Status quo ante

Elaine Sciolino reported late last week, By Making Holocaust Personal to Pupils, Sarkozy Stirs Anger (Somehow the Times makes a stand on principle seem like a bad thing.)

President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”

Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”

Crunchy Con applauds the effort but wonders if it will help

France has a massive problem with these Muslim ghettoes and the children within them who are being raised as veritable Hitler Youth, and if Sarkozy thinks expanding Holocaust education is going to solve the problem, he’s dreaming. On the other hand — and this is why I support what he’s doing, with the same reservations that offend Simone Veil — I believe it is imperative to reach the hearts of the French majority, and inculcate within them from a young age an emotional identification with the victims of the Shoah.

He goes on to describe how the mini-series “Holocaust” affected him and hopes that President Sarkozy’s plan will have on the majority of the French population.

Contentions.Noah Pollak shows that this episode isn’t isolated, it’s part of a pattern with the new French President.

Have you heard what the French President has been saying lately?On Wednesday, he declared that “I won’t shake hands with people who refuse to recognize Israel,” a snub directed at Muslim leaders. On the same day he warned that France may join the U.S. and Canada in boycotting the UN’s anti-Israel hatefest (known officially as an “anti-racism conference”) in Durban, South Africa: “France will not allow a repetition of the excesses and abuses of 2001.”

He has pledged to attend Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations in May, and after the recent suicide bombing in Dimona, sent a condolence letter to Shimon Peres in which he went out of his way to declare that he will always stand with Israel against terrorism.

His rhetoric on Iran of late has surpassed President Bush’s in its spirit of determination: “Proliferation is a grave threat to international security. We cannot sit by and do nothing while Iran develops technologies which are in violation of international law.”

Sarkozy made some of the above comments at the annual dinner of the CRIF, the umbrella organization of the French Jewish community — it was the first time a French president had ever attended.

I can think of at least 3 ironies with the new French President.

1) His new wife comes from a world where Palestinian revolutionary chic is quite in fashion.
2) In another year or so it might be conservatives who are wishing that the American President was more like the French President, mirroring the distress of the Left over the past 8 years.
3) Depending on who’s elected President in November, France might return to its pre-1967 role as Israel’s chief ally in the West.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.