is to summarily dismiss the main thrust of all the reports and opinion so far (excluding discussion of the allegations, arrest, and legal proceedings), which is the well-known pattern of DSK’s aggressive behavior around women. This sets up Stein’s second thought: “hey, where’s the pattern?”

    Points 3-7 are special pleading. When will we see pundits like Stein make similar benefit-of-the-doubt arguments on other occasions, say in defense of people like John Demjanjuk? Never.

    Last on Stein’s list is a thought I have not yet seen expressed in anyone else’s reports or opinion, but it does give us a taste of the insecurity which must haunt the minds of at least some plutocrats:

    8.) In what possible way is the price of the hotel room relevant except in every way: this is a case about the hatred of the have-nots for the haves, and that’s what it’s all about. A man pays $3,000 a night for a hotel room? He’s got to be guilty of something. Bring out the guillotine.

    Finally, Stein offers these efforts for a fellow he says he doesn’t know and never laid eyes on. Why then? Schoen claims he’s a friend. What inspires Stein to think and write in DSK’s defense?

  25. But of course Stein revealed what inspires him in that last thought. The prospect of a revolution in which people like DSK and himself lose their heads. As he says, that’s what it’s all about.

  26. Arrest of top presidential contender shakes France’s Jews – St. Louis Jewish Light:

    It also represents a particularly harsh blow for many in France’s Jewish community.

    Strauss-Kahn – popularly known by his initials, DSK – has been outspoken about his Jewish identity in a country where politicians typically are mum about their religion. He also has expressed feelings of attachment to Israel in the past, all the while maintaining a measured distance from actively participating in Jewish institutions, according to Jewish leaders.

    “We lost a friend,” said Rabbi Michel Serfaty, president of the Jewish-Muslim Friendship of France. “It’s true that the Jewish community has a friend in Sarkozy,” as well as among other Socialist Party leaders, “but with DSK there was no doubt he was a member of the community, interested in Israel, that we have lost.”

  27. BHL’s own translation of his “what I know” defense of DSK cited above: Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Bernard-Henri Lévy Defends IMF Director – The Daily Beast.

    Laila Lalami Defends Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s Accuser – The Daily Beast is the sound of “Morrocan American” useful idiot leftist cognitive dissonance:

    But it certainly would be nice to know how a philosopher who has so staunchly claimed to defend the rights of Muslim women can find himself on the side of the alleged rapist rather than on the side of his alleged (Muslim) victim.

    I refuse to consider the dime-store psychology explanation that the person Lévy chooses to defend is, like him, the bearer of a fancy, hyphenated name and, like him, a very rich man, and therefore this is all just a case of a few good ol’ boys standing together.

    As an anonymous French commenter at Mangan’s observed:

    – It seems the victim is not only a Black immigrant from Ghana, but also a practicing Muslim who usually wears a hijab.
    – DSK is known as one of the most fanatical pro-immigrationists in France, a staunch supporter of the invasion of France by foreigners.
    – As a Jew, he’s also a fanatical Israel-firster, which he admitted publicly (he doesn’t want Muslims in Israel, but France is OK: after all, it’s not the country of his allegiance).
    – Which means that it is a conflict between two protected species: the influential and rich Socialist Jew who raped a Black Muslim.
    – DSK, morally burried by a member of a group that he wholeheartedely welcomes in France, at the expense of the natives!
    – besides, all his friends from the French political, mediatic and financial circles defend him now, against all logic, for a crime against a victim who shares all the traits they favor: Black, Muslim, immigrant, single mother.
    – it can’t be funnier than that, can it?

    It’s not against all logic. There’s the jewish connection. No paid pundit will dare notice that connection because they all know what Joe Sobran knew – there’s a swift and stiff penalty for noticing. Even Moroccans know though, that nobody gets in trouble for knocking “good ol’ boys”

  28. More from Mangan’s anonymous commenter:

    I stumbled across fdesouche.com a few days ago. Since then, I read it with passion as much as I can. Administrators, publishers, commenters are pro-Marine Le Pen, but they are FAR from being a French Stormfront. They are usually French decent citizens who are fed up about their situation, about immigration, about Islam, about a White being lynched, raped, beaten, robbed in their cities on daily basis (worse then anywhere in Europe). And they do their best not to think negatively about the Jewish influence on their society, they do their best not to sound, as the establishment calls it, “anti-Semitic”. Yet following the developments in the last 2-3 days, they couldn’t help themselves to notice the obvious: how the same ruling class who tells them to accept any atrocity coming from Blacks, Muslims, immigrants now orders them to excuse the possible rapist of a Black Muslim immigrant, rapist who is just “human”, after all. They ask themselves why this happens. And some of them mentions something they didn’t even dare to think before – “la famille apatride”, the family without a safe country, who wants us to be equally countriless.

    . . .

    The first French newspaper which breaks the silence, on the first page, “France Soir” of tomorrow: “Everybody knew! We had to provide him bodyguards to hinder him to make stupid things.” (he had a long series of similar stories in France, covered by the political buddies and the media), at fdesouche.com. It seems one protected species might win against the other. Of course – my comment, not theirs – it was not a serious problem as long as the victims were French shiksas. After all, everybody among the privileged minorites is invited to rape them.

    . . .

    I’m not particularly fond of the French, I am pro-all the European Man’s nations, from the West Coast of the US to Russia, when they try to resist the scourge that was brought upon our heads. Most of the times, my enthusiasm was exaggerated, to say the least. I was Serbian in my heart, when the Serbs were bombed. I was Danish during the Mohammad’s cartoon affair. I felt Dutch when Geert Wilders’ party won the first seats after the elections. I felt like a Tea Partier when I saw the crowd before the White House, two years ago. Now, I am absorbed by France. Etc.

    All of these were illusions, and I know it takes a change and a transformation of cosmic proportions to really change something in the West. Probably it will take a generation or two.

    But as in life, no matter how many dissapointments you have, you still feel joy at the slightest sign of hope.

    And, all in all, I believe in those 300 who will resist.

    Check François Desouche via Google Translate.

