French president cancels lunch after Iranian president asked not to share wine during his visit to France

French President François Hollande decided
having wine with lunch is more important than
breaking bread with Iran’s President Hassan
Rouhani during an official visit to Paris.
Hollande scrapped the lunch at the Élysée Palace
after Rouhani asked for a halal menu in keeping
with his Muslim faith, and that also meant no
wine at the table during his first visit as president
to the City of Light.
“It is not the halal which was a problem but
the wine,” France's ambassador to the
United States, Gérard Araud, said on
Twitter. “Nobody should constrain anybody
to drink or not to drink.”
Hollande’s decision means he’s likely to avoid the
criticism leveled at Italian Prime Minister Matteo
Renzi this week.
In Italy, where wine is just as much a part of the
culinary routine as in France, officials submitted
to the Iranian leader’s demands during a state
dinner Monday. Italian officials also erected large
boxes around nude statues at Rome’s
Campidoglio museum to protect the gaze of
officials from the Islamic Republic from falling on
artists’ renderings of the human form.
Renzi’s decision outraged critics on the left and
right.
"Respect for other cultures cannot and
must not mean negating our own," said
Luca Squeri, a lawmaker in former prime
minister Silvio Berlusconi's center-right
Forza Italia party. "This isn't respect, it's
canceling out differences and it's a kind of
surrender."