The following is excerpted from an email written and circulated by a French Jew. It was published as an article, “One Day in the Life of a Jew in France,” in FrontPage Magazine on November 9, 2011.
“I am a Jew—therefore I am forwarding this to everyone on all my e-mail lists. I will not sit back and do nothing. Nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France: In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Creteil—all recently. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words ‘Dirty Jew’ were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.
According to the Police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents PER DAY in the past 30 days. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming ‘Jews to the gas chambers’ and ‘Death to the Jews.’ A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher’s shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse; a Jewish couple in their 20’s were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne—the woman was pregnant; a Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles. This was just in the past week.
So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from depravity…to care enough to stay informed. Don’t ever let yourself become deluded into thinking that this is not your fight.… Please pass this on. Let’s not let history repeat itself.…”
PROTECTING FRANCE’S JEWS
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, March 19, 2012
…It is abundantly clear that the man who opened fire on schoolchildren and a teacher at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse early Monday was out to kill Jews. The results were tragic: Yonatan Sandler, a 30-year-old teacher from Jerusalem; his two children Aryeh, 6, and Gavriel, 3; and Miriam Monsonego, 8, the daughter of Ozar Hatorah’s principal, are dead, and several others are wounded, one critically.
“For someone to locate this school in a place like Toulouse means he knew what he was doing,” said Gil Taieb, a vice president of CRIF, France’s Jewish umbrella group. “He went there to kill Jews.…”
Since late 2000, the Jews of France—who number about 500,000 and make up the third-largest Jewish community after Israel and the US—have been exposed to the most extensive outbreak of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust. The vast majority of hate crimes have been perpetrated by Arab immigrants protesting against perceived Israeli aggression against the Palestinians.
Acts of violence against Jews in France peaked again during and after Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day military incursion into the Gaza Strip to stop Hamas rocket fire against southern towns that began at the end of 2008. But extreme xenophobia and far-right extremism are additional factors undermining French Jews’ security.
France’s presidential election campaign, which is heating up ahead of the April 22 vote, has been marred with xenophobic elements that have not helped create a particularly welcoming atmosphere for Jews or Muslims. Earlier this month, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Union for Popular Movement (UMP) party, publicly criticized ritual slaughter in an apparent attempt to curry favor among France’s right wing and take away votes from Marine Le Pen, the presidential candidate of the anti-immigration National Front.… The Union of French Jewish Students rightly noted that the statement “created suspicion with regards to Frenchmen who observe these religious rules.…”
Due to the rise of both Islamist and right-wing anti-Semitism, France’s Jews have grown increasingly uncomfortable. According to a survey by The Israel Project released in 2004, 26 percent of French Jews were contemplating emigration. In July 2004, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon urged French Jews to make aliya. (There are already an estimated 100,000 Jews of French origin in Israel.)
After Monday’s shooting at the Ozar Hatorah school, MK Yaakov Katz (National Union) reiterated calls for French Jews to come to Israel. France’s Jews, and the Jews of Europe in general, are acutely conscious of the threats they face. Jewish schools, synagogues and other easily identifiable Jewish institutions are under tight security. The attack in Toulouse will undoubtedly add to European Jews’ feeling of vulnerability.
But while aliya is an honorable and desirable act, it is not the only answer to European Jewry’s predicament. Inflammatory campaign rhetoric in France’s presidential elections must be toned down. The delegitimization of Israel should be aggressively combated. And above all, the security of Jews in France and elsewhere in Europe should be carefully guarded.
AFTER THE CARNAGE IN TOULOUSE,
TOGETHER AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISM
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Huffington Post, March 19, 2012
So France is a country where, in 2012, in the country’s third largest city, one can shoot at a Jewish school and kill, point blank, children there.…
Whatever we may learn about how the shooting that took place before the gates and then, as I understand it, inside the Ozar Hatorah lycée-collège played out, whatever link may be established with the mysterious murders of soldiers, last week, in Toulouse and in Montauban, the fact remains—and it is monstrous: French children, Jewish and French or, if one prefers, sovereignly French but guilty of having been born Jewish, were coldly gunned down, in broad daylight, on the territory of the Republic.
