Free Republic

Considering that it seems to be every prominent Canadian’s preferred second nationality, from the Governor-General and the new Leader of the Opposition down, France is a faraway country of which we know little. One had assumed the French themselves were a wee bit more on top of things. Switch on the TV from time to time and you often stumble across footage of the mob overturning cars in Paris over some modest regulatory change M Chirac’s hapless ministers have proposed. It would seem to indicate a more active engagement with politics than most western citizenries are willing to muster. Yet...

Many people, so polls say, think that Israel is a danger to world peace and often go so far as to conclude that the state ought not to exist. Some of these, in Europe especially, are classic anti-Semites who cannot live with the novelty of Jews responsible for a country of their own. But there is more to it than that. In the first decades of its existence, Israel was widely admired as the national refuge which Jews deserved and an egalitarian society as well. The Six-Day War of 1967 was the turning point. The Soviet Union and its clients,...