It's official, racism and anti-Semitism are rampant in France:

Mounting racism and anti-Semitism in France represent "a radical threat to the survival of our democratic system", according to a [50-page] government-commissioned report presented to the interior ministry yesterday.

Nothing new there. But read on:

[Jean-Christophe Rufin, the report's author], who based his conclusions on police data and a large number of interviews, said that contrary to popular belief the majority of anti-semitic acts in France were not carried out by supporters of the far right and disaffected youths of north African origin.

"Anti-semitic acts are the work of a far more diverse group of French people who use Jews as their scapegoats," said Mr Rufin, who is a former vice-president of Médecins sans Frontières and Goncourt prize-winning novelist.

"Attacks and threats against French Jews are a social phenomenon at once new [sic], evident and extremely preoccupying [we imagine this to be a French locution for an unduckable problem]."

M. Rufin provides a thumbnail of the French anti-Semite and goes on to spoil the French romance with the little chairman and his intifada thugs:

Mr Rufin said the evidence showed that most people found guilty of anti-semitic acts in France shared common characteristics, such as a "lack of bearings, a rootlessness, a loss of identity, a sense of social frustration and failure, a disintegrated family".

Pronounced anti-Zionism amounted to a form of anti-Semitism and should be equally reprimanded, he said. "Anti-Zionism legitimises the Palestinian armed struggle even when it targets innocent civilians," he said. "Thus it could also legitimise violent acts committed in France. By the same token, accusations of racism, apartheid and nazism against Israel could by extension put France's own Jewish population in danger."

Dom de Villepin, a less-than-bestselling author and the sometime French Foreign Minister, had a whimsical take on the report's findings:

Mr de Villepin welcomed Mr Rufin's report, saying it was a "personal [Huh?] but extremely useful contribution" to a crucial debate, and that its conclusions "deserve to be studied very carefully indeed".

Indeed.

[Emphases added.]