Friday, March 02, 2007

There he goes again

Well, well, well. Just when one might have thought that Jean-Marie Le Pen had carefully retooled his political strategy -- less ranting about Arab immigrants, with said ranting redirected towards the Chinese, a robust anti-Iraq war position, and the not unreasonable claim that the US was attaching a strange weight to 9/11 versus the chaos in Iraq -- out pops the old Le Pen with some classic innuendo.

Making the obligatory stop of all presidential candidates before the hunters' convention (a ritual that will come as news to American right-wingers), Le Pen said --

Dans le Marais de Paris, on peut chasser le chapon sans date d'ouverture ou de fermeture, mais dans le marais de Picardie, on ne peut chasser le canard en février

which to our pretty bad franglais, translates as

In the Marais in Paris, you can hunt capon year round, but in the Picardy marsh, you can't hunt duck in February.

Le Pen is universally assumed to be playing on the image of the Marais as having a concentration of young gay men, in which context his carefully venomous choice of word to describe the urban prey makes extra sense. Of course the Marais is also known as a historically Jewish area, so in his mind he got even more points for that one.

[Note: the statement was made on 20th February but only seems to have broken as a story yesterday, 2nd March]

No comments: