A Farewell to Figaro

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

When Senator McCain agreed to give the keynote speech to the British Conservatives at their convention in Bournemouth this week, his hosts reckoned it was quite a coup. Despite the anti-American tone of British politics — including, lately, even the Tories — it seems that a prerequisite for anybody who hopes to be prime minister is to gain the endorsement of an Uncle Sam figure from across the Atlantic.

Last week the Labor Party had been wowed by Bill Clinton, who poured a barrelful of schmalz over Gordon Brown, the man who is determined to succeed Tony Blair next year. But Mr. Clinton is yesterday’s man, whereas Mr. McCain’s presidential ambition belies the fact that, as he told the Tories, “I am older than dirt and have more scars than Frankenstein.”

In most respects, the senator played his part well. Interviewed in the London Times, he compared David Cameron, the Conservative leader, to FDR and JFK — both sufficiently remote in history to be uncontroversial here and, as Democrats, appropriate role models for a self-styled “liberal conservative.”

Mind you, I do wonder what Mr. McCain really thought of Mr. Cameron’s speech to an American audience on last month’s anniversary of 9/11. Asked about it, he chose his words carefully: “I was not troubled by it when I read the whole speech.” Mr. McCain would have enjoyed hearing himself quoted calling for “European leadership” and would have agreed with Mr. Cameron that Guantanamo Bay is “illiberal” or that American “unilateralism” has failed to defeat terrorism. He might have been less comfortable with Mr. Cameron’s criticism of Israel’s “disproportionate bombing of Lebanon,” let alone the implication that anti-Americanism was America’s own fault.

I doubt, though, that any Republican presidential candidate would say, as the Tory leader did, that the West must address “the perception by many Muslims that Islam is under attack … and the belief that the West deliberately fails to resolve issues of crucial concern to Muslims, like Palestine.” This scarcely coded plea for appeasement would be electoral suicide in America — and rightly so.

When it came to Mr. McCain’s own speech, it was his turn to make the Tories feel uncomfortable. For this was one of the few conservative speeches that the Conservatives have heard this week.

He began by praising Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, two ghosts from the past that Mr. Cameron would rather lay to rest. Both are associated with what Mr. McCain called “a short-list of self-evident truths: love of country; the importance of strong national defense; steadfast opposition to threats against our security and values that matches resources to ends wisely; the integrity of the rights of individuals and the values of families and local communities; the wonders of free markets; encouraging entrepreneurship and small business; low taxes; fiscal discipline; and generally, the government that governs best governs least.”

The trouble is that the Tories were unwilling to trumpet any of these principles this week. Instead, they had a very different shortlist of self-evidently insincere untruths: that the right response to climate change is new carbon taxes; that tax cuts threaten “stability,” and that the public does not want a smaller state or less government. Mr. Cameron has no time for President Bush, but he goes into raptures about Al Gore’s campaign against global warming. He castigates Mr. Blair for supporting Israel against Hezbollah and thereby alienating the “moderate Muslim world,” but his only policy proposal yesterday was to open more state-subsidized Muslim schools. A teacher friend tells me that many of her Muslim pupils, like their parents, are Holocaust-deniers — and this is at a non-Muslim school. Yet Mr. Cameron wants Muslim children to have teachers who may share their parents’ prejudices.

Mr. McCain is probably as liberal a Republican as any in the Senate — but he is still much more conservative than Mr. Cameron on any issue you care to name. That gulf may reflect a deep cultural difference between Europe and America, but as the example of Mrs. Thatcher reminds us, it ain’t necessarily so.

Despite his criticisms of the Pentagon, Mr. McCain was wearing a “Support Our Troops” wristband. The Tories have rightly demanded that the meager pay of British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan should not be taxed so heavily. But Mr. Cameron is eager to woo the “moderate” Muslim vote. He has yet to mention the soldier who was wounded in Afghanistan and woke up in a Birmingham hospital to find a fanatic threatening him for having “killed our Muslim brothers.” British military hospitals no longer exist, so wounded servicemen and women feel vulnerable at home and prefer to be treated at American facilities in Germany. This is shameful.

Mr. McCain told the Tories in no uncertain terms that “we will not be vanquished by forces that scorn the dignity of Man, and the laws and ideals that protect us.” This is an uncongenial message for many Tory voters, a third of whom want us to admit defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we haven’t heard a peep out of the Conservative Party leadership about threats to free speech here in the West, either.

The case that has been exercising me is that of the philosophy teacher in France who has been driven into hiding after writing an op-ed for le Figaro, the leading conservative newspaper, in which he supported Pope Benedict XVI. Robert Redeker denounced Muhammad as “a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass murderer of Jews and a polygamist.” He argued that, in contrast to Judaism and Christianity, “Islam exalts violence in its everyday rites and sacred book.” This is strong language, but well within the bounds of fair comment.

Mr. Redeker was instantly threatened with murder, and the publication of his address and photograph on the Internet forced him to go underground. In a letter to his friend, the philosopher André Glucksmann, he pleaded for help: “So the Islamists have succeeded in punishing me on the territory of the Republic as if I were guilty of a thought crime.” Most of the leading thinkers in France, including Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut, have called on the government to help Mr. Redeker.

So far, however, ministers have been singularly reluctant to condemn the campaign of intimidation unequivocally. You can almost hear Prime Minister de Villepin squirming in this comment: “Everyone has the right to express his views freely — while respecting others, of course.” Of course. What Mr. de Villepin means is that in France you are free to criticize anything — except Islam.

Most disgraceful of all has been the conduct of le Figaro, the editor, Pierre Rousselin, appeared on Al Jazeera to apologize for publishing an “Islamophobic and heinous article.” Having met Mr. Rousselin, I am shocked but not surprised. There has been a sad decline at that once-great newspaper since the days of Raymond Aron, the cold warrior whose columns adorned le Figaro from 1947 until 1977. He wrote once: “A love of truth and a horror of falsehood — this, I believe, lies at the very heart of my way of being and thinking. And in order to be able to express the truth, one must be free.” I cannot imagine Aron grovelling to Islamists, any more than he did to Nazis or Communists. His successors at le Figaro should hang their heads in shame.


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