The erstwhile foreign minister of France, Dominique of Villepin, will appear tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. at the New York Public Library to promote his book “Toward a New World.” He deserves to be greeted with a crowd of protesters dressed as weasels, as Iraqi victims of Saddam Hussein, and as the Jewish inmates at the Nazi internment camp in Drancy, from where more than 61,000 French Jews were sent to their deaths.

If that sounds harsh, try leafing through his book, an epistle of appeasement in a time of war against not only America but also Israel, and not only Israel but also Jews the world over. The volume includes the speech that Mr. Villepin delivered to the United Nations Security Council on March 7, 2003, in which he pronounced, “We certainly do not subscribe to what may be the other objectives of a war. Is it a matter of regime change in Baghdad?… Force is certainly not the best way to bring about democracy. It would encourage dangerous instability, there and elsewhere.”

No doubt the crowd at the library is going to be swooning over this kind of language. Perhaps they’ll call it prescient. But the Marquis of Lafayette certainly never balked at using force to bring democracy to America. And what is Mr. Villepin going to say about the 300,000 Iraqis who were sent to Saddam’s mass graves, while French officials were reportedly scarfing up oil-for-food vouchers and seeking to undermine the democratic forces in exile?

In that same speech, Mr. Villepin said, “let us not forget the immense hope created” by the Oslo Agreement. If he has any inkling of who dashed those hopes, it’s not apparent in this book. In a passage of the book taken from another March 2003 speech, Mr. Villepin claims that the conflict between Israel and the Arabs “is fueled by a deep sense of injustice.” It’s part of the Big (French) Lie. What fuels the war against the Jewish state is the same hostility to Jews that brought death to so many Jews in Europe, including those concentrated at Drancy and sent from there to German camps.

Mr. Villepin pretends, incredibly, that this refusal, this anti-Semitic rejectionism, does not exist. In a May 2003 speech delivered in Jerusalem and included in the book, he claimed, “Today no one really contests Israel’s right to exist within its internationally recognized frontiers. And if anyone did contest it, they would meet with firm opposition from France.”

Even for a French foreign minister, it was a memorably ridiculous statement. The Quai D’Orsay has been defending the right of the Palestinian Arab terrorists to wage their suicide bombing campaign against Jewish civilians, including women and children.

Nor can Mr. Villepin be ignorant of the maps in Arab schools that do not include Israel, of the speeches of Arab leaders vowing to end the “occupation” that began in 1948, of the terrorist groups openly pledged to Israel’s destruction. And not only that but to the death of all Jews.

In his speech in Israel, Mr. Villepin quoted the French president acknowledging the responsibility of France in the deportation of French Jews during the Holocaust. “France is forever inconsolable for this inexpiable transgression,” he said. Having decided that the transgression is inexpiable, France has apparently decided to stop trying to expiate it. Perhaps this accounts for its callousness toward Israel, toward the Iraqi victims of Saddam, and toward America. It may be that the reason Mr. Villepin is speaking at the library is that he would be mocked and jeered were he to show up in, say, BoroPark.

Nothing Mr. Villepin writes can efface the fact that Jews are not safe in his own country. We are at a sad pass in relations between France and America. The country that provided not only Lafayette but vital military aid to America in winning freedom and democracy during the American Revolution, and that saw our GIs in Normandy shed American blood to free France from the Nazis, this France is out of the fight for democracy in Mr. Villepin’s time. Not only out of the fight, but all too often – particularly in the Middle East – on the other side.