Vive la Difference?

"One is tempted to suggest that Prime Minister Sharon send a note cautioning Monsieur Chirac about cycles of violence...back in the 1990s the French sneered at America for the Los Angeles riots...that something on the scale of the Los Angeles riots could not happen...because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs."

(from front page editorial, NY Sun, 11/4/2005.


For those unfamiliar with New York's one conservative newspaper, you might want to examine today's front page editorial, Intifada in France . Lessons about the perils of appeasement seem lost on the French government, which ought to know at least some of what its citizens have known since 1940. Given that government's history, however, one guesses that today's NY Sun (like Kubrick's Paths of Glory in another era) will never be seen in Paris. For secret agents looking for incriminating evidence, find the file next to the one on the UN oil-for-food scandal, just left of the one on former Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac's kickbacks-for-politicians scandals in his pre-Lycee Palace days.