With doublespeaking France, honor gets lost in translation

[Blackleaf]

With doublespeaking France, honor gets lost in translation

August 20, 2006
By Jules Crittenden Boston Herald City Editor

France has its huge Muslim population, the largest in Western Europe, to satisfy.



French is the traditional language of diplomacy. Diplomacy is the art of saying one thing while doing another.

In recent weeks, France stepped forward to act as a broker of peace in Lebanon . “Act” is the key verb in that last sentence, as it now would seem that the only other verifiable part of the sentence is “in recent weeks.”

To correctly parse that sentence, one must understand that when France suggested it wanted to broker peace in Lebanon, it did not necessarily mean “broker” or “peace” or “Lebanon” in the way we might understand those words. The same is true when France further suggested it wanted to “lead” a “strong” “multinational” “force” there.

I don’t speak French, so I have no idea what the actual French words are for those concepts or what possible nuances there may be. I’ve been relying on news reports in English, which now inform me that the French do not intend to send any significant number of troops to what is supposed to be a force of 15,000 in Lebanon, like everyone thought they said they would.

The heady moment of peace brokering having passed, upon sober reflection, the French now say they already have a general and some staff in south Lebanon ordering about UNIFIL, the U.N. monitoring entity there. That’s plenty of leadership, the French suggested: All France needs to contribute now is another 200 combat engineers.

In tactical terms, when it comes to securing a Middle East conflict zone, that can be referred to as “squat.”

The United Nations, which is trying to salvage what is left of its own self-respect after the utter failure of UNIFIL in Lebanon, is now publicly begging European nations to contribute troops.

To find the last plain-speaking French leader, it is necessary to go back to Napoleon Bonaparte. He said he was going to take over Europe, and proceeded to do so (with the exception of Britain, of course). No, scratch that. He said he was going to bring French liberty and equality to Europe, then crowned himself emperor. Subsequent French history offers us a sordid string of third world colonizations followed by bloody wars to hang on long after the time to relinquish colonies had passed, setting the stage for corrupt government and prolonged conflict in places like Vietnam.

More recently, we’ve seen the naked hypocrisy of Dominic de Villepin in the United Nations, braying about his humanitarian concerns for the Iraqi people, while trying to ensure mass murderer Saddam Hussein remained in power to honor his French contracts.

The shamelessness of France knows no bounds. They have a domestic Arabic population and business interests in the Mideast to satisfy. They desperately want to be taken seriously as a major power. So they sat down with the United States and hammered out a peace plan. Then, before the ink was dry, they shrugged a Gallic shrug.

I wish I could be charitable here and find some good excuses for the French. Ernest Hemingway, who had a soft spot for them, used to like to say, “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk.” But Hemingway, unlike the French, had a sense of honor.

French was once the lingua franca, back when men wore powdered wigs and France was a power to be reckoned with. None of those things are true now. French has been replaced by English as the language of foreign policy, business, tourism, the Internet and just about everything else.

If we, those of us who enjoy conducting business in English rather than say, Chinese or Arabic, want it to stay that way, I’d suggest step one is that we should continue to state clearly our intentions and do what we say we are going to do. Even when the world doesn’t necessarily like what we are saying.

That is our French lesson for the day.

news.bostonherald.com .

 

[Blackleaf]

Re: With doublespeaking France, honor gets lost in translati

A New Muslim Country
By Guy Milliere
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 12, 2003

The Muslim Brotherhood is a forbidden movement in Egypt where it was born. It is a forbidden movement in the rest of the Arab-Muslim world. All the specialists speak of it as a dangerous, integrist Muslim movement that has only one aim: to take the political power and to impose Sharia, the Islamic law to whole countries.

In France, it’s different: the Muslim Brotherhood can exist officially. Under its French name, Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF), it is even an important part of the French Muslim council recently created by the French government. You might think the Muslim Brotherhood goes forward by partly hiding what it wants in order to be accepted. You’d be wrong: it says exactly what it wants. It created many websites in French and in Arabian where everything is explained very clearly. It organize lectures everywhere in France where you can hear speakers saying: “we only have to obey the law of Allah”, or more nicely, “some stupid western intellectuals, mostly Jews, write that nobody has the right to kill in the name of God. They do not understand: It’s a duty to kill in the name of God.”

These speakers are the Ramadan brothers, grandsons of Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who have created a European center of Islamic studies based in Geneva, Switzerland. One of their stars is a man called Yahya Michaux. He is a Christian converted to radical Islam. He is one of the most ferocious and scary orators I have ever heard. His story is interesting: he was a university professor in Belgium till the moment the Belgian police discovered he was writing jihad-based justifications of slaughtering of Algerians. He was fired then and fled to Great Britain where he became immediately professor at Oxford University. Since then, he avoids Belgium where he could be put in jail for his former activities, but he comes to France every week to speak to “good Muslims.”

