Sunday Posts

From: David Pope

Francois Hollande may just win the French presidency on 6th May, and break the habit of the Centre-Left of losing elections. In fact, one could argue that the Centre-Left parties, across the developed world, can offer an useful alternative perspective to pandering of bankers that the Right wing Neo-liberal incumbents seem to limit their imagination to. Their promises always seem to be what Gandhi described as, in an altogether different context, 'a postdated cheque on a failed bank': Often, this metaphor seems literal. Views of Centre-Left, men like Mr Hollande, do indeed sound very different, and therefore, promising. However, I am waking up not just to the news of Mr Hollande's first round victory, but also the rather expected but still disappointing surge of the Far Right, in the figure of Marine Le Pen, in the French election. She indeed managed to come third, with 18% or so of votes, a greater proportion of votes than her father ever won. Indeed, she couldn't ...

Four separate incidents in the last few weeks, and suddenly, Samuel Huntingdon's Clash of Civilization thesis looks like a self-fulfilling prophecy: First, a pastor in an obscure church in Florida decides to burn Koran on the 11 th September, apparently in retaliation of the perfectly legal plan to open an Islamic community centre at a site near Ground Zero. The event ended in a farce, the Pastor finally agreeing to cancel the event after worldwide condemnation, though not before making a face-saving claim that the community centre in New York will be moved, which the Imam in New York flatly denied. Next, France's legislators outlaw wearing Burkha in public places. This comes after their completely illegal and racially motivated expulsion of Roma gypsies from the country, another desperately xenophobic stance by the deeply unpopular President, the neo -Napoleon Sarkozy . If the French Muslims took a leaf out of Gandhi and turned this into a non-violent civil disobedience, ...