Mark Steyn has a column that puzzles over France's foreign policy, particularly in relation to the Middle East. It has some snippets from history that I did not know about:
....it’s sobering to be reminded that the French were doing the Israelis-are-the-new-Nazis shtick within ten minutes of the end of the Second World War. Jews, wrote the consul-general Rene Neuville, in a lengthy cable from Jerusalem in 1947, are “racist through and through… quite as much as their German persecutors”. The dispatches of Pierre Landy, French consul in Haifa, rely heavily on “the Israeli Gestapo” and similar formulations. In public the political class was usually more circumspect, though not always. President de Gaulle famously raged at a press conference that the Jews were “an elite people, self-assured and domineering” with “a burning ambition for conquest”. In the ensuing controversy, M le President assured the Chief Rabbi that he’d meant it as a compliment.
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