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PARIS — Americans were busy electing the leader of the free world this week, but French Jews had a different foreign dignitary on their minds: Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian leader arrived in France last week, after President Jacques Chirac eagerly accepted Arafat's request for access to medical treatment. Chirac proudly framed the decision as an example of French humanitarianism, but local Jews were more cynical in their take on the situation. "This is another example of France sucking up to the Arab world," said Sonia Fellous, an expert on Hebrew manuscripts at the prestigious state-funded CNRS research center in Paris....

The news director of the state-run radio network Radio France Internationale (RFI) resigned on Monday after he was accused of making anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist statements in the promotion of his new book on Israel's separation fence. Alain Menargues, speaking last week on Radio Courtoisie, an extreme right-wing Catholic radio station, said, "I was very shocked by the wall. Read Leviticus in the Torah. What is it about? Separation between pure and impure. To pray, a Jew must be pure and whatever comes in the way of this purity must be separated. Where was the first ghetto? It was in Venice....

Here's an exclusive excerpt from the new book by NR's John J. Miller and his co-author Mark Molesky, Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France. (For more information on the authors and their book, plus daily commentary on French politics and history, visit their website here.) Just after three in the morning on November 8, 1942, two British cutters carrying a battalion of American soldiers approached the harbor of Oran, in French Morocco. Their mission was to capture and secure the port for the off-loading of men and materiel during the imminent Allied invasion, called Operation...

PARIS, Sept 6 (Reuters) - France has expressed solidarity with Russia but wants all "necessary information" about Moscow's handling of the Beslan school seizure, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said on Monday. In comments similar to remarks by the European Union's Dutch presidency which triggered a diplomatic row with Moscow at the weekend, Raffarin said France constantly reminded Russia of the need to respect human rights. Responding to a call from Socialist party leader Francois Hollande for French authorities to demand an "explanation" from Moscow, Raffarin said in a live debate on RTL radio: "We have already done so."

PARIS -- When "Fahrenheit 9/11" was selected for the Cannes film festival, another documentary about George W. Bush was waiting in the wings in case Michael Moore's film wasn't ready in time. "The organizers were keen to include our film in the Official Selection but felt it was politically incorrect to have two anti-Bush documentaries at Cannes," says Jean-Francois Lepetit, whose Flach Film produced "Le Monde Selon Bush" (The World According to Bush). Directed by seasoned documentary maker William Karel, the 90-minute film could scarcely be more different to Moore's pamphlet that went on to win the Palme d'Or. Karel's...

French authorities rushed thousands of tourists out of the Eiffel Tower after receiving a warning that a plane was about to crash into the famous Paris landmark, police and the tower's management said. Around 4,000 people were evacuated from the 324-metre (1,070-foot) structure, which was closed for two hours before police ascertained that the threat was a hoax and it was re-opened. The company managing the tower, SNTE, said in a statement it had received "an anonymous message" which triggered the alert. It refused to elaborate on the threat, but a police source said a caller had spoken of a...

VANDALS daubed black swastikas and SS symbols on 14 graves at a Christian cemetery in eastern France, the second such incident at the graveyard in a month, police said today. The pro-Nazi markings were discovered early today at the cemetery in the Alsatian village of Niederhaslach. Similar graffiti was found on some 20 graves at the cemetery in early May. The incident in May came on the heels of the desecration of 127 graves at a Jewish cemetery in the same region, not far from the border with Germany. Vandals scrawled swastikas and sayings glorifying Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler on...

CANNES AND THE HYENAS’ FESTIVAL By: Jesús J. Chao 5/25/04 Michael Moore brought to their feet the adoring European elites with his accustomed diatribes, defamations and wild attacks against President Bush and the American traditions and values. The jubilant reaction of the privileged European and Hollywood elites in attendance to the Festival, says more about their own values than the alleged merits of Moore’s documentary. Accordingly, he received the longest standing ovation ever at the Cannes Festival, an spectacle bordering on collective hysteria. What makes it more loathsome, is that the French would be speaking German today if Americans had...

