Israellycool

Looks like we have entrusted our security to the Village People.

French soldiers from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).(AFP/Dominique Faget)

Update: I knew it looked familar..

The Associated Press has gone to the dogs.

French United Nations peacekeeper Staff Sgt. Sebastien Moity of the Dog Handler Squad unit greets Japp, a Malinois shepherd dog, during a training session in Naqura, headquarters of United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon, or UNIFIL, Friday, Sept. 8, 2006. The dogs are trained to attack but have been used during the recent 34-day long Hezbollah-Israel war to search for people in the rubble of Tyre. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

I told you the French were anti-Semites.

Not many news reports cry out “blog post” like this one.

French try not to be so rude

AS Parisians crowd to the beaches in August, tourists are descending on the City of Light in droves, undeterred by a recent survey highlighting complaints that visitors get the cold shoulder from locals.

The most visited country in the world, France received 76 million tourists last year, with Asians making up a growing proportion of those who came from non-European countries and 50,000 visitors jetting over every month from China alone.

All this despite stereotyped images of rude waiters, bored shop assistants and impatient Parisians all too ready to give nervous tourists the brush off in rapid French.

“French hospitality doesn’t always have a good reputation,” says tour guide Dalanda Diallo, leading a group on a “bateau mouche” tourist boat on the river Seine in Paris.

“We get some feedback from tourists who have visited us before, and in general they tell us that the French are cold and not very welcoming ‚Äì and sometimes it is true,” she said.

“But it is a generalisation. There are also French people who are very welcoming.”

France has always been a tourist magnet ‚Äì its capital Paris is considered one of the world’s most beautiful cities and its varied countryside and cuisine are bywords for good living and the finer things in life.

The only sticking point has long been the way tourists see the French themselves.

The latest research by the pollsters IPSOS shows that the one thing most visitors complain about is that they are not made to feel welcome.

“They’re good but they’re very reserved,” said Brian Peters, a 40 year-old dentist visiting from Santa Barbara in California. “It takes a while to warm up to them.”

Alarmed by the findings, the Government commissioned a special report to try to make improvements.

“Our competitors are benefiting from the bad reputation of our welcome,” the report said, noting that France risked slipping behind countries like Britain or Italy.

As well as smartening up Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport and improving training for tourism professionals, the report recommended encouraging ordinary French people to improve their welcome of foreign visitors.

“A taste for service which is not servile, a sense of a team effort necessary for the international success of France Ltd, have to be revived,” it said.

I applaud this as a welcome, overdue development. But I won’t get carried away just yet. After all, as a wise man being once said: “Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

..is this one:

French are rudest, most boring people on earth: British poll

..since it sums up what most of us have known for so long.

But even though the headline does not teach you anything new, I suggest you read the article, if only for the *shock*horror* reaction of the French.

The French have been voted the world’s most unfriendly nation by a landslide in a new British poll published. They were also voted the most boring and most ungenerous.

—- 

French founder, Jerome Touze, told the papers he had been stunned by the thumping condemnation of his compatriots and sought to blame it on Gallic love-struck sulking.

“I had no idea that the French would emerge as such an unfriendly country,” he said.

“I think our romantic ‘moodiness’ is misunderstood and I will be sure to pass on the message to my family and friends back in France to be a bit more cheerful to tourists in the future.”

You do that.

Israellycool reader Grumpy Troll has given some more insight into the French media’s coverage of the murder of Ilan Halimi. 

Here in France, the religion of Ilan Halimi’s killers is virtually unreported. No major French news agency has revealed that the murderers recited the Qur’an in calls to the family. There has only been Nicolas Sarkozy to say, at the National Assembly, that the murderers supported the Palestinian cause, an unreported fact. Don’t want to offend our peaceful Muslim community, do we? The one that called Sarkozy a “dirty Jew” during the riots.

