Chirac's hard line was already well-established before the Muslim riots of 2005. In 2003, Israel National News reported that he "thwarted a European Union condemnation of a strongly anti-Semitic speech by the Malaysian Prime Minister." Yet when hate speech occurred within France, the Chirac government's response went far beyond mere condemnation. "More than three dozen imams whose preachings are violent or do not conform with French values have been expelled since 2003," the Associated Press reported.
Nor does the current French administration hesitate to use massive deadly force against noncombatants, as they proved in 2004. After Ivory Coast warplanes killed nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker in a bombing raid, the French struck back against the Ivorian military--"but the story did not end there. On November 6, 2004, French helicopter gunboats fired on unarmed protestors crossing a bridge in Abidjan, the capital of Cote d'Ivoire; on November 9, French forces fired on another crowd of protestors at a hotel. The final toll was 57 unarmed civilians killed and over 2,200 injured, according to the Ivorian government; French estimates are lower. The French government has rejected all demands for an investigation. And yetà ? ¦responding to the October 26, 2005, suicide-bombing that killed six Israelis and wounded dozens in a Hadera marketplace, a French Foreign Ministry spokesman warned Israel that protecting its citizens by targeted killings of the terrorists would be "contrary to international law."
Perhaps the world leaders meeting in St. Petersburg as a new war rages will remember how the Allied leaders responded to the Nazi threat, for the current attack on Israel is eerily identical to Hitler's aggression. Then, as now, diplomacy was tried for years and failed. Then, as now, the ceding of land for peace only produced further attacks. Then, as now, the aggressors had the same two goals: to exterminate the Jews, and to impose their nightmarish form of fascism on the world. As Hamas terrorists, whose charter calls for genocide of Jews and the eradication of Israel, proclaimed in a recent video, "We will rule the nations, by Allah's will, the USA will be conquered, Israel will be conquered, Rome and Britain will be conquered."
Journalist Patrick D. O'Brien, writing at clarityandresolve.com, has aptly summed up the international scope of the threat: "the future of Western liberal democracy is squarely in the sights of very bad men who want to drag all of us--"whether we are liberal, conservative, or centrist, and whether or not we support Israel--"into the wretched pit of barbaric medieval theocracy they believe to be God's will. The Sunnis of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al-Aqsa are in lockstep with Shia Hizbullah to light the fuse in Israel as Iran puts the finishing touches on Allah's fiery final answer to the might of the infidel. The future is here, and there is scant time to shape it into the hopeful image of liberty and justice that our children deserve."
It is unlikely that there were many calls for "proportionate response" after Pearl Harbor and Hitler's invasion of Poland. The operative phrase at the time, both as policy and rallying cry, was "unconditional surrender" of the enemy. As author Melanie Phillips recently wrote, "Israel is our collective front line" in the Iran-led war on the free world. If the major world powers will not actively help Israel to defeat Hezbollah and Hamas as decisively as the Allies crushed Germany and Japan, the least they can do is to refrain from pressuring Israel into "restraint" that would not expected of, or practiced by, themselves or any other nation under endless attack.
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