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A nation of busybodies
By Benny Ziffer
Tags: Israel News, gays, France

French Minister of Culture Frederic Mitterrand is a declared homosexual. That in itself is reason to envy France, where a person's sexual inclinations make no difference when he serves in a senior government position. Many years of education for tolerance have done their job. Just as we used to smoke everywhere and today we have become accustomed to respecting the right of others to breathe clean air - in the same way, people have apparently learned to respect different sexual inclinations. However, in this respect, in Israel, we still have a long way to go: The idea of a gay person sitting with ministers around the cabinet table is a wild fantasy. Not because the ministers are narrow-minded, but because Israeli society as a whole is still generations behind France when it comes to tolerance.

In 2005 Mitterrand published a book called "The Bad Life," in which he described how he paid money to sleep with boys in Thailand. The truth is that he also writes about other things in that book, like sleeping with boys in North Africa under the same circumstances. This was enough to spur Marine Le Pen, a member of France's extreme right-wing party, to attack Nicolas Sarkozy's government for allowing a man who buys the sexual services of boys to serve as minister of culture. A week ago France was in an uproar surrounding the affair, albeit momentarily.

The latest news on the Mitterrand-and-his-boys front is that on Wednesday, at a cabinet meeting, Sarkozy gave his blessing to the ministers who supported their beleaguered colleague, and declared: "When there is an eruption of sewage and filth, we must wait until it passes."
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Here is another reason to envy France: Its president in effect declared that if two offenses are weighed against each other to determine which is more serious - i.e., purchasing pedophilic sexual services, or self-righteousness and hypocrisy and sticking one's nose into people's private sex lives - the latter trio is worse, although the pedophilia issue is a not strictly a matter of one's private sex life.

There is nothing more alien than this to the Israeli mentality: Here, sticking one's nose into the private lives of famous people is a divine commandment. And it is justified by the excuse that because they are public figures, they must serve as an example to others in their private behavior as well.

Had a case such as Mitterrand's come to light here, all the television channels would have ordered public opinion polls on the question: "Is it right for an Israeli minister to pay to have sex in Thailand?" Then they would present a graph showing the percentages of support or lack thereof for the sex-industry using minister.

After the death a year ago of Austrian politician Joerg Haider in an accident caused by drunken driving after he attended a party for gays, I spoke with a respected Austrian professor of my acquaintance about the circumstances of the death. He was surprised that I attributed so much importance to the assumption that Haider was gay. In his opinion, the deceased was an excellent, seasoned politician and it was a shame he died as he did. I felt tremendous embarrassment at the time for revealing myself, in all my disgrace, as a scion of a nation of busybodies who never learned that among cultured people, a person's sexual inclinations make no difference. And, furthermore, that a person was exhibiting self-righteousness when he asked: "How can the fact that he was gay be reconciled with the fact that he was a chauvinist and anti-Semite?"

Something similar happened last week in Egypt. The newspaper Al Balagh al Jadid thought it had a tremendous scoop when publishing the names of three famous Egyptian TV stars who participated in a gay sex party in a suite in the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo. Logic says that the police would swoop down on the people at the party and arrest them, since Egypt, as we know, is a benighted Islamic country. But that was not the case: It was the newspaper that was punished. It was closed by court order. Because a person's sexual inclinations are his private affair. Even in Egypt, it turns out, they sometimes judge inquisitiveness and self-righteousness more severely than we do.

All these things have more than one connection to the latest scandal which has our self-righteous country up in arms: the affair of the million shekels spent on the trip by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, his entourage and other guests to the Paris air show. It's true that this is a scandalous expense, but what is far more scandalous than the expense is the knee-jerk self-righteousness of the reactions. As soon as the state comptroller's report on this affair reached the media, it was clear that every self-respecting citizen would be walking around with a worried look on his face, expressing something like, "What has this country come to?"

Does the fate of the country really matter to every one of those worried-looking citizens? I'll bet that, in fact, they are mainly tortured by the question of why they don't get such perks.
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