An ancient form of anti-Semitism is on the rise in France. Photo by Francis DEMANGE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
French Jews are fast coming to the conclusion that the second half of the 20th century, when anti-Semitism had all but vanished from the country, was not the norm, but an aberration. Back then, a 1978 poll found that only 4% wouldn’t want their children to marry someone Jewish. Violence against Jews, or their institutions, was unknown. In the notoriously inbred French political elites, in the civil service or the business world, Jews were unremarkable, undistinguishable, even.
In the 1980s, the chairman of the newly-privatised Renault was the École Polytechnique and MIT graduate Raymond Lévy, at the same time that the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), the hard-line Communist union, was headed by Henri Krasucki, a Polish-born metalworker and Résistance hero. When the time came for the annual collective wage bargaining sessions, commenters often remarked that Krasucki’s first job had been on the Renault shop floor, never that he and Lévy shared an “ethnicity” — a word that didn’t exist in the political discourse at the time anyway.
In contrast, the past two decades have seen murderous attacks against French Jews in the streets, in their homes, in their synagogues and in the districts where many of them had settled back in 1962, at the end of Algeria’s victorious independence war. Insults, bullying and worse against Jews became common in the classrooms of the difficult banlieues around large cities, where Muslim pupils are the majority, forcing an exodus of Jewish families to calmer areas, and some 50,000 people in the past decade to Israel. A smaller number have moved to London.
Things have got so bad that a yet-unpublished report commissioned by Ronald S. Lauder, the former U.S. Ambassador to Austria, rates France as the most dangerous place to be a Jew among 11 European countries.
This comes as no surprise here. Since the 1990s, as satellite Arab channels, and later the internet, started spreading the anti-Semitic propaganda that’s the norm in the Middle East, the French state was slow in acknowledging the existence of a problem, and even slower in responding. (One rare exception was the 2004 banning of the Hezbollah-financed Lebanese Al-Manar channel, where, among many comparable offerings, one 12-episode series followed a complicated plot culminating in Jews slaughtering the gentile children they’d kidnapped to make Matzo bread for Passover).
Warnings from sociologists, teachers and social workers, in numerous interviews, speeches and books, went unheeded or scorned. As a result, quite a few of the children brought up within this closely-insulated vortex of hatred ended up joining ISIS in Syria, or, like Mohamed Merah who in 2012 shot point-blank Jewish children in their Toulouse primary school, brought terror to France.
This, as well as the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan killings, finally roused the French authorities to declare the fight against anti-Semitism a national priority, especially as the Hebdo massacre was followed by an attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris. Yet more horror was to come in 2017 with the horrific murder of 65-year-old Sarah Halimi in Paris. She was tortured and killed by Kabila Traoré, a 27-year-old young neighbour she’d known all his life, the murderer calling out “Allahu Akbar” and, finally, “I have killed the shaitan” (devil).
Not only did it take time to reclassify the murder specifically as an anti-Semitic hate crime: when the case finally came to court last year, the judge ruled Traoré “psychologically irresponsible” and sent him out to hospital treatment. (France has her share of activist judges — civil servants here — who often find sociological excuses not to sentence delinquents harshly.)
What’s new (“old-new”) is the recent resurgence of a more ancient form of anti-Semitism, born on the far-Right and now often shared on the far-Left. This seems to have left the country strangely unmoved. The rise of conspiracy theories has been charted by sociologists, who find that 22% of the French now believe in some sort of Jewish world-domination conspiracy: this proportion doubles to 44% among the Gilets Jaunes movement. (In fairness it is not just the Jews; large numbers of French people also believe in conspiracies involving the Freemasons and Illuminati.)
Emmanuel Macron, a non-practising Catholic who once worked for two and a half years for the merchant bank Rothschild et Cie, was routinely abused on Gilets Jaunes banners and posters showing him standing in front of a Star of David, surrounded by hooked-nosed Jews, captioned “Rothschild’s man”.
The Gilets Jaunes movement has abated, but similar slogans appeared in union marches against the pensions reform: they are all over the internet and in online comments on the websites of mainstream newspapers. Perhaps more than anywhere else, French anti-Semitism manifests itself across the political spectrum.
French authorities are at fault here, not because of institutional anti-Semitism but rather that French elites, so resistant to change, are still locked in 1960s ideas. Terrified of being accused of Islamophobia, they have, Left and Right, rejected for two generations the kind of law and order policies that voters clamour for (which explains Marine Le Pen’s swelling support, even without a credible platform). Half-hearted attempts by Nicolas Sarkozy, and later statements by the short-tenured hardline Les Républicains leader, Laurent Wauquiez, were nearly unanimously condemned by commenters and the rest of the political class.
