Saturday the French ambassador to the United States Gerard Araud downplayed the attacks on Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic facilities in Iran. Following the execution of controversial Saudi Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, Iranian mobs surely backed by the clerical regime set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran, and the kingdom’s consulate in Iran’s second-largest city, Mashad. In response to the destruction of diplomatic missions, the chief of France’s diplomatic mission in Washington wrote that “Iran was obliged to react. Burning an embassy is spectacular but not war.”

Araud articulated his bizarrely obtuse thesis during a Twitter exchange with Omri Ceren, the managing director for press at the Israel Project. Ceren responded by citing an opinion from the International Court of Justice holding that, “there is ‘no more fundamental prerequisite’ for interstate relations than protecting embassies.” Violating diplomatic immunity, Ceren continued, is the “single most corrosive thing you can do. More corrosive than war because war is governed by rules.”