France: "It's when there are a lot of them that there are problems"

France: "It's when there are a lot of them that there are problems"


Video here.


France's interior minister sparked a storm of protest and accusations of racism Thursday after a video showed him making an apparently derogatory joke about French citizens of Arab origin.


"When there's one, it's OK," Brice Hortefeux, a key minister in President Nicolas Sarkozy's government, said in the film posted on Le Monde newspaper's site that rapidly became an online hit on a host of video websites.


"It's when there are a lot of them that there are problems," he said in the film Le Monde said shows him getting ready to pose for a photo with a young man from France's large community of Arab origin.


The young man, referred to as Amin, is seen in the middle of a small group of laughing and joking activists from Sarkozy's UMP party at the party's summer gathering in Seignosse in southwest France on September 5.


One woman can be heard saying about the man, who is also seen laughing and apparently enjoying himself: "He eats pork, he drinks beer."


To which Hortefeux replies: "He doesn't correspond at all to the prototype." He then goes on to make his comment that "when there are a lot of them that there are problems."


The Socialists, the main opposition party, called for Hortefeux's resignation and described the comments as "shameful and unspeakable."

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And the young activist himself told Le Monde that the minister's comments had been taken out of context.


"It's disgraceful. I am Arab but he completely respected me, it wasn't at all out of place. And I do not consider that it was a blunder," said the man, who was not named by the newspaper.


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Source: France24 (English)

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