"Vindictive, cowboy-style justice." It has "reawakened the anti-Americanism that is latent in many French souls"
GLOBALIST
Kahn have provoked a national trauma in France far deeper than anyone
could have imagined.
And it is the pictures that did the harm.
Video footage of Mr Strauss-Kahn emerging in handcuffs from a Harlem
police station has been repeated endlessly on TV channels.
His haggard features stare out from every newsstand.
A new photograph - an almost unrecognisable headshot of Mr Strauss-
Kahn in prison clothes - will certainly cause even greater shock.
Remember this was a man last photographed getting out of a Porsche in
central Paris two weeks ago.
Presidential candidate
He was not just a likely presidential candidate, he was a likely next
president.
For the social commentator Sophie de Menthion: "The whole nation - all
political parties and all social classes - has just stood there
aghast.
"Thanks to the new technologies, we are watching, in real-time, an
event unprecedented in the history of humanity - a man's condemnation
to death by media.
"It creates feelings and reactions which go far beyond what is,
essentially, after all just another minor alleged crime."
The most traumatised have been Mr Strauss-Kahn's friends on the left
of French politics. Their reaction is one of sheer pain.
Jean-Francois Kahn, a left-wing journalist, said he was being "ripped
apart inside" in a way he had never felt before.
He made the comment on his blog to explain away previous remarks on a
radio interview.
'Unheard-of brutality'
Asked what he thought had happened in the New York hotel room, he said
it could not have been attempted rape: "More likely an act of
imprudence, a bit of domestic tupping."
“
All I know is that there is nothing in this world that permits a man
to be thrown to the dogs in this way”
Bernard-Henri Levy
French intellectual and media commentator
If other Socialist friends have been more circumspect about the
alleged act, they are unanimous in their condemnation of the way Mr
Strauss-Kahn has been treated in the US.
Former Minister Elisabeth Guigou said the images of her friend being
led from the police station were of an "unheard-of brutality, cruelty
and violence".
Party leader Martine Auby is reported to have broken down in tears.
But it was the media intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy who went
furthest, delivering an anti-American diatribe in his weekly column in
Le Point magazine.
"All I know is that there is nothing in this world that permits a man
to be thrown to the dogs in this way.
"And I feel nothing but loathing for the judge who delivered him to
that pack of newshounds in front of the police station, on the
pretence that he was a citizen like any other."
National trauma
Mr Levy even said the whole story about the attempted rape sounded
fishy, because in his experience chambermaids in top New York hotels
never work alone, but in teams - a claim that has been roundly denied
in the US blogosphere.
The Socialists are caught in an anguished dilemma. They do not want to
abandon a man they know and admire.
The beginning of the end for Mr Strauss-Kahn?
But if the charges are upheld, they will have to find the words to
condemn him.
Already, the feminist wing of the party is angry that so far the pain
is all Mr Strauss-Kahn's - and none of it his alleged victim's.
But it is not just the Socialists who have been transfixed by the
Strauss-Kahn story.
His treatment by the New York judge, police and press has reawakened
the anti-Americanism that is latent in many French souls.
People who certainly condemn the alleged crime, also condemn what they
see as vindictive, cowboy-style justice.
And, above all, they condemn the images.
Such humiliating pictures would never be taken in France - indeed the
law bans "degrading" photographs of prisoners awaiting trial.
But, more poignantly, the images are of a man who just one week ago
was about as high as a man can be in the eyes of the world.
From that, to this. It is a deeply unsettling sight, and therein lies
the national trauma.
=================
I still say if he was a hog farmer from Iowa whopping it up after a
few beers, at a Convention and was inappropriate with the hired help,
this would be on page 10 under "used bunk beds for sale".
But the feminists eat this shit up.....VICTIMHOOD INC. I want to
see it on COPS ,as he is chasing her around the room like Grocho
Marx. It sells papers is all I can say.