I watched Sarkozy’s speech to Congress on C-Span last night and it brought tears to my eyes. That guy has some good writers.
Sarkozy summoned us to what is great in America. He talked about American individuality and daring, he told us what Duke Ellington and Marilyn Monroe had meant to him, and he said that a black grandson of slaves had forced America to be true to its promise: Martin Luther King. That brought the pols to their feet!
He also reminded us what we did in the good war, WW2, when we liberated Europe. We freed his parents’ generation. He grew up reading the letters home of 20-year-old American boys who were about to die for him. He told us about Eisenhower’s speech to his soldiers before D-Day. He said, "The eyes of the world are upon you." They were taking a stand for freedom. Wow. I would have fought my guts out, too. And Sarkozy said that France was all for the war in Afghanistan.
He skipped right over Iraq, saying that we had our "disagreements." But France was with us in the war against terror.
There’s an Israel angle here. Friendship contains disagreement. It’s happened in my strongest friendships. Friends grow apart, friends sometimes disapprove of each other; but your good friends maintain a connection. France is seen as hard on Israel now, but time was when France helped Israel fight Nassar in the Sinai, and when France helped Israel get nukes. I believe the French would fight if anyone tried to push the Jews into the sea. Here, the Israel lobby has maintained a steadfastness in American support for Israel that is unhealthy. There’s no room. You’d think that 40 years of illegal settlements and now a confiscatory apartheid "security fence" might have precipitated some distance, some sanctions, some angry words between our countries. No. The settlements proliferate, and we have to stick by Israel. That’s not what friends do.
