Yesterday’s International Herald Tribune included a rambling, incoherent column by Jean Daniel, defending France from anonymous anti-Semitism charges. The article includes this paragraph:
[T]here probably is no other country in the world that displayed as much warm and active sympathy for Israel as France did from 1948 to 1967 (the government) and to 1975 (public opinion). The entire French intelligentsia was profoundly pro-Israeli. Yes, there has been a change in France since then – as there has been in Israel. There exists an Israeli opposition, to which a whole segment of the French political class has rallied. After all, it was not an Arab or a Palestinian or a Frenchman who killed the great Yitzhak Rabin.
Try as we may, we cannot understand the relevance of the last sentence to the rest of the paragraph.
Yet this poorly-argued piece dominated yesterday’s comment page of the International Herald Tribune. In fact, it was translated from the original French for inclusion in the IHT. Did IHT editors believe the thrust of the article compensated for the extremely poor prose?
(Hat tip: Tom Gross)
