France loves to boast that it was founded on the principles of liberté, egalité et fraternité. But, as the front cover of the Weekly Standard magazine recently suggested, fraternité is little apparent in France today. The French should consider revising their motto to liberté, egalité et antisémitisme.

Since shortly after the commencement of the second intifada against Israel a year and a half ago, France has seen Europe's largest outbreak of violence against Jews since the demise of Nazism.

Hundreds of synagogues, kosher restaurants and Jewish schools, cemeteries and community centres have been vandalized. Ransacking, firebombing and spray-painting of swastikas are common, but Jewish institutions have been riddled with gunfire, too.

Jewish children have been stoned on public school grounds. Rocks have been thrown at worshippers leaving Sabbath services in three French cities. In a Paris suburb, goons in hoods ruthlessly beat players from a Jewish soccer team with metal bars and sticks while shouting racial insults. Racists have carried banners down public streets in five major cities proclaiming "Death to the Jews!" and "Hitler was right!"

Between September 2000 and the end of last year, there were reportedly 406 incidents of anti-Semitic violence. In just the first three months of 2002, French police reported nearly 200 more, and in April, a staggering 500.

Since far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen narrowly secured second place in the presidential election, it has been widely suggested his brand of anti-Semitism, with ugly Holocaust jokes and deliberate echoes of Vichy fascism, is at the heart of France's problem. But this is not the truth. The bulk of the attacks are committed, apparently, not by white French thugs but by Arab and North African immigrant thugs - the very immigrants Le Pen would like to get rid of.

France's modern history in this area is ugly - from the Dreyfus affair in the late 19th century, when politicians, clerics and intellectuals concealed the wrongful conviction for treason of a Jewish army officer, to the enthusiastic collaboration of the Vichy government with the Nazis' "final solution."

Official France has frequently ignored and denied anti-Semitism, often quietly aided it and occasionally actively promoted it. And it is still ignoring rampant anti-Jewish bigotry in its midst today.

Last fall, during a meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, French President Jacques Chirac declared: "There is no anti-Semitism and no anti-Semites in France." Several cabinet ministers and big-city mayors have been equally blind and foolish. Many Jewish leaders charge, plausibly, that police are reluctant to investigate attacks against the Jewish community.

Denying violence and intimidation against Jews is itself a form of anti-Semitism. France's rampant hostility toward Jews, coupled with airy official denials, is at once disgusting and not surprising.

France has long supported Arab tyrannies against Israel, first to rival the British influence in Palestine, now to counter American influence in Israel. Half of France's oil comes from the Arab Middle East. Ten per cent of France's population is Muslim. As Chirac told a rabbi before Christmas, there are six times as many Arab voters as Jewish ones in France - do the math.

But this French math is cynical and reprehensible. So is the public rhetoric coupled with private insouciance.

It was, remember, the French ambassador to London who last year described Israel as "a shitty little country," neatly summarizing France's disdain of a tiny and vulnerable democracy, whose existence and much-persecuted people deserve the unswerving support of anyone who genuinely believes in liberté, egalité, and fraternité.

Western countries, often quick with diplomatic statements on racism in countries that are not part of their treaty organizations and not close trading partners, should not remain quiet while France again descends to these depths.

A country that does not speak up against rising anti-Semitism, hate crimes and promotion of hatred within a friendly nation is as hypocritical as those who say nothing when such racism is expressed by guests in their home.