The Spectator: France’s Jews are afraid Opinion by Gavin Mortimer

13 October 2023 16:42

The British magazine The Spectator features an article by journalist Gavin Mortimer on anti-Semitism in France. Caliber.Az republishes the piece.

Emmanuel Macron addressed France on television on Thursday evening. It was an opportunity for the president to reiterate his support for Israel in its war against Hamas, but also to call for his country to remain united.

As Macron spoke to the nation, police in Paris were using tear gas and water cannons to disperse a pro-Hamas demonstration. Meanwhile, some 10,000 police in France have been deployed to stand guard outside Jewish schools and places of worship.

The atmosphere is tense and France’s Jewish community are right to be frightened. No European country has suffered as much brutal anti-Semitism as France in the last decade.

On Wednesday two of Macron’s ministers visited a Jewish school in Sarcelles, a northern suburb of Paris, in a show of solidarity. Why Sarcelles? It was here in 2014 that mobs of youths went on the rampage in response to an Israeli offensive in Gaza. They attacked Jewish shops and desecrated a synagogue. Two years earlier in Sarcelles an extremist had thrown a grenade into a Kosher shop; that was the same year an Islamist shot dead three Jewish children and their teacher in a Toulouse school.

In January 2015 an Islamic State gunman murdered four shoppers in a kosher store in Paris. As the BBC reported at the time, acts of anti-Semitism had risen by more than 90 per cent in France in 2014 and half of all religiously-motivated attacks were against Jews, despite the fact they represented under 1 per cent of the population.

By 2022, attacks against Jews in France had increased from 50 per cent of the total number of religious-motivated crimes to 62 per cent. That figure is likely to rise again following Hamas’ murderous assault on Israel. On Thursday police announced that so far this week they have logged over 100 anti-Semitic acts and made 41 arrests.

France isn’t alone in experiencing a surge in anti-Semitism; across Europe, from Stockholm to Berlin, Jews are justifiably fearful. In London, a city its mayor likes to claim is a beacon of tolerance, four Jewish schools have closed and pupils in other establishments have been advised not to wear their kippah on the way home. 89 anti-Semitic incidents have been recorded in the UK this week: a 300 per cent increase on the same period in 2022.

The truth – so bitter that no political leader has yet summoned up the courage to admit it – is that through its uncontrolled immigration policy Europe has exacerbated tensions around the Palestine conflict.

Earlier in the week, Le Figaro interviewed Pierre Brochand, France’s erstwhile ambassador to Israel and also the former head of DGSE, the equivalent of MI6. He expressed his regret that Gerald Darmanian, the Minister of the Interior, had been obliged to convene a security conference to ‘deal with the repercussions on our soil of events taking place 3,000 kilometers away’.

But Brochand was not surprised. ‘This is just one of the many security repercussions that non-European immigration can have on our society,’ he said, adding that there is now among the French population ‘a significant proportion [who] feel solidarity with the Palestinian cause, whatever means they use.’

Last week, France revealed that in the first eight months of 2023 there were a record 93,000 asylum applications. Syrians, Bangladeshis and Turks represented more than a quarter of all claims.

Of the tens of thousands of migrants who have crossed illegally into Britain in small boats since 2018, seven countries make up 83 per cent of all arrivals: Iran, Albania, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea and Sudan.

How many of these people have brought their governments’ anti-Semitism with them across the sea? We have no idea because Europe long since gave up border checks, allowing well over a million migrants into the continent without establishing what they think of Jews, gays or women.

The video of migrants in a Greek camp celebrating Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli women and children should send a chill down the spine of every Jewish European.

In an interview on German television this week, Henry Kissinger described his ‘pain’ at seeing images of demonstrators in Berlin celebrating the slaughter of Israel women and children. The 100-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner issued a grim critique of where Germany and Europe have gone wrong. ‘It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts, because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that,’ he said.

Kissinger fled Germany to the USA in 1938 to escape the Nazis; how long before a new generation of German and European Jews are forced to make the same journey because they are no longer safe in their own country?

Caliber.Az

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