President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to select Israel as guest of honor at the International Book Fair (salon Due Livre) in Paris underscores his government's obscene embrace of Israel's manifestly criminal policies in the occupied Palestinian territories, including apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Indeed, hosting Shimon Peres only one week after the Israeli Wehrmacht murdered in cold blood more than 130 Palestinians, including babies, children, minors and other civilians in the Gaza Strip underscores the moral quagmire in which the French President and government have sunk.

This repulsive celebration of Zionism, which in truth is a celebration of evil and racism, will leave an indelible stigma of shame on France, a country that prides itself on adhering to the principles of "liberté, égalité and fraternité."

This dark embrace also means that France is supporting soul and heart Israel's Nazi-like policies of killing Palestinian civilians, destroying their homes, stealing their land and narrowing their horizons. Moreover, it implies that France views as legitimate the hermetic blockade being clamped on 1.5 human beings in the Gaza Strip who are being denied access to food, water, fuel and electricity as well as nearly all consumer products on no account other than the fact that they two years ago elected a political party that Israel and the US didn't like. It also implies that France is effectively quite satisfied with Israel's rabid settlement expansion on occupied Arab land, as expressed in the recent Israeli decision to built for-Jews-only 1100 settler units in the heart of Arab East Jerusalem. This is at least how Israel is going to understand the meanings and implications of Sarkozy's honeymoon with the Jewish state.

But Israel has not only been indulging in pornographic mass murder in Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli political, military and religious leaders have also been making strident statements and remarks that really would make the most virulent anti-Semites look very much like innocent boy scouts.

Let us remember a few examples of how Zionism is unmasking itself and exposing its ugly face. The Israeli Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Vilnai, declared recently that "We will inflict on the Palestinians a greater holocaust." Greater than what? Moreover, two Knesset members, speaking during an official session of the Israeli parliament last week, warned their non-Jewish lawmakers that "we will kick you out of this house" and "we will kick you out of the country." I don't really know if these two Nazionist thugs, Eifi Eitam and Avigdor Lieberman, will also be invited as guests of honor to the Palais de l' Elysées

Similarly, a growing number of Rabbis in Israel are already instigating the Jewish public to commit genocide against the unprotected Palestinians on the ground that in war there are no civilians of the enemy.

So why does enlightened France, the country of Voltaire, and its so-called enlightened President, not speak up against this brazen barbarianism, instead of celebrating a hateful war criminal, who has a lot of innocent blood on his dirty hands, by asking him to be a guest of honor at such a solemn occasion as the Salon du Livre? Isn't that comparable to inviting Adolph Hitler to a symposium on the sanctity of life?

Is Sarkozy trying to transform France into another Zionist fiefdom? Another Israeli-occupied territory, to be added to the US government and congress and media?

For younger generations who don't know, Shimon Peres is a war criminal by every shred of imagination.

In 1996, during his brief stint as Prime Minister following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Peres instructed the Israeli army to bomb the UN peace keepers' headquarters at the village of Qana in Southern Lebanon, killing over a hundred civilians who had sought refuge there. Then an official UN report condemned Israel for "knowingly and deliberately" perpetrating the horrible crime.

Interestingly, up until now, the so-called dove of peace, the Noble Laureate, has not uttered the word "mea kulpa" neither to the helpless victims and their families, nor to the world at large.

Well, I wonder when, if ever, will Zionist Jews apologize for their crimes against humanity? Perhaps when kosher pigs fly.

Is it possible that Sarkozy doesn't know all these facts about Peres and Israel? Well, I doubt it. Which actually makes Sarkozy a willing friend of war criminals?

This is to say the least of a man who is planning to visit world's last-remaining apartheid in a few weeks to celebrate the ethnic cleansing of millions of native Palestinians who were banished from their ancestral land in order to effect Zionism.

It is very shameful indeed that the President of the French republic has chosen to identify his country so closely with a pariah state that constantly defies international law and norms, a state that carries out ethnic cleansing and commits genocide in full view of the entire world, a state that murders and steals and lies to fulfill an diabolical ideology called Zionism.

It is true that thanks to his unholy relationship with Israel, Sarkozy is insulting and flying in the face of the Muslim world and jeopardizing France's traditional relations with the Arab world.

But, first and foremost, he is actually harming France's image, not only among Arabs and Muslims, but also among millions of people around the world who had hoped France would serve as a moral counter-balance to America's wanton inhumanity and incivility.