French Foreign Minister Barrot Dodges Question About Failure to Enforce ICJ Order Against Israel
During a media stakeout at the United Nations last Wednesday, journalist Sam Husseini confronted French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot about his country’s failure to properly implement the ICJ’s orders in the genocide case against Israel.
“You and most of the rest of the Security Council voted for a US resolution that FALSELY claimed that Israel agreed to a ceasefire resolution. Didn’t that in effect give Israel a green light for further aggression?”
Barrot answered in French — even though he’s fully fluent in English and answered the previous question in English — making it impossible for Sam (and other reporters) to follow up, and then walked off.
Sam: “Can you please give an English response?? You’re literally speaking a different language!”
Below are a few quick examples of Barrot speaking English. He sometimes does entire events and interviews in English:
Barrot also made a brief (~90 second) statement in French when he first approached the podium.
Here’s a transcript and translation of that, created by feeding the audio into Google Translate:
“[The French government likes] to act like they are unhappy about Israel’s attacks on Lebanon,” Sam wrote on X on Monday night, “but they went along with ridiculous US resolution of June 10 instead of implementing the orders of the ICJ, as the Security Council should have done.”
“This effectively gave Israel permission for more and more violence,” he added. “And his non-answer is further indictment of France’s position.”
Sam reached out to the UN and ultimately received the following translation, which he calls “boilerplate diplo-gibberish”:
“The resolutions of the Security Council are the basis of the platform we are developing with our American partners, and I believe that on the contrary, it was very useful to convene this emergency meeting of the Security Council, which obviously enabled everyone to express their views, and for the international community to call for a ceasefire as soon as possible.”…
“[This] in no way responds to my question,” Sam said on X.
Back in June, he had questioned US State Dept spokesman Matthew Miller about UN Security Council Resolution 2735 — the same resolution he asked Barrot about — and the apparent ulterior motives behind it:
WATCH: Journalist @samhusseini questions the State Dept about the timing of the Biden admin's UNSC “ceasefire” resolution earlier this month, after having vetoed multiple previous ones
— Decensored News (@decensorednews) June 26, 2024
“It came just after the latest orders from the ICJ on May 24th,” Sam notes… orders which… pic.twitter.com/xMz7VIB8lE
“After the May 24 International Court of Justice orders telling Israel to stop its invasion of Rafah, the Algerians put forward a UN Security Council resolution to implement that order,” Sam wrote at the time. “Biden’s phony ‘ceasefire’ plan, which he claimed was an Israel plan, sabotaged that.”
Sam provided further context and analysis regarding Resolution 2735 in an article published in July.
“In a nutshell, the Biden administration hijacked the rhetoric of ‘ceasefire’ to obstruct the ICJ orders and international law,” he wrote.
Russia had abstained from voting on Resolution 2735 because, according to their UN ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy, they had “the most serious doubts” regarding its “feasibility”—doubts which, he said in August, were ultimately “confirmed”:
“[The resolution] contained three phases with extremely ambitious plans, from a comprehensive ceasefire to the start of a full-scale reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Not a single one of these phases has materialized. Now, they all look absolutely surrealistic. And, unfortunately, the Security Council signed up for this surrealism…”
“But what’s worse than anything is that it signed up to a blatant lie: the first operative paragraph stated that Israel agreed to the proposed conditions of the ‘deal.’ Israel’s representatives on many occasions, including in this room, said directly that they did NOT agree to it…”
“Moreover, the entire rhetoric of Israeli officials shows that Israel has no intentions at all to stop its military operation, whatever the position of the Security Council may be…”
“So what result, then, came from—to quote our American colleagues—their ‘active’ and ‘assertive’ diplomacy on the ground to bringing the parties to agreement, which the Security Council was told it should not interfere with?… We are not aware of any progress at all. The only ‘anti-result’ since the adoption of Resolution 2735 was the blatant, provocative assassination of the main negotiator for Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh – the former Palestinian prime minister – during his visit to Tehran…”
