Anti-Semitism Sweeping France
by Peter Martino, Gatestone Institute
Early this month, the French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur devoted a cover article and several otherarticles to the phenomenon of the rising anti-Semitism in France. The magazine referred to several incidents of anti-Jewish violence during the previous weeks.
The Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) keeps track of anti-Semitic incidents. In the last decade, the number rose well above 300 incidents per year. In 2010, there were 466 incidents. In 2011, there were 389. However, 2012 will break the record. During the first five months of 2012, already 268 incidents of hatred against Jews have been reported. In certain neighborhoods of Paris, Marseille or Lyons it is no longer safe for Jews to walk the streets.
Young Jews in particular are made to suffer for their Jewishness. Le Nouvel Observateur relates how Elie M., a 12-year old Jewish Parisian, told his parents that he wants to have his name changed because he is being called “dirty Jew” at school.
On 26 March, an 11-year old Jewish boy was hit in the face in front of his school in Paris by a man who was screaming “Dirty Jew.” That same day, in the Rhone Valley, youths threw stones at a rabbi. On 30 April, two Jewish boys were beaten up in Marseille by an aggressor shouting: “We support the Palestinians. You will be killed, you will be exterminated.” On 8 June, a Jewish adolescent was beaten up by three youths who were shouting anti-Semitic insults. In early June, three Jews were attacked by a gang who hit one of the Jews on the head with a hammer.
On 5 July, the very day that the Nouvel Observateur was published, a 17-year old Jew was beaten up in a train near Toulouse because he was wearing a necklace with a Star of David. The aggressors were two 18-year old Frenchmen of North African origin who had just applied to join the French army. The victim was a student at the same Jewish school where last March the jihadist Mohammed Merah murdered a rabbi and three children.
Mohammed Merah, the Nouvel Observateur points out, has become a role model for many young French of Islamic origin. In many French schools, incidents occurred while a minute of silence was being observed for the victims of the Jewish school in Toulouse. Iannis Roder, a teacher of history and geography in Saint-Denis near Paris, confirmed in the magazine that anti-Semitism is rising in French schools and that almost always the anti-Jewish venom is coming from Islamic youths. As soon as the Holocaust is mentioned in class, or whenever lessons deal with a historic French figure who is Jewish, such as Léon Blum, Muslim pupils start making anti-Jewish remarks.
While the culprits of anti-Semitic acts are predominantly Muslims, analysts point out that there are some unsettling similarities with the European anti-Semitism of the 1930s. As then, anti-Semitism goes hand in hand with anti-Americanism. As then, the Jews are depicted as rich and powerful capitalists who manipulate the media and rule the world through their money — a bizarre assertion when one considers that today Arab plutocrats control so many Western media outlets.
According to Muslim youths interviewed by the Nouvel Observateur, of every meal bought at McDonalds one euro is paid by McDonalds to the Israeli army. Coca Cola, too, is part of the Americo-Jewish plot as its logo, when read from back to front, allegedly reads: “No to Allah, no to the Prophet.” This information, they claim, is well known, although it will never be heard on French television because French television “belongs to the Jews.”
Because of the rising anti-Semitism, many Jews no longer send their children to public shools. The number of children in Jewish schools has increased to 30,000 and is growing every year. Many of the 600,000 Jews in France no longer feel safe in the country. “People ask themselves whether they should stay,” says Sammy Ghozlan of the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, a French Jewish organization. Young Jews dream of a safer future in the United States or Israel.
Unfortunately, the situation in other West European countries is grimly similar to that in France. Last month, the Italian journalist Giulio Meotti wrote an article about the plight of the Jews in Italy. He described how synagogues and Jewish schools in Rome are protected by cameras, metal detectors, security guards and police officers, while their windows are plumbed with iron grates like the Jewish homes of Hebron and the schools of Sderot.
Already in 2006, the London Daily Telegraph ran a story entitled, “Is this the last generation of British Jews?” In 1990, there were estimated to be about 340,000 Jews in Britain. By 2006, the population had declined by a fifth to 270,000. While the article dealt mainly with the consequences of secularism and intermarriage, it referred to a parliamentary inquiry which stated “that anti-semitic violence has become endemic in Britain, both on the streets and university campuses.”
As in France, in Britain, in the past few years, emigration to Israel has doubled. The Jewish population in the United Kingdom is expected to decline to 240,000 by 2020, 180,000 by 2050, and 140,000 by 2080.
In the Netherlands, in 2010, Frits Bolkestein, a prominent Dutch Conservative and former European Commissioner,said there is no future for Jews in his country because of “anti-Semitism among Dutchmen of Moroccan descent, whose number keeps growing.” He referred to the increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the Netherlands over the past decade and urged Jews to “emigrate to the U.S. or Israel.”
As always, the Jews are like the canary in the coalmine. If Europe fails to protect its Jews, it must be feared that soon Christians, too, will no longer feel safe in Europe. When the Jews are made to flee, it will not be long before others will have to flee as well. Recently, Monsignor Anba Damian, bishop of the Coptic Church in Germany,warned that persecutions of Christians might soon be a reality in Germany. “There is a real danger that an ever more dominant Islam in Germany will seriously threaten Christians,” he said. Many think the Bishop is scaremongering. However, as teacher Iannis Roder said in the Nouvel Observateur, in the late 1990s, he could not have believed that anti-Semitism would again become a common phenomenon in France. “I am from a generation that thought that anti-Semitism had died with the Shoah [Holocaust]. I could never have imagined that it would resurface.”