    So much for the suicide meme. There may be no precedent and no hip, pithy term for being sold out by your treasonous, greedy, cowardly, short-sighted, self-interested, alien-loving, corrupt, dishonest leadership. But it certainly isn’t suicide.

  29. “So much for the suicide meme. There may be no precedent and no hip, pithy term for being sold out by your treasonous, greedy, cowardly, short-sighted, self-interested, alien-loving, corrupt, dishonest leadership. But it certainly isn’t suicide.”

    Amen to that.

  30. French Jews React to the Strauss-Kahn Story – Global – The Atlantic Wire:

    The absence of anti-semitic remarks in the aftermath of the scandal was acknowledged by CRIF, a French Jewish umbrella group. A researcher there told JTA he hasn’t seen any significant reference to Strauss-Kahn’s religion in the press. The group’s president told JTA “Everybody knew he was Jewish, and that didn’t prevent him from being the most popular candidate in France and that says something about France. Today we find it completely normal that a Jew can become president.”

    That’s right. Because remarking on jewish connections in a negative fashion is something nobody can do and stay in the press, and everybody in the press knows that.

    They screenshot Ann Coulter’s “offensive Jewish joke” without linking her:

    DSK’s accuser a Muslim, he’s Jewish, so now DSK is claiming that he raped in self-defense.

  31. Two Tone Deaf Defenses of Strauss-Kahn:

    But two pieces today, which both seek to address issues in the media coverage of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, show an unbelievable level of tone-deafness on their way to opening up this discussion. The first comes from French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, writing for The Daily Beast; the second comes from Ben Stein writing at The American Spectator.

    Two jews offer unbelievably tone-deaf defenses of a tribemate. Who could have predicted THAT?

    And for some strange reason The Jewish Journal and Rabbi Joe Black aren’t getting any credit. Weird.

  32. Atlantic Wire: ** The group’s president told JTA “Everybody knew he was Jewish, and that didn’t prevent him from being the most popular candidate in France and that says something about France. Today we find it completely normal that a Jew can become president.” **

    The French may know that DSK is Jewish, but it doesn’t mean anything, as most of them don’t know who the Jews are. They don’t know that it isn’t simply a religion, and they have no idea that Jewish activists play an important role in the third-world invasion.

    Until this week, the media kept repeating that DSK was the most popular candidate, even though he had been living abroad for three years and wasn’t much in the news. Repeating that he was popular was a good way to encourage people to think of him as a good choice.

    But what are the chances that French people, by themselves, would naturally choose a Zionist candidate like DSK who wants Turkey, Israel and Northern Africa to enter the European Union? In fact, people choose whoever the media encourage them to choose.

  33. In fact, people choose whoever the media encourage them to choose.

    Yes. And on the other side, people will come to dislike and distrust whoever the media constantly encourage them to fear and loathe – like that “scary” “extreme” “far-right” “xenophobe” Marine Le Pen they keep hissing about.

  34. More tidbits:
    From NY-Post:
    “The [current] apartment isn’t rented under her name. Harlem [Community AIDS] United places their tenants in our building,” explained an employee of the apartment building’s property manager, Chaim Gross, of Brooklyn.

    The victim lived in an apartment owned by a Chaim,LOL

  35. Accuser is black, immigrant, muslim, single mom, … with AIDS?

    How many more politically incorrect hurdles will DSK’s liberal (jewish) defenders be forced to jump in order to stand with their marxist/capitalist (jewish) international banker prodigal son, the rutting chimpanzee?

    When will they abandon him and claim, “he was never a very good liberal (jew) anyway”?

  36. Self-righteous jewess Anne Applebaum, the uber-quick uber-defender of Roman Polanski, hints Sarkozy is to blame, not DSK. Like Ben Stein, Applebaum is capable of just blocking out reports of DSK’s well-known reputation for sexual aggression:

    Which brings us back to Strauss-Kahn: Unlike Sarkozy, he had a reputation as a responsible adult with a good head for economics — at least until last weekend

    Or maybe Applebaum read the copious reports of DSK’s well-known but underpublicized reputation for skirt-chasing, orgies, and rutting chimp-like behavior and it fit her definition of “responsible adult”.

    It’s one thing for people disillusioned with the mainstream, those more willing to entertain heretical, cynical views, to cast aspersions on powerful mainstream figures based on speculation rather than solid evidence. Even so I try not to do that kind of thing and I find it unusual to hear from “responsible adults” who make their living in the mainstream. Like Applebaum. It begs for an explanation. A motive. Does Applebaum know DSK, or is it tribal empathy?

    Strauss-Kahn also risks discrediting, once again, the entire French political class.

    Why not the entire jewish political class? Oh, that’s right, because it’s OK to lie and paint DSK as French and say his scandal reflects badly on France. What it’s not OK to do is tell the truth about DSK’s strong jewish identity or the very self-centered jewish hand-wringing about whether this is bad for jews. Well, you can but only if you lament how bad this is for jews, and how badly that too reflects on France.

    What’s good or bad for the French isn’t ever really discussed honestly. For example, Applebaum concludes by directing fear and loathing at Marine Le Pen and the French:

    The main beneficiary will be the politician with the fastest-growing constituency in France at the moment: Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and now the leader of the uber-nationalist, anti-European Union, anti-immigration National Front. Much more presentable than her father, Le Pen started polling higher than Sarkozy in March, not least because she offers populist economics and promises to prevent the number of North African immigrants from swelling. And she has good reason to believe in her chances: Once before, in 2002, Marine’s father unexpectedly wound up in a presidential runoff against the then-president, Jacques Chirac. Chirac won in a landslide, but the French establishment got a good scare.

    Maybe they weren’t scared enough: France seems consumed by the same kinds of scandals, the same grumpiness about foreigners and the same sense that the political class is out of touch as it did 10 years ago. French politicians continue to live in a world remote from that of the “ordinary” people they are meant to represent. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest certainly won’t make any of the mainstream parties more popular than they were last week. How many will want a radical alternative?

