France: Jews in danger

Since the Hamas pogrom in Israel on 7 October, the number of anti-Semitic acts in France has soared to 1,518, according to the French Minister of the Interior.

According to the Minister of the Interior, “These are mainly tags and insults, but there are also assaults and injuries.” The Ministry of the Interior found that 50% of anti-Semitic incidents were “tags, posters and banners”, 22% were “threats and insults”, and 10% involved apology for terrorism. As a result of this wave of anti-Semitism, 600 people have been arrested and 300 investigations opened. In all, since the beginning of the year, 1,762 anti-Semitic acts, 564 anti-Christian acts and 131 anti-Muslim acts have been recorded. In one month, there have been three times as many anti-Semitic acts as in the whole of 2022. Over the last ten years or so, anti-Christian incidents have accounted for the largest number of incidents, followed by anti-Semitic incidents (around a third) and anti-Muslim incidents (10%). In relation to the number of believers, anti-Semitic acts before the Hamas attack were, on average, 50 times higher than anti-Muslim acts and 25 times higher than anti-Christian acts over the last ten years. Proportionally, it is the Muslim community that is least affected by anti-religious acts. This is in total contradiction with a certain discourse in vogue among the Parisian elite, which sees Muslims as yesterday’s Jews.

Some will say, like the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, in 2021, that it is “the language of the 1930s” against the Jews that is now being applied to Muslims. Apart from the fact that I have never heard it said that Muslims controlled the world, were war profiteers or speculators, I have no memory of anti-Christian acts by Jews in the 1930s, who were more concerned with trying to go unnoticed than with showing their identity. There are very few figures on the perpetrators of anti-Semitic acts, but the most serious are all the work, without exception as far as I know, of people claiming to be Muslims.

Even before the Hamas pogrom, for a Jew to live safely in France requires a minimum of precautions. Numerous reports have shown that a large majority of Jews have been forced, because they are Jews, to leave the suburbs where populations from predominantly Muslim countries have settled. As a result, many Jews began to withdraw into their own identity, in particular, to be able to live out their faith while protecting themselves and their children. In the last forty years or so, the proportion of Jewish children attending Jewish schools has almost doubled. They are all highly secure, as are the synagogues. You have to realise that all the places where the majority of Jews live in France are obliged to have security cameras, bullet-proof windows, airlocks and concrete blocks and that in “normal” times, the police have to patrol them every day and stay there all day on high alert. Hardly any Jews wear their yarmulke in the Paris metro when they are alone in normal times, and even when they are on alert, they very rarely dare to do so.

Of course, not all Muslims are anti-Semitic, far from it. But there is real Muslim anti-Semitism. According to the few studies that have been conducted, and which are beginning to date, in France and Europe, anti-Semitism is 2 to 3 times higher among Muslims than among non-Muslims. To see this, you only have to look at the causes for which Muslims rise up. Who has seen demonstrations for the Uighur Muslims persecuted by Beijing? Against the total destruction of Syrian cities by Putin and Assad? The hundreds of thousands of deaths of Muslim Yemenis by Saudi Arabia? The tens of thousands of Muslims killed and tortured by Islamists? On the other hand, the Jewish state of Israel always manages to arouse the conscience and indignation of Muslims en masse.

There are three main obstacles to putting an end to French anti-Semitism of Muslim origin. Firstly, there is a kind of political correctness within the Muslim community that does not allow its non-anti-Semitic members - and there are many of them - to come out. At the march against anti-Semitism in France on 12 November, the Muslim community was conspicuously absent. While Catholic and Protestant leaders were present, Muslim leaders, with a few exceptions, did not wish to join the march. As the President of the Israelite Consistory of Paris regretted, „I appealed several times to the Muslim community to be more present. We haven’t seen the Muslim authorities calling for a massive demonstration. (...) It’s important that more Muslims speak out. There are some who have the courage to speak out. We can no longer say that we are afraid. It’s not possible for Jews to continue to say we’re afraid. But neither should Muslims be afraid to express themselves, nor should top artists be afraid to express themselves.”

The second obstacle is structural. Even if we disregard the acts, words and writings of the Prophet, the Koran, the Sharia and Muslim traditions, many Arab or Muslim states have such outrageously anti-Zionist propaganda that it can only lead to “hatred of the Jew”. You have to listen to the Algerian media and the influencers linked to Algiers, Teheran or Damascus. For a start, they almost never say “Israel” but “the Zionist entity”. They invite “researchers” who are as eccentric as they are unknown to refute any right to the existence of a Jewish state and demonstrate just how vile the “Zionists” are. While the Palestinian population has almost tripled in a generation, they accuse the “Zionists” of committing “genocide”, an “extermination” of the Palestinian people. Of course, they never ask about the persecution of Christians and the disappearance of Jews from Muslim countries. They all deny the Hamas massacre: according to them, only soldiers or armed settlers were killed. Or that it was the “Zionist entity” that organised everything. They have created a new form of Holocaust denial, like those who deny the existence of the gas chambers. Unfortunately, a large number of Muslims in France follow these media (which are in Arabic and French), sometimes even more than the mainstream French media. There are a number of influencers from the French Putin sphere in these French-language Algerian media. As I wrote at the beginning of the year (delibeRatio - Is the nest of Russian agents in France dangerous? Right-wing networks and Russian disinformation), Alain Soral, a friend of Alexandre Douguine and an avowed Putin supporter, is one of the main ideologists and founders of the French Putinosphere. He has succeeded in bringing together, to the great benefit of the Kremlin, a nebula of groups from the anti-Semitic far right and the anti-Zionist far left. Only yesterday, this galaxy was working to promote Russia, pacifism and/or reassurance on RS. Today, the same groups are devoted not to the Palestinians but to generating popular rage against Israelis and, indirectly, French Jews by using the Palestinian tragedy. These groups represent very few French people but are very influential among Muslim communities, the radical left and the non-progressive right.

