Emmanuel Macron a few weeks ago was declaring that Lebanon’s government needs reforming. Though married to his ex-teacher, it seems nobody has told him how France and Britain seized territories from the Ottoman Empire, exploited them for their own purposes, murdered the inhabitants, imposed borders without consulting the survivors and created the chaos that has convulsed the region for the past century and may well have created a powder keg which could destroy life on earth.
French bigotry, reactionary and Catholic, favoured the small Catholic minority in Lebanon. One lot of bigots switched places in Paris and different communities in Lebanon were smiled on, but otherwise life was not made any the more prosperous, secure or settled.
Perhaps Madame Macron may remember when France, together with Britain and in league with Israel ,attacked Egypt in 1956, or when police in Paris murdered hundreds of North Africans and threw their bodies in the Seine in 1961, during the Presidency of Charles de Gaulle. Maybe she appreciates the fact that the Prefect of Police involved had form in this area. During the Presidency of Marshal Petain and the Premiership of Pierre Laval, the same official rounded up Jews and handed them over to the Germans for extermination in death camps.
If President Macron visits French graveyards from the First World War, he may find numerous headstones engraved with a Crescent and the legend “MORT POUR LA FRANCE.” When de Gaulle, broadcasting from London, appealed for recruits to join the Free French, the response of French Christians was relatively poor, but Moslems from North Africa rallied to his support. De Gaulle himself said he got most of his support from “Wogs” or the French equivalent of that term.
The bigots who called for Captain Dreyfus’s execution ran a magazine called Free Speech.
The bigots who publish Charlie Hebdo use the same slogan.
They deliberately cause offence to Moslem believers and hypocritically claim enlightenment values of equality and fraternity.
A teacher who indoctrinates his pupils with hatred for the faith of their classmates and contempt for those classmates, deserves imprisonment and should be tolerated in a classroom even less than one who seduces their pupils.
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