says Zeus to Mohammed in the France Soir cartoon, which ran today, after its managing editor Jacques Lefranc was fired by Raymond Lakah, the paper’s Franco-Egyptian owner for publishing the twelve Prophet Mohammed cartoons from Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten. Erik at ¡No Pasar¡n! is covering the European response.

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BBC

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It did seem strange that the controversy over the rather bland Danish cartoons should break out again so vigorously recently in Islamic countries and Islamic European communities. Counterterrorism Blog explains how this came about.

Garrison Keillor debunk‘s Bernard-Henri Lévy’s recent attempt to redo Tocqueville:

It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a “partner-swapping club” in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair (“a festival of American kitsch”); Sun City (“gilded apartheid for the old”);a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz – you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World’s Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there’s nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You’ve lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel… and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There’s no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title…

…every 10 pages or so, Lévy walks into a wall. About Old Glory, for example. Someone has told him about the rules for proper handling of the flag, and from these (the flag must not be allowed to touch the ground, must be disposed of by burning) he has invented an American flag fetish, a national obsession, a cult of flag worship. Somebody forgot to tell him that to those of us not currently enrolled in the Boy Scouts, these rules aren’t a big part of everyday life.

Sabine Herold

Joel Shepherd, Australian Sci Fi author, profiles France’s most prominent Libertarian organization, and introduces us to its photogenic heroine, Sabine Herold, the ideal nominée for la République’s next Marianne.

Liberté Chérie (liberty most-cherished) is a liberal think tank comprising of 2000 members in cities throughout France. It’s far from the only libertarian organisation in France, but it is perhaps the most prominent… it functions like an information and PR centre for the promotion of the concept and philosophy of libertarianism…

(Its) first brush with fame came two years ago, during one of Paris’s predictable general strikes that paralysed the city. Liberté-Chérie called for a counter-demonstration, against the strikers. A little publicity was expected to draw perhaps a few thousand people — instead, 80,000 exasperated Parisiens arrived.

Hat tip to Paul Belien found via the succinct, but talented, Glenn Reynolds.

Thomas Bray points out that America-style civil liberties are unheard of even in some prominent democracies:

Spying on e-mail and cell phone traffic without a warrant. Searching offices and residences without a court order. Locking citizens away for weeks or months without filing charges.

Sound like your worst nightmare about the supposedly lawless Bush administration? Perhaps. But I refer to restrictions on civil liberties that are taking place not in the United States but, in the order in which I cited them, Canada, France and Great Britain.

All three countries are cited as moral superiors to the rogue regime in Washington, where the fascist leaders George Bush and Dick Cheney are said to be intent on fastening a reign of terror on the United States. But a brief scan of newspaper websites in those countries — something that the American mainstream media could easily have done before unleashing its own reign of terror on unsuspecting readers — reveals that their governments have in many cases gone far beyond where the Bush-Cheney could ever dream of going.