This is something that has been most upsetting to many of us who have
observed with disgust and wonderment the way that DSK has been
treated, in front of the whole world. Disgust, because we firmly
believe that a man is presumed innocent until he is proven guilty. If
an African president (or the Chairman of the African Development Bank
for that matter) had been treated in the same way as DSK, I'm sure
that many a so called Afrikanist in this forum would have been
rattling their teeth, seething with unspeakable anger and fuming
their favourite accusation : racism!
And after the Dominique Strauss-Kahn debacle it would not be
entirely out of place to ask , "Why apply a different standard on
them? "
In my opinion it's a distinct possibility that DSK was set up, to
destroy his chances of being elected president of France.
Here in Fareed Zakaria's GPS (first item after the introduction)
Bernard-Henri Lévy and Chrystia Freeland summarise the gut feeling
and main objections to such treatment being meted out to the Former
head of the International Monetary Fund and I'm sure that you will
agree with them:
Here's the transcript :
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1107/10/fzgps.01.html
Bernard-Henri Levy, I'm going to start with you because you have been
a -- a prominent participant in the whole affair DSK. There's a column
in "The New York Times" by Joe Nocera in which he says -- describing
your writings on these issues, "To judge by his recent writings,
Bernard-Henri Levy prefers to live in a country where elites are
rarely held to account, where crimes against women are routinely
excused with a wink and a nod, and where people without money or
status are treated like the nonentities that the French moneyed class
believe they are. I'd rather live here," he says.
You are of course in Nice, and I'm happy to be there, but what do you
say to this -- to this columnist?
BERNARD-HENRI LEVY, PHILOSOPHER AND AUTHOR: What I tell him is, first
of all, that I love America. I'm a defender of America. I so often
explain that anti-Americanism is a sort of form of -- of fascism, and
that I hate sometimes the way in which America is cartooned, and
sometimes by itself.
The image of the justice which was given in the first days of this
Strauss-Kahn affair was a cartoon image. It was not America. It was
not the justice, the judicial system which de Tocqueville praised so
highly and which he exhibited as the model for the whole world.
For somebody like me who likes America as much as France, it was
heartbreaking, and when I said that, I did not defend my friend,
Dominique Strauss-Kahn. I defend the idea which I have of justice in
general and of American justice in particular.
ZAKARIA: But, let me ask you, you -- you know, again Nocera says I
don't see what Vance did wrong. The -- the woman alleged rape. She had
no criminal record. Her employer vouched for her. The quick decision
to indict made a lot of sense for legal and practical reasons.
Then, as the victim's credibility crumbled, Vance didn't -- the
district attorney -- didn't pretend that he has -- still had a slam
dunk. He acknowledged the problem.
LEVY: What he did bad was to consider from the very first minute
without having heard the word, the voice, the -- of Dominique Strauss-
Kahn, that he was a guilty one. What he did wrong was to offer him to
the whole world as a sort of beast, as a sort of perv, as a sort of
criminal by essence and substance. The jail, the shame, the public
humiliation, the leaks organized to the tabloid press, presenting the
facts in a completely disordered way, these the district attorney
Vance did it badly.
What he does now, which is to leave the two parties free and to fact
check, to double cross the information, to -- to try to understand
what really happened in this Sofitel suite, this is right. And if --
if there has been a -- a crime, if there has been a rape or an attempt
of rape, it is a big crime, and it -- it will have to be punished.
ZAKARIA: Simon Schama, in his column at "The Daily Beast," Bernard-
Henri Levy says that this is like Robespierre. You wrote a book on the
French Revolution, which -- do you think that there's any parallel?
SIMON SCHAMA, PROFESSOR, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: I -- I can understand
Bernard's passion about that, but, as we know, the guillotine was the
-- was the conclusion of that. That's not exactly what happened to
Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
What I wanted to say that I think to -- to Bernard and to the
discussion is that -- is that, you know, much of what he says I -- I
share, but I think it boils down to this kind of very lurid
relationship between the tabloid press and the nature of criminal
prosecution. Spectacular criminal prosecution or criminal -- criminal
apprehension, potential criminal apprehension as a kind of public
spectacle --
CHRYSTIA FREELAND, GLOBAL EDITOR-AT-LARGE, REUTERS: But (INAUDIBLE)
any trial --
SCHAMA: Yes. Yes, exactly. There is something in American public life
which actually assumes it not to be problematic, actually, to make a
show even before any guilt is necessarily proven.
