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Zim Lines, the Israeli shipping firm, was expelled because its booth advertised tourism in Arab territories now occupied by Israel. Although Singer Joan Baez was paid her usual fee and won applause for talking about her "pacifist-anarchist" views, she eventually announced that she regretted having performed for the party. It seems she learned that the Communists, anxious to win votes by looking respectable, had resoundingly denounced France's 1968 student upheavals, of which she heartily approved. Said Baez: "The French Communist Party has done some very lousy things." She would not sing for it again, she said, "because it makes me a hypocrite." For all the polemics, the predominant atmosphere of the West's largest proletarian festival was decidedly bourgeois. The take from the fair, which is divided between the central party, L'Humanité, and local cells, totaled more than $4,000,000 in 1970, and attendance at this year's funfest was up 20%. Money, after all, helps make the party competitive in the electoral market, and the Communist share of France's vote generally runs 20% or even higher.
