The French Quotes
Chvalkovsky had just returned from Berlin where he had met with Hitler and German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. He related the meeting to the French Ambassador who reported it to the French Foreign Minister by letter.
What makes this quotation particularly funny is that “entrepreneur” is not originally an English word but was borrowed from the French. However, probably what the president was trying to express is that the French act as if they had not word or concept as they have many economic policies that discourage entrepreneurship. The President while a bright man has never been particularly gifted as an intellectual or an orator, becomes the butt of humor with this quotation. There are Bush supporters who challenge the fact that Bush actually made such a gaff, and there has been no other verification other than Baroness Williams.
Because of the classic historical anti-Semitism and discrimination, Jews were barred from land ownership and as a result few were farmers or had agricultural experience in their families. They were tradesmen, artisans, professionals in Europe. So amongst Jews and non Jews alike the notion of Jews settling the land of Palestine and farming it or trapping, the way the Boers had in South Africa or the French in Canada, was not a very credible image. The Zionists, realizing this potential weakness, placed strong emphasis on agriculture, developed the agricultural kibbutz concept and encouraged Jews to become farmers. The effort was so successful that almost all the leading early Zionist immigrants to Palestine became farmers. When independence came to Israel, the Jewish agriculture was more productive than most of that in Europe and almost on a par with small farms in the United States. The Israelis were known for “making the desert bloom.
Nguyen Ai Quoc was early pseudonym. It was many years and millions of combatants sacrificed, but the Vietnamese resistance finally won.
Attacked by so many after years of service, he was finally defeated.
This is a complaint similar to that made by anti-immigrant Americans. France, like most other countries of the world, has never had the large scale immigration of today, nor have they had such a large proportion of the same ethnicity at once—in this case, Muslim North Africans. There were never, before the last decades, enough immigrants of any ethnicity in France to have a choice of maintaining their traditional languages and culture and not learning French or otherwise assimilating. America, in contrast, had large immigrations of different ethnicities, and despite the erroneous beliefs of immigration opponents, these blocs of immigrants have wherever there was sufficient density—usually cities, they maintained their old language and other customs. However, their children and the next generation in almost all cases have abandoned the language and many of the customs of the old country. This was true of the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the European Jews, the Russian Jews, the Scandinavians’, and the Hispanics with their different cultures.
