...any time anyone in France or Europe wakes up to the problem, any time they begin to analyze the sources of Muslim hatred of European culture, any time they identify autonomous elements within Muslim and Arab society that may be critical in appreciating the nature of the threat… in other words, any time the auto-immune system begins to operate, and a European, a Frenchman or woman, begins to identify the real threat to their culture, the anti-Zionist impulse shuts it down.

The first time this pattern became clear was in the case of Muhammad al Durah: the French news stations ran his picture repeatedly because this tasty truffle so pleased the French palate — a get-out-of-holocaust-guilt-free card. But they played them at the same time to their Arab and Muslim populations for whom it was a much more powerful drug — a call to global Jihad in which the French were as much the target, as worthy of death, as the Israelis.

It continues apace, replicated in the self-accusatory response to the riots, to the Danish Cartoons, to every aggression from a religious and social movement whose scale and menace the Europeans systematically underestimate, systematically dismiss. “Il faut pas dramatiser,” say some French academics. After all, it might seem unseemly, or still worse, it might let Israel off the hook. Sooner die than that.