Balter's Blog: Paris City of Night

Balter's Blog: Paris City of Night

Obama: Europe a target? Not news to Europeans

"A fast-moving, atmospheric thriller. Best to start reading this one early in the evening... unless, that is, you don't mind losing a night's sleep!" ——David Hunt, best-selling author of The Magician's Tale

Why do we Americans have such short memories, and why do we always seem to focus on ourselves, ignoring or forgetting the lessons to be learned from others?

While president Barack Obama was visiting France in April, without a word of commentary to set Obama’s statements in a historical context, ABC News reported him as saying “I think that it is important for Europe to understand that even though I'm now president and George Bush is no longer president, al Qaeda is still a threat and that we cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president suddenly everything's going to be OK.”

Some Europeans legitimately took offense at the suggestion that they have failed to grasp the threat posed by extremist violence. Paris has experienced deadly bombing episodes periodically for decades, long before 9/11 awoke the sleeping American giant.

On October 1, 1995, The NY Times’ Alan Riding reported that “It is probably fair to say that if Paris were not normally such a safe city a recent spate of terrorist bombs would not have been so disturbing. Parisians -- and visitors to Paris -- are used to feeling secure here. And now, metaphorically speaking, they have to look over their shoulders.”

What many had already forgotten in the fall of 1995 were the bombings of the mid-1980s. Here is the NY Times, again (in an April 15, 1992 report): “The Tunisian leader of an Iranian-backed group that killed 13 people and wounded 303 others in a series of bomb attacks in central Paris in 1985 and 1986 was sentenced to life imprisonment by a special anti-terrorist court here today.”

Little attention was given in the USA to reports of an even older bombing incident in Paris. On November 13, 2008, CBC News reported “A University of Ottawa sociology professor has been arrested in Gatineau, Que., in relation to a bombing that killed four people near a synagogue in Paris almost three decades ago. Canada's Department of Justice confirmed that 56-year-old Hassan Diab was arrested Thursday, Agence-France Presse reported.”

That bombing occurred on Oct. 3, 1980, outside the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris.

Live and learn?

Meet reality

Paris City of Night

It’s worth asking whether we as individuals are capable of learning from the past. George Santayana’s celebrated aphorism, that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it,” is as apt as ever. Apply it as you like to economic meltdowns or failures of security and intelligence.

Was there a link between what happened--or did not happen--in December 1994 in Marseille, Algiers and Paris, and on September 11, 2001, in New York?

Why would anyone want to attack the Eiffel Tower?

In a September 24, 2001, article titled Terror from the sky, by Rohan Gunaratna (published by Jane’s, the world’s self-styled “leading Open Source Intelligence provider”), the author notes that, “The unprecedented multiple attacks on high-prestige US targets on 11 September 2001 exposed the vulnerability of that state to the suicide terrorist threat.” Unprecedented? It wasn’t the first time someone had tried. “The only previous attempt by a terrorist group to use a passenger airliner to mount an airborne suicide attack was in December 1994,” Gunaratna continues. “To punish France for its assistance to the Algerian government and to draw international attention to the Algerian conflict, the Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Armée Islamique – GIA) hijacked Air France Airbus A-300 Flight 8969 in Algiers on 24 December 1994.”

Forty of the 227 passengers were French. The GIA released a few women and children and then murdered three passengers. Only after this did the Algerian authorities allow the plane to fly again, heading for Paris. “The intention of the GIA cell,” reports Gunaratna, “led by the 25-year-old Abdul Abdallah Yahia, alias Abou, was to crash a fully fuelled plane into the Eiffel Tower in the heart of Paris.”

The GIA was thwarted, of course: the Eiffel Tower still stands. But fifteen years after the failed attempt, and despite 9/11, the details of this episode are still unclear. Why?

Ask a Frenchman.

Food Wine Rome

April in... Paris and Rome. Paris for thrills (as in Paris City of Night) and chills (the weather). Rome for fabulous food and wine.

This April saw the long-awaited release of Food Wine Rome, part of the Terroir Guide series, dedicated to the authentic, regional foods and wines of the world.

The essentials:

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Little Bookroom (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1892145715
• ISBN-13: 978-1892145710

ABOUT Food Wine Rome

Food Wine Rome is a tightly focused guidebook and traveler’s companion to the culinary delights of Rome. For each neighborhood, listings are in three categories: 1) dining: restaurants, trattorie, osterie; 2) gourmet shopping: bakeries, markets, salami makers, cheesemongers, and more; 3) wine: shops and wine bars. A dozen or more sidebars add entertaining and informative bits of city lore, culture, customs, quotes, and anecdotes to bring alive the city’s historic culinary richness: the Roman love affair with artichokes; the watermelon festival held for years on August 24, when giant, ripe watermelons would be released into the river upstream and Roman kids would dive into the river to grab them; the Cacio e Pepe Family of Pastas; the cult of the strawberries of Nemi (one of whose devotees was Caligula); the Renaissance of Rome’s wines; Holy Water and the Aqueducts; Spring Fever (lamb, favas, artichokes, zucchini flowers); and others.

A glossary of essential Roman/Italian food terms helps make shopping, marketing, and eating fun and rewarding. Food Wine Rome is illustrated with scores of atmospheric photographs and an overall map of central Rome.

A few reviews:

“Getting to the heart of regional cuisine can be a tall order, but The Terroir Guides ably examine the interplay between markets, local food artisans, winemakers, and chefs on a town-by-town basis, taking the reader from field to plate and making a great companion for any food-obsessed tourist...packed with local history, food lore, and useful translations.” --Sherman's Travel

“I love The Terroir Guides. They give me everything I want. They're a tactile pleasure, compact, meaty. They're lovely to look at, elegantly laid out, mutedly and tastefully colored...positively overflowing with the Who, What, Where and How even an intrepidly independent traveler should know...The Little Bookroom has a knack for putting guidebooks into print that are as useful as they are beautiful.” --Wine News

Click for reviews of Cooking the Roman Way: Authentic Recipes from the Home Cooks and Trattorias of Rome. The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, and other major newspapers and magazines, listed Cooking the Roman Way in their top-10 cookbooks of the year.

And don't miss Food Wine the Italian Riviera & Genoa, also published recently in the same series:




Stay tuned…