Reply #12: this is a very skillful little hit piece.

[Hannah Bell]

The piece begins at a dinner party in paris, where supposedly all the guests are talking about dsk, and they are all in agreement (especially those who "knew him best") that he was an incessant uncontrollable groper.

None of the people at this dinner party are named or quoted, however. Surely if so many of DSK's friends feel this way, at least one would be willing to say so on the record?

Apparently not, because the writer next quotes the "philosopher" Pascal Bruckner (at a cafe "earlier in the day"): “He wasn’t a womanizer—he was sick.”

There's no connection between this quote and the supposed dinner party later in the day. Bruckner is never mentioned as a guest at the party & is not quoted as saying anything at the party, though the writer says "Everyone at the dinner party agreed, and they, too, spoke of Strauss-Kahn in the past tense" in order to introduce a specious connection in the reader's mind.


Who is Bruckner? Here's a sample of his "philosophy":

http://www.signandsight.com/service/2123.html

Bruckner's "philosophy" is very similar to the Heritage Foundation's "philosophy," i.e. he's a neo-con & a supporter of Sarkozy. To call him a philosopher is a kind of joke. He's a polemicist & propagandist.

Among essays, La tentation de l'innocence (Temptation of innocence) (Prix Médicis in 1995) and, famously, Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc (The Cry of the White Man), an attack against narcissistic and destructive policies in the interest for the Third World, and more recently 'La tyrannie de la pénitence' (2006), an essay on the West's endless self-criticism.

He is an active supporter of the US cause and the invasion of Iraq, signing letters and petitions in favor of Donald Rumsfeld, along with Romain Goupil and André Glucksmann <1>. Bruckner supported the leader of the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, Nicolas Sarkozy, during the campaign of the 2007 presidential election, claiming that the French Left now incarnated "conservatism" and that Sarkozy was the true heir of May '68.

http://translate.dc.gov/ma/enwiki/en/Pascal_Bruckner.


This "philosopher" is a member of this think-tank:

Cercle de l'Oratoire:

A French think tank created a short time after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Since 2006, it edits a journal, Le Meilleur des mondes.... This journal has been described by some in the French media as the "Voice of America" or as a gathering point of French neoconservatives (néo-conservateurs à la française). The journal, however, rejects these labels, describing itself as "anti-totalitarian". It considers radical Islam as a "real danger", and claims that "there has never been so much anti-Jewish propaganda."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cercle_de_l'Oratoire


Returning to the New Yorker piece, the writer next quotes an anonymous aide at the French Foreign Ministry saying the perp walk is savage, but maybe DSK did it, DSK is like a character out of Dostoevsky.

Then we have Bruckner again, saying DSK has “the face of a libertine” and “a bulldozer.” Bruckner says DSK's "passion was sex, much more than power,” and Bruckner has many women Socialist Party friends who've told Bruckner about him and he thinks they should have encouraged DSK to seek psychiatric help.

Then we return to the dinner party where the anonymous guests are now speaking about “wife-swapping Freemasons” & wives who are complicit in "pathology". An anonymous female guest is quoted as saying: “I’m beginning to think all the pictures of Strauss-Kahn in custody were a good thing—maybe they’ll put some fear into men.”

Then we have a quote from Dominique de Villepin, the Gaullist former Prime Minister, (right-winger but Sarkozy opponent), who says of the Socialists: “While they say, ‘We feel betrayed,’ others would say, ‘But you knew and you didn’t say anything.’ ”

Finally, at the very end, we have one actual friend/associate of DSK's quoted on the record:

“I think the best service I can give him is not to speak, not to hear, not to listen, as a kind of moment of mourning."

Which the writer alleges says "a lot," but which in fact says nothing absent the context in which it was said -- other than that Jacque Attali prefers not to speak about or hear about the DSK matter & feels he is "mourning". Why he mourns, why he doesn't want to hear or speak, we can only speculate. But given the context within the essay, we will *assume*.

So we have a hit piece which alleges that DSK's close friends/associates believe he's guilty & are treating him as basically dead ("past tense").

The only person willing to go on the record & say this directly, however, is not a friend or associate, but a Sarkozy supporter & a neo-con think tanker & propagandist.

Very skillful piece. The neo-con Bruckner's quotes are the backbone of the piece, with a bunch of anonymous/innocuous stuff draped over it to create the desired impression.

The writer Philip Gourevitch has a record, too, which includes white-washing Paul Kagame:

http://www.cjr.org/feature/one_mans_rwanda.php

or worse:

http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/html-52Depopulation%20As%20Policy.htm

It's very interesting he chose Bruckner as his #1 "source". That Gourevitch has to use a neo-con Sarkozy supporter as his primary source for a story which is supposed to convince us that all DSK's friends/associates have deserted him actually actually tends to lend credence to the reverse.