Global Voices

English

The world is talking, are you listening?

Abdellali Hajjat, author of the book The Boundires of National Identity: The Injunction to Assimilation in France and its Territories, explains in an interview [fr] on the blog Contretemps the ideological seeds of Islamophobia and the institutional logic that reinforces it. “Racism needs a crutch to provide the principle of separating national/foreign” he concludes.

The blogger Menilmuche reports [fr] that a massive search began on February 14th at the home of Teoforo Obiang, the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, in his Parisian mansion on Avenue Foch. The search is in response to complaints against some heads of African states in France for their “ill-gotten gains”.

Boubacar Sanso Barry wrote for the site Yanous [fr]: “Example of the indifference and the negligence in Guinea towards disability issues: It is almost impossible to find an organization that is capable or likely to concern itself with the lives of disabled people, or that would think to tackle those types of problems.”

Dédé l'Abeillaud (another name for a drone – a male bee in a colony of social bees, which inspires his costume) is the self-proclaimed candidate of biodiversity for the French presidential election of 2012. He boasts of winning over 300 promised votes for local officials, as much as the National Front candidate Marine Le Pen. He humorously details his commitments, particularly the defense of bees, and his political agenda on his blog [fr], where his press representative is said to be “responsible for the clearing of the conscience”.