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Notice the utter megalomania of Chirac's threats. The attacks on Jews are not coming from Le Pen voters. They are coming from the North African immigrants whom the French welfare system lets lie about all day and stew in hatred. But the French political establishment has blamed all the racism and antisemitism in France on Le Pen and his followers, and whipped up these bizarre mass protests against a guy they all knew was going to get shellacked in the election. The whole point of this, in my opinion, was to assert its own innocence even as they continue to be willfully blind to Arab violence against Jews.

Now Chirac draws the moral. He has denied steadfastly all along that there is any antisemitism in France, and now, in his eyes, the election proved it. France has proven its innocence, proven that the attacks on Jews don't add up to anything, by voting for him! He, Jacques Chirac, the tribune of the People, is in his own person the proof that there is no antisemitism in France - just as De Gaulle was the living proof that no Frenchman really collaborated with the Nazis.

Providing the French nation with a rationale for avoiding self-examination and creating the illusion of grandeur for a second-rate power with an increasingly insular cultural life is, after all, what Gaullism has always been all about.