This week, Elliott Abrams, the former Bush official and noted neoconservative, wrote an essay in the Weekly Standard attacking the Obama administration for not more forcefully defending Israel during the flotilla crisis. Abrams said the White House had joined an anti-Israeli “lynch mob.” Over the course of the article, he used the metaphor six times.
It’s remarkable when you think about it. To Americans with even the slightest degree of racial awareness, “lynch mob” conjures something quite particular: African American men hanging from trees in the post-civil war South. To deploy the metaphor to describe a United Nations resolution that obliquely criticizes Israel is audacious. To deploy it to describe the support for that resolution by America’s first African-American president is downright astonishing. It’s a bit like calling Joe Lieberman’s opposition health-care reform a “pogrom.”
As an Obama official once told me about the Netanyahu team, with amazement, “these guys are actually waiting for President Palin.”
Why does Abrams’ metaphor matter? Because it shows how out of touch the Israeli government’s American defenders are with, well, America. There’s an irony here. The Netanyahu government is filled with Americans. The prime minister himself attended high school in the Philadelphia suburbs. Ron Dermer, one of his closest advisors, was born in Miami Beach. His ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, hails from New Jersey. In addition, prominent Americans like Abrams regularly appear in the U.S. media to echo the Netanyahu line. But paradoxically, this familiarity breeds overconfidence and ignorance. When Netanyahu travels to Washington, he speaks before Jewish audiences that mostly dislike Barack Obama’s Israel policy, even though according to a recent American Jewish Committee survey, American Jews overall support it by a margin of close to two to one. When he’s not speaking to right-wing Jews, he’s speaking to right-wing Christians. And when he’s not speaking to right-wing Christians, he’s speaking to former Bush administration officials who expect to soon be back in their old jobs. As an Obama official once told me about the Netanyahu team, with amazement, “these guys are actually waiting for President Palin.”
What Netanyahu and his acolytes seem not to understand is this: Although there are lots of Americans who will support Israeli policy no matter what, their side is not likely to wield power anytime soon. The two most important emerging forces in American politics are Hispanics, America’s largest minority group, and millennials, the most diverse generation in American history, and one larger than the baby boomers. Both are growing inexorably as a share of the electorate. Both have tipped decisively towards the Democrats, not just in 2008, but in every election since 2004. And neither is likely to be uncritically pro-Israel. According to a 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center, only one-third of Hispanics, compared to almost half of non-Hispanic whites, say they sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians. Given the disproportionate percentage of Hispanics and African-Americans in the millennial generation, it’s a good bet that younger voters tilt this way too. If the Netanyahu government and its allies have a strategy for talking to these Americans—as opposed to the ones who attend the AIPAC Policy Conference or Christians United for Israel rallies—it has been well-hidden. Comparing the Obama administration to a lynch mob isn’t a very good way to begin.
Once upon a time, all this might not have mattered. In the old days when the Jewish State faced off against leaders like Yasir Arafat and Saddam Hussein, Israel’s foes could be trusted to make it look good by comparison. Today, by contrast, Israel’s most influential critic in the Middle East is Turkey, a democracy and a member of NATO. The Palestinians in the West Bank are led by Salam Fayyad, a proponent of nonviolence, a source of anti-corruption and a devotee of the Texas Longhorns. For too long, Israeli leaders had it easy: unsympathetic enemies in the Middle East and uncritical friends in the United States. The result was hubris, a belief that Israel could do whatever it wanted, and still win the political debate in the United States. That is no longer the case. In Congress, Israel can still do no wrong. But the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue doesn’t hold that view, and he will likely be there for quite some time. Israel’s leaders need to come to grips with how much American politics have changed in the last several years. Obama is the new normal. When they figure that out, perhaps they can tell their friends in the GOP.
