Mssr. Chirac may be starting to figure out who the real enemy is:

In the Middle East, France and America are working intimately on Lebanon. They are pointing a collective finger at Syria and forcing U.N. resolutions demanding that it stop trying to control its neighbor. Chirac was a close friend of the murdered Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who kept a good chunk of his $6 billion fortune in France. Furious Hizbullah leaders in Beirut, supported by Damascus, denounce the French president as a poodle of Washington. Even more significant is the new joint front on Iran. Chirac has led Europe’s condemnations of Tehran’s threats against Israel and has been instrumental in referring its nuclear challenge to the Security Council.

Little of this is reflected in the French press, which cleaves to its diet of America-bashing pur et dur. But Chirac understands that posturing over Iraq has not protected France from Islamofascism. Militant Islamist preachers are active among the nation’s 5 million Muslim citizens, many of whom willingly believe that all their problems will get better if they follow Sharia and reject French secularism. Chirac also reacted swiftly when a French Jew was recently tortured to death after being kidnapped by a thuggish gang who believed that, because he was Jewish, his family by definition was rich enough to pay a massive ransom. This vestige of the very worst anti-Semitism shocked France and may serve to wake up intellectuals blinded to the excesses of radical Islamists by their own anti-Americanism.