The French pm didn't want Netanyahu there. The US seems to have insisted on him. I don't know why, but I suspect it's to improve the world image of Israel. It can use all the improvement it can get. I once saw him in Montreal. He was there to give a speech across the street from my office. But he never showed. The university had been set up to stage a riot that would make him look good in press coverage. I was down on the street for almost the whole time. And I saw that even the police were in on it. As the riot got really wild and a huge window was smashed, (and the riot was building long before that), I wondered where the police were. It had been at least two hours since the story had been on the news.And we were expecting a riot long before that. And if, as he said, Netanyahu wanted a Jewish audience, why did he insist on our downtown campus which was nowhere close to a Jewish district. Our other campus was within walking distance of the two most densely populated Jewish areas in Canada. And why did McGill absolutely refuse to let him use its buildings?
As the tumult rose, I walked down the street to get a coffee, on the way I passed a lane behind my office. There was a bus - and in it were riot police - just relaxing. As I got my coffee and walked back, they were still there, not moving. So I leaned against the building where the riot was happening. I was passed by a journalist who looked at me, really scared. So he should have been. this was a war.
It must have been another ten minutes until the riot police charged in. there was quite a bit of damage, but the riot broke up pretty quickly. Netanyahu never arrived. He didn't have to. He got coverage across Canada and the US for a tour that the press had, until then, shown no interest in.
Charlie Hebdo will not say a word about the arrest - unless it's to laugh at the prisoner. Hebdo is a cheap, ignorant, nasty tabloid designed to appeal to racists. And France has a long history of racism.