    Like DSK, Applebaum is grumpy about any potential for the French to be ruled by the French for the benefit of the French. That’s the “radical alternative” she’s scared of. The status quo is genocidal mass immigration imposed by an uber-anti-French political class.

  37. Robert Kuttner: Strauss-Kahn and the European Left:

    Strauss-Kahn’s reckless and grandiose personal behavior is symptomatic of a deeper sickness afflicting the European left. It isn’t just that people like Strauss Kahn flaunt their wealth, but that they share the financial outlook of the wealthy.

    Like Ben Stein?

    I suppose we Americans can take pride that our president has never been accused of assaulting a chamber maid in a luxury hotel. Now, if he would just assault the financial barons.

    Somebody tell Stein we found someone who’s out to get the “haves” (who doesn’t look like a “have-not”).

    I think if I claimed reckless grandiose smears and calls for assaults on the “haves” were “symptomatic of a deeper sickness afflicting the jewish left” Kuttner would probably respond by blaming zionist Christians.

  38. I think they have become so powerfull and so many in high places that they don’t need to play minority-sticking-together tactics anymore and can freely go at each other’s throat when they have to. The accuser’s lawyer is jewish, his replacement in the IMF is jewish, his archrival for the French presidency is jewish, so what’s the big deal here anyway? Whether he was set up or not and for whatever reason, it looks more like an internal affair of the power game within the “new elite”.

    Of course, even so he ‘ll still get his fair share of support from willing tribesmen/women in the media who will take care that he won’t be “demonised” beyond repair, who will once again distort reality, facts and basic common sense in order to exonerate him and put the blame on everyone else (white christians in particular) other than himself or even the accuser.
    And who will make sure that his jewish identity won’t be put into the equation and only be treated as “French”.

  39. Strauss-Kahn’s Womanizing: Why France Was Silent About It – TIME:

    Strauss-Kahn may have been abetted by the fact that most of his so-called conquests involved ideological fellow travelers — as was reflected by the Banon case. Says the French lawyer who asked not to be named: “My clients and other women I’ve been contacted by with reports of sexual aggression by Strauss-Kahn were all either Socialist Party members, supporters, or involved in wider leftist political activity that eventually brought them into contact with Strauss-Kahn.

    Ahhh, but of course it wasn’t France who was silent, it was DSK’s political circle and the media. It was part political solidarity, part fear of retribution. A similar dynamic explains his defenders today, except here the political fear and solidarity are quickly evaporating. What remains are personal and tribal motives.

  40. Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s Apologists Are a Narcissist Clique – The Daily Beast starts with this editor’s introduction:

    Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest reveals the underside of the discreet French approach to the private lives of public figures. But the Arnold Schwarzenegger scandal shows Americans don’t know how to deal with the messy confluence of sex and politics either, says Michelle Goldberg.

    Goldberg explains:

    So this is the dark side of the famed French sexual sophistication. For decades now, American liberals, myself included, have bought into the notion that the discreet French approach to the private lives of public figures is superior to America’s tabloid Puritanism.

    . . .

    But the aftermath of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest puts the French approach in a rather different light. Rather than evidence of liberality, the silence that protected Strauss-Kahn seems like a conspiracy allowing a powerful man to prey on powerless women. And the apologists for Strauss-Kahn, like the egregious Bernard-Henri Levy, reveal themselves not as worldly humanists, but as members of a narcissistic clique with a monstrous sense of entitlement.

    In fact the DSK part of the article is almost all about BHL and a bit about Jean-Marie Le Guen, “a Socialist party MP who has known Strauss-Kahn for 25 years” – it’s a narcissistic clique of three. Goldberg could at least have extended it to Ben Stein.

    The DSK scandal has very little to do with Americans or the French collectively other than as convenient scapegoats. Here again we see the license pundits, especially the jewish ones, take in tossing off anti-White generalizations. When they blame “Americans” they’re not talking about P. Diddy or Al Sharpton. And when they blame “the French” they’re not talking about the Algerians in the banlieues. What does Goldberg mean by “tabloid Puritanism”? Perez Hilton, TMZ, The New York Post? That kind of “Puritanism”?

    If a paid pundit make these kind of sloppy smears against the jews – saying some scandal reveals the underside of the discreet jewish approach to whatever, or shows that jews don’t know how to deal with whatever – they’d lose their media job immediately.

  41. Excellent coverage of the responses to the DSK affair here in the comments. You might want to incorporate these into the main post – it’ll probably be the best summary out there.

  42. Dominique Strauss-Kahn Mugshot

    No diplomatic immunity for Strauss-Kahn – The Early Show – CBS News:

    The State Department has wrapped up its legal review of the case and decided Dominique Strauss-Kahn doesn’t have diplomatic immunity because, when he was arrested, he was not on official business for the IMF.

    . . .

    [CBS News Legal Analyst Jack] Ford continued, “Here what’s happening is the prosecution, we know, has said, you know, he was in the act of fleeing. This is a serious offense. He has no ties to this community. He’s a French citizen, we don’t want to give him any bail.

    DSK is a flight risk because he’s a jet-setting internationalist cosmopolitan with jewish ties, and sympathizers, all over the world.

    IMF’s Strauss-Kahn resigns amid sex charges – Yahoo! News:

    “To all, I want to say that I deny with the greatest possible firmness all of the allegations that have been made against me. I want to protect this institution which I have served with honor and devotion, and especially — especially — I want to devote all my strength, all my time and all my energy to proving my innocence.”

    . . .

    Europeans have led the IMF since its inception after World War II. Americans have occupied both the No. 2 position at the IMF and the top post at its sister institution, the World Bank.

    . . .

    “We must establish meritocracy, so that the person leading the IMF is selected for their merits and not for being European,” Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega said, calling for a “new criteria” for leadership. “You can have a competent European … but you can have a representative from an emerging nation who is competent as well.”

    The usual narrative inside Western countries is that meritocracy is a form of crypto-“racism”, at least when Whites benefit, thus Whites are mercilessly guilt-tripped and browbeaten to hand over power in the name of “diversity”. Here however meritocracy serves as the excuse to reduce European and American (ie. White) participation. Meanwhile jewish ethnic networking and over-representation will continue unabated and uncriticized under any “new criteria” which opens IMF leadership to jews from Israel, jews from Latin America, jews from Africa.