And then this corollary which is nearly as unbearable: we have returned to the dark times when we must “direct the prefects to reinforce surveillance around all confessional sites in France, and particularly around Jewish schools.” These are the terms of the French Ministry of the Interior’s communiqué Claude Guéant released a few minutes after the tragedy. It was inevitable, this communiqué. It was the very least the authorities, dismayed as we all were by the horror of the situation and taking the appropriate emergency measures, could do. But at the same time, these words make our blood run cold. And one trembles with shame and rage at the idea that, once again, we’re here, where we were after the attacks in the rue Copernic and in the rue des Rosiers and after the outburst of anti-Semitic acts at the beginning of the 2000s: pray, reflect, die, or simply study, under “reinforced police protection” and in the shelter of reconstituted “perimeters of security”—what an outrage!
Confronted with this abomination, then, and given the very specific moment at which this catastrophe has occurred, only one reaction is possible. I mean, while [France’s] campaign for presidential elections is in full swing and even, apparently, in its final phase, there is only one response that measures up to the event. Of course, indignation and fear. And yes, verbal condemnation, strong words, the symbolic appearances that are being announced as I write these lines.
Of course, the beau geste of candidate Hollande who, in homage to the victims, decided to unilaterally suspend his campaign and to devote the coming hours to a great moment of collective reflexion and mourning. Of course, the none less noble reaction of candidate Sarkozy, who speaks of a “national tragedy” and decrees, for his part, a moment of silence in all French schools in memory of these three children, aged 3, 6, and 8, and their teacher, massacred in cold blood by a professional killer.… But also a common action, or better still, an act of communion in which all candidates…forget for the moment all that opposes them and cry out with one voice (and, if possible, without political ulterior motives), their categorical rejection of anti-Semitism and its always criminal consequences.
A little over twenty years ago, the entire political class, all families together with the exception of the National Front, was capable of marching behind President François Mitterrand to condemn the profanation of 34 Jewish graves at a cemetery in Carpentras. Today, we need an equivalent of that demonstration, with Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande in the lead, in grieving Toulouse, at the Place Capitole, this landmark of national memory where General De Gaulle came, on September 16, 1945, to preach the unity of the country to the people of the maquis, FFI, FTP, and survivors of the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. A great, solemn meeting, all political forces attending, to come to say, without nuance, that all of France is being attacked and must take a united stand when its children, whatever they may be and whatever, I repeat, the profile of the killer or his reasons, are massacred like this.…
There can be no worse blow to French culture, to the soul of our country, its History and, when all is said and done, its grandeur than racism and, today, anti-Semitism.
(Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French philosopher and writer.)
ANATOMY OF A SLANDER:
EU OFFICIAL COMPARES TOULOUSE TO GAZA
Jonathan S. Tobin
Contentions, March 20, 2012
The after shocks of the terrorist attack at a Jewish school in Toulouse are still being felt as French authorities seek the person or persons responsible for the murder of three children and a teacher. But for the European Union’s foreign policy chief, this anti-Semitic atrocity was just grist for the rhetorical mill in her ongoing campaign against the state of Israel. Baroness Catherine Ashton used the occasion of a speech to a Palestinian group in Brussels to compare the deliberate targeting of Jewish children to recent events in Gaza.
The idea that there is any moral equivalence between a person stalking and killing kids in cold blood at a school and casualties incurred when the Israel Defense Force responds to missile attacks on other Jewish children in Southern Israel is an outrageous slander. It reflects the view of European elites that while the killing of Jews may be regrettable, the spectacle of other Jews defending themselves is inadmissible.
Ashton is now claiming she was misunderstood but even when you read her remarks in context they are damning: “When we remember young people who have been killed in all sorts of terrible circumstances…we think of what happened in Toulouse today, we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, we know what is happening in Syria, we see what is happening in Gaza.…”
Of course, the loss of all life is regrettable. One can certainly draw some sort of parallel between the Toulouse crime and the mass murder in Norway as well as the slaughter of civilians by the brutal Assad regime in Syria. But what has happened in Gaza is nothing like that.
