Frederic Mitterand in trouble over rent boys:
and in 1989
Call boys took midnight tour of White House.
Roman Polanski scandal makes his Bangkok confession hard to accept
The French culture minister Frederic Mitterand, who is openly gay, was fighting for his political life last night after it was revealed that he had admitted in a four-year-old memoir to paying Thai rent boys for sex during visits to Bangkok.
Opposition politicians have jumped on the case not just because it exposes him as a sex tourist, but because it brings into question his support for Roman Polanski, the film director facing extradition to the US over a 30- year-old charge of sex with an underage girl.
Mitterand, nephew of the former president Francois Mitterand, was one of the first senior French politicians to stand up for Polanski when he was arrested by Swiss police on September 26. "I strongly regret that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them," he said at the time.
Other members of the government, including foreign ministerBernard Kouchner, also expressed support for Polanski. But following a backlash from the French public, who generally feel the film director deserves what's coming to him, the French government was forced to issue a statement withdrawing support from the famous Parisian exile.
Mitterand admitted to his enjoyment of rent boys in his critically acclaimed autobiography, La Mauvaise Vie (The Bad Life), published in 2005. Opposition politicians went back to the book in the light of his recent appointment to Nicolas Sarkozy's cabinet.
"I got into the habit of paying for boys," Mitterand wrote. "The profusion of young, very attractive and immediately available boys put me in a state of desire that I no longer needed to restrain or hide."
At the time, he was praised for his honesty. But in the light of the Polanski controversy it looks like costing him his job. Benoit Hamon, a senior Socialist, said: "I find it shocking that a man can justify sex tourism under the cover of a literary account," said.
The word at the Elysee Palace is that it was Carla Bruni who pushed for the appointment of Mitterand, a non-politician who was well-known in France for his television work. Sarkozy's advisers were aware of the risks, given Mitterand's known homosexuality, but decided he would be protected by France's tradition of discretion over the private lives of public figures. That was before Polanski. 
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Irish Daily Mail: Pedophilia and the dark heart of the EU’s parliament *
Wise Up Journal
26.05.2009
The following text was printed on page 12 of the Irish Daily Mail newspaper, Monday the 25th of May 2009:
Irish Daily Mail
Monday, May 25th, 2009
By Mary Ellen Synon
The following text was printed on page 12 of the Irish Daily Mail newspaper, Monday the 25th of May 2009:
Irish Daily Mail
Monday, May 25th, 2009
By Mary Ellen Synon
The horror at the dark heart of a sordid, arrogant parliament
Here we are, a few words about Brussels and how it feels about child abuse. I’ll move onto the elections for the European parliament in a moment, but given the horrors of the Ryan report last week, I thought that you ought to know how seriously the euro-elite treat any suggestion of improper behaviour by adults towards children.
In other words I give you Daniel Cohn Bendit, an MEP for the German Green Party. He is a self-confessed kiddie-fiddler, but pulling down his trouser zip for tiny children hasn’t stopped him becoming one of the most influential members of parliament. Here is his story. Keep in mind this man has more power over the legislation of this country than does any member of the Dail.
Mr Cohn-Bendit is better known as Dany the red of the 1968 Paris Barricades. He is a kind of mid-century leftover leftie who was active in squatting, street fighting and agitation before he re-invented himself as a Green and was elected to the European parliament. Last month I went to watch him in a debate with Declan Ganley. The thing was standing-room only in a ballroom in a Brussels hotel.
Excuses
Mr Ganley produced a book Cohn-Bendit wrote in 1975. He read out Mr Cohn-Bendit`s account of how he had worked in a kindergarten and allowed the children to pull down the zip on his trousers and touch him intimately. In the book he had asked them why they wanted to play with him and not with each other, but in the end he ‘caressed’, his word- them too.
Mr Cohn-Bendit disputed none of it. Indeed when Mr Ganley finished reading, the former kindergarten teacher whooped that he had just won €500 because he had bet someone that Mr Ganley would read out that bit of his auto-biography. When Mr Cohn-Bendit’s supporters in the room did not give him quite give the sound of applause he seemed to be looking for with that reply, he changed tack and insisted that everything in the book had been discussed in Germany and France years ago and the parents of the children had never raised any concerns. Mr Ganley asked: ‘And the children, what did they say?’ Dany the Red assured him and the audience that years later the children had all said their time at the school was extremely happy. And then he went on about how attitudes were different in the 1970s.
And if none of those excuses sounds familiar to you - in particular, the excuse about how attitudes were different in the 1970s - then you weren’t paying attention last week.
But let me give you another example of how ’seriously’ the euro-elite take the protection of children. You may remember the Marc Dutroux case in Belgium. It could be called the most horrific example of child rape and murder in Europe since the war.
Known as the beast of Belgium, Dutroux is now serving a life sentence for a series of child kidnappings, rapes and murders in 1995-96. He kept some of his victims locked in a dungeon he had built in his basement. Two eight-year-old girls starved to death there after Dutroux was arrested and served a short prison sentence for car theft: his wife didn’t bother to open the dungeon door to feed the girls.
Part of the great mystery and scandal that accompanied the case was the relentless incompetence of the authorities, at that time led by the Justice Minister, Melchior Wathelet. For years, as victims were kidnapped and murdered, police files were full of reports and tip-offs that Dutroux was selling young girls. Yet Dutroux stayed free. In the end Mr Wathelet was forced to resign in disgrace. And his reward for incompetence in the administration of Justice was - to be appointed a judge at the European Court of Justice.