  43. streiff at RedState takes note of the flip side of the media’s “Puritanical” Americans – the “macho” French.

    The French media’s respect for privacy now looks more like an exaggerated deference towards the rich, powerful and macho.

    Not to mention jewish.

    streiff cites the odd co-occurence of strauss-kahn macho and objects:

    What you see exhibited in DSK has nothing to do with “macho” or even manliness. It has nothing to do with living in that hotbed of macho culture, France, or working in the pressure cooker of machismo that is the IMF. They are the actions of a run-of-the-mill sociopath who grew up in a culture where having enough money, going to the right schools, making the right contacts, and having a position of power enabled, if not encouraged, him to believe he could simply take what he wanted with impunity.

    Not to mention being jewish.

    As Svigor has often said regarding jewish malfeasance in light of the deference shown to jews – it’s like expecting the Invisible Man not to steal.

  44. Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Shock… and silence | The Jewish Chronicle:

    Richard Prasquier, head of CRIF, the umbrella body that represents French Jews, said: “As a French citizen, I am shocked and I feel sorry for his family. Let us not forget that until and if he is formally convicted, Strauss-Kahn should not be considered guilty.”

    The embarrassment of the French Jewish community was obvious in the total absence of any comment on the news on any of its websites, including that of the CRIF.

    Mr Prasquier said: “The fact that Strauss-Kahn is Jewish has nothing to do with the charges against him; his political career and his position are in no way linked to the community.”

    Doubletalk. If Prasquier’s second statement is true then what do jews have to be embarrassed about? What they have to be embarrassed about is their portion of all the things pundits have so far had no trouble unfairly assigning entirely to “the French”.

    In France, a person’s religion is regarded as a private matter and is seldom discussed in public. While Mr Strauss-Kahn has made no mystery of the fact that he is Jewish, it has not been a political issue for him. Anti-Zionists have nevertheless regarded him as a Zionist because he reportedly said in 1991 during the Gulf War: “Every diaspora Jew, wherever he is, and this includes France, must help Israel. This is the reason why it is important for Jews to take political responsibilities. In my position and in my daily life, I modestly try to help to build Israel.”

    More doubletalk. DSK declared himself a zionist, explaining quite plainly that jewishness is a political issue for him and should be for every diaspora jew. How is it anti-zionist for the French to want political leaders who put helping France before all other concerns? And pardon moi, but since when is DSK religious? As Praquier must know, about half of France’s 600,000 jews have no connection to judaism.

  45. As a French citizen, I am shocked and I feel sorry for his family.

    How about feeling sorry for his victim?

    Oh yeah, his victim isn’t a “French citizen”.

    That explains why the head Jew in France only cares about his fellow “French citizens” in DSK’s family.

    Let us not forget that until and if he is formally convicted, Strauss-Kahn should not be considered guilty.

    The standard of proof in the American judicial system is very high, making this statement moronic in the extreme.

    Should we also not consider O.J. Simpson guilty because a jury said there was a reasonable doubt as to his guilt?

    What utter nonsense.

  46. Why isn’t that French dog barking? This demands an explanation!

    Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the French Anti-Semitism Myth – The Daily Beast:

    Although Dominique Strauss-Kahn fits the stereotype of rich, leftist, Jewish banker preying on the poor and getting ethnic support from notable friends, there have been few anti-Jewish attacks on him in France, showing that claims of an anti-Semitism epidemic in the country are overblown, writes Eric Alterman.

    It’s an anti-Semite’s dream and a nervous Jew’s nightmare.

    Alterman goes on to detail the stereotypical jewish aspects of the scandal, including the ridiculous defenses offered by BHL and Ben Stein.

    After two pages of jew-this and jew-that Alterman’s conclusion, and the whole point of his piece, is highlighted so you can’t miss it:

    As it happens, Strauss-Kahn’s religion has proven relevant, really, to only two types of people: Neo Nazis and Ann Coulter, (though this might be a distinction without a difference).

    Get it? Jews are sooooo worried about an epidemic of jew-hate that their man at the Daily beast calls attention to the jewish angles, and preens about the fact that almost nobody else has done this, all so he can equate Ann Coulter with “neo-nazis” (yet another stereotypical jewish behavior). Nevermind those other trivial jewish angles, he’s saying, this is about the eternal persecution of the jews by their eternal anti-jewish enemies.

    In the end, for rhetorical purposes, Alterman blots out the third type of people who consider DSK’s jewishness relevent. His own article is a good example, being among the few prominent pieces so far dedicated to the topic. All have come from jews who seem sincerely obsessed not only with DSK’s jewishness, but with the relevence of jewishness in general.

    Rob Eshman at the Jewish Journal was first, calling out for the “neo-nazis” to bring it on.

    The second was Rabbi Joe Black who sees DSK as a saintly jew wrongly accused, just like Dreyfus.

    Then The Jewish Chronicle explained that the shock and silence of jews was due to hyper-consciously jewish embarrassment.

    Alterman’s unique combination of hasbara and smear is now the fourth in line, though I’m sure I’ve missed a few.

    It wasn’t an entirely worthless read. He brought to my attention the American Jewish Congress and Ed Koch’s call for a boycott on France. No doubt jewish aggression like this, and the fact that in France you can be persecuted for “anti-semitism”, goes a long way toward explaining why there is so little “anti-semitism” in France. Which is to say that the French dog isn’t barking because he understands he’ll be whipped by his cruel jew and jew-serving masters. You won’t hear an explanation like that from jews because they’re too busy playing the eternal powerless victims.

  47. Strauss-Kahn’s Journey From Acceptance to Sex Scandal – Forward.com:

    Just weeks ago, Dominique Strauss-Kahn worried aloud that his Jewish identity would be exploited during France’s upcoming presidential campaign.

    Oh yeah. So contra Eric Alterman, the types of people who think DSK’s jewishness is relevent are “neo-nazis”, Ann Coulter, jews, and DSK himself.