The conflict in Gaza is the result of Israel’s total withdrawal from the territory in the hope of peace which led to the takeover of the strip by the Hamas terrorist group which, along with its Islamist competitors, now uses that area as a launching pad for missile attacks on Israeli territory. The Israeli army is forced to shoot back at the terrorists in order to suppress the fire and sometimes civilians are hurt since Hamas and the other groups use the people of Gaza as human shields. However, it should be noted that while 25 Palestinians were killed in the aftermath of the 200-missile barrage on Israel last week, virtually all were part of the terrorist groups launching the missiles. While the Palestinians claimed that the Israelis also killed a child, it turned out that the fatality was the result of Palestinian gunfire at a funeral for one of the terrorists.
During her tenure as the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Ashton, a Labor Party politician, has been a relentless critic of Israel while sparing the Palestinians and expressing neutrality about the prospect of Hamas joining the Palestinian Authority.
No matter which group carried out the Toulouse attack, it must be understood that the crime happened in an atmosphere in which the delegitimization of Israel by European elites has given some sanction for a new wave of anti-Semitism. Those who cannot condemn this crime without also attempting to draw a false analogy with Israeli actions are part of the problem, not the solution. Such canards are nothing less than a modern version of the medieval blood libel aimed at Jews.
JEWS, GET OUT OF EUROPE!
Giulio Meotti
Arutz Sheva, March 20, 2012
While the American Jewish intelligentsia discusses the legitimacy of an Israeli strike on Iran, European antiSemitism raises its head, leaving on the ground three Jewish children and a rabbi in Toulouse.
During the Holocaust, Jews were dispatched to the gas chambers (in France the local police did the “dirty work”). Seventy years later, in a modern, democratic Europe that presumably had shed itself of the legacy of that era, Jews have again come under attack. Witnesses of the Toulouse killing spree in the Jewish school tell of students hunted by the terrorist inside the building.… The terrorist aimed to slay Jews, only because they were Jews.
The school had absolutely nothing to do with “the occupation”, but has everything to do with the Jewish question.… The attack in Toulouse is the culmination of a long anti-Semitic campaign. Two weeks ago, Paris’ Interior Ministry released the statistics of the anti-Jewish wave: 389 anti-Semitic attacks—only—in 2011, at least one every day.
In 2006 Ilan Halimi was kidnapped in Paris by a group of young Muslims. He was tortured for four weeks while they read him pages of the Koran, and then thrown into a landfill to die, covered with mortal wounds. France is not an isolated case. Anti-Semitism in Western Europe is “the worst since World War II”, according to the Jewish Agency. It will only worsen in the future.
Books such as Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are prominently displayed bestsellers in Muslim stores on Edgware Road in the heart of London. In Sweden, a country described by The Guardian as “the greatest success the world has known,” Jews are leaving large cities such as Malmö due to security reasons, in order to escape anti-Semitic attacks. The Netherlands, which was once the shelter for the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who fled the 15th century Inquisition, is now a realm of fear, intimidation and subjugation. Jews are fleeing Antwerp, the city once proudly called “the Northern Jerusalem.…”
Always the same target: the Jewish people and the State of Israel, which the late French ambassador Daniel Bernard called “ce petit pays de merde”—that shitty little country.
Jewish life in France and Europe is not under question, it’s already history. For as comfortable as life might be in the arrondissements of Paris, it is time for the Jews of France to come home. Before it’s too late, they should leave for Israel.…
Anti-Semitism is an eruption of barbarism in our civilization and the Jews have always been a barometer of tolerance. Europe is living its new nightmare and classical anti-Semitism has become a potent and dangerous mix in countries with enormous Muslim populations. We will not be surprised if one day, under the Eurabian banner, these new Europeans will try to expel the descendants of the Holocaust from the land of Israel.
This second Shoah will be called “Peace and Justice for Palestine.”