We saw this recently with an imam from the Grand Mosque of Paris who, on a major French radio station, cast doubt on the veracity of the figures for anti-Semitic acts. He asked, “Where are these 1,200 or so anti-Semitic acts in France? I would like them to be revealed so that we can show solidarity.” By doing so, he is participating in the new Holocaust denial maintained by pro-Russian Islamic countries. Moreover, when you watch the interview, at the moment when the journalist asks him about anti-Semitic acts, he gives a small smile to one of his close friends on the set just before answering, as if he had been well prepared for this question. This outburst was premeditated. In fact, his entire speech was a “soft” reworking of the Algerian narrative, adapted for a Western audience. Like when he said that he had not taken part in the march against anti-Semitism because its “purpose was to fight anti-Semitism and, at the same time, to show solidarity with the atrocities committed by Israel against the people of Gaza”, when the organisers had clearly stated the opposite. The aim was to lump together French Jews and “Zionist exterminators” of Palestinians. It should be noted that the Grand Mosque of Paris is close to Algeria and that the imam’s parents are also Algerian. For Algerian social networks and media, he has become a hero. The headline of the “Algérie patriotique” media outlet reads: “Imam Abdelali Mamoun washes clean the tarnished honour of the Grand Mosque of Paris” and congratulates him, in particular, for having retorted that “Hamas is an Islamic resistance movement (...) these people, who the people of Gaza have chosen to defend their interests, decided that to awaken international opinion to the plight of Gaza, they had to go and kill Israelis, and they succeeded.” Finally when the journalist gave concrete examples of anti-Semitic acts, he replied that the perpetrators “are children. They have a childish attitude; they don’t realise the seriousness of what they are doing. You have to put things into perspective.” And it is true that many Muslim children are increasingly expressing outright anti-Semitism. Former journalist Paul Amar revealed that in a secondary school in the south of France, an 11-year-old child of the Jewish faith was pushed by another 12-year-old child of the Muslim faith, who head-butted him, causing a nosebleed and head trauma. A few days earlier, another Muslim child had shouted, “You filthy Jewish whore” at him, and another “In the Koran it is written that Jews must be killed”. And just a few months earlier, another Muslim child had hit him, then threatened, “Next time it'll be the knife”. All the surveys show that young Muslims are more radical than their parents. Yet nothing is being done by the public authorities to combat this anti-Semitism of Muslim origin, even though almost one child in five born in France now bears a Muslim first name. 

All the conditions are in place for a tragedy or tragedies to occur, all the more so because states could profit from them, as they did from the Hamas massacres. As I wrote a month ago (delibeRatio - Hamas is on the verge of handing Putin a strategic victory) these events have diverted the West’s attention from Ukraine. Tomorrow, if French terrorists in the name of Islam slit the throats of their Jewish compatriots and set them on fire just before an election, who would benefit? Essentially, the pro-Russian French parties. Soviet Russia had already used the Baader Gang terrorists in this way to create a climate of fear in Europe, just as it did at the beginning of November when all the media reacted to the stars of David spray-painted on the wall of a building. After investigation, it was discovered that the tags had been commissioned by a pro-Russian Moldovan businessman.

All this would be “curable” were it not for the blindness of our elites. For them, it is almost inconceivable, even unavowable, that Islam is not a religion of peace and love, and that Muslims are not exclusively victims of racism but can also be its executioners. In the mainstream media, very few dare to make the link between Islam and anti-Semitism. Some, such as the President of the Republic, in an accusatory inversion or mental confusion, even go so far as to claim that the fight against anti-Semitism can “pillory French Muslims”. In France, at the media and institutional level, absolutely nothing is being done to combat anti-Semitism of Muslim origin. Worse still, the French government is fuelling it. Firstly, by letting in hundreds of thousands of people every year who have been subjected to structural anti-Semitic propaganda from school to mosque to university to television. Secondly, by having these migrants welcomed on their arrival in France by state-subsidised NGOs, most of them from the radical anti-Zionist left, who confirm their representation of the world. Alas, the French elites are unlikely to change their ways. For all these reasons, I find it hard to be optimistic and not fear the worst.