    The jewish hand-wringing about “anti-semitism” in France, even in its absence, is an attempt to curry sympathy, exploiting jewish identity.

    Like all politicians in this staunchly secular country, Strauss-Kahn, who is widely known as DSK, rarely spoke of his religious beliefs. But unlike a number of his Jewish colleagues, he has always been open about his faith and his support for Israel.

    If jewishness is about religion they why does this word secular keep coming up?

    The only child of an Alsatian father and a Tunisian mother, Strauss-Kahn was raised in a secular, progressive environment in France and in Morocco. Although he celebrated his bar mitzvah, he ultimately seemed to distance himself from Judaism; his first and second wives were not Jewish. However, he has said that the Six Day War in 1967 helped revive his Jewish identity. And following two divorces, he married American-born Jewish journalist Anne Sinclair, who, according to a recently published biography, “made him more Jewish.”

    Even by this account DSK’s jewishness is secular – it has to do with support for the jewish ethnostate and selecting a jewish mate.

    It wasn’t Strauss-Kahn’s Judaism, but the other two issues he articulated concerns about during the Libération and Marianne conversations that would ultimately turn out to be much bigger problems for him.

    Exactly. In this context all the jewish navel-gazing about jewishness is a sign of narcissism.

  48. Strauss-Kahn arrest rattles French, American Jewish communities – CNN Belief Blog:

    Until this week, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was an object of Jewish pride, a hugely successful leader of the International Monetary Fund and an outspoken supporter of Israel who was viewed as potential contender to become France’s first Jewish president.

    Now, the arrest of the former IMF chief on sexual assault charges has rattled France’s Jewish community, raising concerns that the case could inflame anti-Semitism and inspiring similar handwringing among some American Jews.

    . . .

    On the website of the Jewish Journal, another American Jewish newspaper, the most read story for a couple of days this week was a blog post headlined “Dominique Strauss-Kahn Is Jewish. So?”

    Despite the headline, the post argued that to most Jews, Strauss-Kahn’s religion matters.

    Since jews themselves keep saying DSK’s jewishness matters, why should the rest of us pretend it doesn’t? Beside the punishment that is…

  49. So, You’re A ‘French Intellectual,’ Eh? – by Marc Tracy > Tablet Magazine – A New Read on Jewish Life:

    David Rieff has a must-read takedown of the apologies offered on Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s behalf from several of his French friends, who doubt that their buddy the former International Monetary Fund head, known as a philanderer, could possibly have been guilty of attempted rape and other crimes. . .

    I come, however, to make a different point, and it is raised by the three examples Rieff cites of DSK apologists: The freelance intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, mais, bien sûr; Jean Daniel, a prominent editor; and Robert Badinter, a human rights lawyer who, more than any other single person, is responsible for France having abolished the death penalty. What do they have in common? They are all French intellectuals. They are all, in their various idiosyncratic and self-professed ways, men of the left. They are all buddies with DSK—come to think of it, another French intellectual man of the left. Is there anything else these four share … ?

    Of course, there is, and I put it to you, France: Can’t you guys get yourself some non-Jewish intellectuals?

    The only people writing about jewishness are jews. Most everyone else either doesn’t care or is too scared to mention it.

  50. Wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn Stands by Her Man – NYTimes.com:

    The New York-born child of a family who fled to America to escape the Nazis, and of a father who had the code-name “Sinclair” in the French Resistance, she insisted on a Jewish ceremony after the legal exchange of vows in a Paris city hall.

    . . .

    Still, she was the driving force behind Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s political ambitions, and her wealth, inherited from her grandfather, the art dealer Paul Rosenberg, enabled the couple to live lavishly and independently, with two extraordinary apartments in Paris, a $4 million house in Georgetown and a riad in Marrakesh.

    She also helped finance a group of political advisers, press aides and Internet sites that were preparing the ground for what was soon supposed to be a triumphant return to France for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, to begin a race for the presidency many thought he would win.

    “She always wanted to prove that, 75 years after Léon Blum, the French were capable of electing a Jew,” a friend told Le Monde. “In her eyes, that would be a formidable revenge on history.”

    Formidable revenge on the French. Payback for all those generations of mistreatment they tell themselves their people have suffered at French hands.

  51. France’s ‘hot rabbit’ finally run to ground, The Australian finally
    lets Australians know that DSK isn’t really very French:

    Recently, Strauss-Kahn told journalists he expected to be targeted for three things on the campaign trail: “Money, my Jewishness and women.”

    When it comes to the third, Sinclair, who is also Jewish, has always stood by her “Domi”. Some say she is even keener than he on conquering the Elysee Palace. Certainly she has consistently forgiven her husband.

    Not that they had anything bad to say about that.

  52. In a 14 Feb 2011 article, back when DSK was on track to become the next president of France, his jewishness front and center, being used as both a shield and a weapon against his “extreme right” opponents.

    Strauss-Kahn draws fire from French right:

    Socialists reacted angrily to the attacks, in particular to the suggestion that Mr Strauss-Kahn could be considered un-French. Several politicians suggested they bordered on the anti-Semitic due to Mr Strauss-Kahn’s Jewish heritage.

    “Soon they will be talking like Déroulede or Maurras,” said Jean-Jacques Urvoas, deputy for Finistère, in reference to the leaders of France’s extreme right in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

    “These attacks are profoundly unhealthy. It is a bit like the rhetoric of the extreme right between the wars,” said Pierre Moscovici, a former Socialist minister.

    Who is attacking who? Unhealthy for who? It sounds like the French have a history of regarding rule by un-French jews unhealthy for themselves, and jews have a history of attacking them for it.

  53. Tiberge at GalliaWatch:

    The man at the center of it all is Jewish, but more than that, his most ardent supporters, the ones who immediately came to his rescue – Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jean-François Kahn, Jack Lang, Robert Badinter – are also Jewish. They are the faces seen nightly on French television. Theirs is the liberal policy of open borders, sexual liberty, globalism, anti-nationalism, multiculturalism, etc… All the evils we perceive as destroying the French nation, they perceive as good things BECAUSE they are destroying the French nation. In the longstanding tradition of François Mitterrand, the nation is the greatest evil; progress (i.e., Socialism) the greatest good. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a good Socialist.

