October 24, 2003, 8:43 a.m.
Life of the Party

A European Union without Italians is strictly Vermont. You got your scenery and your quaint old buildings and your surly natives with their cute accents. But mostly, you have cold melancholy and an increasing amount of statutory self-righteousness.

Italy, of course, is different. The first time I went to Rome, in the late '60s, was to pick up a car from a Fiat dealer near the train station. When I arrived, it wasn't ready. So they put me up for a couple of nights in a hotel on the Via Veneto, an astonishing freebie. My room had a vast marble bath and a little balcony from which I could watch the cafes below. Once I saw Lionel Stander, then living in Rome, make a procession through the tables. He was wearing a cape and a couple of platinum blondes. When I finally got my car, I set off to meet a friend in Paris. It was the first time I drove in Italy. I got almost halfway to Naples before I figured out I was going the wrong way.

But what I liked most about Italy then, as now, was the way in which everyone refused to take themselves seriously. Or rather, they recognized what should be taken seriously — and in this life, that's not a terribly long list. For example, driving south on the autostrada when you meant to be going north only increased the opportunity to pay tolls. At the time, the entire country was out of pocket change. There were simply no lira coins. So when you gave the tollbooth attendant your ten-billion lira note or whatever, he gave you your change: a handful of candies, tiny plastic toys, and little cards with pictures of birds on them. By the time I crossed over into France, I was a walking piñata. Later, when I lived in the Ticino, my greatest pleasure was in going to town on Fridays, when all of Italy invaded dour Switzerland to mail letters and cash checks. It was like a six-hour Shriners' convention.

Banks and post offices work in Italy now, so a lot of that brilliant improvisational bureaucracy has vanished. But an echo of the liberating sense of Italian zest was on display last week in Strasbourg, where Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, is the European Council's president-in-office — a rotating office if ever there was one. Berlusconi addressed the European parliament for the first time since last July, when he made his debut by famously ridiculing a German MEP who had hectored him, an event I covered here.

Berlusconi is not appreciated by Eurocrats, if only because he occasionally insists on at least a degree of meaningfulness. After all, there was a great deal of self-congratulation going on last week because of the remarkably meaningless "success" of the Europeans in convincing Iran to temporarily suspend its uranium enrichment program. Le Monde was especially proud of the moment. The headline: "How Europeans put an end to months of crisis." The paper goes into detail, but the real answer is found in an accompanying piece — a Q&A with Iran's Hassan Rohani who, when asked if the suspension was permanent, said of course not. In other words, the Europeans put an end to months of crisis the same way the Cubs put an end to months of crisis. They folded, but counted it as a triumph anyway.

That remarkable diplomatic coup was followed by the Iraq donors' conference in Madrid, where, as Liberation pointed out, FranceGermany once again delighted in telling the U.S. they were lining up behind Belgium and Luxembourg to donate a unified cold shoulder to requests for help in rebuilding Iraq. The Madrid conference quickly turned into yet another demonstration of how modern "multilateralism" is a sharp tack on a broad highway, where what should have been an American juggernaut against terrorism turns into a Edsel that swerves to run over the tack once, then backs up to run over it again, just to be sure the tires are good and flat.

Berlusconi ignored all that and suggested to the Euro-parliament that if Europe wants to behave like a single state, it should start by protecting its borders. He called for the EU to take seriously the conference, reported in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, convened in Brittany by France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain, to address the problem of widespread illegal immigration. According to the Guardian, Berlusconi had been very moved by the deaths of African clandestinei who had fled Libya, only to die at sea and found adrift off the coast of Italy. The paper quoted a part of Berlusconi's impassioned speech:

The loss of so many lives of people driven by desperation to seek a better future must spur us on to strengthen our cooperation to prevent such disasters from ever happening again.
We all need to think very carefully about how this civilized and Christian Europe, this Europe of prosperity, can open up to welcome those who come here with a desire to seek a better future for themselves and their children.

Italy is particularly vulnerable to massive waves of illegal immigrants. The coastline near Bari, for example, is chock full of little white caravans parked in neat rows behind barbed wire — all housing Albanians who have fled to the welfare-rich side of the Adriatic. And the threat from the south is even more acute. As Berlusconi noted, and as Il Giornali reported, there are a million or more people just waiting for the right opportunity to cross the Mediterranean. Romano Prodi, Berlusconi's political rival at home, and president of the European Commission in Brussels, responded to Berlusconi's call to action in a manner much more in keeping with the EU's style. The situation was best addressed, he told Il Messaggerio, by using a financial and political approach. So right after Africa is put on its feet, the EU can start guarding the coasts.

And what cheerful coasts they will be! According to the EU's happy newspage, the EU Observer, the other monumental task accomplished by the European Union last week was the considered decision by the Euro-parliament to throw its weight behind "a new system of 'smileys' to indicate clean bathing water at beaches across Europe." The Observer reports that "[sponsoring Dutch] Liberal MEP Jules Maaten...said after the first reading, 'I have introduced to the Commission proposal a system of different signs to indicate water quality. A symbol such as the universally recognized "smiley" is something that all EU citizens will understand and appreciate'." Say whatever's Dutch for cheese, Jules! :)!