As a result, France accepts a level of petty crime (quaintly called incivilités, as of someone eating the cheese course with their hands) that’s unheard of in the rest of Europe, from the regular burning of thousands of cars on holiday nights annually, to robberies, muggings and vandalism. State school teachers are often attacked by parents angry at their children’s bad marks; nurses and doctors are set upon in hospital emergency services; night bus drivers beaten up by gangs of youths in difficult areas, or simply threatened by clusters of passengers who refuse to pay.
What pushback there is from the police is due to local courage among the teams on the ground, who receive little thanks from their superiors. The feral youth created by this terminal attitude of laissez-faire targets Jews first, but many in France are uncomfortably aware that if Jews went away, they would be next. Until France decides to replace declarative posturing at the top with actual enforcement of the law at the citizen’s level, France will remain the most dangerous place to be a Jew in Europe — and the late 20th century will seem like another age.
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SubscribeThe government have let us down badly, not listening to a broader science and SAGE have been nothing short of criminal.
PCR testing – is route of there still been a pandemic with high false positive numbers, SAGE know this. Funny how the NHS staff now use a lateral test, too many staff off with false positives.
COVID- death figures, nobody dies other diseases now.
Distorted data being provided.
SAGE – starting at the point that no one has immunity across the public. Vallance knows this isn’t true – let’s Dr Mike Yeadon prove this he calls Vallance a down right liar!
The pandemic won’t be over until SAGE say it over.
This goes further than not listening the situation we are in is a criminal act of TREASON!
The Sunday Times refers to its latest ‘investigation’ where “Insight asks whether the PM’s decision to prioritise the economy over ‘following the science’ led him to repeat the errors of the spring”.
It is hardly worth reading any further because the article fails to produce a shred of evidence that the PM prioritised the economy. Indeed, I am not sure how anyone could argue that blowing 3 x the annual budget of the NHS in just a few months is prioritising the economy, particularly when the end result is significantly longer waiting lists for health care and higher insolvencies and unemployment. We are now heavily in debt with nothing to show for it – hardly prioritising the economy.
If the PM failed to follow ‘the science’, it would be the significant scientific evidence that shows lockdowns don’t work. The medium and long term costs of lockdown far exceed any short term gains. Interesting that when the PM announced the second lockdown, the number of daily cases were around 22,000 which is almost exactly what they are today after a month of lockdown.
This nonsense has got to stop, but when you’ve got the mainstream media such as the ST & BBC publishing alarmist garbage it is hard to see where or when it will all end.
at least Unherd is able to employ some people capable of doing actual trustworthy, balanced journalism
Completely agree. I read the Times article thinking the same: they are just trying to maintain the argument that we didn’t do enough, sort of like trying to shift the overton window. This has the effect of making it harder to question the effects or necessity of the lockdowns, and gives the government an excuse not explain their reasoning. If everyone is shouting for more, then why explain yourself? Some of us want the government to make a logical, scientific case for it, not be given a free pass by vocal lockdown supporters.
Absolutely Peter.
What also scares me, apart from an article like that in The Times, is almost all the comments below it! They’re playing yo the audience for sure.
One lady said ‘but flu doesn’t have the potential to overwhelm the nhs’ I thought, every other winter that’s all over news!
Spiked has a great article taking apart the “insight” in more detail too btw.
Over and above the fact that any arm of the British state will always achieve precisely the opposite of that which it intends to achieve, it seems that these circuit breakers and lockdowns fail for the following reasons:
– You confine people to their homes, which are often cramped and have poor air circulation etc, making it easier for the virus to spread. In addition, some people break the law to gather in their homes to drink and watch football etc with other people.
– Everyone is compelled visit the same few shops, instead of at least some people going to some smaller, different shops.
– When confined to their homes, people get less vitamin D (not that there is much of this to be gained from the sun at this time of year)
– Face masks are a giant racket that only makes things worse.
I spend two hours minimum, every day, out dog walking. I never wear a hat and my vitamin D lever is ” off the Richter scale, according to my GP!
Apparently the ‘sun’ gets through even the thickest clouds! Astonishing n’est pas?
