Finkielkraut raised a storm after a November 2005 interview with Haaretz, at the height of the Muslim riots in the French suburbs. He harshly attacked the forgiveness of some leftist circles and their attempt to “understand” the riots as an outburst of social anger, instead of seeing them as a clear expression of hatred for France and the West.
After the interview’s summarized publication in France, Finkielkraut was repeatedly attacked as a “racist.” “Even a week ago, when I came to give a lecture on the collapse of the French education system, a group of demonstrators was waiting to demand ‘the racist’s lecture’ be blocked,” he says. “After the publication of the interview, I had a difficult conversation with the director of the Ecole Polytechnique, where I have been teaching for 20 years, and he said to me: ‘You have apologized, and we will accept your apology.’ The truth is that I did not apologize, but I felt everything I had done there, including a book of my lectures I recently published - all that didn’t count, and they just wanted to get rid of the racist professor.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/842795.html