That would be like our chief executive of the Financial Regulator, Patrick Neary, being appointed head of NAMA. Which would be a joke. But having anyone involved in any way with the horrors of the bungled Dutroux investigation appointed to one of Europe’s most senior judicial positions is no joke. It is, however, a good measure of the arrogance of the euro-elite towards what might be called the plain people of Europe.
Arrogance
But still back to the elections of the European parliament. And that also takes us back to the arrogance of the euro-elite. Just in case it had slipped past you, the voters of Europe are supposed to be voting to determine the membership of the next European parliament which, under existing European law, that is to say, the Nice Treaty, will have 736 seats. But the euro-elites are manoeuvring to make the voters elect 754 MEPs - that is, to elect an extra 18 politicians to the lushly-paid parliament, even though these politicians will have no seat to fill. The euro-elite want the 18 to have full salary, full tax-free allowance for every day they turn up at the European parliament building, full expenses, business-class travel allowances and all the rest. The 18 will be given everything except a job.
The excuse given? That the Lisbon Treaty allows for the creation of an extra 18 seats. So even though the treaty is not yet ratified, the 18 extra politicians ought to be elected and paid as MEPs until the Lisbon Treaty comes into force. Note that arrogance: the treaty has not yet been ratified, and indeed,
may yet come totally off the rails if Gordon Brown is forced to call a general election in the Britain. It may never become law. Yet the euro-elite intends to ignore that fact. They expect the European voters, sheep that we are all assumed to be (and given the docility of the Irish in accepting a second referendum yet again, we have certainly proved to be sheep) to ‘baaaa-baaaa’ their way into the polling booths and deliver 754 MEPs for 736 seats.
The extra 18 are supposed to act as observers until the Lisbon Treaty comes into force, and then they will take their newly-created seats. But for technical reasons the earliest that could possibly happen is two years after the European elections. So we will have 18 politicians pouring money into their bank accounts for at least two years in return for doing no work at all as MEPs. Remember: any member of the European parliament who plays all the angles can bank €1m over the five-year term of a parliament. This euro-wheeze makes the scandal of British MPs’ expenses look like nothing worse than pilfering Biros from the stationery cupboard.
It can be a useful wheeze to us, though. It can remind us of how the idea that we - any of us, any of the voters of Europe - have ever had democratic power over Lisbon Treaty is a lie. The French and Dutch voters rejected the text when it was called the European Constitution, the Irish voters rejected the text when it was called Lisbon. The 27 member states have not finished with ratification. And yet the euro-elite have been proceeding for years as though the treaty were already law. And in their minds, of course, it is law: for European law is whatever the euro-elite say it is. Like Dutroux with the young girls, they do not consider that ‘NO’ is an available answer.
I will remind you of just a few examples of how the euro-elite have been for years seizing important new powers which were supposed to theirs only after the treaty was made law by the member states. There is the European Space Policy (which is now developing military use for the European Gallileo GPS system),the European Defence Agency, the borders agency called Frontex, and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Each of these institutions was meant to be created only after the ratification of the European Constitution. When that collapsed, and even before it was re-packaged as the Lisbon Treaty, the euro-elite used legal trickery to start constructing these new institutions anyway.
To repeat: European law is whatever the euro-elite say it is.
http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/1244195224.3/
Paedophile taunt fires up French euro campaign
(PARIS) - The European parliamentary election campaign may not have fired up voters, but it has triggered an ugly debate among French political chieftains, who traded bitter insults at a televised debate.
The most heated exchange was between the leaders of the parties battling for third place, when Francois Bayrou of the centrist Modem accused the Green list's flag-bearer Daniel Cohn-Bendit of having defended paedophilia.
The clash erupted Thursday on France 2 television when Bayrou accused Cohn-Bendit, who as "Danny the Red" was a student radical leader in May 1968, of being a friend of France's right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Cohn-Bendit bristled and, impolitely adopting the familiar "tu" form of address, said: "Playing this kind of game before the citizens, I'm telling you, chum: You'll never be president, because you're pathetic."
Bayrou retorted that Cohn-Bendit was in no position to hand out insults, as he was himself responsible for a "number of ignominies". Challenged by the Green leader to provide examples, Bayrou went on the attack.
"For example, I myself find it ignoble to have pushed and justified acts, with regard to children, that I cannot accept," a none too thinly veiled reference to a controversial 1975 publication by Cohn-Bendit.
In the book, The Grand Bazaar, Cohn-Bendit described what he said were encounters with children while he lived in a radical commune in Germany and appeared to suggest that he had exchanged intimate caresses with them.
When, in 2001, the earlier writings threatened his new career in European politics he strongly defended himself against charges of paedophilia and received the support of the parents who were former members of the community.
The rest of the debate was almost as stormy. At one point leftist leader Jean-Luc Melenchon told moderating journalist Arlette Chabot to "Go to hell" because he felt she had not given him enough time to speak.
Marine Le Pen, daughter of far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, accused anti-capitalist Olivier Besancenot of talking down to the French, leading him to reply: "When I listen to you I feel like joining a protest march."
And when Cohn-Bendit referred to his grand parents' deaths in a German concentration camp, Le Pen hit back: "And mine died on a German mine. Let's not have a competition over the dead!"
Summarising the debate, Chabot told viewers: "The idea was to encourage electors to turn out to vote. I'm not sure we managed that."
Despite the media storm stirred up by the debate, Bayrou said Friday that he stood by what he had said, saying that he had not read the Cohn-Bendit until a few days before the debate and had been shocked by the child sex passage.
"This is a subject that gets me angry. I stand by that, it's in my nature," he said. "If you read the text the air of truthfulness strikes you."
Cohn-Bendit tried to play down the dispute, and said the episode in his book was a "page of provocation that I denounced myself in 2001."
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