From another Website by John Ray: “And if even the French Ambassador to the Court of St. James can refer to Israel as ‘that shitty little country’, surely anyone can diss Jews!” The French. My heritage. Disgusting. I suspect the French are cowards because of their awful losses in WWI. In all the discussions of the motives of the French, I have not seen the conclusion the French are cowardly today.
My grandfather was French, and he wrote them off as lousy communists after WWII. Paw Paw was an interpreter for the Allies in WWI. I have his helmet. I barely remember him, but he loved to see me and his other grandchildren jump into his ice cream counters with just our legs sticking out. He made a fortune during the War, and gambled most of it away; this was feasible during Louisiana’s Head and Master days.
So, maybe the French are just cowardly. I suggest we traditionalists connect with Frenchmen of similar mind and make a stand. The French are not genetically cowardly. Their leaders are cowardly or just corrupt or both.
He didn’t say it.
The French ambassador didn’t call Israel that or anything close to it. Barbara Amiel, wife of Conrad Black the newspaper magnate, mistranslated something the ambassador had said in French at dinner, something entirely different—something innocent and not impolite. That whole flap was over a non-event: an “event” that never happened. Miss Amiel is either a mischief-maker or ignorant of idiomatic French. Why that false accusation made against the ambassador has not been officially, definitively corrected by media of the English-speaking world, I don’t understand (or maybe it has, for all I know—I certainly don’t regularly read lots of newspapers or news web-sites or listen to lots of TV newscasts). The responsibility for correcting it rests with the English-speaking world and the Jewish world including Israel (and including Lord Black, who is Jewish). The ambassador, the French government, and the French-speaking media have already denied—and correctly so—that he said what Miss Amiel claimed he did. He didn’t say it.
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Long live free Flanders!
> Miss Amiel is either a
> Miss Amiel is either a mischief-maker or ignorant of idiomatic French.
As both (a) an anglophone Canadian and (b) the wife of Conrad Black, and like Black, a foaming-at-the-mouth neocon, both options are plausible 😉
Seriously, though, who knows; maybe he did say it at a private dinner, thinking, as he ought to have, that anything he said was not going to be repeated, that he was off the record, and needn’t fear any reprisals, except, alas, he was heard by Ms. Amiel, and some major Canadian journalists are notorious for publishing “off-the-record” remarks… (And some people are foolish enough to think that they are truly “off-the-record” when they speak to said journalists, but oh well; live and learn!)
In any case, it’s always about Them, Fred, and so it persists, even if false, mainly because it feeds the “Boo-hoo; everyone hates us, now support us in whatever we say or do or else you’re an anti-Semite, too!” mentality They find so useful to promote…
He did say it but it translates very differently into English
Will, thanks for your thoughts on this. He didn’t deny he used the expression in question, “un petit pays merdique,” when referring to Israel. He did use it—on that, everybody agrees: he referred to Israel in passing as “un petit pays merdique.” And there’d be no reason whatsoever for him to deny it. That completely harmless, not at all vulgar, sometimes even sort of nice, French expression doesn’t mean “shitty little country” in English and it’s not a small difference. It’s a big difference. I know, I know, it sounds to everyone as if that’s what it means, because “merde means shit” and all that. But take my word for it, “merde” doesn’t mean “shit,” for one thing, and for another, the expression “petit pays merdique” doesn’t mean “shitty little country.” It doesn’t. In the context in which he apparently said it, it doesn’t mean it at all. It’s just incredible that that whole flap was over nothing. Nothing happened. The ambassador was absolutely right not to apologize and his government was absolutely right to back him on this. He did not do anything wrong and the harmless expression he used does not translate into “shitty little country.” The one who was wrong was Barbara Amiel.
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Long live free Flanders!
Thanks, Fred. Interesting;
Thanks, Fred. Interesting; what does “merdique” mean? “Merde” always meant “shit” to me, and I am fairly fluent in French myself; what did that phrase mean? I know in some contexts, variants of “merde” can mean “annoying”, or “shit-disturber”, etc.
Anyway, I have no trouble at all believing Amiel may not have understood his words properly, and that she was, as a Jewess, overly prickly, and ready to be offended in a heartbeat; that is so often the case with those people…
Those People
“Those people” is an expression that almost everyone realizes is filled with negative subjectivity and necessarily includes Our Savior when directed at Jewish people. It implies Jewish people are somehow not of human origin. Jesus, our dear Jewish leader, has an excellent reason to be offended in a heartbeat: He is disrespected relentlessly by non-Jewish people who think he is somehow not a real Jew but a being that discards Jewishness, which is something wholly without evidence. Now how or why would Jesus discard the Jewishness he so carefully adhered to? He would not and did not. So it is inappropriate to speak of Jewish people as “those people.â€
I draw a distinction…
… between those who were in the Old Testament Church (including Jesus Christ and His apostles and other followers from that nation at that time), and those who today remain in the old faith which has been superseded, fulfilled in Jesus Christ, who was the fulfillment of the promises made to God’s people, and created the New Testament church, which expanded God’s people to include not only the faithful from the nation of Israel, but from the other nations, the Gentiles. I certainly intend no disrespect to Christ, or anyone else. But, as regards the Jews of today, on a spiritual level, I don’t think any higher of the them than I do of any other non-Christian people, whether atheist, Hindu, Muslim, Satanist, or whatever. Anyone who is not of Christ is His enemy, unless and until turning to Christ in repentance, to be received into the fold of His people. We are God’s people; not those still following Judaism, whether observant, religious Jews or non-religious Jews – either way, if they’re not following the Saviour, they’re not His.
Now, that said, I’m not in the habit of regularly using capital T for “they” and “them”, or for that matter, saying “those people” like that, and perhaps I’d do well to avoid any misunderstandings, that I am actually filled with hatred, which I certainly am not. But I am continually frustrated to see how prickly many Jewish people are, and how their most vocal members successfully use the spectre of “anti-Semitism”, which they seem to find behind every tree (the way McCarthy was said to have feared communists; or the way liberals fear “McCarthyism”), as a device, a weapon, with which to bludgeon others into supporting their agenda – anyone, for example, who has the least criticism of Israeli policies / actions gets smeared as anti-Semitic, whether deservedly or not – and 99% of the time, they don’t deserve such.
My comment “it’s always about them” is due to frustration with their prickliness, and their understandable tribal instincts (you’ve heard their eternal question in matters political, I’m sure) – which instincts, BTW, in and of themselves I have no problem with, but rather, I’d like to see the rest of us think the same way – and the desire of some of their most vocal spokespeople to bludgeon the rest of us into conformity with their agenda by raising the spectre of “anti-Semitism!” any time someone disagrees with them on any issue.