PressEthic

In a recent interview, Borat's creator says his character is partly a device to draw out hidden anti-Semitism in the United States. The columnist Charles Krauthammer responded as follows:

With anti-Semitism re-emerging in Europe and rampant in the Islamic world; with Iran acquiring the ultimate weapon of genocide and proclaiming its intention to wipe out the world's largest Jewish community (Israel); with America and, in particular, its Christian evangelicals the only remaining Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost -- is the American heartland really the locus of anti-Semitism? Is this the one place to go to find it?

I thought about that critique when I read this story, which didn't even make the front page of the International Herald Tribune:

PARIS: French security and sports officials condemned racist violence by a mob of soccer fans in the capital Friday after a black police officer seeking to protect a Jewish fan of a visiting Israeli team shot and killed one man and wounded another.

The officer, Antoine Granomort, 32, rushed to the aid of a French fan of the Hapoel Tel Aviv club late Thursday after the Israeli team defeated Paris Saint-Germain in a UEFA Cup match, according to the police and witnesses.

About a hundred fans cornered the two men near the Parc des Princes, the stadium in Paris where the game was played, shouting racist and anti-Semitic epithets at them and making Nazi salutes, according to the accounts. When they began beating Granomort and threatening to kill the fan, the officer first lobbed a tear gas canister, then fired his service revolver.

Wow. A mob of one hundred Frenchmen saluting like Nazis and trying to kill a cornered Jew, and this isn't a huge story? Perhaps Borat should make his next movie in France.