LEVY: You have this tendency, and also in France, and I was even more
severe or as severe concerning France than America, you have this
tendency to mix show and justice. And when you saw the lawyer of the
maid expressing himself, having a sort of a bad (ph) press conference
on the stairs of the -- of the court and describing in such a graphic
way the most intimate parts of the body of his client, this was not
only graphic, it was pornographic.
Maybe Strauss-Kahn rapes, maybe we'll see -- the attorney will say,
but the lawyer this day committed also a sort of symbolic rape. You
cannot speak of your client, when she's a woman, in such a rude way,
coming again and again to the world to the parts of the -- of the body
and so on. All this, this way of giving a theater show for all the
press all over the world, this was really problematic.
FREELAND: None of you --
ZAKARIA: Yes?
FREELAND: None of you have mentioned something -- the thing that
actually angered me the most about how Dominique Strauss-Kahn was
treated, and actually mostly the media treatment, which is I think
something quite characteristic of America and I hope that Europe
doesn't import, which is the confusion of promiscuity with sexual
assault. What I really didn't like was in the early stories about
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, people talking about, well, he's had affairs.
I don't think that's relevant, and actually I think it's so important
for women and feminists to take a very firm stand on saying a person's
personal sexual ethics have no bearing whatsoever on wrongdoing and on
criminal activity. And why this is so important is it used to be the
case that we would say it wasn't possible for a woman to be raped or
assaulted if she was loose, if she had affairs or slept around, and
equally I think just because a man has affairs, which Dominique
Strauss-Kahn was known to do, it doesn't mean we should assume he's
more likely to rape someone.
ZAKARIA: But you think -- you wrote in your column, you said, look,
the guy's a sleaze and he probably did it.
BRET STEPHENS, WALL STREET JOURNAL: No, I didn't say that.
ZAKARIA: What did you say?
STEPHENS: I said that's what I was inclined to think, and I reproached
myself for having that thought because, look, we liked our news to --
ZAKARIA: But (INAUDIBLE) by saying he's probably a sleaze.
STEPHENS: He is probably a sleaze, and there's a lot of information to
testify to that, which is not in -- in dispute, including sleeping
with chambermaids in New York City hotels and his affair for which he
was reprimanded by the IMF, and a long trail of stories emerging from
his past in -- in France. But Chrystia is entirely right. Being a
sleaze is not the same as being a criminal.
And our problem here, which is I think universal, not just -- not just
an American one, is that we liked our news to have the quality of a
parable. And here there was a parable -- really, whatever your
political persuasion happened to be, if you were a -- a feminist of a
certain point of view, it was -- as Chrystia says, this is a guy who's
a sort of a sexual rogue, hence he must be a rapist. If you had a --
maybe a right of center persuasion, you didn't like Strauss-Kahn, you
didn't like French socialists, you don't like the lending policies of
the IMF, you kind of -- you were -- there -- there was a sense of
delight this guy had been pulled from his first-class Air France seat
and sent to Rikers Island in the best American traditions.
So it all came together to convict the man before anyone -- most of
us, including myself, had asked some common-sense questions, not the
least of which was does this really make sense for him to do? And were
the details that were known to us merely from the very beginning of
the trial, did they correspond to the idea that -- that a sexual
assault had actually -- had actually taken place?
I think this happens in more than just the case of DSK. I think it's
-- it's pervasive in the was we make news judgments about different
stories. We mistake anecdote for data, and that's what we did here.
There were anecdotes about DSK and we suggested that this led
inescapably to a conclusion. We forget that stories in life and in
history as well tend to be crooked.
ZAKARIA: Hold that thought, Bret. We're going to leave the DSK
business here, but with one footnote that we need to remember -- rape
charges are still pending against Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Now, the panel's going to stick around, and when we come back, we'll
talk about Greece and Libya and much else. Back in a moment.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ZAKARIA: And we are back, talking about everything other than
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, since we did that for the last segment, with
Bernard-Henri Levy from France, Simon Schama, Bret Stephens and
Chrystia Freeland.
--
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