MegaUpload is one of the most prominent file-hosting services on the Internet. It is owned by an unbelievably colorful individual who is probably better known for his multiple convictions for computer fraud, embezzlement and insider trading. He owns several luxury cars, for which he is currently under investigation, and has just acquired New Zealand’s most expensive house – a snip at just over $20m.
The file-sharing and anti-piracy world is full of interesting characters, most of whom remain hidden in the shadows. Some individuals are just too large to be contained though, and are either involuntarily thrust into the media spotlight by force or become deliberately high-profile by design.
While many people will be familiar with Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid and Fredrik due to them being featured in countless articles, the pair tend to shy away from too much direct publicity. The same cannot be said of Peter Sunde who rarely misses an opportunity to be in the spotlight, and to great effect it must be said.
The believed owner of MegaUpload, however, makes Peter Sunde look like a shrinking violet.
Kim ‘Kimble’ Schmitz is a quite unbelievable character. Born in 1974 in Germany, he grew to become a computer hacker, successful businessman and convicted criminal. In 1998 Schmitz received two years’ probation for hacking into corporate networks and abusing telephone services but the draw of big money was just around the corner.
In 2001 Schmitz pulled off a huge stock market bluff which netted him a small fortune. After buying shares worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the almost bankrupt LetsBuyIt.com, he announced that he would invest 50 million euros in the company, but in reality he didn’t have the money. His declaration led to the biggest single-day rise on the German stock market which allowed Schmitz to sell his shares and pocket $1.5 million profit. He was arrested for insider-trading in 2002, sentenced to a term of 20 months and given a 100,000 euro fine.
Also in 2001, one of Schmitz’s companies loaned another one 280,000 euros and conveniently both went bust shortly after. Schmitz later pleaded guilty to embezzlement and received another two years probation.
A master of the PR stunt, Schmitz has previously faked his own suicide and also offered a $10 million reward for the capture of Osama Bin Laden. He also claimed to own a fleet of jets but apparently the planes he was photographed with belonged to other people.
A self-confessed car-nut, Schmitz entered the Gumball 3000 rally many times and actually came first in 2001, but his appearances in this event brought even more controversy. According to YouTube videos here and here, Schmitz drove at 240 km/h on a public road in Belgium, ignored stop signs and drove in cycle lanes where one of his friends hit a pedestrian. In another clip he’s seen admitting to bribing the police and deliberately nudging a rival’s Porsche with his Mercedes.
But claims that he also did the private jet ‘trick’ mentioned above when photographed with, allegedly, other peoples’ cars, may have been a little off the mark.
According to a recent report from New Zealand, Schmitz is currently under investigation for using multiple names to register three luxury cars including a Rolls-Royce Phantom convertible. The cars are adorned with personal plates – GOD, WANTED and GUILTY.
The vehicles are registered to an address in Coatesville, New Zealand, which turns out to be a very special venue indeed – Schmitz’s newly-acquired mansion and the country’s most expensive house, a snip at just over $20 million USD.
The mega-money has clearly continued to roll in, with the addition of porn site Megarotic and the site most readers will be familiar with, MegaUpload. Although Schmitz’s connection to these projects has been denied in the past, he was the person who registered the site’s domain name in 2005 and there are many other links which are difficult to simply brush off.
MegaUpload has become more and more successful in recent times and its growing popularity make it a popular choice with those looking for an alternative to RapidShare. Much of MegaUpload’s system appears to be running from host LeaseWeb in The Netherlands and Carpathia Hosting in the US. In both locations they have many hundreds of IP addresses and servers.
While RapidShare’s huge growth has seen the company become the target for recent legal action, according to information received by TorrentFreak it appears that an apparent expansion of MegaUpload hasn’t gone unnoticed either. French anti-piracy group ALPA has been cranking up the pressure on LeaseWeb in what is being described as a “pre-litigation period”.
If the future of MegaUpload and Kim Schmitz is anywhere as colorful as the past, there will be yet more amazing stories to come.