  54. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a good Socialist.

    I would say that, above all, he was a good Jew (good for his own people, of course, while lethal for the others).

  55. Tanstaafl said…
    Sometimes a sexual assault is just a sexual assault.

    You really think so Tan??

    President Bill Clinton survived his sexual escapades, because he was a servant to the system, not a threat. But Strauss-Kahn, like former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, was a threat to the system, and, like Eliot Spitzer, Strauss-Kahn has been deleted from the power ranks.

    […]

    It is possible that Strauss-Kahn eliminated himself and saved Washington the trouble. However, as a well-travelled person who has often stayed in New York hotels and in hotels in cities around the world, I have never experienced a maid entering unannounced into my room, much less when I was in the shower.

    In the spun story, Strauss-Kahn is portrayed as so deprived of sex that he attempted to rape a hotel maid. […]

    A powerful man such as Strauss-Kahn would not have been starved for women, and as a multi-millionaire he could certainly afford to make his own discreet arrangements.

    http://vdare.com/roberts/110517_police_state.htm

  56. In the spun story, Strauss-Kahn is portrayed as so deprived of sex that he attempted to rape a hotel maid. […]

    A powerful man such as Strauss-Kahn would not have been starved for women, and as a multi-millionaire he could certainly afford to make his own discreet arrangements.

    If powerful people wanted DSK out of the way they could certainly afford to make their own discreet arrangements – no hotel employees required.

    DSK was apparently deprived of sex enough to proposition two other hotel employees, who rejected him. Perhaps the accuser accepted his proposition but decided it was an assault after he got rough (an established pattern of his).

  57. Ex-IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn made advances on two hotel staffers, flight attendant – NYPOST.com

    Strauss-Kahn DNA Found on Maid’s Shirt – WSJ.com

    Dominique Strauss-Kahn pals plan to pay off family of woman accusing the former IMF boss of rape – NYPOST.com:

    Friends of alleged hotel sex fiend Dominique Strauss-Kahn secretly contacted the accusing maid’s impoverished family, offering them money to make the case go away since they can’t reach her in protective custody, The Post has learned.

    The woman, who says she was sexually assaulted by the disgraced former head of the International Monetary Fund, has an extended family in the former French colony of Guinea in West Africa, well out of reach of the Manhattan DA’s Office.

    “They already talked with her family,” a French businesswoman with close ties to Strauss-Kahn and his family told The Post. “For sure, it’s going to end up on a quiet note.”

    Prosecutors in Manhattan have done their best to keep the cleaning woman out of the reach of Strauss-Kahn’s supporters, but the source was already predicting success for the Parisian pol’s pals.

    “He’ll get out of it and will fly back to France. He won’t spend time in jail. The woman will get a lot of money,” said the source, adding that a seven-figure sum has been bandied about.

  58. The France That Hasn’t Shown Its Face to Dominique Strauss-Kahn – Forward.com, by Robert Zaretsky, a professor of French history at the University of Houston Honors College:

    The case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former director of the IMF and leading Socialist politician now accused of sexual assault, has left the French public shocked and scandalized in many different ways. But curiously, there is one response that we have not seen: anti-Semitism.

    Curious, because France’s long history with its Jews has often been troubled and it is at moments such as these that an ugly strain of homegrown anti-Semitism rears its head.

    It’s a tradition that has its roots in late 19th-century populism. With the nation mired in a severe economic slump and governed by a venal and feckless political class, there was a ready market for demagoguery. In 1886, Edouard Drumont published a two-volume work, La France Juive (“Jewish France”), which became one of the era’s best-sellers. Drumont declared that a cabal of Jewish bankers and financiers — “this hook-nosed tribe” and “sons of Abraham” — had taken the nation’s economy hostage. The newspaper Drumont founded during the Dreyfus Affair, La Libre Parole, brandished as its motto, “France for the French!”

    But the anti-Semite’s Jew was polymorphic. Not only did he control the nation’s economic system, but he also conspired to bring down that very same system. Nationalists claimed that the ranks of those critical of liberal democracy were riddled with Jews, as well. During the last years of the 19th century, French Jews became synonymous with socialists; in the wake of World War I, they were re-labeled as agents of communism. Banker or Bolshevik, the essence remained constant: The Jew was a relentless financial and political outsider who preyed upon the French nation.

  59. Following this are another five paragraphs of specifically jewish anti-French grievances. Zaretsky concludes with an attack on the Le Pens:

    This brings us back to the absence of an anti-Semitic backlash, the dog that didn’t bark. In a country awash in news and commentary about DSK’s arrest, Marine Le Pen’s public remarks have been strikingly circumspect. Though appalled by the nature of the charges, Le Pen, when she was interviewed on May 15 on French television, rather than reaching into her father’s repertory of rhetorical provocations emphasized that DSK must be granted the presumption of innocence.

    Against these remarks, however, we should not lose sight of Le Pen’s efforts to meld France’s festering concerns over immigration to its growing fears over globalization. The immigrant to be feared is not the Jew from East Europe, but the Muslim from North Africa. The Muslim has come to represent all that threatens the social and economic fabric of the nation. No less a threat to France are international and supranational institutions. Le Pen has relentlessly attacked not just the European Union — she has proposed pulling France out of the euro zone — but also the International Monetary Fund, which had been led until very recently by the man who was to be her probable opponent in 2012, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. DSK, like the Muslim immigrant, is to her little more than the gravedigger of French national identity. For Le Pen, France is besieged by what she calls “Islamism” and the global sway of “roi-argent” (King Money). The two, she warns, form the dual totalitarianisms of our era.

    It may well be that phrases like “King Money,” which echo the rhetoric of Drumont and Poujade, are accidental. We will certainly know better in the coming weeks and months. For now, the question is whether we must give Marine Le Pen the same presumption of innocence she has granted her bête noire.

