Anti-Semitism in France
Dark days
Jul 22nd 2014, 9:22 by M.S. | PARIS, The Economist
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FRANCE’S leaders are increasingly worried about the apparent rise of anti-Semitism in their country. (In July),
François Hollande, the president, called an urgent meeting of Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Buddhist leaders to
discuss the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence when demonstrators against Israel’s actions in Gaza ran wild.
On a Saturday in the predominantly Muslim neighbourhood of Barbès, a crowd of around 3,000 ignored an
official ban on demonstrating. They set fire to an Israeli flag, bashed in shops and threw stones at ranks of riot
police, 15 of whom retired wounded.
On Sunday afternoon the violence spilled over into Sarcelles, a suburb with a large Sephardic Jewish population.
A Molotov cocktail was launched at the main synagogue and a kosher shop was burnt down. Shop windows
were smashed; several stores were looted. Tear gas hung heavy in the air as riot police scattered the thugs, firing
rubber bullets. Four policemen ended up in hospital. Permitted pro-Palestinian demonstrations elsewhere passed
off peacefully, prompting some to say that banning the demonstrations in Paris was provocative as well as
contravening the right to free speech. But a week earlier several Paris synagogues had been targeted by
protesters shouting “Death to the Jews”.
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After the meeting with the president yesterday, Joël Mergui, president of the Jewish Central Consistory of
France, paused to shake hands with Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris. But fixing the toxic
mix of economic marginalisaton and growing radicalisation among many Muslims that provides the backdrop to
such episodes will take more than a handshake.
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In March 2012 a shooting spree in the south of France targeting French soldiers and Jewish students left seven
people dead, including three schoolchildren and a young rabbi. The perpetrator, Mohammed Merah, a French
criminal of Algerian descent, claimed connections with al-Qaeda. On May 24th of this year, four people were
shot dead in the Jewish Museum of Belgium. Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman of Algerian origin who is
believed to have fought with Islamist rebels in Syria, was arrested for the crime, which he denies committing.
Later that evening, two Jews in traditional dress coming out of the synagogue in Créteil, near Paris, were
attacked by thugs.
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“Anti-Semitic acts and threats are getting worse every day,” said CRIF (the Representative Council of Jewish
Institutions in France) in a statement, calling it an offshoot of terrorism that should be treated as such. Though
there were far fewer anti-Jewish acts and threats in 2013 than in 2012, according to the Society for the Protection
of the Jewish Community (SPCJ), since 2000 anti-Jewish violence is running at an average annual rate seven
times higher than in the 1990s.
Laurent Fabius, France's foreign minister, and Bernard Cazeneuve, his opposite number at the interior ministry,
have a different view. In an op-ed piece in the New York Timeson July 10th called "France is Not an AntiSemitic Nation" they chose to compare the 2013 crop of anti-Jewish words and deeds with those of 2004, and
found them far lower.
The incidents of July 20-21 come at a time when France is increasingly anguished over issues of national
identity and values. Muslims, roughly estimated at 10% of the population, are more inclined to test the country’s
determined secularism to its limits. A number of young jihadists are finding their way into conflict zones such as
Syria, and helping others do the same. Trading partly on anti-immigrant sentiment, the far-right Front National
received almost a quarter of all votes in the recent European elections in May.
France’s war-time history of occupation and collaboration with the Nazis remains a sensitive topic. Before the
Molotov cocktails started flying in Sarcelles on Sunday, Manuel Valls, the prime minister, was speaking in
commemoration of the Jewish victims of “Vel d’Hiv”, where French Jews were rounded up and sent off to
concentration camps, calling complicity in it “le déshonneur de la France”. Earlier this year Dieudonné M’bala
M’bala, a notorious French Cameroonian comedian of pronounced anti-Semitic views who favours a reverseNazi salute, was forced to cancel a tour on the grounds that it would threaten public order.
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Both Mr Hollande and Mr Valls have effectively called this weekend’s events “intolerable”. Unexpectedly, it
was Bernard Cazeneuve, Mr Valls’s uncharismatic successor as interior minister, who brought a hint of
philosophy, even poetry, to the matter. Speaking on the radio yesterday, he said that France had chosen the path
of reason to fight irrational passions such as racism, and that the same energy it puts into defending its Jews now
it would put tomorrow into defending mosques, churches and temples—“C’est cela la République.” (765 words)