To anyone who has noticed that there has been a lot of lazy Youtoob videos and the like here at 'Exile' these past couple of days...unfortunately I have been battling the flu and bad toothache but hopefully it will be over soon...
wikileaksAllegations in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.3 minutes ago via bit.ly
Jean Seberg in Jean‑Luc Godard's masterpiece, Breathless. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Two trailers bookend my half-a-century of writing professionally about the cinema and bracket the career of the man who is arguably the most influential moviemaker of my lifetime. Fifty years ago this month I dropped into an Oslo cinema while waiting for a midnight train and saw an unforgettable trailer for a French picture. It cut abruptly between a handsome, broken-nosed actor I'd never come across before, giant posters of Humphrey Bogart, and the familiar features of Jean Seberg, whom I knew to be an idol of French cinéastes as the protegee of Otto Preminger. Shot in high contrast monochrome, rapidly edited, interspersed with puzzling statements in white-on-black and black-on-white lettering, it was like no other trailer I'd seen, and I was captivated. Not until my return to London did I discover that the broken-nosed actor was Jean-Paul Belmondo and the film was the debut feature of the Cahiers du Cinéma critic Jean-Luc Godard. It had opened in Paris six weeks before to considerable acclaim and had been made with the help of two fellow critics-turned-directors, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, whose first films I'd seen. When A Bout de souffle (aka Breathless) opened in London a year later, it did live up to my expectations.
Eighty years old this November, Godard has just compiled another trailer for his latest (according to him, his last) picture, Film Socialisme. As provocative and original as ever, the two-minute trailer can be viewed online. It is in fact the whole film, speeded up for an audience too impatient to concentrate for two hours. The movie, premiered at Cannes last month, has subtitles that are deliberately unintelligible to anyone who doesn't understand the various languages in which it's made. In an interview with that other onetime revolutionary firebrand of the 1960s, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Godard said simply: "Don't translate, learn languages." For nearly 40 years I've been convinced that whenever a Godard movie is shown at Cannes, everybody in the world interested in seeing it is present at the Palais du Festival, elbowing other critics aside as they struggle to get into the early-morning press show. Nowadays, I only see a new film by the aloof, hectoring, didactic Godard when wild horses turn up at my front gate to drag me to a London press screening.
How, then, to explain what Godard meant to us back in the 60s? Why did I put on the dustjacket of my first book a photograph of myself scowling in a leather jacket and dark glasses, a cigarette in the corner of my mouth, because I thought it made me look like Godard? Why was I thrilled when Truffaut, as the director in his La Nuit américaine, eagerly tears open a parcel of books on the cinema, one of which is a symposium on Godard containing my 1965 essay on Une Femme mariée? Why did we sit around discussing the ideas and innovations of Godard the way young filmgoers today talk about box-office grosses, special effects and continuity errors?
Since the mid-50s we'd been looking for the new in the arts, society and politics, and our latest hopes were being invested in our cinema's working-class realism, which came out of fiction and the theatre, and in the nouveau roman and nouvelle vague from across the Channel. The latter term was coined in L'Express in 1957 by Françoise Giroud to describe the whole postwar generation and was applied to the cinema the following year by Pierre Billard in Cinéma 58. Talk of the new wave dominated Cannes in 1959, when films as different from each other as Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour and Truffaut's Les Quatre cents coups were perceived as characteristic examples of the new movement. Of the three, only Truffaut was a critic, and along with Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma. Their polemical writings were devoted to overthrowing the cinematic old guard they called "Le cinéma du papa" (Dad's cinema) and promoting the politique des auteurs. They saw directors (or at least a select group of them) as auteurs, a term soon introduced into worldwide usage. These omniscient figures, whose ranks they sought to join, were seen as imposing their personalities, at times almost mystically, on every film they made, wielding what the moviemaker and theorist Alexandre Astruc called "le camera stylo" or cinematic pen.
