Fascinating interview with Alain Finkielkraut, the French intellectual of Polish-Jewish origins, by the voice of bien-pensant contemporary German society, Der Spiegel magazine. Ostensibly, it’s about the cultural ramifications of large-scale Muslim immigration to France, but the real clash of civilizations is between Finkielkraut’s belief in the primacy of Western civilization and the two German interviewers’ typically fashionable, brain-dead multiculturalism as channeled by Karl Marx. Read it as much for the questions as for Finkielkraut’s uncompromising responses. A sample of some questions:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Finkielkraut, are you unhappy with today’s France?
SPIEGEL: Why is that? Post-national and multicultural sounds rather promising.
SPIEGEL: Aren’t you giving in here to the right-wingers’ fears of demise?
SPIEGEL: But France has always been a country of immigrants.

And those are just the first four. But wait — there’s more!

SPIEGEL: You yourself are the child of immigrants, the progeny of a persecuted family. Does your personal will to integrate explain your radical commitment to the values of the Republic?
SPIEGEL: And made you into its apologist?
SPIEGEL: But doesn’t French secularism today also serve to justify the aggressive rejection of Islam?
SPIEGEL: Hasn’t Islam long since become a part of Europe, a part of France and Germany, as former German President Christian Wulff once put it?
SPIEGEL: Isn’t it extremely easy to attribute all problems to poverty immigration from the developing world?

Then, of course, there’s le sandbag:

SPIEGEL: How do you view the political rise of Marine Le Pen and her far-right National Front party?
SPIEGEL: That sounds as if you could imagine voting for the party.
SPIEGEL: What do you say to people who call you a reactionary?

Somehow, they forgot to ask whether he’s stopped beating his wife. Be sure to read the whole thing here.