France’s Outrageous Double Standard on Hezbollah and Terrorism

For anyone who still thinks Europe’s widespread anti-Israel sentiment is purely a reaction to Israel’s policies, completely untainted by anti-Semitism, consider the unblushing announcement made by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius today: France, he said, is now ready to consider listing Hezbollah’s military wing as a terrorist organization, because “the fact that it has fought extremely hard against the Syrian population” has caused Paris to reverse its longstanding opposition to the move. 

Naturally, I’m delighted that France has finally seen the light about Hezbollah. But France had no problem with the organization during all the years it was conducting cross-border attacks on the Israeli population. Lest anyone forget, these attacks continued even after Israel’s UN-certified withdrawal from every last inch of Lebanese territory in 2000; it was one such cross-border raid that sparked the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006. In other words, France has just declared that cross-border incursions to kill Jews in Israel are perfectly fine, but cross-border incursions to kill Muslims in Syria are beyond the pale. If that isn’t an anti-Semitic double standard, I don’t know what is.

Indeed, until now, France has consistently billed Hezbollah as a legitimate political force that contributes to stability in the Levant. That was always nonsensical: Starting a war with your southern neighbor that devastates large swathes of your own country, as Hezbollah did in 2006, is not exactly stabilizing behavior. But apparently, in France’s view, fighting Israel does contribute to Middle East stability: It’s only because Hezbollah is now fighting Syrians instead that Paris suddenly sees the organization as a destabilizing force.

If other European countries think the same thing, they had the decency not to say it aloud. Germany, for instance, said it has reversed its longstanding opposition to blacklisting Hezbollah due to evidence that the organization was behind last summer’s terror attack in Bulgaria, which killed five Israeli tourists and one Bulgarian, and had been collecting information in Cyprus in preparation for additional terror attacks against Israelis and Jews on European soil. I’m no fan of the German approach, which essentially says terrorism is fine as long as you keep it out of Europe, but there’s nothing anti-Semitic about it; it’s perfectly normal for Europeans to care more about attacks on European soil than they do about attacks in the Middle East.

France, in contrast, has just said it cares deeply about attacks in the Middle East–but only if they’re directed against (non-Israeli) Muslims. You want to kill Jews in the Middle East? Go right ahead, says France: We’ll even help you do it, by keeping you off the EU’s list of terrorist organizations and thereby ensuring that you can fund-raise freely on our territory. Just don’t make the mistake of turning your arms on Muslims instead.