Underreported Story: French Jews Under Attack

Lyon, France, March 6, 2006: a Jewish student was attacked and kicked in the face by four youths. Paris, March 12: vandals broke into a synagogue and threw religious objects on the ground. Sarcelles, March 4: youths beat a 28-year-old Jewish man, and made anti-Semitic remarks while they were assaulting him. He suffered a dislocated shoulder. March 3: a 17-year-old, the son of a local rabbi, was attacked by two men near the Sarcelles synagogue. The teenager suffered a broken nose. March 3: also in Sarcelles, an 18-year-old Jewish teenager was attacked by five men who threw him to the ground and shouted insults and anti-Semitic threats. You get the idea. See http://www.adl.org/Anti_semitism/

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Most alarmingly, almost all of these attacks came after a 23-year-old French Jew, Ilan Halimi, was held captive and tortured this January before his kidnappers dumped him in a vacant lot to die. See: http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2006/03/13/ anti_semitism_seen_rising_among_frances_muslims/.

You would think that there might be sympathy for the Jewish community in France after a young Jew was captured, tortured and killed. While there were large demonstrations in Paris and elsewhere in France on February 26, Halimi’s murder was followed by an outbreak of more violence against French Jews. Reportedly, there has also been a campaign to raise money to pay for defense of the gang that kidnapped and murdered Halimi. See Elias Levy, “France’s Jewish community fighting anti-Semitism,” Canadian Jewish News, Vol. 36, Issue 16, April 12, 2006.

It is doubtful most Americans know about Ilan Halimi and the rise of anti-Semitism in France’s Muslim communities. Halimi, the son of Moroccan-born Jews of moderate means, worked at a cell phone shop in Paris, according to The Boston Globe. He was abducted allegedly by a majority-Muslim youth gang. According to French police the gang wanted a ransom of over $500,000 because they thought all Jews were rich. When Halimi’s family could not cough up the money the gang killed him.

Before anyone doubts that Halimi was targeted because he was Jewish, note that the gang called Halimi’s family repeatedly, using anti-Semitic slurs and telling them to get cash from their synagogue. They even called a French rabbi and boasted that they had captured a Jew. See: http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2006/03/13/anti_semitism_seen_rising_among_frances_muslims/. Sadly, while investigators believe many residents in the community knew the gang had abducted a Jew and where holding him captive, no one called the police or intervened.

According to The Boston Globe, Halimi was kept in a basement of a housing project, held naked, and bound with tape and cloth. His face was slashed with a knife, pictures of which were emailed to his family, and a burning cigarette was extinguished on his forehead. His eyes and mouth were covered with tape, leaving only a hole to slurp from a straw. Before he was dumped in an empty lot, he was drenched in acid and stabbed four times in the throat. After he was dumped in the lot, somehow he crawled toward a train station and was found, albeit too late. He died in the ambulance.

The Boston Globe points out that the immigrant underclass in France, made up largely of Arabs, Africans and Eastern Europeans, are increasingly blaming Jews for their poverty. France currently has the largest Muslim population in Europe at around 6 million, and also Europe’s largest Jewish population at 600,000. Shockingly, anti-Semitism in France has become cool. It’s featured in rap music, violent jihadist videos and extremist Islamic rhetoric—though always one to be politically correct, the Globe notes that all this bears little or no resemblance to Islamic religious practice.

In defense of France, the French Ambassador to the US, Jean-David Levitte (yes, he’s Jewish) wrote in the Washington Times recently that anti-Semitic attacks in France were actually down by 48 percent last year, compared to the prior year, and that 82 percent of French people like Jews. Moreover, French President Jacques Chirac declared in 2003 that "when a Jew is attacked in France, it is an attack against the whole of France." See Jean-David Levitte, “Don’t insult the French,” Washington Times, April 7, 2006.

But it appears that a sizable chunk of the French population does not share Chirac’s sentiment. It is wonderful that 82 percent of French people like Jews; the problem is that among the remaining 18 percent there are some who have no qualms torturing and killing a Jew simply because he’s a Jew.

Chirac and Prime Minister de Villepin must walk a fine line these days between a massive Muslim immigrant population, including many unemployed youth not afraid to take to the streets and set fire to cars, and a native French population with ultranationalist and xenophobic tendencies. As has been true throughout history, Jews inexplicably find themselves caught in between and are blamed for everyone’s troubles.

On June 14 this year, de Villepin stood next to Israel’s Ehud Olmert and inaugurated the “Wall of the Righteous” at the Shoah Memorial in Paris in memory of the French men and women who risked their lives to save Jews in WWII. In de Villepin’s speech, he said that, “[t]he truth is that France was not able to protect her own from hatred and barbarity. The truth is that the Republic abandoned to persecution and violence citizens who had always defended its values with conviction and fervour.” See http://www.premier-ministre.gouv.fr/en/acteurs/speeches_45/ inauguration_of_the_wall_56299.html

The sad truth today is that France again is either unable or unwilling to protect her own from hatred and barbarity. Fittingly, the gang that abducted Halimi calls itself “the Barbarians.”