Word: provocateur
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...PROVOCATEUR...
Kishore Mahbubani is that rarest of creatures, a card-carrying member of the sober, slightly stuffy international establishment who still occasionally manages to hurl provocative smart bombs into the debate on global affairs?an agent provocateur in gentleman's clothing. In the mid '90s, when the U.S. was aflutter with insecurity about how it was losing the global economic race to (believe it or not) Japan, he wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs on "Asian values." At the time it caused a furious discussion among American foreign-policy ?lites about whether there was any difference in "values" between East...
...People like the 135 kg, chain-smoking Van Gogh could make that difficult. Always a provocateur, he had taken verbal swipes at virtually every Dutch minority. Three cases had been brought against him for slurs against Muslims and Jews; he was convicted of anti-Semitism in 1990, attacked Catholics in his spare time, and routinely referred to Muslims with an unpublishable epithet. Wilders, now under police protection, defends him. "Van Gogh was provocative, but in a democracy you fight words with words, not bullets," he says...
Michael A. Vitali, the attorney for the protesters, said that Mathews was in a different position from the other defendants because the “judge saw him as a provocateur...
...avoid the issue of the war (which both supported) and let others carry the attack against Bush. Michael Moore is happy to offer his services. Fahrenheit 9/11, his new Bush-bashing movie, has generated more heat than any attack ad the Democrats could possibly dream up. In effect, the provocateur has become an uninvited (but not altogether unwelcome) Democratic operative, and his documentary can be thought of as an independent, uncoordinated expenditure on behalf of the Kerry-Edwards campaign. Moore wasn't anywhere near Kerry and Edwards last week - he's such a divisive figure in the U.S. that...