Michael L.
Stephanie Butnick, writing in Tablet, gives us the following breakdown of joy for the Jewish community in France for 2014:
Jan. 26, 2014: Video footage captures anti-government protestors shouting “Juif, la France n’est pas a toi”—“Jew, France is not yours”–at a demonstration in Paris.
March 2, 2014: A Jewish man is beaten on the Paris Metro by assailants who reportedly told him “Jew, we are going to lay into you, you have no country.”
March 3, 2014: France’s Jews demand the election of new chief rabbi (the post had been filled by two interim chief rabbis since April 2013), in a letter that cites the need of a leader “to express the voice of Judaism during the difficult period we are experiencing.”
March 10, 2014: An Israeli man is attacked with a stun gun in the Marais district.
March 20, 2014: A Jewish teacher is attacked leaving a kosher restaurant in Paris. After breaking his nose, the assailants drew a swastika on his chest.
April 3, 2014: A French court fines a 28-year-old Moroccan man $4,130 for posting photos online of himself giving the quenelle salute in front of Grand Synagogue in Bordeaux.
May 15, 2014: A Jewish woman was attacked at a bus stop in Paris’ Montmartre district by a man who shook her baby carriage and said, “Dirty Jewess, enough with your children already, you Jews have too many children, screw you.”
May 19, 2014: A poll of 3,833 French Jews reveals 74 percent have considered emigrating.
June 9, 2014: Two Jewish teenagers and their grandfather are chased by an ax-wielding man and three accomplices as they walk to their synagogue in the Paris suburb of Romainville on Shavuot.
June 10, 2014: A Jewish teen wearing a yarmulke and tzitzit is attacked with a Taser by group of teens at Paris’ Place de la République square. In Sarcelles, two Jewish teens wearing yarmulkes are sprayed with tear gas.
June 23, 2014: Rabbi Haim Korsia is elected Chief Rabbi of France.
June 24, 2014: A French court drops its lawsuit against Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, ruling the French comedian’s video mocking the Holocaust doesn’t constitute hate speech. (Europe’snotoriously strict hate speech laws regulate Holocaust denial as well as “racially or religiously discriminatory expression”.)
July 10, 2014: A 17-year-old Jewish girl is pepper-sprayed at Paris’ Place du Colonel-Fabien square.
July 14, 2014: Bastille Day celebrations in Paris turn violent. Anti-Israel rioters attack the Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue on Rue de la Roquette, and its congregants fight back.
July 16, 2014: More than 400 French Jewish emigreés arrive in Israel, most of them young families from Paris and its suburbs.
July 23, 2014: French Prime Minister Manuel Valls denounces anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. “Anti-semitism, this old European disease,” he said in a speech, has taken “a new form. It spreads on the Internet, in our popular neighborhoods, with a youth that has lost its points of reference, has no conscience of history, and who hides itself behind a fake anti-Zionism.”
Aug. 14, 2014: The Simon Wiesenthal center requests that a small hamlet south of Paris known as La-Mort-aux Juifs—‘Death to the Jews’—since the 11th century change its name.
Sept. 2, 2014: Two French teenage girls are arrested for plotting to blow up a synagogue in Lyon. A Central Directorate of Homeland Intelligence source said the teens were “part of a network of young Islamists who were being monitored by security services.”
Sept. 12, 2014: French anti-Semitic watchdog group SPCJ reports 527 anti-Semitic incidents from Jan. 1 to July 31, 2014. There were 423 incidents reported in all of 2013.
Oct. 23, 2014: French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman is indicted for referring to Dieudonné as a “professional anti-Semite” during a television appearance.
Nov. 5, 2014: Arsonist responsible for setting fire to a kosher supermarket during July 20 riot in Sarcelles is sentenced to four years in prison.
Nov. 12, 2014: In a new spree of anti-Semitic incidents in Paris, a kosher restaurant is firebombed, and a Jewish student wearing a yarmulke is assaulted outside his private high school.
Nov. 21, 2014: French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve expresses his support for the Jewish community. “Every time you feel the violence exercised against you, when you are afraid for your children, when you are worried about this rising violence, remind yourselves that the republic protects you and an interior minister who loves you and who is your friend,” Cazeneuve says at an event sponsored by Station J, a Jewish radio channel.
Dec. 2, 2014: France votes to recognize Palestine as a state, which the Israeli embassy in Paris says sends “the wrong message to leaders and people in the region.”
Dec. 31, 2014: France states the country from which the largest number of Jews immigrated to Israel in 2014. Nearly 7,000 French Jews immigrated to Israel, double the 2013 figure of 3,400.In considering such data, we need also to recognize that Jews represent a tiny portion of the French population. Jews are roughly a tenth of the Muslim population of France, while Muslims represent about a tenth of the population of Euros. French Jewry is around 500,000 to 600,000 thousand people and is the largest concentration of Jews in Europe, just as French Muslims represent the largest concentration of Muslims in Europe with upwards of perhaps six to eight million people.
As it happens, about ten years ago I was friendly with a well-respected and talented American professor of European history who assured me that anti-Semitism was, if not done, then in serious decline in France.
He was mistaken because at that point most scholars were still blind to the degree and nature of Muslim anti-Semitism and its developing influence on Europe. In fact, I feel reasonably confident in saying that most scholars are still blind to this ugly development and the ones who are not largely blame it on the victims, by blaming it on Israel and, thereby, blaming Arab-Muslim behavior on Jews.
In any case, any French Jew would do well to ponder the list above.
In fact, French Jews should simply get out, if they can.
Heh...
ReplyDeleteJust four years for an antisemitic firebombing during a riot, and the prosecutor even asked for less than that?
ReplyDelete"The 27-year-old who set fire to a kosher supermarket during a July 20 anti-Israel riot in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles was sentenced to four years in prison, JTA reports—a jail sentence nearly double what the prosecutor in the case was seeking. The suspect was also convicted of assaulting police officers and aggravated theft."
What would have gotten if not for the latter stuff, a $50 fine?
In modern western history the Jewish people go through something like this every generation, or thereabouts.
DeleteThe mid-twentieth-century example, of course, was the worst and this one will be nothing like it.
What we are looking at now is the usual diet of medium-level anti-Jewish violence and persecutions and pogroms.
The West is perfectly comfortable with this level of hatred toward us, but I don't think that we need to be.
Can't find the link for the life of me but I read some bon mots somewhere today to the effect:
ReplyDeleteIt's not that they are coming for the Jews again; it's that they never stopped.
Ain't that the truth. Statistics confirm this is generally true everywhere, yet point it out in certain company and you'll either be stared at as if you had just instantly sprouted a second head, or you'll be told "yeah, butbutbut Israel"...
DeleteNow here's Obama without any snark indicator:
ReplyDelete""It's why we speak out against the deplorable anti-Semitism that has resurfaced in certain parts of the world. It's why we continue to reject offensive stereotypes of Muslims – the vast majority of whom share our commitment to peace."
Don't want those Jew hating Muslims to get offended.....oops, did I say that in my outside voice?