In a televised interview with OTV, Lebanese MP Roger Azar made an extremely baffling mistake when he reported an infamous incident of the last queen of France, Marie Antoinette.
MP Azar was discussing how he relates to people’s poor living conditions, insinuating that he had previously gone through similar experiences in his life.
“I know what it feels when a parent is not able to pay tuition for their kids,” Azar said during the interview. “I know what it feels like not to have basic necessities at your home, because I’ve been through that myself.”
“I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” he explained. “Not like old days when they told Marie-Rose from Achrafieh that flour and bread have disappeared, she replied with: Let them eat cake.”
Azar just muddled up different times and spaces when blaming that legendary lack of empathy towards the poor people on a Lebanese woman.
This infamous historical incident had happened in the 18th century in France, and not in Lebanon, and by the infamous Queen Marie Antoinette, and certainly not by a Lebanese woman in Achrafieh.
France, back then, was a monarchy and the nation was suffering from hunger, all while the Queen lived in extreme opulence and spent ostentatiously. At being told that her French subjects are hungry for lacking bread, she allegedly sniffed, “So let them eat cake.”
With that thoughtless remark, the French queen became a hated symbol of the corrupt and inconsiderate monarchy and caused her to (literally) lose her head during the French revolution.
Somehow, MP Azar really believed that it was a certain Marie Rose from Ashrafieh, whoever that is, who is to blame for that thoughtless stance.
When the TV host tried to correct him, saying “Marie Antoinette,” Azar laughed and said, “With all my due respect to the women of Achrafieh” and went on to maintain, even more confusingly, “but she was in Ashrafieh, it is said that she existed in Achrafieh.”
At that point, the FPM politician still insisted that she was a woman living in Achrafieh.
The Lebanese people caught him on that and quickly poked fun at him on social media as the video is still going viral.
One Twitter user wrote: “Like what the Aounist MP Roger Azar said, this is a picture of Marie [in Beirut] waiting for her sandwich.”
“It is said that Marie Antoinette sank her husband Louis XVI and left her palace in Versailles and settled down in Sursock Palace,” a Twitter user teased.
Someone even posted an extract of a movie of the French Queen, captioning it: “We present you exclusive shots of the visit of Marie Antoinette to Achrafieh.”
“How did people vote for these people?” A twitter user asked in response to the video.
Good question.
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