SubscribeJe ne suis ni pour saddam, ni pour bush, ni pour chirac, ni pour les communistes, ni pour dieu, ni pour la palestine ni pour israël, ni pour l'europe, ni pour la corse...('I'm not for saddam or bush or [...] I'm the Human, a particular animal who has learned how to destroy himself!')
Je suis l'Humain, animal particulier qui a appris à s'autodétruire!
Our two countries are united by a friendship that goes back more than 200 years which makes France the oldest ally of the United States.This is meaningless--David Sedaris, who is a fixture on NPR's This American Life, now lives in Paris. Interviewed recently by host Ira Glass, he said there was no animosity or anger displayed towards Americans or British on the part of the French, no matter how they felt about America or Britain. They were aware of our ridiculous scapegoating, freedom fries and so forth, but so far no was speaking of renting a copy of Liberty Gigolo or Freedom Graffiti. The French, unlike us evidently, can tell the difference between a government and a people. The defilement of the graves no more represents the French than does our rising rate of recent hate crimes against foreigners who look even vaguely mid-Eastern represent us. In short, what jonmc said.
Based on solidarity that has never failed, from the battlefields of Yorktown to the beaches of Normandy and through all the crises of the past half century, the friendship between our two countries is especially strong because it is rooted in shared values. The American dream of the Founding Fathers melds readily with the ideals of the French Revolution. It is no accident that an American woman and a Frenchman, Eleanor Roosevelt and René Cassin, together wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights more than 50 years ago.
This community of values is today our most precious asset enabling our two countries together to address the important common challenges facing them, foremost among them terrorism. After the horrific attacks that so wounded America, the very deep solidarity between France and the United States illustrates once again the lesson of our common history--that whenever the essential is at issue, whenever the values underlying our civilization are threatened, our two countries are naturally at the other's side in the same cause. As President Chirac said when he came to the United States a few days after the September 11 attacks, "France will be in the front line in the combat against international terrorist networks, shoulder to shoulder with America and its ally for ever."
The following pages give some idea, albeit a necessarily incomplete one, of the wealth of ties between France and the United States."
The Embassy of France
Plus impressionnant encore est le faible degré de solidarité des Français avec les Etats-Unis et la Grande-Bretagne. Un tiers d'entre eux seulement (34 %) répondent que, dans ce conflit, ils se sentent " plutôt du côté des Etats-Unis et des Anglais" et ce pourcentage est systématiquement inférieur à la majorité, même chez les sympathisants de droite (44 %) et chez les plus âgés (47 % chez les plus de 70 ans). A l'inverse, un quart des sondés se déclarent " plutôt du côté de l'Irak" et jusqu'à 30 % chez les moins de 35 ans. Enfin, 31 % des personnes interrogées disent ne se sentir proches d'aucun des deux camps et 10 % ne se prononcent pas.
rswst8 : chirac barely beat out an openly anti-semitic candidate in the last election, who got almost 20% of the vote.true, he's an equal opportunity racist, i was going to mention that but i hate to be long-winded. i don't think it's misleading, merely incomplete.
To describe Lepen as simply anti-semitic is like describing the KKK as anti-catholic. It's true but misleading. Lepen got his votes principally because he was anti-immigrant and anti-Arab. And the election result was 80-20 (hardly barely).
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posted by Yelling At Nothing at 6:08 PM on April 1, 2003