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Another “surrender” cliché was found today in a restaurant review penned by Ken Scrudato for BlackBook Media. “Who says the French surrender too easily? Le big shot chef Alain Ducasse, for one, is a Gaul with gall.” (…) “After his eponymous and debut New York restaurant finally raised the white flag in 2007″

Our immediate response was: “Enough with the clichés. A historical fact from sixty years ago does not make a character trait.”

But wait, there’s more! In a previous entry, whilst describing the new Koko hotel in Montréal, Ken Scrudato described French-Canadians as “those artful, Frenchie Quebecois”. The fact the word “Frenchie” is considered “chiefly derogatory” as defined by the Oxford Dictionary seems not to bother neither Ken nor BlackBook Media. Maybe Ken should team up with Bill O’Reilly the next time he reviews a Harlem restaurant.

Putting down the French, no matter how trivial the issue, is just too easy for many journalists, pundits and talking heads.In the last month we were graced with surrender jokes by CBS’s Craig Ferguson, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and “surrender monkey” slurs from a Jonah Goldberg Canadian Mini-Me known as Don Martin.

On Friday, Sean Michaels, a columnist with the British paper The Guardian covered the French Eurovision flap over Sébastien Tellier’s English lyrics by stating: “in true French fashion, (Tellier) appears to have surrendered.” Read the rest of this entry »

Between 1940 and 1945, France was the second most bombed country of the War after Germany. By liberation, the Allies had dropped 600 000 bombs on 1500 cities, towns and villages.

The Allied bombing campaign killed over 67 000 French civilians and wounded tens of thousands more. Most hit were, Boulogne, Clermont-Ferrand, Saint-Etienne, Caen, Le Havre, Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire.

The French understood this was necessary, but anger at civilian deaths over five years could not always be entirely squelched. Despite this, American or British airmen who had been shot down by the Germans over France were NEVER treated with hostility by the civilian population, quite the contrary. Read the rest of this entry »

With Official French Bashing (2003-2007) now as irrelevant as Fox News, “surrender jokes” should have been on the way out. The opposite now seems to be the case with a renewed effort from some columnists and comedy writers, including of all people Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian columnist resorts to Anti-French slurs

We at Miquelon.org, are not interested in editorializing France’s position vis à vis NATO, nor Nicolas Sarkozy’s new commitment to Afghanistan. Political experts and well-versed columnists often discuss the merits of those foreign policy choices at length. However, when a columnist, likely under the pressure of a deadline, resorts to parroting stale clichés and pop culture references borrowed from the likes of Jonah Goldberg, it’s time once again to take a stand. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear America,

Some of you have finally witnessed that Jay Leno is an insensitive, patronizing buffoon.

While interviewing Ryan Phillippe, over his first role as a gay teen on daytime television, Jay repeatedly teased his guest with requests like: “Can you give me your ‘gayest look?’.” Critics are now voicing their concern, most notably Jeff Whitty, who later blogged: “Would you ask a guest to make their ‘blackest face?’ Their ‘Jewiest face?’ Why not?”.

To tell you the truth, America, you could have asked us. We’re the French expatriates, whom years ago knew the embarrassment that is James Douglas Muir Leno!

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The so-called “fair and balanced” news channel, world famous for its frequent and incessant French Bashing, is losing ground and relevancy in America. The channel has been the focus point of a number controversies lately, including Bill O’Reilly’s astonishment over the civility of the patrons of a Harlem restaurant and his comments over starting a “lynching party” against Michelle Obama. These and other controversies are for some, including Time Magazine, signs of a growing irrelevancy in today’s political post-Bush landscape.

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