Every year in April, UOIF organize a national congress in Le Bourget, just north of Paris. This year, more than thirty thousand people came. If you went inside the main meeting hall, you had a shocking view: ten thousand people seated, five thousand men on the right side, sixty per cent of them wearing a thick beard; five thousand women on the left side, almost all of them wearing scarves that cover everything, the hair, the neck, the ears, and let appear only what’s in between the eyes and the chin. The orators speak about the greatness of Allah, about the fact that everything is ruled by the Quran. “Nobody must say we have to respect the secular rule of law, the Quran provides us the rule of law.” There are guests from all the main French political parties, except the rightist National Front. When it’s their turn to speak, they seem too afraid to say anything except: “Islam is one of the greatest accomplishments of civilization.”

On the Congress's last evening, Saturday April 19, Nicolas Sarkozy, chief of the Department of the Interior, came and said he agrees with everything Muslims ask from the French Republic, except one thing: Muslim women will not have the right to have a picture of them with a scarf on their ID. A large boo came from the audience, and Sarkozy could hardly finish his speech. He then left very fast. After he left, the president of UOIF said that to push Muslim women to not wear their scarves would be a way to discriminate against them. He added, without shame or hesitation, that it would the equivalent of the yellow star Jews had to wear in the forties.

Outside the meeting hall, you can find books. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is forbidden in France, but you can find The Sharon Protocol. And the seller will say to you: “Read it, it’s almost the same. Everything is explained, the way Jews want to seize the world and enslave all its people”. If you do not like The Sharon Protocol, you can buy another best seller: a booklet by Muhammad bin S'ad Al-Shwey'ir, a Saudi columnist. It's called The Jews Follow the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and many things are explained very clearly, even the fact that “Jews use human blood for rituals”. Do not say it’s anti-Semitism or immediately somebody will give you the explanation: “We cannot be anti-Semitic. Arabs are Semites, and they cannot have prejudices against Semites.”

UOIF has a student branch called Muslim Students of France. It’s supposed to be a student trade union, but their meetings have always the same object: fight Islamophobia in France, fight the assimilation of Muslims in France and explain to them they do not have to loose their identity, fight against the “Zionist entity” (they never say Israel, because for them Israel does not exist and is just an ugly pustule that will be removed from the maps very soon). They know they have strength and the future is open. Right now, Muslims are around 12 percent of the French population (only 3% of the British population). Within ten years, they will be more than twenty per cent. They will be mostly young, and non-Muslim French people will be mostly old. “Be patient, be wise, time is on our side,” said one of the orators in Le Bourget. The audience answered frantically “Allahu Akbar.” Allah is great.

French socialists politicians have a big problem: “We have been identified with Zionism for too long,” one of them wrote recently. “We have to show much more to the Muslim community we respect it, and we have to show we understand the sufferings of Palestinians and their need to have a state as soon as possible.” French socialist politicians will change the way they speak, and they started to do it already.

But Muslims, and especially radical Muslims are more trusting of Jacques Chirac and his moderate right party. “Chirac knows very well we are the future, and he accepts it completely,” says a document written for the members of UOIF. And I think the document is right. Chirac knows very well radical Muslims are the future. A book has recently been published in France and is on its way to become a best seller. It’s called The Orient of Jacques Chirac, the author, Ahmed Youssef, says “Chirac is more Muslim than many Muslims.” “He acts through feelings, not reason.” And “he respects authority”. “He has been the builder of many bridges between France and the Arab world.”

France will become a Muslim country. French leaders know it. They will never take a decision that could make young radical Muslims angry. It’s one of the reasons why they could not support the United States during the war in Iraq. The results would have been riots in the suburbs, and the French police is ill equipped to face riots. French leaders have no choice except to be the leaders of the Arab-Muslim world. They accepted too many things to go backward now. The rift between France and the United States will become bigger and bigger. France is already the main enemy of western civilization. The most dangerous enemy is always the enemy within, and France is the enemy within. What France has become could have consequences for Europe and for the world. The faster France appears dangerous and powerless, the better.

 

[FiveParadox]

RE: With doublespeaking France, honor gets lost in translati

Hm. Another Blackleaf-patented "C'mon, everyone! Pick'em up yer pitchforks and chase 'dem Frenchmen down the road yonder!"-post. Don't you think it's time to give the British–French rival thing a rest?