What French media bias?

3 November 2004: Le Monde French Newspaper
Headline: Baghdad under the occupation
Purpose: Paint as grim a picture of Iraqi hatred against America as possible.
Mission: Accomplished

Nobody had considered these nineteen months like that. For the Iraqis, delivered to violence, with paranoia and the depression, Bush, it is the enemy, Kerry, it is the unknown.

Baghdad is an occupied city. It is a not easily describable state. And yet, there is always something in the air to point out it.

The American occupation, it is Abou Ghraib and torture, they are the systematic prisons and blows, humiliation.


Granted the translation is imperfect, but the meaning is clear. Bush is the enemy to Iraqis and Kerry an unknown.

Rare are these Iraqis who do not describe themselves like angels struck down by a foreign and diabolic force. Rare are those which do not recall all the day, as to entreat the fate, than this country is that of the "kindness" and L ' "hospitality" . The enemy of Iraq, it is inevitably the foreigner. The first marked ones are the United States, Al-Qaida, Iran and other neighbors.

"We will not however be free, known as the student, as long as Saddam will be in our heads." He speaks about mentalities, good manners, and especially about "values" . For him, the enemy of Iraq, it is initially the Iraqi.

"Under the dictatorship of Saddam, the Iraqis were wolves for the Iraqis. It there deaths, disappearances, of had tortured many, remembers Mona, an academic. However it was nothing compared to today. Under this occupation, with this war, solidarity and confidence do not exist any more. We are not only any more afraid of the moukhabarat - secret service of Saddam Hussein -, but of the our neighbor, man in the street. The danger is everywhere." "people do not think any more that to survive and gain dollars , known as Ammar, even if it means to trample the others."

...Because there are today at least two dictatorships in Iraq, that of the occupant and that of the rebellion. The occupation, which brought, by eliminating Saddam, a freedom of unanimously greeted word, a political freedom, a religious freedom, is however a dictatorship in oneself. "There cannot be democracy under occupation" , hears one everywhere. As for the rebellion, it makes reign terror, it refuses the freedom of found word, it imposes its order political and religious, it judges and it condemns. "It there has a multitude of dictatorships, thinks Ali, a writer. That of the Americans, that of the government of Iyad Allaoui, that of the nationalist guerrilla sunnite, that of the guerrilla sunnite islamist, that of Al-Qaida and the foreign djihadists, that of the guerrilla Shiite of Moqtada Al-Sadr, that of the gangsters, that of the jerk of my street with his kalachnikov... " It speaks, like Ammar, of the Iraqis become of " small Saddam ".

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