[A-List] US news media: France

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Wimps, weasels and monkeys - the US media view of 'perfidious France'

Dissenters in Europe become the first victims - of a war of words

Gary Younge in New York and Jon Henley in Paris
Tuesday February 11, 2003
The Guardian

The "petulant prima donna of realpolitik" is leading the "axis of weasels",
in "a chorus of cowards". It is an unholy alliance of "wimps" and ingrates
which includes one country that is little more than a "mini-me minion",
another that is in league with Cuba and Libya, with a bunch of
"cheese-eating surrender monkeys" at the helm.

Welcome to Europe, as viewed through the eyes of American commentators and
newspapers yesterday, as Euro-bashing, and particularly anti-French
sentiment, reached new heights. In a barrage of insults and invective which
ranged from the basest tabloid rants to the loftiest columnists on the most
respected newspapers, European-led resistance to America's war plans in Iraq
was portrayed not as a diplomatic position to be negotiated as a genetic
weakness in the European mindset which makes them reluctant to fight wars
and incapable of winning them.

The front page of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post yesterday shows the graves
of Normandy with the headline: "They died for France but France has
forgotten." "Where are the French now, as Americans prepare to put their
soldiers on the line to fight today's Hitler, Saddam Hussein?" asks the
pugnacious columnist Steve Dunleavy. "Talking appeasement. Wimping out. How
can they have forgotten?" A cartoon in the same paper shows an ostrich with
its head in the sand below the words: "The national bird of France."

If such language is proving a headache for the diplomats, then spare a
thought for the French translators, who have struggled for words to convey
the full force of the venom. "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" - a phrase
coined by Bart Simpson but made acceptable in official diplomatic channels
around the globe by Jonah Goldberg, a columnist for the rightwing weekly
National Review (according to Goldberg) - was finally rendered: " Primates
capitulards et toujours en quête de fromages ". And the New York Post's
"axis of weasel" lost much of its venom when translated as a limp " axe de
faux jetons " (literally, "axis of devious characters").

American wrath has been reserved for those nations which oppose their
leadership, particularly following the decision to oppose shifting Nato
resources to Turkey. "Three countries - France, Germany and their mini-me
minion, Belgium - have moved from opposition to US policy toward Iraq into
formal, and consequential obstructionism," argued the Wall Street Journal in
an editorial yesterday. "If there is a war [the Turks] will face the danger
of direct attack that is not feared in the chocolate shops of Brussels." The
front page of the National Review blares "Putsch" with a sub-headline: "How
to defeat the Franco-German power grab."

While the jibes may be puerile, the possibility that the Bush administration
and commercial outlets might follow them up with punitive measures has
struck some as pernicious. An ad, due to come out soon, shows three
German-made cars, including an Audi and a BMW, driving towards the camera
with a voice saying: "Do you really want to buy a German car?"

If there has been any European country that has attracted more contempt than
others, it is France. In the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Hitchens
described Jacques Chirac as "a positive monster of conceit _ the abject
procurer for Saddam ... the rat that tried to roar". In the Washington Post,
George Will opined that the "oily" foreign affairs minister, Dominique de
Villepin, had launched France into "an exercise for which France has often
refined its savoir-faire since 1870, which is to say retreat - this time
into incoherence".

And in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman argued that France should be
removed from the security council and be replaced with India: "India is just
so much more serious than France these days. France is so caught up with its
need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it's become
silly." The Wall Street Journal editor, Max Boot, argues: "France has been
in decline since, oh, about 1815, and it isn't happy about it." What
particularly galls the Gauls is that their rightful place in the world has
been usurped by the gauche Americans."

At its ugliest, the transatlantic bile is becoming increasingly personal.
When France Inter radio's correspondent in Washington, Laurence Simon,
started to explain her government's position to Fox News (owned by Murdoch)
she was interrupted by the presenter. "With friends like you, who needs
enemies," she was told as she was taken off air.