PrintMacron's criticism of Israel is hypocritical
Liberté, égalité, fraternité is the motto of France, and in 1958, it was written into the French constitution. Yet its early use was nothing to be proud of: It began among the rallying cries of the French Revolution’s frenzy of terror, with its guillotine punishments of some 15,000 to 17,000 people, based on quick opinions and no due process.
But these days, that ugly backdrop seems to be forgotten and hypocrisy has taken its place.
France's president Macron, Emmanuel Macron, says he's “outraged” at Israel for a mistake in a war not of Israel’s making.
If France had to be at war now because they were invaded how would Macron fight? Really. How?
Israel is not to be blamed for mistakes in the heat of battle.
For years, thousands of missiles have been fired upon Israel, so many that the world’s internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia, even has an entry just for missiles rained down on Israel year by year.
Macron likes to make declarations, though.
Immediately following the October 7 attacks, he called the invasion of Israel by Hamas the “largest antisemitic massacre of our century.”
Which isn't the tune he's singing now.
If Macron were overseeing the liberation of France in World War II, would he not have landed at Normandy for fear of killing innocent French civilians and the various nationalities of Nazi conscripted laborers?
In World War I, U.S. doughboys once chanted, “Lafayette we are here” in a reference to the great assistance the Marquis de Lafayette gave the U.S. during its own revolutionary war.
But it's also worth remembering that Lafayette then returned to France, and within a few years had to flee because he would not align his thinking with the murderous frenzy of mob rule in revolutionary France and had been threatened with arrest by this mob, with many of his political allies sent to the guillotine.
Our own State Department has written that anti-semitism may be the most long-running prejudice in all of world history.
The nations that recognized the State of Israel after WWII likely made their decisions influenced by the horror of the Nazis' industrial scale genocide of the Jewish people as well as other non-approved peoples, but the world is ever a complex place and politicians too often justify Jonathan Swift lamenting that “whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”
Maybe Macron can learn this lesson instead of telling Israel what to do.
Image: www.kremlin.ru / Пресс-служба Президента Российской Федерации (cropped) // CC BY 4.0 DEED
