The Galliano Affair: Fashion And Racism In 21st Century France

L’enfant terrible of fashion, John Galliano, received a suspended sentence on September 8th for anti-Semitic and racist remarks made at a bar within walking distance of his home in Paris. He might have been better off had he not left under his own power that night as his chauffeur was “trained” to contact a lawyer as soon as the Valium and booze kicked in.

He went to rehab (in America, of course) and expressed regret for “the sadness this whole affair has caused.”

Although incidents were down last year from the alarming peaks of 2009 — 466 incidents last year vs. 822 the year before — French anti-Semitism has been on the rise in recent years. Anti-Semitism in France has a long history and in some ways, Galliano’s comments were more of a sourcils haussés moment than full-on cul par terre. Shocking, but not surprising.

And yet, anti-Semitism in France is at an all time low among the French. French Catholic families now overwhelmingly view French Jews as French [pdf]; the new Others are seen as the Maghrebis, Arabs, and Berbers from the former North African colonies of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia. Even the far-right Front National has been toning down its anti-Jewish rhetoric lately, and Marinne Le Pen, their current leader, is actively courting French Jews to join the Front’s crusade against Arab and Berber immigrants. All of which is made more bizarre by the fact that Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, is Godfather to Plume M’bala M’bala, the third daughter of activist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala who began his career fighting for the cause of the sans papiers, the undocumented Maghrebis.

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The Decade Of 9/11

The President ordered from Costco for the Osama Bin Laden watch party. Turkey pita sandwiches, cold shrimp, potato chips. The White House’s comfort food of choice to witness the end of the world’s most wanted man.

“Now entering Pakistan,” CIA director Leon Panetta narrated over the big screen. Joe Biden kneaded rosary beads. Hillary Clinton covered her face in shock. But President Obama looked on. Stone-faced.

“GERONIMO. EKIA.”

Geronimo. The code name for Osama Bin Laden.

EKIA. Enemy Killed In Action. Osama Bin Laden had been shot in the head.

A hushed silence. “We got him,” President Obama said finally, quietly. A pause. Then the backslapping, the high-fiving all around. “We got him.”

With that Obama grabbed a sandwich to go and marched upstairs to tell the nation.

Osama Bin Laden was irrelevant by 2011. Al Qaeda, decimated by Drone attacks from above, infighting from within, and reviled across most of the Muslim world. But the visceral joy was still there. That sneering, bearded mug of barbarity was shot in the head. By an American bullet.

The mystique died next. Turns out, Osama Bin Laden was not a hardened ascetic denouncing the West from a snow-capped mountain pass. Instead, he reclined on the third floor of a million dollar compound forty miles from Pakistan’s capital. He was a vainglorious media junkie who dyed his beard for his next video. He spent his time looking at a) himself on TV and b) porn.

Osama Bin Laden was protected not by legions of hardened Mujahideen fighters but two well-to-do Pakistanis and their children. A private family that kept to itself with no phone-lines. They burned their trash indoors lest anyone riffle through the refuse.

He spent his final days listening to the pitter patter of children’s feet. Buffalo crowning a yard over. And that cloudless night the incoming roar of four U.S. helicopters and then gunfire. He was shot once in the head, once in the back, before his body was unceremoniously dumped somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

A decade after September 11, Osama Bin Laden was not the savior of the Muslim world but its scourge. His name sneered, not chanted. A decade later, Osama Bin Laden was no longer the bearded totem of resistance to American imperialism. He was the crutch of Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi and the region’s other loathed strongman who argued they alone could safeguard against him.

A decade after 911, America rebuilt the World Trade Center taller than ever. It is the façade of Arab strongmen that tumbled. The rusted rebar and rubble expose depraved men clinging to fists full of petro-dollars. Their towering walls of brick and mortar no match for the pixellated Facebook walls of ones and zeroes. Social media did not topple Mubarack. The audacity of Tahrir Square did. But social media helped the rage go viral. Skyping, tweeting its way from Tunis to Hama. They were felled by students, lawyers, and bloggers who knew simply there must be another way.

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September 11th And The Legacy Of Islamophobia In America

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was 11 years old. After the first plane hit, teachers took kids in from the playground and quickly ushered them into the classrooms. Some of them turned on TVs; others did not. Mine did. At that age, I was not fully able to comprehend what I saw. Though what I did see — buildings stripped to skeletal foundations, men and women covered in ash wandering the streets like ghosts, and remnants of homes, identities, and belongings strewn about like shattered glass — left quite an indelible mark in my heart. Ten years later, I think that this was my first glimpse into how fragile a nation and its unity can truly be. Funny, then, that we have chosen to rebuild ourselves and attack others with some of the very things that caused the mass destruction to begin with.

Although the neologism that is Islamophobia dates back to the 1990’s, it was not until after September 11, 2001 that the intolerance was so rampantly widespread that Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, stated that “when the world is compelled to coin a new term to take account of increasingly widespread bigotry, that is a sad and troubling development.” While its definition, and for that matter, existence as a term, is contentious, many agree that Islamophobia is the hatred and fear of Islam and by extension, all Muslims. Though as much as I would like to say that American Islamophobia only emerged after 2001, the unfortunate truth is that it and the driving themes behind it have been around for quite some time; it is only after that cataclysmic day that it reared its ugly head that much higher.

According to Hussein Ibish, Senior Research Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, what we recognize today as Islamophobia is merely a reincarnation of 20th century anti-Semitism, a time when it was popular to create fantastical scenarios wherein Judaism and its followers were “dedicated to plotting and carrying out the violent overthrow of American and Christian Capitalist society.” Sound familiar? That’s because it is.

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Has America Betrayed The Legacy Of Martin Luther King?

“If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell…”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Martin Luther King Memorial is a colossal block of granite, devoid of the emotion of the man it was meant to pay tribute. It’s hard to imagine how it could have been worse or how one of America’s most incandescent souls would have reacted to it. It’s big. There is that.

The last time Dr. King planned to return to the Washington Mall was as part of the Poor People’s Campaign, before his life was cut short on that shabby balcony at the Lorraine Motel. He was in Memphis in the spring of 1968 to support black sanitary public works employees as they demanded equal and fair pay.

Ironically, the MLK memorial was not built by union labor, it appears to have been built by what can only be called slave labor. As detailed by the Washington Post, workers were shipped over from China without pay to back up sculptor Lei Yixin as he chipped away at a giant chunk of rock from Greece.

I very much doubt that King would have minded the ethnicity of those workers. He wasn’t very big on patriotism as Edward Rothstein points out in his excellent critique of the memorial’s flaws. I do think that it’s safe to say that he would have objected quite strongly to the idea that those workers were being paid in “national pride” and cigarettes.

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Is The Summer Of 2011 The Worst Ever?

Rupert Murdoch was pied in the face. TBS canceled the late-night show of alleged comedian George Lopez. And a Mexican mariachi band serenaded a beluga whale in Connecticut.

That was it. Media schadenfreude and a gyrating marine mammal: the lone highlights of the Summer of 2011. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Summer of 2010 should have been rock bottom. Three interminable months of the Greek contagion, the BP Gulf Leak, and an Icelandic volcano no one could pronounce.

Sports fans endured breathlessly hyped months of LeBronian ego. Saintly boyfriends, Sex & The City 2. And fratty roommates everywhere, the Smirnoff Ice Bros Icing Bros meme.

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