In today's Winds of Change.NET guest blog feature, Gabriel Gonzalez of Paris, France, writes about some French intellectuals making strong, beautifully-argued cases against the growing tide of hatred and idiotarianism there. These guys are good, too - I'm talking Mark Steyn or Victor Davis Hanson class. You owe it to yourself to get to know them better.

Gabriel's post is especially timely in the wake of P.'s exchange with Norwegian Blogger about the EU and the future of Europe, and chilling pieces from Israeli writers like Hillel Halkin who openly wonders "Will Jews have a place in the new Europe?" Thankfully, Sabine Herold isn't the only brave voice in France these days. But will it be enough?

Finkielkraut et. al. - The Coming Anti-Semitism
by Gabriel Gonzalez

The right-leaning French newspaper Le Figaro published an interview last week with leading French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut entitled "The Coming Anti-Semitism." The article (English translation here), as its title suggests, focuses on anti-Semitism, but deals more generally with the radicalization of the French Left around an extremist and simplistic Anti-Americanism which has been fused with Anti-Semitism. A few passages:

"After a brief interlude, the grand simplifiers are back. We have seen, since the end of Communism, a stupefying re-Stalinization of part of the intelligentsia and the progressive movement… [The] image of an all-powerful America breathes new life into the pernicious notion that politics is responsible for everything: all disasters are perceived as crimes; the objective universe appears to be made up of subjective wills, those that fight against evil and those that foment it. Thus conspiracy thinking is again taking over simple minds, and conspiracy leads sooner or later to the Elders of Zion."

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