A TV grab
made from French TV channel France 2 on November 4, 2011 shows US president
Barack Obama (R) and his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy during their joint
appearance for a pre-recorded interview at the end of the G20 meeting of Cannes
(AFP Photo / France 2)
No comment. Absolutely none. This is the first time I have read anything decent about these two world leaders. Not that it raises them much in my estimation too much!
November 8, 2011
The presidents of America
and France have aired complaints about the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, in the course of a private conversation overhead by journalists,
reports say. President Sarkozy went so far as to call Netanyahu a liar.
“I can’t stand him!” the Frenchman told his American counterpart in a would-be confidential discussion.Obama’s reply was “You're fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!”
The exchange is alleged
to have happened on Monday on the fringes of the G20 summit, following a media
conference. According to the French website Arret Sur Images, the
private conversation between the two was broadcast to a half-dozen-strong press
crowd when microphones were accidentally left switched on.
The two leaders first
discussed France’s vote in favor of Palestine’s accession to the UNESCO, which
came as a surprise to the US, which opposed the move, the report says. The pair
went on to pursue an undiplomatic discussion of Netanyahu’s personality.
The report further
alleges that the journalists, who involuntarily witnessed the conversation,
decided not to make it public due to its sensitive nature.
The tensions between the
Israeli leader and some of his Western partners, including Obama, are no big
secret, but the differences have not been brought to the public eye in such
blunt terms before.
The website does not
reveal the identity of the journalists who leaked the story.
Politico author Ben Smith
compared the exposé to the WikiLeaks’ “Cablegate revelations”: "Things
that are widely understood, but not supposed to be spoken aloud."
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