Melanie Phillips has a piece in the Spectator about the recent French court judgment against Le Monde. The paper was found guilty of racial defamation against the Jewish people for a piece it ran in 2002 called “Israel-Palestine: the Cancer.” Here’s Phillips:

One might have expected such a momentous ruling pronouncing Le Monde guilty of racial prejudice against the Jews to have made waves. Not a bit of it. The French have ignored it. The case was only brought to light by the Middle East commentator Tom Gross in the Wall Street Journal Europe, who asked why nothing had been written about it anywhere a week after the ruling. Following his article, the Guardian belatedly ran a story.
The media has been silent because the same kind of calumnies are routinely published and broadcast in Britain and throughout Europe: obsessively disproportionate and libellous coverage which equates Israel with the Nazis, misrepresents its defence against terror as brutal aggression, and singles out the Jewish people in their ancient and restored nation state as uniquely unworthy of self-determination.

But should we celebrate the ruling? Here’s Phillips again:

…[H]eartening as it is to see a public body at last calling this prejudice by its proper name, the case against Le Monde also provokes unease. Racial prejudice is hateful and should be exposed as such. But this should be done at the bar of public opinion, not in a court of law.

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Read the whole thing here. (See here for Tom Gross’s WSJ piece.) And check out Phillips’s Diary too, if you’re not already a reader. On Iran, for example, see this post and this one. For another good point about the campaign to delegitimize Israel—and Israel’s own ineptness in countering it—see here.