PRESS REVIEW: Friday, September 11– 25 years on from 9/11, the international press reflects on the war on terror, its legacy and its failings. In France, the far-right National Rally party tries desperately to distance itself from the overtly racist comments of one of its security officials, made while on duty for his day job as a police officer. Finally, a fossilised feather may give us new insights into why birds survived the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
The Washington Post headline reads “the 9/11 response got the most important thing right”, despite mistakes – the paper acknowledges – in Iraq and Afghanistan. A similar verdict from the Wall Street Journal: taking the war to terrorists abroad and holding any country harbouring terrorists responsible were two key principles that protected the US against any similar attack in the 25 years that followed. There is a different angle in the European press. The Times reminds us that the Bush administration were quick to conflate an attack perpetrated by Saudi citizens with Iraq, an “entirely unrelated country”. Here in France, Le Monde has interviewed a former French intelligence official, who, when asked whether Osama Bin Laden had succeeded in his objectives, said “al Qaeda’s trap was the long wars into which America plunged.”
In France, the National Rally seek to distance themselves from a scandal after a police officer with close ties to the party inadvertently recorded himself complaining about seeing Black and Arab people around the town of Carcassonne using offensive racial slurs. Quoted in Le Figaro, representatives of the far-right party called the incident an “isolated case” and insist that such convictions have no place within their ranks. L’Humanité, though, argues that the officer said out loud what the National Rally truly believes, citing MP Caroline Parmentier, who has bemoaned a “normalisation of homosexuality”, referred to the travelling community as “scabious bohemians”, and lamented the “demonisation” of Nazi-collaborationist leader of Vichy France, Maréchal Pétain.
And, finally, The Times brings us news of a piece of fossilised dinosaur dung in which a feather appears to have survived the domestic journey. The feather may offer a rare insight into why almost all bird families went extinct with the dinosaurs: was it a question of feathers? Did the other prehistoric bird families have plumage too thin for the post-asteroid climate?
