French President Jacques Chirac has let it be known that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is not welcome as a guest in Paris. Mazel tov!
Can you actually imagine Chirac putting out a genuine welcome mat for the Israeli leader who has shown that all of France's interventions in the area have brought nothing good: more of terror, more of Arafat, worst of all, more of Palestinian suffering, all to succor the illusion of French influence in the region.
But this latest donnybrook between the two leaders focused not on the dispute with the Palestinians but about anti-Semitism in France itself.
Chirac has for years been denying that the ugly phenomenon even exists. Finally, when day after day, evidence mounted that the country has not expelled the virus of Jew-hatred from the body-politic and that it is now becoming more malignant, even Chirac himself has had to sound the tocsin.
And Sharon sounded it, as well, when this week he called on French Jews to make aliyah or "go up" to Israel. (Would that some Israeli leader had a quarter century ago called on the Jews of Argentina to immigrate.)
This really got Chirac's goat. But not before he demonstrated in an off-hand remark that, for him, neither Jews nor Muslims, for that matter, are really genuinely French: "we are witnessing racial events involving our Jewish and Muslim compatriots. ...
Sometimes just simple Frenchmen are attacked." This is an ugly dichotomy. But it is not new. After the terrorist bombing of the rue Copernic synagogue on October 3, 1980, Raymond Barre, the French prime minister, alluded to this "odious act which intended to strike Jews [and] struck innocent Frenchmen."
Of course, Chirac and Barre are from the center-right and right where anti-Semitism has always nested. But such views are now a staple of the oh, so enlightened left, as well. French hatred of Jews now goes wall-to-wall. And French hatred of Israel, too.
A few days ago, France went into a frenzy to mobilize the countries of the European Union at the UN to vote "yes" on the General Assembly resolution calling on Israel to take down the security barrier it is building against Palestinian terror. Many fatuous reasons were mustered to support this demand. But the real reason that France and some others oppose the fence is that it works.
A new book by Christopher Andersen will hit The New York Times bestseller list this week. It is called American Evita, and it is about Hillary Rodham Clinton. She pushed herself into a prime time, opening night spot at the Democratic convention after the Kerry folk had relegated her to just one in an "all-the-girls" appearance of the party's women senators, with Barbara Mikulski doing the speaking.
How Rodham Clinton maneuvered herself out of this is hard to tell. But one clue is that the Democratic National Committee is still run by Clintonians. And, while we're mentioning arch names, there is Teresa Heinz Kerry, more than a bit on the haughty side herself. Heinz Kerry has certainly put John Edwards in his place in announcing that he is her husband's "second running-mate." This is fair warning of how she sees herself as first lady.
On the day that the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to begin divesting its holdings in corporations that do business with and in Israel, there was a pitched street battle in and around Bethlehem. It was not a battle between Jews and Arabs or between Hamas and Fatah. It was a battle between Christians and Muslims.
Bethlehem used to be a largely Christian city. It is, after all, where Jesus was born, so where the Church of the Nativity stands. Roman Catholics, Armenians, and Greek Orthodox have lived and flourished there since the first centuries of early Christianity. No longer.
As soon as the Palestinian Authority took over in 1994, the Christians of Bethlehem began to leave, many in an understandable panic. For all its secular pretenses, the PA is a militant Muslim jihadist show.
A Christian population that not so long ago stood at roughly 75 percent may now be as low as 30 percent. Many of them have come to the U.S. But American churches have averted their eyes from what is really tantamount to an expulsion of Christians not only from Bethlehem but from the Holy Land itself.
The Presbyterians have also turned the other cheek by siding with those who torment their own. And they have disavowed Christian Zionism as a heresy. Of course, there are only two and a half million Presbyterians in the U.S.--way down from what once made up this proud church. Moreover, there is growing alienation between the political leadership of the church and lay believers, as there is in the Episcopal communion, much of this revolving around the implicit support of the clerisy for Palestinian terror.
French President Jacques Chirac has let it be known that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is not welcome as a guest in Paris. Mazel tov!