THIS country has always been reputed for its cold dismissal of commonplace, illogical ideologies. After all it was the French thinker Descartes who had proven his existence by a rational statement in Latin: cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).

But gone are those times. Today you are no longer expected to reflect but rather believe in the tweetered and facebooked brainwash. If you disagree, you are accused of being an intellectual terrorist. Such is the dilemma for a well known French journalist André Bercoff who had dared to raise a few politically incorrect questions during a debate last week on the TV network Cnews.

The discussion concerned a video aired practically by all the channels a few days earlier bringing tears to the eyes of millions of viewers, and since then repeated on the so-called ‘social networks’ thousands of times every day.

It shows a modern building in the centre of Paris. You see on the balcony of the fourth floor a child hanging outside, holding on to the edge of the gallery only with one hand. Then appears a man followed by a woman on the adjacent balcony. He puts his arm around the child’s body but doesn’t pull up.

All of a sudden the camera focuses on another figure down in the street leaping up from the ground level to the first floor like Spiderman. He continues his bounces to the second and the third floor and finally reaches the fourth floor with astonishing speed and saves the child. The video abruptly stops here.

The Spiderman, an illegal immigrant from Mali named Mamoudou Gassama, was immediately transformed into a hero by the media. He was invited to the Elysée Palace by President Emmanuel Macron who offered him French nationality and a job in the fire brigade. A few days later the Mayor of Paris conferred upon him the medal of honour.

While journalists and political leaders were still showering compliments without exception on the Spiderman, Bercoff declared that after watching the video again and again he visited the area in question in order to personally verify a few of the details that were bothering him. Bercoff’s observations, then questions, are as follows:

1. The child seen in the video is a three-and-half-year old boy. His parents live on the sixth floor of the building. How could such a small kid skip over the balcony measuring well above his height, fall down into the void, then suddenly grip the edge of the fourth-floor balcony with his left hand and stay there all the time waiting for the Spiderman to come up and rescue him? An impossible exploit even for a perfectly healthy and athletic adult.

2. What was the neighbour couple doing all this while? One clearly sees the man holding the boy with an arm around his body. Was the child too heavy to be hauled up by a man who appears well-built in the video?

3. The very next day newspapers and TV channels interviewed the neighbour who claimed that the boy was holding on to the brink of the gallery so fiercely that it was impossible to pull him off. Does this sound really credible?

4. The video also shows that once the Spiderman arrives on the fourth floor balcony, the neighbour hands the boy over to him. Why couldn’t he do all this himself?

Bercoff’s questions were answered by thousands of emails suggesting that the whole scenario was probably faked by one of the many NGOs with mysteriously unlimited means who go practically every day out to the coasts equipped with boats, often with helicopters, and bring in illegal immigrants. The latest is that Republican Senator Ladislas Poniatowski qualified yesterday the Spiderman video as the “biggest fake news of the year”.

But a number of messages equally accuse the journalist of being a complotiste –the ‘brain behind a conspiracy’ in plain English.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, June 10th, 2018