The word "Enough," splashed
across the front page of the Algerian government newspaper El Moudjahid ,
referred not, as one might have expected, to the continuing massacres by
Islamic extremists, which are reported to have claimed at least 600 dead since
the holy month of Ramadan began Dec. 30, but to the agitation the killings have
provoked in western Europe and the United States. "Only Paris has no Algeria
plan," ran a headline in Germany's Die Welt over a story about France's fear of offending its former
North African colony.
Everyone
else was urging Algeria to agree to an international commission of inquiry, an
offer that it angrily rejected. El Moudjahid suggested that the
countries trying to meddle in Algerian affairs "begin by worrying about the
terrorists they harbour and protect in their own territories in the name of the
right of asylum and the rights of man."
The Vatican's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano (ignoring the murder of a
gentleman-in-waiting to the pope, which was given big play in all other
European newspapers because of its apparent homosexual overtones), called for
"a clear and decisive intervention" in Algeria to stop the massacres from
sliding into "genocide." Most of the press in the Arab world remained silent on
the subject, an exception being the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah, which
appealed to Algiers "to accept the offers of Arab countries and to co-operate
with them to study ways of pursuing the authors of these terrorist crimes."
On the subject of terrorist
crimes, the Daily
Telegraph of London carried an op-ed feature by former Washington
correspondent and veteran conspiracy theorist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (whose
Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories was reviewed in
Slate
) under the headline "The Oklahoma Bomb: has justice been
done?" It claimed that the Justice Department and the FBI had deliberately
covered up the fact that the bombing had been a broad conspiracy, involving
several other people, in order--for unexplained reasons--to put all the blame
for it on Terry Nichols and Tim McVeigh.
In an
editorial opposite this piece, the conservative Daily Telegraph noted
that even the meltdown of the Asian financial system had failed to stem the
fall in the price of gold, and said: "The insatiable demand for dollars, and
for dollar instruments backed by Washington, is a defining vote of confidence
in the American political economy." "The US economy now rules supreme,
vindicating the chaotic dynamism of American culture, so much better suited to
the technologies of the 1990s than the dirigiste and over-regulated system of
Japan," it added. "But some of the credit, at least, must go to Alan Greenspan,
who has re-asserted the primacy of the US Federal Reserve, which he chairs, by
pursuing a monetary policy of near-perfect calibration for the past
decade."
Across the English Channel, the influential
Le Monde said that
nothing seemed able to stop "the financial torment of Asia," which was now
poised to claim China as its next victim unless there was a "rapid and
collective reaction" by the international community. "Like the Titanic, Asia
seems to be sinking inexorably into crisis," its alarmist editorial continued.
"There is a vicious circle from which one can see no way out."
Titanic --James
Cameron's $200-million movie, that is--opened in continental Europe this week
to rave reviews, with Le Monde describing it (under the headline "The
world's most beautiful melodrama between Belfast and New York") as one of "the
masterpieces of the 1990s." Germany's Die Welt was equally enthusiastic
and commented, "This Titanic is unsinkable."
Warm praise was bestowed by
the left-leaning Paris newspaper Libération on the often derided paintings by Sir Winston
Churchill, of which the auction house Sotheby's staged an exhibition in London
this week. "The old lion had some paw," it said. "Without going as far as the
Times [of London], which likened some of his paintings to Monet on a bad
day, the exhibition shows the work of a real artist," Libération added.
The press in Britain agreed that Churchill had anyway far outstripped Adolf
Hitler in artistic talent.
The most widely published
photograph across western Europe was of Mohammed al Fayed, the Egyptian owner
of the London department store Harrods (and now-never-to-be father-in-law of
Princess Diana), holding on his head a diamond and platinum coronet that had
been reduced in the Harrods sale from $400,000 to just under $300,000. He was
standing in at the opening of the sale for the actress and singer Cher, who had
pulled out after the death of her former husband and stage partner Sonny Bono.
(Click here for the
spin on Bono's fatal skiing accident.)
