The New York Times's Scott Sayare reported on Saturday from Toulouse, France, the sight of the killing of Jewish schoolchildren by a radical Islamist, "After Unity Over a Rampage in France, Politics Drives in Wedges," and accused the French paper Le Figaro as being "increasingly viewed as a mouthpiece" for tough-on-crime French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
That's quite ironic, considering Sayare himself functioned as a mouthpiece for Obama in a September 23, 2010 story, calling the president "a powerful symbol of hope" among poor Muslims in the Paris slums. And the paper has long been irredeemably hostile to President Nicolas Sarkozy, whom the Times can never forgive for being friendly with President George W. Bush.
Shock and solidarity gave way to political recrimination and criticism here on Friday, one day after the police killed a 23-year-old self-proclaimed jihadist, as government officials were put on the defensive about whether intelligence failures cost his seven victims their lives.
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At the far right of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, the Union for a Popular Movement, four members of Parliament called Friday for reforms in immigration law, suggesting that Mr. Merah, the son of Algerian immigrants, “had nothing French about him but his identity papers.”
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The French news media, which covered the killings with breathless nonpartisan zeal, resumed their accustomed political polarization on Thursday. In an editorial Friday, the leftist newspaper Libération asked why the intelligence services “underestimated the potential for harm from an individual that they knew,” and wondered: “Did the timing of politics influence the work of the police?”
Le Figaro, the right-leaning daily newspaper that is increasingly viewed as a mouthpiece for Mr. Sarkozy and his government, printed a page-wide, two-word headline over a photograph of the elite police officers involved in the final assault on Mr. Merah: “Mission Accomplished.”
So claims the New York Times, the left-leaning daily newspaper that has always been viewed as a mouthpiece for President Obama and his party.