French cinema chains are refusing to distribute or screen Mel Gibson's controversial film The Passion of the Christ because of fears that it may spark a new outbreak of anti-Semitism. France is the only European country where there is still no distribution deal for the film, which depicts the last days of Jesus Christ in graphic detail and is accused by critics of stoking anti-Jewish sentiment. The film was released in America and Australia last week but French distributors are wary of its impact on audiences and want to gauge its reception elsewhere in Europe, where it is due to...

PARIS-Yair Tsaban is very clear about the way he regards Father Alexandre Glasberg, a Jewish-born French Catholic priest named a Righteous Gentile. "I know of no other person who saved so many people in so many different places over so many years," said Tsaban, a former Knesset member. "I would describe him simply as a life saver." Recently, Glasberg was posthumously awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in recognition of his work saving hundreds of Jews in the nonoccupied zone of France during World War II. Glasberg was honored along with his...

Dieudonne once called white Catholics 'racist slavers' PARIS (AP) - A well-known French comic will be prosecuted for on-air antics that included dressing up as an Orthodox Jew and decrying an "American-Zionist" axis, the Paris prosecutor's office said Friday. Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala's performance, which drew criticism from the French prime minister, came during a prime-time TV show, "On Ne Peut Pas Plaire a Tout le Monde," ("You Can't Please Everybody") on Dec. 1. As part of the skit, the comic raised an arm and shouted "Isra-Heil!" - a reference to the Nazi slogan, "Heil Hitler." Prosecutors opened a preliminary...

Paris (CNSNews.com) - A comedian's skit portraying a Palestinian guerrilla wearing a Jewish Orthodox hat and giving the Nazi salute on state-owned French television has raised an outcry and is under investigation by a Paris prosecutor for racial defamation. Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala, an often provocative French comedian, appeared on France 3 Television in December as a masked guerrilla wearing a Jewish Orthodox hat and called on "young people watching from suburban housing projects to convert like me ... and join the American-Zionist axis." He then shouted "IsraeHeil" and made the Nazi salute. France's housing projects are considered breeding grounds of...

<p>October 18, 2003 -- French President Jacques Chirac blocked the European Union from condemning Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's tirade that "Jews rule the world by proxy." Other European leaders drafted a resolution denouncing the remarks as "false" and "offensive" - but Chirac nixed the proposal yesterday, saying there was no place in an EU summit for such a declaration.</p>

77 trains on the French rail lines ran to the death camps Despite compelling evidence, a case seeking damages for the role played by the French railways in the Holocaust will probably be dismissed as beyond the statute of limitations By Amiram Barkat Kurt Werner Schaechter's parents, who arrived in France as refugees, were transported to death camps in Poland along with 76,000 other Jews aboard 77 trains that were operated by the Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais (SNCF), the French national railway. The transports took place between March 27, 1942 and July 31, 1944, a few days...

Reprinted from NewsMax.com None So BlindDiane AldenWednesday, March 26, 2003 The left insists the war against Saddam Hussein is about oil. The record shows that is not the case. Currently the U.S. buys $15 million worth of oil from Iraq each year. The cost of the war is estimated at $100 billion. Even if the U.S. took all Iraqi oil and pocketed a net of $30 per barrel and produced oil at maximum capacity that would add up to $40 billion per year. That means it would take over two years to make up the costs of the war. (1)...

The French: celebrating 60 years of cowardice!

Now that France has emerged as a leading critic of U.S. policy toward Iraq, a lot of pundits and editorial cartoonists are having a field day lampooning France's ''cowardice'' and proclivity to ''surrender.'' The supposed evidence for this slur is France's defeat in World War II. Why is that, exactly? No one would dream of sneering at Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Norway or any of the other nations overcome by Germany in the war. So what makes France fair game? France's critics need to be aware of some historical facts. At the beginning of World War II, Germany possessed the world's...