The French Dilemma

Michael L.

Record numbers of Jews are emigrating out of France this year.  The French government is therefore taking measures to secure the safety of its Jewish citizenry after the anti-Semitic Islamist attack on the Hyper Cacher kosher market... which the Obama administration now insists was merely a "random" attack by some generalized human beings against other generalized human beings for reasons unknown.

The Jerusalem Post tells us:

The French government has decided to delegate the safe-guarding of Jewish institutions to the army for the time being, while beefing up police presence in all Jewish neighborhoods.

I have little reason to doubt that when French governmental authorities claimed that they would do their best to protect the tiny Jewish minority in that country that they were largely sincere.  The fact that they have actually dispatched the French army to guard Jewish day schools and synagogues speaks to that fact.

The problem is that while guarding Jewish institutions with the army may prevent future Islamist attacks, it is simply no way to live.  Who would want to raise their children in an environment so dangerous as to require armed guards?

Why would any Jew choose to live in a country wherein the hatred toward them is so great from the ten times larger French Muslim community that they need the military on a daily basis to protect themselves and their children?

The truth is, there is probably precious little that the French government can do, beyond the heavy-handed use of the military, to protect French Jewry from Islamist violence.

Ultimately French Jewry has three options.

1)  It can put its head down and simply hope for the best... which is the traditional strategy that has worked out so well in the past.

2)  It can somehow fight back.  (If it does - which it won't - I recommend taking a few pages from Martin Luther King, Jr's playbook.  A non-violent, publicized "sit down" in a Muslim neighborhood might not be a bad place to start.)

3)  It can leave.

Conversations with Jews in Paris and elsewhere in France reveal that, a month after the Hyper Cacher massacre, surprise and shock are giving way to disappointment and even disillusionment. Many of them think that the Toulouse murders should have been a warning sign to the French nation, and that the awakening now is too little, too late.

The French nation went out to the streets after the Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher massacres.

Would a million people have gone out to the streets just for the sake of the kosher shop murders? We do not know. The masses did not go out to the streets after Toulouse. They did not go out to the streets after Ilan Halimi,” said Benhaim sadly.

If recent history is any guide, and I believe that it is, the French would not have taken to the streets if Islamists merely killed Jews.  In the European imagination when Muslims kill Jews this is not terrorism.  When Muslims kill Euros, that is terrorism.  But when Muslims kill Jews that is unfortunate, but understandable, resistance to occupation.

If Islamists had only killed Jews they would have clucked their tongues and shook their heads and understood about the necessity of a strong response toward the brutal occupation of the innocent indigenous people of "Palestine."  They would think it rather unfortunate that innocent Jews pay the ultimate price, but, after all, innocent Arabs are suffering in Gaza, too.