France’s Macron and the Law of the Jungle

Of all the speeches that hit the headlines during the U.N. General Assembly—President Trump's, Iranian president Pezeshkian's, Prime Minister Netanyahu's, the Jordanian king's—the one that was most stunning came from the president of France, Emmanuel Macron.

There was a kerfuffle of press attention around Macron's false claim that the Hamas terrorist group was not active in the West Bank. The American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, set the record straight on that one. "Hard to imagine a more out of touch with reality speech than Macron at UN," Huckabee said, reposting a response by an Israeli minister, Amichai Chikli. "Since 1990, Hamas has carried out more than 80 lethal terrorist attacks originating in or directed from Judea and Samaria, murdering more than 350 Israeli civilians," Chikli said. The French anonymously claimed that Macron's remarks had been mistranslated, but that claim is not credible.

Macron's Hamas blunder was a symptom of a French speech that was out of touch with reality in a much bigger way.

Start with the main framing, as Macron put it: "The question we must answer is very simple. The question is, do we want to live under this state of affairs with a return to the law of the jungle? Or do we want to live in a civilized international society?"