Le Journal

Le premier ministre a promis une «transparence absolue» concernant les causes de ce drame, pour l’instant inexpliqué.

Among those who defend the behavior of ICE in the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, one argument goes like this: Activists have been recklessly trying to obstruct these agents as they carry out their work, all for the sake of getting a viral moment that makes the officers look like thugs. These ICE defenders are not wrong, but what they see as annoyance and endangerment seems more like a deliberate strategy with a long history—a successful one. The unarmed, nonviolent citizens who have been following ICE agents, blowing whistles to alert people to their presence, even heckling and mocking them, are not just trying to impede their work. They are aiming, as well, to illustrate a contrast, evoke a reaction that will reveal a moral truth, and tell a story they can capture on their phone: on one side, an aggressive, violent, extrajudicial (and masked) paramilitary group exercising brute force against anyone who gets in their way, and on the other, people who are simply attempting to be decent neighbors. Good and her fellow “rapid responders” achieved this contrast—at the cost of her life.Some people might think this is unfair, that ICE agents are just trying to do their job of finding and deporting undocumented people, and that the activists are to blame for provoking the violence. But this is not the way the activists see it, and after Good’s killing, it’s not the way the majority of the country sees it either. A CNN poll conducted after the shooting found that 51 percent of Americans believe that “ICE enforcement actions were making cities less safe rather than safer.” And the number of people who feel that Trump’s immigration-enforcement efforts go too far has grown, increasing from 45 percent last February to 52 percent in the new poll. The change is incremental, but for those who have been opposed to ICE all along, it is steady progress. What the neighborhood-watch groups and activists are doing in Minneapolis seems to be working, and their tactics are worth recognizing today in particular as Americans reflect on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.The civil-rights movement was built on creating and exploiting (in the best sense) such moments of moral witness, images of contrast. And King was the most prominent promoter of this approach. Sitting in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, in April 1963, where he was detained for eight days, he composed one of his most famous pieces of writing: a letter to a group of clergymen who were advocating a more moderate approach to activism. (The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue under the headline “The Negro Is Your Brother.”) King was in the city as part of a campaign, called Project C (for confrontation), to break segregation in a place where it was as settled as sedimentary rock. The movement organizers had planned a series of rolling marches and sit-ins everywhere from the local Woolworth’s to the public library. The cartoonishly racist commissioner of public safety known as Bull Connor had tried to shut it all down by obtaining an injunction against protesting—which is how King ended up behind bars. [Read: The unspeakable, enabled]Persuading the local authorities to come to the table and loosen racial restrictions demanded the “creation of tension,” King wrote in his letter. The movement would have to provoke “a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” He was even prepared to accept the label of “extremist,” he wrote. “The question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”The confrontations in Birmingham were being staged for an audience, just as the many people who filmed the moment when Good was shot—including the ICE officer, who sought to tell his own story—were recording for an audience. King knew that he couldn’t easily…

European leaders are in a dither, understandably but inexcusably, about Donald Trump’s threats to take Greenland by force, and to use tariffs to slap around anyone who objects: understandably, because no previous president would ever have acted this way; inexcusably, because a clear if unpalatable solution lies right before them.If European countries were to permanently deploy, say, 5,000 soldiers armed with surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles to Greenland, keeping them there with orders to fight invading American soldiers to the last round of ammunition, Trump would not order the paratroops and the Marines to assault that frozen wasteland—too many body bags. If they were willing to put comparable economic sanctions in place—denying American companies access to Europe’s economy, still collectively the world’s third largest—he would back down from those threats as well. Such policies go against the grain of a continent that is, to use the word popularized by the British military historian Michael Howard, debellated, but that’s the world they are in.The Greenland episode, disgraceful and shameful as it is, should be seen in the context of Trump’s other foreign-policy escapades—the capturing of Nicolás Maduro; the bombing of the Iranian nuclear program; the attempt to rebuild and reorient war-shattered Gaza; the on-again, off-again relationships with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky; the tariff bazookas that get downgraded to squirt guns with China. Erratic as the president sounds, the Trumpian worldview is comprehensible and even, in some respects, predictable.Trump is an ignorant man; unlike many other would-be or actual dictators, he does not read books and has difficulty writing more than a few badly spelled sentences on social media. But he does intuit certain truths, and one must give him credit for those, because he is not stupid and they animate his policy. Greenland really has been neglected by Denmark and, since after the American Civil War, has been coveted by the United States. The Iranian nuclear program was a regional and in some respects global menace, and, after a week and a half of Israel softening up, was vulnerable to a single heavy punch. Europe has long underspent on defense, and where American cajoling for decades had not worked, a few face slaps succeeded.Trump’s domestic political gift is the feral instinct for weakness that characterizes most authoritarians. That instinct is shakier in international affairs, but it shapes the way in which he views the world. With an image of American industrial and military power that is rooted in the world of several generations ago, he has enormous confidence in American strength and therefore assumes that bullying is preferable to negotiation, unless you are up against someone who is as tough as you, even if less muscle-bound.He knows what he hates in foreign affairs—the mealymouthed multilateralism of the Biden administration, its catering to deadbeat allies, and its weakness in fleeing Afghanistan. He likewise despises the caterwauling about liberal values and democracy and the long-term military commitments of the George W. Bush administration. Indeed, although he cannot get over Joe Biden—Trump’s insecurities and grievances about the 2020 election and the various prosecutions he has faced between then and now prohibit it—from a foreign-policy point of view, he is at least as anti–George W. Bush as he is anti-Biden. And he despises the reverence for deliberate decision making, consultation with experts, and the willingness to engage in the conventional diplomacy that characterizes both. He views talk of international leadership, much less its practice, as claptrap.Above all, he has three principal instruments in foreign policy: tariffs and kindred economic sanctions, brief bombing campaigns, and commando raids. He has no tolerance for bloody battles, which is why he will not authorize an Arctic amphibious campaign that faces real opposition. If he is going…

The Chicago Bears season ended on Sunday following a 20-17 overtime loss to the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Divisional Round but it wasn’t without some insane drama. Late in the fourth quarter, trailing 17-10 and facing a fourth down, Caleb Williams made another ridiculous play by scrambling to avoid being sacked, drifting back […] The post Kevin Harlan’s Radio Call Of Caleb Williams Miracle TD vs Rams Was Wild (AUDIO) appeared first on Daily Snark.