Tel-Chai Nation

Gavin Mortimer at the UK Spectator wrote about how, while anti-semitism committed by Islamofascists is on the rise in Britain, it's still a serious problem in France too:

In January 2016, Nicolas Sarkozy was honoured by British Jews at a ceremony in London. The former French president was thanked by Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldsmith for his support during a decade that had seen an upsurge in anti-Semitism across France. ‘France right now is the main battleground between hope and fear for the future of Europe, especially for the Jewish community’, said Goldsmith.

Why do I get the feeling the French community, by contrast, didn't thank him, for valid reasons? After all, this was the same "president" who actually gave Charles Enderlin an award - to a man who crafted a blood libel against Israel, and the award was surely no accident - which only compounded the notion Sarkozy actually agreed with his positions. And he otherwise didn't make any serious efforts to get rid of Islamists from France, or make serious improvements to law enforcement, which only led in part to the worse situation under Francois Hollande.

Two years on, and Britain has also become a battleground for Jews. Anti-Semitic attacks are now at record levels in the UK, according to a report released this week, with 2017 witnessing a 34 per cent rise in violent assaults against Jewish people. Holland and Belgium have also undergone similar dramatic surges in anti-Semitism in recent years. But it’s France that remains the most dangerous European country for Jews. This week saw another violent attack, when an eight-year-old boy wearing a Jewish skullcap was beaten by two teenagers in a northern suburb of Paris, the same suburb that was ransacked during a pro-Palestine rally in 2014. In response to this latest outrage, president Emmanuel Macron tweeted that ‘every time a citizen is attacked because of their age, appearance or religion, the whole republic is attacked’. It was a facile tweet, one that will do nothing to assuage the growing fear among France’s diminishing Jewish population.

As I wrote after the Marseille attack, around 7,000 French Jews emigrated to Israel in 2014, while an estimated 8,000 took the same route in 2015, (more than four times the number who emigrated in 2011). That number had dropped to 5,000 in 2016, largely because of the reassuring security presence outside Jewish schools and synagogues following the Islamist terror attacks that included the killing of four people in a Kosher supermarket, but that still adds up to more than 20,000 Jews who fled France in three years.

It is a statistic that has drawn little honest analysis from politicians. A generation ago, anti-Semitism was almost exclusively the preserve of the far-right, egged on by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the then thuggish leader of the National Front who described the Nazi gas chambers as a ‘detail’ of history.

Now the Islamists are responsible for the majority of the attacks, often using the situation in Palestine as the pretext. There were 808 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in France in 2015, prompting Zvi Ammar, head of Marseille’s Israelite consistory, to advise his community to ‘remove the kippah during this troubled time until better days…as soon as we are identified as Jewish we can be assaulted and even risk death’.

Despite being a "conservative" magazine themselves, they still perpetuate the "far-right" conception as though there's no such thing as far-left (and if they're perpetuating "palestine", that's additionally damaging). That said, I have no doubt Le Pen used his anti-semitism over the years to sabotage the efforts to combat Islam effectively, and that's something he should be remembered in infamy for.

Meanwhile, whether Jews move to Israel from France, what remains the main issue is how to get the Islamists out of there. Otherwise, how will the whole problem be solved?

Labels: anti-semitism, belgium, dhimmitude, France, islam, jihad, londonistan, Netherlands, racism, terrorism