The Friend of My Enemy is My....

One can judge a person by who he associates with. One can judge the same of countries, and by this measure, France is surely not a friend of the US. Diana West points out the friends of France.

Of course, a French hostage crisis in Iraq was never supposed to happen — or so thought the French. Wasn't France, as head, if not head scarf, of the emerging Eurabian bloc, the Arab-Muslim world's best friend? From dictators, including Saddam Hussein, to terror kingpins, France has long been the good, Ol' European to count on. Not that dictators and — even more revealingly — terror kingpins haven't come through for France in this, her darkish hour. From Hezbollah's Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, to the Palestinian Authority's Yasser Arafat, to henchmen of Najaf renegade Muqtada al-Sadr, a roster of what passes for character witnesses in the best terrorist circles has signed on to attest to the bona fides of France and its kidnapped journalists.

Maybe the Muslim Brotherhood, probably the world's largest sharia-advocacy group, put it best: The group demanded freedom for the Frenchmen, and particularly because "they were participating in exposing the occupation [in Iraq] and its practices." In other words, these were good (anti-American) French eggs. The killers of Islamic Jihad praised France as a whole for having "distinguished itself, compared to other European nations, in its position on the American occupation of Iraq." The killers of Hamas lauded France's opposition to "the totally partial American support of the Zionist entity," adding that the release of the hostages would "increase the isolation of hostile American and Israeli attitudes toward the Arab and Muslim nations, and would boost French support for our aspirations."