All of Gaul is stunned by the surge of the right-wing racist Jean Marie Le Pen, but he is just the sort of skunkweed one would expect to sprout after the rains of appeasement that have been soaking the soil of France. One day the French envoy in London, unable to contain his hatred of the Jews, erupts at a fancy dinner and calls Israel a “sh—ty little country.” He gets no dressing down from the Quai d’Orsay. The next thing you know, French diplomats all over the world are complaining about the Jewish State. Monsieur Jospin and his colleagues on the left all pride themselves when they denounce the burning of French synagogues, the stoning of a school bus carrying Jewish students, a shooting attack on a kosher butcher shop. But Mr. Jospin, save for one or two pointed comments about Hezbollah and Hamas, has been taking a neutralist stance with respect to the Arab attacks against the Jews in Israel. Actually, neutralist is too kind a word for it — last week, France actually voted for a resolution at the U.N. affirming the legitimacy of the Palestinian Arabs’ use of “all available means, including armed struggle” against the Jewish State. Is it any wonder that so many voters among France’s 700,000 Jews, normally sympathetic to the Socialist party, shifted out of the Socialist column and contributed to Mr. Jospin’s humiliation? He resigned late yesterday. And the Jews are just, as ever, the miner’s canary — under Mr. Jospin French immigration policy is so hostile to refugees and newcomers that they are willing to risk death by running the Channel Tunnel to get to Great Britain, where they are just slightly more welcome. Maybe the left in other countries will start to wake up, though we wouldn’t bet on it.

Last week the president of New York University handed out a leadership award to an Arab undergraduate who had once circulated to fellow pro-Arab undergraduates a speech by David Duke. At Columbia, left-wing professors are fomenting hatred of Israel. The Ford Foundation, that den of multiculturalism, carries on the animus of the founder of its fortune, Henry Ford, by pouring its riches into the vilest of PLO front groups.

The New York Times is issuing long editorials about how criticism of Israel is not the same as anti-Semitism. Well, on the rare occasion, maybe not. But the one-sided, morally myopic criticism of Israel that has been emanating from the elites on both sides of the Atlantic is hard to distinguish from the classical hatred. It’s getting so that between the odious Mr. Le Pen and those liberals who are gasping at him like he is a deranged homeless man who just stormed a private black-tie dinner — well, from where we sit, they have more in common than either might imagine.