HEY! Where are the Parisian masses supposed to have been marching behind the World Leaders?! Media images were cropped to suggest the Euro cabal headed the populist march, but a long shot establishes the illusion to have been a lie. It turns out the forty figureheads held their own parade for Charlie Hebdo in a vast no man’s land of high security. Video footage shows the leaders surrounded by only media, beckened to move hither and forth to simulate an advance, marching in place more or less like a chorus line of marionettes.
The photo-op is disgracefully contrived, the subjects looking cluelessly right and left at imaginary onlookers, waving occasionally at what are probably only government snipers on the rooftop. An audio track records applause generated by a small number of determined clappers, while stage managers bark cadences to prompt the line forward, repeating “Vite, vite, vite” and “Ein, Zwei, Drei.”
The complicity of the international press recalls the iconic toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue by US marines, flanked by an entourage of Iraqi collaborators made to look like jubulant masses by means of judiciously cropped camera angles, unmasked in the alternative press by under-populated far shots. Even if the leaders’ isolation is dismissed as pragmatic, what does a complicit media tell you about whose agenda is rolling out the JE SUIS CHARLIE offensive?
The impromptu summit had media waxing that Paris at that moment was the “Capitol of the World.” An Anglo-Capitalist Putsch, yes. The march in Paris was a self-congratulatory televised re-declaration of the War On Islam. President Obama’s non-attendance is a red herring, and points to another missed opportunity. Had Obama been any kind of people’s hero he could have sent a drone in his stead to dispatch this Islamophobic assembly like just another Afgan wedding party.