Given that North America is one of the few places a Jew can ( still ) feel safe, why are so many on the left? This is an issue I can’t understand. The desire to be liked, to integrate themselves with the masses, to seduce gentile white women? Do they not see that what stands between them and the muzzies is the US Army whom they spend 1/3 of their time denigrating?
The time spent denigrating Tsahal by the Israeli left is the same of not higher
When all is said and done, there is only one place in the world where any Jew is not just allowed to stay but is actively and enthusiastically wanted. That place is the Jewish state, the State of Israel. Even those of us who do not live in Israel more or less recognize that.
I have family roots in the Midwestern USA that go back to the 1880s, when my paternal grandparents came to this country from deep in the Russian Empire, then settled into life in the small Mississippi River ports of Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa, right across the river. Despite that, and my three years of service in the US Army during the Korean War, I know that this essentially is a Christian land whose national mood could turn me and my family into refugees in a relatively short amount of time. That is exactly what happened to the German Jews from January 1933 to August 1939. The smart ones among them found a way to get out of Germany. The smarter ones among them got out of continental Europe altogether or got themselves deep into the Soviet Union. The smartest ones found ways to put an ocean between themselves and Hitler’s armed agents of doom.
So what does this have to do with the French Jews? I suppose many of them would feel comfortable in Quebec, because French is their language. But Quebec is more or less solidly Roman Catholic. Whether their the priesthood of the Quebecois are a pack of faggots like those who have destroyed the worldwide reputation of Popery, I know not. But a Jewish state, Quebec never has been and never shall be.
Which leaves only one best all around choice: Israel. Or Outremer (“Across the Sea”), as the Crusaders termed it. My wife and I knew French Jews whom we had met in Israel in 1973-1974 when we were studying there. Most of them knew little or no English and Stefi and I understood no French. But as we all learned “Ivrit” together, it gave us a common and even universal way to communicate with one another.
The Age of Reason and the French Revolution that brought citizenship to the Jews of France, following centuries of on-again/off-again toleration and mass expulsion at the hands of the Catholics, has gone and is not likely to return. The time has come for a massive aliya from Tsarfat.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
If Jews would just read the bible the answers are there in plain sight. The exile is not meant to last forever. The exile is meant to be concluded step by step. Some Jewish communities have already been emptied with many or most going to Israel. It many now be the turn of the French Jews and later the British Jews. And on and on until the spoiled American Jews will find their welcome too is coming to an end. Naturally Jewish atheists and leftists will resist and that is their choice. We can either resist the inevitable or accept it with a positive attitude because it points the way to a glorious future for Israel and the Jewish people
I don’t see that happening in this country. Perhaps far into the future when America’s demographics have been completely altered in which third world people and muslims represent the majority. At that point it will not be a good place for white gentiles either.
Laura,
Every diaspora Jew, recognized as such by other Jews, in order to rationalize his or her Jewish identity, carries a deeply embedded dual identity; as a member of the Jewish nation and as a citizen or resident of whichever country in which he or she resides. I am not referring here to the all too-numerous self-hating Jews, mostly of the radical left. They may well be Jews, but they freely side with the enemies of our people, and as such, must be regarded as traitors.
But among those who clearly recognize their own Jewish identity, and who are aware of the fate of expulsion, degradation, impoverishment and — not infrequently — violent death, there is an understanding that these episodes can happen anywhere, anytime and under circumstances than cannot always be predicted.
The United States of America — land of my birth, youth, adulthood, parenthood and now seniorhood — is one of the most free societies on Earth. Certainly it is a democracy controlled by sometimes overlapping circles of mutually contentious plutocracy. One never quite knows where one stands in such a kaleidoscopic environment.
These days, we — as Jews — are all but overwhelmed with professed love by politicians, Evangelical Christian religious leaders, and others. Increasingly we are distrusted and even despised by leftists and by numerous academicians and the educational institutions they either strongly influence or control outright.
I no longer fear any of this. I’m far too old for that. But I am never have been sufficiently overcome by the cultural chloroform that declares us all equal in this wonderful land. We certainly are a lot more equal if we command large amounts of money or are known for our societal usefulness in some socially acceptable endeavor. But there are unspoken limits that all of us know about. And all that is irrespective of whether or not we Jews formally practice the religion of our forefathers and foremothers.
We are in fact Americans. By birthright and by the US Constitution. But only up to some not-well defined but nonetheless certain point.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The French people have brought this evil upon themselves–by embracing cultural Marxism–and by foolishly flooding their nation with Godless Muslims!
Auntie Semitism? Oh well, whoever… it’s about time SOMEBODY swept France!
Thank Dear, It is very helpful post
About a year ago we were assured by none other than the ineffable president Peres that “there is no anti-semitism” in France. So there…
Now seriously. We, the Jews conclusively include groups that lost their homing instinct.
Among other attributes.
After the active part of France in the Holocaust and after Dreyfus, etc, they still hang on in there. The same applies to many that “returned home” to Hungary, Poland, Germany, etc. Go figure.
Not only that but out of those items many turned into implacable enemies of Israel.