Since the August 4 explosion in Beirut, Paris has sought to take an active role in helping its former colony’s recovery, and overseeing political reform. One major obstacle is Hizballah, which, in Matthew Levitt’s words, serves “as the militant defender of the corruption and cronyism of the current government system.” While France has historically been reluctant to confront the terrorist group, its president seems to be losing patience:

In late September 2020, Hizballah threw a wrench into . . . Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to stabilize the Lebanese political system . . . by insisting that the party or its allies remain in control of key ministries as a condition of any future government or program of political reform. . . . President Macron’s response was uncharacteristically blunt for a French politician speaking about Hizballah. In a public statement, [he] said, “Hizballah cannot operate at the same time as an army against Israel, a militia unleashed against civilians in Syria, and a respectable political party in Lebanon.”

In the past three decades, the Iran-backed guerrilla group has repeatedly attacked French soldiers in the Middle East and French civilians at home—most notably by carrying out a number of bombings in Paris during a nine-month period in the mid-1980s. As Levitt explains, France has responded with a policy of appeasement, first refusing to consider Hizballah a terrorist group, and, once it finally did, insisting on a meaningless distinction between its illegal “military wing” and its legitimate “political” one:

By the 1990s, . . . French decisionmakers . . . opted not to cross Hizballah or Iran and risk terrorist retaliation. Today, a primary concern French officials articulate about designating Hizballah in its entirety is that the group could retaliate by striking French forces serving in the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). In fact, many countries have designated Hizballah in full, and in no case did the group respond with retaliatory attacks. Moreover, regardless of whether France were to designate Hizballah in full, the group already targets French soldiers attached to UNIFIL.

Indeed, while France has been effectively deterred from taking action against Hizballah, the group periodically works to undermine French interests in Lebanon.

One primary reason Hizballah engages in such brazen activity is that it believes it can get away with it. Indeed, failure to hold Hizballah accountable for its illicit conduct has not prompted any moderation in the group’s behavior, but rather has emboldened it to amplify its aggressiveness. That is true in Lebanon, and it is true in France.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”