Posted on 07/18/2004 6:18:18 PM PDT by O.C. - Old Cracker
PARIS (Reuters) - France sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday after he urged French Jews to emigrate immediately to Israel to escape what he called "the wildest anti-Semitism."
Branding Sharon's language "unacceptable," a French Foreign Ministry spokesman said Paris had demanded an explanation.
France, home to western Europe's biggest Jewish and Muslim communities, has been troubled by attacks on Jewish people and property in recent years, some of it blamed on youths of North African origin angered by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Sharon, who regularly calls on all the world's Jews to migrate to Israel, acknowledged in a speech to Jewish leaders in Jerusalem that the French government was making efforts to stem anti-Semitism. But he added that the threat was so grave that French Jews should head for Israel without delay.
"If I have to advise our brothers in France, I'll tell them one thing -- move to Israel, as early as possible. I say that to Jews all around the world, but there (in France) I think it's a must and they have to move immediately," Sharon said.
The French spokesman said: "We have been informed of comments made today by Sharon calling on the Jews of France to emigrate to Israel.
"We immediately made contact with the Israeli authorities to ask for an explanation of these unacceptable comments."
Some 600,000 Jews and five million Muslims form part of France's population of 60 million.
The French Interior Ministry registered 67 attacks on Jews or their property and 160 threats against Jews in the first quarter of this year compared with 42 attacks and 191 threats in the last three months of 2003.
(Additional reporting by Megan Goldin in Jerusalem)
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07/18/2004 19:44
I don't understand why you're so adamant about pointing out the obvious. To the point where you have to scream in capital letters. Yes, we all know that boycotts aren't done to save money. Obvious. Tautological. Unimportant to the point of being irrelevant.
Your loud insistence in emphasizing this utterly uninteresting tautology makes me wonder if you don't have another agenda. Perhaps what you're really doing is trying to talk us out of boycotting France. Is that true?
Are you a closet Francophile?
(I know the question will make you angry, but nothing else I can think of explains your obsession with explaining that which needs no explanation. Yes. We get it. You don't make money holding boycotts. Got it.)
I made no economic analysis. None. I said simply this:
There are more important things than economics. You appear to agree with that statement in the middle of each of your posts but by the end of each post you come around to your uninspiring conclusion that boycotts are unsound economics.
For the record: Boycotts worked against South Africa and would work against France if more people participated.
If Americans completely stopped visiting France, it would hurt their economy. You say it would also hurt American tourists. Because they'd be making something other than a "sound economic decision". But the desire to tour France is not an "economic decision" in the first place, but a life-style/quality-of-life decision. Pure economics would mean you only go to work, home, school, grocery store, etc. No pleasure travel at all.
So let's stop talking about "pure economics", ok? There's no such thing. Not with free people in a free country. We do things we like to do because we feel like doing them and that's the way we act all the time. Economics is involved, but in some cases only peripherally, as in the case of tourism. (We try to get a good travel deal to our destination, but we don't choose our destination based on price alone. Otherwise, we'd only visit Iowa.)
So if you post on this subject again, please don't end your post with a little lecture-byte on personal economics.
The fact is, none of us have to visit France ever again. Our household budgets will survive such a decision. There are thousands of other cool places on the planet to go.
If we all stuck together on this, not only would the French suffer (economically), but we'd all be doing the right thing.
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