Unless France's leaders admit to antisemitism in the present, how can we believe they're sorry about the past?
Barbara Kay at the National Post wrote about Emmanuel Macron's condemnation of Vel d'Hiv during WW2, and how condemning antisemitism from the past does not equal a condemnation of antisemitism in the present:
If nobody today is willing to acknowledge how men like Chirac have responsibility to shoulder, then they're not recognizing the problem convincingly.
In a work of fiction, the hug between the French and Israeli heads of state would have signified triumph over a long history of French anti-Semitism. Real life is rarely so obliging.Even if he acknowledged Islamic antisemitism in this case, as noted before, he still spoke out of two sides of his mouth at one point. Furthermore, if they're going to condemn Muslim antisemitism today, they should also condemn some of its most notorious enablers, like Jacques Chirac, who allowed it to mutate when he was president of France. As a result, his alleged recognition of Vel d'Hiv and other such tragedies, alas, was not. If anything, Chirac in his tolerance of Muslim anti-semitism and misogyny proved that an alleged conservative can be as evil as a liberal, and maybe even more so.
Macron understood he had to address the painful reality of the new French anti-Semitism. He therefore referred in his speech to the murder, 12 days earlier, of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year old Orthodox Jewish doctor, battered to death by her Mali-born neighbour Kobili Traoré. Traoré had reportedly referred to Halimi as a “dirty Jew,” and shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he threw her off her apartment balcony.
The indictment filed against Trahoré did not categorize the killing as a hate crime, let alone an act of terrorism, as many believe it should be. It became a political hot potato. Macron announced that “the judiciary must as soon as possible provide maximum clarity on the death of Sarah Halimi.”
Second-guessing clarity would be welcome, but irrelevant to the larger problem: the entrenched pathology of Jew hatred in France’s Muslim community. The Vichy government is gone, but its Jew-loathing spirit has returned in, as Macron put it, “the cancerous spread of militant Islam.”
If nobody today is willing to acknowledge how men like Chirac have responsibility to shoulder, then they're not recognizing the problem convincingly.
Labels: anti-semitism, dhimmitude, France, germany, islam, Israel, jihad, misogyny, Moonbattery, political corruption, racism, terrorism
