Fox News Becomes the Unwilling Star of a French TV Satire

Mockery is a national weapon inFrance, so when an American cable news channel raised false alarms about rampant lawlessness in some Paris neighborhoods —proclaiming them “no-go zones” for non-Muslims, avoided even by the police — a popular French television show rebutted the claims the way it best knew how: with satire, spoofs and a campaign of exaggeration and sarcasm.

The show, “Le Petit Journal,” is a French version of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” — irreverent and reliant on mock correspondents who showcase the foibles of the high and mighty.

Usually “Le Petit Journal” reserves its venom for French politicians and the local news media. But in the days after the terrorist attacks
in Paris that left 17 dead, including 12 people at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, it set its sights on a trans-Atlantic target, America’s Fox News, after the channel claimed that swaths of England and France were ruled according to Shariah.

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fmw said:

Interesting. I think I saw all of that stuff. I seem to remember talk show guests talking about no go zones, not Fox itself. Fox airs all kinds of analyses and opinions, even left wing ones. I must have missed whatever fired up the French dander..

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Hatuey said:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/w...es-unwilling-star-of-french-tv-show.html?_r=0



It seems as if France listened to what the right wing American media said about their cities and they vehemently disagree. It's interesting how a lie can backfire so badly for a news agency. FOX News repeated a total lie so much that even the country that was attacked looked at them and said "What the **** are you talking about?!" - I think what FOX News should do is spend 4-5 days debunking their own lie and taking their "experts" to task for their wrongful assertions.

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clownboy said:

The French have to use satire, they're humorless. They still think Jerry Lewis is the height of comedy.

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Hatuey said:

I'm guessing the right wing's honeymoon with the French didn't last too long....

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Papa bull said:

The French are so funny.

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clownboy said:

Guess not, when did that happen?

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American said:

European 'No-Go' Zones: Fact or Fiction?

Apparently someone still believes in the no-go zones and wrote a paper on it. I'm not sure exactly.

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American said:

European 'No-Go' Zones: Fact or Fiction?

Apparently someone still believes in the no-go zones and wrote a paper on it. I'm not sure exactly.

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The Institute for Policy Studies has noted that "[t]he institute was founded in 2011 by Nina Rosenwald, an heiress of the Sears Roebuck empire who has been a key philanthropic backer of anti-Muslim groups and individuals in the United States".[23] Sheila Musaji's The American Muslim includes it and Nina Rosenwald in a Who’s Who of the Anti-Muslim/Anti-Arab/Islamophobia Industry,[24] Ali Gharib, of the blog Open Zion, describes it as "a spin-off of the Hudson Institute where right-wingers (along with Alan Dershowitz) champion hawkish, often "pro-Israel" policies and, not infrequently, rattle off Islamophobic blogposts."[25]

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Hatuey said:

Repeating nonsense from the same sources which have already been discredited doesn't make them correct.

Gatestone Institute - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Jetboogieman said:

Gatestone is a well known anti Muslim site, hardly surprising they would have such an article on their site.

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American said:

Isn't the institute run by an Iranian?

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Shaul Bakhash, a "a specialist in mideast history at George Mason University,"[3] wrote in a review of Taheri's 1989 book Nest of Spies in The New Republic that Taheri concocts conspiracies in his writings, and noted that he "repeatedly refers us to books where the information he cites simply does not exist. Often the documents cannot be found in the volumes to which he attributes them.... [He] repeatedly reads things into the documents that are simply not there."[5] Bakhash stated that Taheri's 1988 Nest of Spies is "the sort of book that gives contemporary history a bad name."[5][6]

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Taheri's byline was attached to an op-ed in the The New York Times of July 11, 2002 under the title "The Death of bin Ladenism". His clip claimed "Osama bin Laden is dead. The news first came from sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan almost six months ago" [7]

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In 2007, Rudy Giuliani campaign adviser Norman Podhoretz wrote an article in Commentary magazine called "The Case for Bombing Iran," which included the following quotation (allegedly from Ayatollah Khomeini): "We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world."[3] The quotation, which was later repeated by Podhoretz on the PBS NewsHour, and by Michael Ledeen in National Review, surprised Bakhash, who had never heard it before and found it out of character for Khomeni.[3] Bakhash traced the quotation back to a book by Taheri, and reported that "no one can find the book Taheri claimed as his source in the Library of Congress or a search of Persian works in libraries worldwide. The statement itself can't be found in databases and published collections of Khomeini statements and speeches."[3]

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