The quote of the week

“Contrary to the impression sometimes given by the American press, neither public opinion nor the political class in France is globally anti-Semitic. There are some limits that are being breached, to be sure. And there is a certain loosening of speech that one didn't feel ten or twenty years ago. It can even be said that we are witnessing in France as elsewhere the construction of a new anti-Semitic machinery based on the three pillars of anti-Zionism, historical revisionism, and the obsessive competition over victim status. But it cannot be said that France has for all that become a country unlivable for Jews. It cannot be said that the country's political institutions have yielded in the face of pressure. Quite the contrary. And I would even add that this mechanism I am speaking of, this new machinery, this way of saying that Jews are guilty of (1) supporting the "criminal State" of Israel, (2) exaggerating the degree of their suffering through an alleged "religion of the Shoah," and (3) blocking, through their own tears and grief, the attention that the tears and grief of other peoples deserve-all this, I want to stress, you find in the United States at least as much as in France. That's right!” Bernard-Henri Lévy