Between 1958 and 1963 an astonishing 170 French filmmakers directed their first features, happily marching under the new wave banner, which was as vague as it was in vogue. But few were truly radical and innovative. The chief exception was Godard, the 30-year-old Franco-Swiss intellectual, as passionate about Hegel as he was about Hitchcock, an artist bent on transforming the nature of cinema and with it the world. "Godard is not merely an iconoclast," that prophet of modernism Susan Sontag declared in 1968, "he is a deliberate 'destroyer' of cinema."
Breathless was the real thing. It was what we'd been waiting for, and it has taken its place alongside 20th-century works that have become familiar landmarks yet not lost their ability to shock and surprise: Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, Dali and Buñuel's Un Chien andalou, Picasso's Guernica, Welles's Citizen Kane, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Burroughs's Naked Lunch. They are what Ezra Pound was talking about when he said that "great literature is news that remains news".
Claude Chabrol, who served as supervising producer on Breathless, famously warned that great subjects rarely make great films. And Godard, the master of the gnomic epigram and perceptive paradox, once said: "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl." This was the basis of the brief scenario that Truffaut, a fellow admirer of film noir and série noire pulp fiction, provided for Breathless. Its antihero, the swaggering, misogynistic petty criminal Michel (Belmondo), steals a car in the south of France and kills a policeman on the road to Paris, where he takes up with an old girlfriend, the well-heeled American, Patricia (Seberg). They talk of life and literature (in particular Faulkner's The Wild Palms) in a seedy hotel, make love and visit the movies while he tries to get money owed him by criminal associates. The police close in, Patricia betrays him. Hardboiled B-feature stuff. But the style is everything, a calculated destruction and remaking of traditional film grammar, and Godard formulated his much-quoted idea that "a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order".
The film is dedicated to Monogram Pictures, the celebrated B-movie studio on Hollywood's Poverty Row, the camera is handheld, the editing is abrupt and inconsistent, Raoul Coutard's masterly monochrome photography is harsh, hard-edged, reliant on natural light. The much-admired director of existential gangster pictures, Jean-Pierre Melville, makes an appearance as himself, the first of such cameos in a Godard picture. The work of other directors is evoked or alluded to, among them Budd Boetticher (Westbound), Samuel Fuller (Forty Guns), Otto Preminger (Whirlpool), Robert Aldrich (Ten Seconds to Hell), and Bogart is a looming presence. We are constantly distanced in the manner of Brecht's alienation effect, told that what we are watching is a film, but also that movies, like our lives, are halls of mirrors.
Godard's methods of work on Breathless were purposefully chaotic. He admitted that he deliberately created confusion to achieve "a greater possibility of invention". Shooting in the busy streets of Paris, he avoided crowd control, and at one point a policeman leapt from a passing bus to assist an apparently dying Belmondo.
Over the next eight years Godard made a dozen feature films and contributed to several portmanteau pictures that defined and refined his art, and they've influenced several generations of cineastes from Nagisa Oshima through Wim Wenders to Quentin Tarantino. Yet the playfulness, the apparent sheer love of the movies, eventually gave way to a deep ambivalence, as his doubts about Hollywood changed to loathing and his sceptical attitude towards the States became unabashed anti-Americanism. "Do you love the cinema?" he was asked around the time of Breathless. He replied: "I have contempt for it. It is nothing. It does not exist. Thus I love it. I love it yet at the same time I have contempt for it."
Most of his 1960s films are masterpieces or near-masterpieces. Several ran into trouble with the censors. Some didn't get released in Britain until years after they were made. Godard managed to attract major stars both then and later. He was constantly at the centre of controversy, debate and even scandal, ever ready with a quote for the press or a quotable line in a film. He mocked the film business in Le Mépris, subverted the musical in Une Femme est une femme, questioned the very basis of marriage in Une Femme mariée, showed present-day Paris as a horrific, depersonalised city of the future in his bleak sci-fi film Alphaville. But none of the later films had an impact comparable with Breathless, and as the decade progressed, his characters turned from nihilistic outsiders to slogan-mouthing revolutionaries. His farewell to anything resembling the mainstream came in 1967 with Weekend, which ended with the title "Fin du cinéma". He then worked within a leftwing collective on low-budget pictures, most of them on video, before moving with his collaborator and third wife, Anne-Marie Miéville, to Switzerland, which has been his base ever since.
