Naughty French politician

We read:

"The French Interior Minister faced calls for his resignation last night after he was caught on camera making apparently racist remarks directed at Arabs.

As outrage greeted the video clip on the internet Brice Hortefeux claimed that critics had misinterpreted his quip: “When there’s one that’s all right. It’s when there's a lot of them that there are problems.”

He insisted that he had not been talking about Arabs, as many had assumed, but about Auvergnats — people from the Auvergne region of central France.

The incident happened at a summer congress of the ruling centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) in Seignosse, southwest France, last weekend. Mr Hortefeux is seen in the video posing for a photograph alongside Amine Benalia-Brouch, a member of UMP whose father is Algerian and mother Portuguese.

An unidentified woman says, apparently in reference to Mr Benalia-Brouch’s Muslim background: “He eats pork and he drinks beer.” Mr Hortefeux, 51, cuts in amid laughter as a group of party activists look on: “He doesn’t fit the prototype at all. Not at all. We always need one. When there’s one, that’s all right. It’s when there's a lot of them that there are problems.”

The comment went unnoticed until the video was sent to Le Monde, the French daily newspaper, which posted it on its website last night.

Source

It's all a bit unclear but I initially got the impression that the politician was saying that UNOBSERVANT Muslims were a problem if there were a lot of them. The politician handled it clumsily, though.

I suspect that the fuss arose because most French people DO think that Muslims are best in small doses. The elite immediately thought that the politician was giving voice to the general view, which you are not allowed to do.

Despite being a third-party candidate, the anti-immigration politician Jean Marie Le Pen got more votes than the socialists in the Presidential election before last so I don't think there is much doubt about what the average Frenchman thinks. Le Pen keeps getting fined for what he says but he goes right on saying it. The average Frenchman cannot afford to do that, though. He has to shut up.