The Vichy government was under occupation and carried out the orders of the German occupier.

There was no reason to label us as anti-Semitic.

What's surprising is that the people who fought against torture here are the communists.

The government would have preferred not to take a stand, but the constant presence of the Israeli-Arab conflict on our television screens made it an issue that could no longer be avoided.

I have no idea what `classic anti-Semitism' is. I'm not familiar with this term. I don't know where it comes from and what connection it has to France and what is occurring here. There wasn't anti-Semitism in France. An isolated incident can always happen. When two drivers curse each other on the road, and one of them happens to be a Jew, you can't define that as anti-Semitism. In recent years - before the intifada - there were three or four incidents of anti-Semitism a year, and that's out of 18 million crimes and violations of the law.

The second world war claimed tens of millions of victims.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.