In 2005, Chirac was president when riots engulfed French suburbs and French voters delivered him a humiliating personal defeat by voting no to the European constitution for which he had campaigned.

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Pierre Aidenbaum, who personally welcomed the participants and encouraged their discussion of this topic - one made all the more urgent in light of the recent, destructive riots in the French capital and elsewhere in the country during the Fall of 2005 and violent manifestations of rising anti-semitism in Western Europe.

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He spoke of the disturbing ideological alliances that underlie large parts of the riots against newly-elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

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Marauding French and English soldiers routinely pillaged and raped, and sparked riots.

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And that, with some support from the French government, it was the army which sought to provide clarity about the riots, by positioning itself as the defender of the revolution against both institutional and popular reactionaries.

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The whining hordes got their way. (We looked through the French press to find out if the Islamic Inquisitors had demanded similar prosecution of those responsible for the deadly riots and such, but found nothing.) Val writes about the issue in today's Wall Street Journal.

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Former U.S. foreign service officer Chas Freeman reports that the French Revolution Zhou Enlai was referring to in the early 1970s was not the 1789 uprising, but the Parisian student riots of 1968.

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The French delight in exposing American poverty, racism and ghetto life, he pointed out well before the country's recent riots proved his point, when at home a tenth of the workforce is out of work and young French Muslims are isolated in suburban tower blocks.

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