Excerpt:
France's interior minister sparked a storm of protest and accusations of racism Thursday after a video showed him making an apparently derogatory joke about French citizens of Arab origin.
"When there's one, it's OK," Brice Hortefeux, a key minister in President Nicolas Sarkozy's government, said in the film posted on Le Monde newspaper's site that rapidly became an online hit on a host of video websites.
"It's when there are a lot of them that there are problems," he said in the film Le Monde said shows him getting ready to pose for a photo with a young man from France's large community of Arab origin.
The young man, referred to as Amin, is seen in the middle of a small group of laughing and joking activists from Sarkozy's UMP party at the party's summer gathering in Seignosse in southwest France on September 5.