There is, very much, a problem in France. If it had been a Jew killing a Muslim, there is no doubt that the media wouldn’t have missed the “detail”.

On Sunday, tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of the city of lights in a huge protest against anti-Semitism. It seems, however, that one demonstration, regardless of how big it was, is not enough to eradicate the ugly phenomenon.

 

The Le Parisien newspaper revealed Tuesday that a schoolteacher seeking to punish a Jewish student proposed that the boy “go to a furnace,” Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported Wednesday.

 

The incident took place about a month ago at one of Paris’ prestigious catholic school. During a physics class, a 10th grade student was busy chatting with his classmate.

 

The teacher, named Pierre, asked the Jewish youth to leave the classroom and wait in the yard, which the students and teachers refer to as “the fridge” because of the intense cold that prevails there during the winter.

 

But the punishment apparently did not suffice, and just before the student left the classroom the teacher told him that “if you don‚Äôt like it in the fridge, there is always room for you in the furnace.”

 

A number of days later, the student’s parents filed a criminal complaint to the police, as well as a complaint to the supervisor of Paris’ education establishment.

Two supervisors were sent to the school and began questioning the students and teachers.

 

The French word for “furnace” (four) bears a highly emotionally charged connotation in France. Therefore, many of the Jewish community members refuse to view the teacher’s remark toward a Jewish student as an innocent slip of the tongue.

French President Jacques Chirac, his prime minister and other politicians joined about 1,000 people at a Paris synagogue, for the memoral service of Ilan Halimi, the young French Jew murdered by Muslims because he was Jewish.

I can’t say that I am particularly touched by photos like this one of Chirac at the synagogue..

..because for every photo like this one, there are about 1,000 like this:

It would also help if he bothered doing anything about Muslim anti-Semitism, the most dangerous type existing in the world, and which is not related to the Middle East conflict, except for the fact that it is the root cause of it.

Anyway, for now I’m done talking about France, that sh*tty, little country.

Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jew from Paris, was recently kidnapped, tortured and brutally murdered. Almost immediately, the French police ruled out anti-Semitism as the motive, despite a number of important facts:

Forget the perception of France as a land of sexual fulfilment. The sad truth exposed in a new report shows that when it comes to performance in bed, the French have nothing to crow about.

 

They may talk a good game. As far as sex in the cinema, literature and advertising is concerned, there is no beating them. Yet the popular image of the French as the masters of all things sexual - consider the terms “French letter” and “French kissing” - is entirely misguided.

 

Far from being obsessed with sex, almost half of French people living alone (49.5 per cent) could not care less if they went without sex for months on end; 23 per cent said they would be “relieved” not to have sex for several months. Half the population did not associate sex with pleasure.

 

The study, published in January’s Journal of Sexual Medicine by a group of French sexologists, confirmed other research showing that for all their reputation as serial seducers, the French are far from “swimming”, as one commentator put it, “in libidinous ecstasy”.

 

Instead, only half of men and even fewer women (45 per cent) expressed “relative satisfaction” with their sex life. Only one-third of men did not wish to change their sex life and a quarter complained of a “diminution of sexual desire”.

 

A pitiful 5.6 per cent of men (and 8 per cent of women) expressed satisfaction with the “frequency of intercourse”.  

In the towns of Aulnay-sous-Bois and Sevran, gangs of stone-throwing youths were met by police firing disabling rubber “flash-balls” to disperse them.

Did you know there is such a thing as the “French Pig Squealing Championships”?

Yohann and Olivier Roussel’s performance climaxed in a cacophony of oinks and grunts, unleashing an explosion of applause. But it was only after lengthy jury deliberations that their hopes were confirmed - the father-and-son team were France’s official Pig-Squealing Champions for 2005.

 

The judges, headed by a former champion, had been impressed by their vocal imitations of pigs in all four of the required categories, reflecting key milestones of porcine existence: from noisy farmyard birth to death under the knife, via suckling and - inevitably - mating.