And as for all those non-EU citizens floating to Italy? :(!

NOTES

And speaking of universally recognized symbols, "Abidjan given the finger" is how Liberation headlined its piece on the possible cancellation of the visit to Paris by Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo. The snub came after a popular RFI correspondent was shot by a policeman on the streets of Abidjan while covering the stumbling, French-led U.N. mission to halt a civil war in the country. The French press was in a state of pure fury at the murder. Le Monde joined other papers in pointing out that the killing came after an unfair media campaign in Ivory Coast designed to "stigmatize" French journalists — sort of the same way many journalists work nonstop to stigmatize Coalition soldiers in Iraq. Who are then shot and killed. "Words can kill just as easily as bullets," Liberation said in its report, without irony.

Offensive to pigs! Umberto Bossi, Berlusconi's controversial reform minister, ended his boss's day in Strasbourg colorfully enough. According to the Daily Telegraph, Bossi told reporters that the EU elite were "filthy pigs" whose ambition was to "make paedophilia as easy as possible." And the euro? A "total flop." But then he came to his senses and explained that the EU was actually only "transforming vices into virtues" and "advancing the cause of atheism every day." When asked about he European arrest warrant — the latest example of EU laws that aspired to replace national laws — the described it as the next best thing to "dictatorship, deportation, and terror, instilling fear in the people," something that would lead to a Stalinist regime "multiplied by 25."

Together at last. Last week, I wrote about every leftwing liberal's favorite Muslim, Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan, you'll recall, is the Geneva-based "thinker" (according to Time magazine) who looks alarmingly like Moby in an Armani suit. As part of the build-up to the European Social Forum meeting in Paris in mid-November, Ramadan had written an essay criticizing French Jewish intellectuals — such as Andre Glucksmann, who makes short work of the Euro-Islamicist in the Nouvel Observateur — for being way too Jewish.

Ramadan's document has pretzel-twisted the conglomerate of leftwing, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, anti-American, and, notably, pro-Palestinian groups who make up the ESF. You can see this humiliating spectacle unfold in the leftwing, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, anti-American, and, notably, pro-Palestinian pages of Liberation, where the paper embraces the fashionable notion of calling for the establishment of a secular, "bi-national" state in Israel. That way, anti-Semitism can be disentangled from anti-Zionism. This would allow the Jews who live there to be bludgeoned into submission by the pro-Palestinian left while keeping their hands clean of the stain of anti-Semitism. But the Israelis don't seem to want to cooperate, and the issue won't admit to such a simple solution anyway, so a subsequent edition of the paper explains how Ramadan's anti-Semitic remarks (he wasn't talking about French Jewish intellectuals being too Israeli, after all) are causing embarrassing fractures in the left.

I received some interesting comments after last week's column, including a very perceptive note from Eli Weinerman, a scholar and historian, who is working on a study of leftwing anti-Semitism. Weinerman notes that "anti-Semitism on the part of the non-Islamic left is not racial, ethnic, or religious, it is rather political. Therefore we see quiet a few Jews among its proponents." Historically, he writes, the same type of anti-Semitism was always present among those on extreme left, "including even Lenin. The truth is that there always was a very thin line between political anti-Semitism, which rejects Jews with ideas [unacceptable to the Left] and 'traditional' anti-Semitism, which hates Jews simply because they are Jews."

He must be right, because I heard from quite a few of both. The leftwing anti-Semites called me anatomical names and a "stupid, greedy Zionist." And bless my sainted Irish mother if the traditionalists didn't call me a "Heeb" and the like. One Dutch correspondent wrote: "[National Review Online] is enough proof that Jews are running your country. Sometimes I believe Hitler was right. More and more people believe this is true." For sure. Many of them are leftwing, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, anti-American, and, um, notably pro-Palestinian.

Benny at the ramparts. One of those French Jewish intellectuals Ramadan dislikes was the remarkable Benny Levy, who, for much of his life, was an atheist and a Marxist. As "Pierre Victor," Levy was one of the leaders of the violent student protests in Paris in the '60s. His revolutionary politics led him to help found Liberation and then to Jean-Paul Sartre, who, late in his life, collaborated with Levy on a series of interviews published as Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews. The book infuriated the French left because in it Sartre seems to dismiss nihilism and Marxism and embrace a form of messianic Judaism. After Sartre's death, Levy became an Orthodox Talmudic scholar. He died last week in Israel. Jean-Claude Milner, the linguist, eulogizes his friend in Liberation. The Daily Telegraph does the job in English.

Candles in the wind. First, an example of why British newspaper editors should never write about religion: The DailyTelegraph's new chief, Martin Newland, has committed an editorial on what he supposes is the importance of ecclesiastical unity. His grasp of church history is especially clammy: "[W]omen," he writes, "began to be pushed to the sidelines as ministers only when the Church re-adopted the notion of the minister as cultic mediator." That Newland — just a regular Gaia. Then as a humorous follow-up, the paper published a sad little call-to-broken-arms by the former Tory leader, William Hague. The thrilling title? "The Tories should be turning all their fire on Labour."

Right. Like Tony Blair really needs a Bic.

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