Yet if Godard was ever a mainstream director, then he started to paddle rapidly towards the river's parallel tributaries as early as 1963. That was when he made Le Mépris, a million-dollar production financed by American producer Joseph Levine and the Italian tycoon Carlo Ponti. They wanted a combination of art-house chic and upmarket sexploitation that would show off the naked charms of Brigitte Bardot. She was cast as the wife of a French screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) working on an Italian version of The Odyssey directed by Fritz Lang and produced by a snarling Hollywood mogul played by Jack Palance. The producers didn't like the fractured masterpiece they were given, edited their own versions, and were denounced as "King Kong Levine" and "Mussolini Ponti". Godard slapped Ponti's 69-year-old Paris representative in public and got a 500 franc fine.
This was the first of a string of confrontations and demolitions that included helping to close down the Cannes film festival in May 1968 as an act of solidarity with demonstrating students and striking workers. Six months later he punched Iain Quarrier, the British co-producer of his One Plus One (AKA Sympathy for the Devil), in the face and stomach on the stage of the National Film Theatre. Richard Roud, author of the first book in English on Godard and director of the London film festival, had brought Quarrier and Godard together for a public discussion on the film's re-editing, and the assault was preceded by Godard advising the spectators to demand their money back.
The worst conflict, however, was the split between Godard and his oldest friend and collaborator, François Truffaut, the man whose first act on gaining a certain industrial muscle by winning a prize at Cannes with Les Quatre cents coups was to help his colleague get his feet on the feature film ladder. There was jealousy and principle on Godard's side, a mixture of guilt and exasperation on Truffaut's. They traded public insults during the 1970s and their irreconcilable differences were never repaired. When Truffaut died in 1984, Godard praised his criticism but refused to make any favourable comments on his films. Truffaut had come to terms with the film industry, Godard would never consider such a compromise. Not until the publication in 1988 of Truffaut's collected letters, which contained a 1973 exchange between the two, did most of us understand the depth of the breach between them. Godard's letter pointed out what he considered the dishonesty of La Nuit américaine, calling Truffaut a liar for not mentioning his affair with its star Jacqueline Bisset. He then demanded as his right that Truffaut should invest 10m francs in his new low-budget movie, Un simple film.
Truffaut's scathing reply, which occupies six full pages of the book, lists a succession of slights, insults and betrayals, calls Godard a shit several times, and begins with the statement: "Jean-Luc. Just so you won't be obliged to read this unpleasant letter right to the end, I'm starting with the essential point: I will not co-produce your film." It has to be added, however, that Godard wrote an affectionate introduction for the Truffaut book, a characteristic mixture of eloquence and obscurity, in which he said, looking back on their youth: "The cinema had taught us how to live; but life, like Glenn Ford in The Big Heat, was to take its revenge."
The file-sharing and anti-piracy world is full of interesting characters, most of whom remain hidden in the shadows. Some individuals are just too large to be contained though, and are either involuntarily thrust into the media spotlight by force or become deliberately high-profile by design.
![A BOUT DE SOUFFLE aka BREATHLESS [FRANCE 1959]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uCpsqxskwpLwI80VGsFuFk6_06tC17HB6GKXdp05FXoMuBoMP62m-BV5S2ltqntZy4ev-hqhNfb0zeFapSrpp_RzfUSZZpIjdUCrLSqDZCk3urfCbbkhuSWbz_fQsidUt3_Z597U13uUKDEyvAi4zwdl0id1NZwmELloNGEZ3Q_FU-kB9AOLTy-te29jwZRl_7mSNNFzZBfbDkMg=s0-d)