    The dearth of contemporary “anti-semitism” compels Zaretsky to go back in time to find crimes with which to pathologize and guilt-trip the French. “France for the French” – the horror!

  60. In Feb 2010 Zaretsky wrote The Tea Party Last Time – NYTimes.com, in which he compares today’s Tea Party to the Poujadist movement in France 56 years ago. (He brought it up in his Forward piece too.) The criminal link, or Zaretsky’s fear at least, is the attempt “to take their country back” “from those who, well, were not like them”.

  61. If powerful people wanted DSK out of the way they could certainly afford to make their own discreet arrangements – no hotel employees required.

    DSK was apparently deprived of sex enough to proposition two other hotel employees, who rejected him. Perhaps the accuser accepted his proposition but decided it was an assault after he got rough (an established pattern of his). @Tan
    ___

    Doesn’t matter, since, as PC Roberts logically pointed out, Bill Clinton was never troubled by the authorities for his extra-marital dalliances, nor hosts of other politicians in similar circumstances.

    Plus, there is no way in hell this would have become an issue, especially with the African immigrant woman, had not very powerful people wanted DSK neutralized for whatever reason.

    Again Tan, do you think that PC Roberts is completely off the mark with his beliefs??

  62. Again Tan, do you think that PC Roberts is completely off the mark with his beliefs??

    I don’t share his belief that DSK “was a threat to the system”. I find his argument unconvincing:

    Strauss-Kahn was the first IMF director in my lifetime, if memory serves, who disavowed the traditional IMF policy of imposing on the poor and ordinary people the cost of bailing out Wall Street and the Western banks. Strauss-Kahn said that regulation had to be reimposed on the greed-driven, fraud-prone financial sector, which, unregulated, destroyed the lives of ordinary people. Strauss-Kahn listened to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of a handful of economists who has a social conscience.

    PCR thinks DSK has a “social conscience” (whatever that means) and was set up. Even assuming this is true… How does it excuse DSK’s enthusiasm for genocidal immigration or negate his full-time professional participation in the internationalist, plutocratic, anti-White system?

  63. Groping in the Dark | Opinion | Jewish Journal, by Erica Brown:

    We do care, and we care for the same reason that when a Jew wins a Nobel Peace Prize, we take just a smidgen of credit for it, and when a popular celebrity announces he or she is Jewish, we stand a little taller. We are connected by a mysterious bond called peoplehood, a psychic sense that we are part of an extended family with deep historical roots and a moral and spiritual vision. This is not something we give explicit voice to, but it is something many of us feel deep down in our kishkes (gut).

    It’s the quiet nod of recognition we give to a woman in a grocery checkout line with a Star of David around her neck. It is the subtle intimacy we experience as a minority people who are experts at the world’s most boring game: Jewish geography. We play it because six degrees of separation is way too many. Six one-hundredths is a lot more comfortable. After all, it’s a hostile world out there. You need to know who your family is.

    Yet, just like we’re not proud of every member of our family, we put up with those criminal few (yes, it is only a few) who need to zip up their pants, get a better accountant or have a time-out from Wall Street. The downside of peoplehood is that just like we may feel psychically connected to strangers merely because they are Jewish, we are also connected to Jews who commit crimes in the public eye.

    You need to know who your family is. Indeed. When jews aren’t lecturing us about the evils of us/them thinking they’re celebrating how well it works for them.

  64. I don’t like the trillion dollar gifts that governments are giving to banks, BUT . . .

    Bill Clinton was never troubled by the authorities for his extra-marital dalliances

    DSK was never troubled by the authorities for his extra-marital dalliances.

    This isn’t sexual harassment. This isn’t adultery. This is violent rape and sodomy. There was physical evidence, the victim was credible, and the crime was immediately reported to the police. There just isn’t anything else to read into it.

    By the way, to claim that Clinton was not “troubled by authorities” is kind of funny now that I think about it. He is one of only two American Presidents to be impeached.

  65. This isn’t sexual harassment. This isn’t adultery. This is violent rape and sodomy. There was physical evidence, the victim was credible, and the crime was immediately reported to the police. There just isn’t anything else to read into it.

    By the way, to claim that Clinton was not “troubled by authorities” is kind of funny now that I think about it. He is one of only two American Presidents to be impeached.

    In a name: Juanita Broadderick

  66. Tanstaafl said…
    “Again Tan, do you think that PC Roberts is completely off the mark with his beliefs??”

    I don’t share his belief that DSK “was a threat to the system”. I find his argument unconvincing:
    ___

    Here is another article on this topic by PCR –

    ===
    The Establishment Eliminates A Threat
    By Paul Craig Roberts

    The police and the prostitute media have made it impossible for Dominique Strauss-Kahn to get a fair trial. From the moment of the announcement that he had been arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, and before he was ever indicted, the accounts given by the police were designed to create the impression that the director of the International Monetary Fund was guilty. For example, the police told the media, which duly regurgitated to the public, that Strauss-Kahn was in such a hurry to flee the scene of the crime that he left behind his cell phone. The police also put out the story that by calling airlines and demanding passenger lists, they managed to catch the fleeing rapist just as his plane was departing for France.

    A New York judge denied Strauss-Kahn bail on the basis of police misrepresentation that he was apprehended fleeing the country.

    Once he was imprisoned, the police announced that Strauss-Kahn was on suicide watch, which is a way of suggesting to the public that the accused rapist might take his own life in order to avoid the public humiliation of a guilty verdict from a jury.

    But what really happened, assuming one can learn anything from press reports, is that Strauss-Kahn, upon arriving at JFK airport for his scheduled flight, discovered that he did not have his cell phone and telephoned the hotel, the scene of the alleged crime. It boggles the mind that anyone could possibly think that a person fleeing from his crime would call the scene of the crime, ask about his left behind cell phone, and tell them where he was.

