In a both funny and serious piece on the state of anti-Americanism in France, Adam Gopnik puts Franco-American tension in perspective. The crazy summer of 2003 was one of record heat in which Paris was shut down by, of all things, a strike on the part of seasonally employed theater workers. Gopnik writes:
For many people in France, it produced, surprisingly, a sense of dour hopelessness greater than that caused by any of the other strikes that have happened in France in the last eight years. It is one thing to have your country stopped regularly by truck drivers and railroad engineers; at least this has the savor of blue-collar rectitude. When the country and its joys can be shut down by part-time trombonists, however, something is wrong, or at least ridiculous. ...
With the egocentrism that is our national character (and which we call "innocence" and others "arrogance"), Americans in Paris were full of apprehension about their welcome, only to discover that they were regarded as less worrisome than your son Gilles, the failed actor.
Vive la France!
Be that as it may, Gopnik also looks at some serious French books defending America and American policy from their critics, although the defense might not be quite recognizable as such to "innocent" American nationalists. That's largely because of the one unignorably stinky albatross around the necks of pro-American apologists, namely our President. As Gopnik puts it, "What the French, from left to right, see as Bush's shallow belligerence, his incuriosity, his contempt for culture or even the idea of difference -- no one in France can forget his ridiculing an American reporter, on his one visit to Paris, for daring to speak to the French President in French -- make him a heavy burden even for the most wholeheartedly pro-American thinker."
The most intriguing book is Qui A Tué Daniel Pearl? (newly published in English as Who Killed Daniel Pearl?), in which venerable French journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy asserts that not only is Iraq a distraction but that the radical movements of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are sideshows as well. The main threat, he says, is Pakistan, where radical Islamists are in control of (real, not hypothetical) nuclear weapons. Lévy claims that Daniel Pearl was killed for knowing too much about the Pakistani threat.
All of that sounds plausible enough to me, but here's one surprising bit as restated by Gopnik:
He writes that Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, the cleric whom Pearl had set out to interview when he was kidnapped, far from being a minor figure, is one of Osama bin Laden's mentors and tutors and has a network in place in the United States. John Allen Muhammad, the Washington sniper, Lévy claims, in a detail that, if not unknown, is unpublicized in the United States, had transferred from the Nation of Islam to Gilani's sect shortly before he began his killing spree.
That's pretty interesting, if true. Could the Washington sniper have been not an isolated nutcase but (however nutty he may be) an operative for people with 9/11 connections? I wasn't sure how to parse "not unknown [but] unpublicized" in the carefully fact-checked lingo of the New Yorker; evidently it means "didn't appear in the Times or the Post but did get coverage in right-wing conspiracy rags we won't name here". (For more in that vein, try Googling for "sniper Fuqra" as well as background on the American operations of Sheik Gilani's Fuqra movement.) I'm not a big fan of the wacko right-wing press either but it sounds like they may have scooped the mainstream press on this one -- either that or they made it all up.
But back to France. The French continue to love American music, despise our presidents, and criticize our policies, while being less rude to us than they are to each other. Not bad on balance. With enemies like these, who needs friends?