    Then in rapid succession, reeking of orchestration, a French woman steps forward and declares that a decade ago she was nearly raped by Strauss-Kahn. This was followed by Kristin Davis, the Manhattan Madam of the prostitute who did in Eliot Spitzer before he could get the banksters on Wall Street, stepping forward to announce that one of her call girls refused to service Strauss-Kahn a second time because he was too rough in the act.
    ===

    http://vdare.com/roberts/110517_the_establishment.htm

  67. “In Feb 2010 Zaretsky wrote The Tea Party Last Time – NYTimes.com, in which he compares today’s Tea Party to the Poujadist movement in France 56 years ago.”

    The French media now use the word Poujadist as a sort of synonym for populist. My strong suspicion is that Jewish activists are responsible for that, and that they also promoted the word McCarthyism. Among other things, Poujade was guilty of criticizing Jewish politician Pierre Mendès-France. (I would also like to know who decided to use the name Quisling as a synonym of traitor).

    Both Pierre Poujade (1920-2003) and Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) were politically active in the 1950s.

    In the last decades, Jewish activists operating in France have come up with the word “lepénisation”. They like to complain about the “lepénisation of people’s minds” (lepénisation des esprits). In Jewish minds, it probably means the contrary of judaization.

    Zaretsky: “In 1886, Edouard Drumont published a two-volume work, La France Juive (“Jewish France”) “

    And in 1888, an American author published “The Original Mr. Jacobs“, which is an adaptation of Drumont’s book.

  68. In US media “populism” is strictly a pejorative with the connotation of anti-jewish sentiment. The public figures most commonly associated with populism in the US are Huey Long and Father Coughlin, who were politically active a generation before McCarthy, and with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, the popular implicitly White contemporary jew-firsters so many jews just love to hate.

  69. Here’s an article that puts together bits and pieces of most of the jewish hand-wringing linked above and lays out their anti-French hostility right up front.

    How the Strauss-Kahn affair effects France’s Jews – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News, by Danna Harman:

    The 600,000 strong Jewish community in France fear charges against the former IMF chief will play into negative stereotypes of Jews, but also that Marine Le Pen’s National Front will benefit from the affair.

    The worldwide jewish community opposes France for the French. No Zion for the French, because that would be bad for “the jews”.

    The younger Le Pen has modernized the party of her father and worked to rid it of its anti-Semitic baggage, and has been carefully circumspect as regards reactions to the Strauss-Kahn affair. But still, the specter of the FNs rise to power of, complete with all its anti-immigrant, and anti globalist philosophies, concerns many Jews as well as other minorities here.

    Oh yeah, and, ahem, bad for other “minorities” too. Never mind that they all have their own Zions elsewhere, except maybe the Roma.

  70. The American Israelite » Jewz in the Newz:

    The following information comes from a scholarly, French language biography that came out this year. DSK is the son of JACQUELINE FELLUS, a Tunisian Jew, and GILBERT STRAUSS-KAHN, who was the son of an Alsatian French Jewish father and a French Catholic mother. (“Strauss” was Gilbert’s father’s name; Kahn was the name of his Jewish stepfather. He combined them in tribute to both). DSK simply went by “Strauss” early in life — but around 1975 he decided to do use both Jewish surnames because, he says: “It was a way to show my commitment to my [step] grandfather and also to affirm my Jewish identity that had been awakened by the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War.”

  71. Presenting DSK’s Brand New $14 Million Tribeca House Arrest Palace

    From the WSJ: “David Bookstaver, a spokesman for the state court system, said that New York Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus approved Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s move to a new residence during a conference call with his defense attorneys and prosecutors on Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Bookstaver said he doesn’t know where Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s new residence will be or when he will be moved.”

  72. “to affirm my Jewish identity that had been awakened by the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War.”

    So sometime after cashing in on his Bar Mitzvah, DSK lost religion and “awakened” at the ripe old age of 18.

    In other words, I was told I was a jew from the day I was born until the day (1967) I woke up and realized “hey, im a jew”.

  73. Repeat after the media pundits – this is a conflict between Americans and the French, Americans and the French, Americans and the French, …

    For French, Arrest Forces Some Questions of Identity – NYTimes.com, by Joseph Berger:

    French-Americans, said Thomas Bishop, director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture at New York University, do not integrate into the American mainstream as easily as other ethnic groups, retaining stronger feelings for their homeland.

    The devotion extends to their passion for French politics. Rather than dismiss Mr. Strauss-Kahn with tabloid descriptions of him as a “frisky Frenchman,” they may view his fall from power as that of a man with “a tragic flaw” who thought he could “get away with anything,” Mr. Bishop said.

    Berger doesn’t breathe a word about jews. If you were to substitute “the jews” into any of the pronouncements he or other pundits routinely aim at Americans or the French, then voila, they would magically transform into ugly tropes.

    For example, see the article linked in the original post, Strauss-Kahn Has France Talking About a Presidential Run – NYTimes.com, which discusses the question of DSK’s identity before he was accused of sexual assault:

    But there have been other, uglier notes in the right’s reaction, circling around the fact that Mr. Strauss-Kahn is Jewish. Christian Jacob, a legislator and farmer, described him as an urban intellectual — a “bobo,” short for “bourgeois-bohemian.” Mr. Jacob said that Mr. Strauss-Kahn did not represent “the image of France, the image of rural France, the image of the France of terroirs and territories.” This notion of rootless cosmopolitanism, of being out of touch with the soil and the mystery of “la France profonde,” is an old trope for foreign and Jewish influence.

    . . .

    On Wednesday, Mr. Jacob denied any anti-Semitic feeling, saying that “as a farmer, I can’t recognize myself or identify with him.”

    As is clear from much of the jewish hand-wringing after his arrest, “the jews” feel quite free to question DSK’s jewish identity. The consensus seems to be, “yes, so what?” Meanwhile, those French who question DSK’s French identity are painted as jew haters. Jewish influence is today so strong that the old anti-jewish trope is quite unpublishable, if not unspeakable, and the new ugly trope, regularly repeated in media reports and opinion, is that the DSK affair reflects badly on Americans or the French, despite copious signs that the majority of Americans and French are appalled and alienated by him and his behavior. DSK and “the jews”, on the other hand, have expressed keen interest in his jewish identity, and what it means to them – a fact no paid pundit will mention much less blame for anything.

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