Yes, I’m out walking for quite long periods most days, without a hat. And I pop out for a few minutes whenever there is a bit of sun. I didn’t know that the sun gets through the thickest clouds, although I always assumed that to be outside was better than nothing. Whatever, I haven’t even had a cold for some years.
That is astonishing, since in winter you could probably walk about naked and not get enough vitamin D. In most of the British Isles the sun is too low to make much difference during winter time. Fortunately, you can easily up vitamin D levels with cheap supplements 10ug or 20ug will do fine. I take these every day from October to April. I have never had a cold since I started doing that.
Jolly Good
Yes, I think there maybe a mistake, but isn’t that heresy these days?
The Sunday Times appears to have lost all sense of balance, and the ability to analyse and report with objectivity. One D. Lawson was tub-thumping and disparaging Gupta et al a couple of issues back ,and last weekend was more of the same, but vaccine-themed, and this article follows a similar pattern.
It’s hard to determine whether the ST is Johnson-bashing, absolutely convinced of the truth of this, or indeed the whole thing is some form of “straw man” effort, designed to bolster the Government’s preferred narrative (aka lies and propaganda). I incline to the latter view.
It is no secret that the government is putting massive amounts of money into broadcast and print advertising, national and local for itself and “our NHS”; a variation on the Bevan “stuff their mouths with gold” approach. Having established such a dependency, I can’t see that many such media would risk the loss of the bribes by opposing that which they are simultaneously advertising.
The BBC is at present engaged in a government boot-licking exercise, most likely connected with appeasement to avoid any of the threatened penalties touted earlier in the year, pre-Covid.
Yes, someone pointed out a few months ago that the press and media are getting huge amounts of govt money for Covid information/propaganda. Another reason not give the MSM any of your money.
I’m afraid that the ST is drowning itself in the “Zeitgeist”. Apart from the nonsense promulgated in the main paper, the magazines are a tour-de-force in “wokery”, the politics of race (a BLM fan club) and the rest; all with a dash of conspicuous consumption and slack-jawed admiration of the wealthy and the latest crop of “celebs”. The only bit which is vaguely informative is the Business section, but for those of us not enjoying government PPE, track and trace, testing and other contract largesse, it makes for pretty grim reading.
The crusading Harold Evans days of exposing the Thalidomide Scandal, Paris Air Disaster and other such things are long gone.
The ST has been garbage for years, Rod Liddle notwithstanding. It even looks horrible.
A friend was boasting a few months ago that he always read the ST and was therefore sophisticated and well informed. I told him in no uncertain terms that the ST is now just garbage, along with all the vast majority of the rest of the MSM.
Great article Freddie!
Even Karl Friston from Sage said that lockdowns would only prolong the agony.
I nowadays get the feeling that the politicians are going to do whatever they want regardless of what new data comes along. They just don’t want to be blamed of inaction. No matter if those actions are detrimental to everyone.
It reads like a complete attack on Guptra and Heneghan. Fuelled more so by the likes of that Trisha Greenalgh.
Good god. I remember her. She used to write for the ICAEW’s Accountancy Magazine.
(This is also ridiculously woke)
In order for the GBD strategy to have any real hope of success: two measures have to be put in place:
1) devise and implement methods to shield the vulnerable;
2) the non-vulnerable must resume normal-ish life.
The former, to reduce the toll from the virus. The latter, to minimize the time, for which the vulnerable must shield. Both measures need public buy-in, and hence a public declaration of intent.
It seems to me, there would be considerable cognitive dissonance at such a turn of policy. given the rhetoric used and the atmosphere established so far. Not to mention the pushback from the “doomers”. So Boris could not go through with it even if he wanted to.
In the absence of explicit adoption, only half-measures could be applied, but these couldn’t have been robust enough to have a similar enough outcome.
I like this article- I like it a lot!
‘Second, when people are concentrated in homes, many of which are small with little or no outside space, this could actually increase the risk of transmission.’
That was written by a doctor in The Spectator today with regard to Wales and a Covid caseload that is ‘spiralling out of control’. I have been saying since March that staying at home is the worst thing you can do. After all, 66% of those in New York who contracted Covid or died from Covid (I don’t remember which it was) had followed the orders to ‘stay home’. If I, with no medical training or knowledge of epidemiology etc was able to see this nine months ago, why weren’t all the ‘experts’ and politicians?
Of course, the problem in Wales is compounded by the fact that when confined to their homes they are compelled to have sex with each other instead of with their woolly friends.
I too was left confused by the ST article. But, just in support of the ST and indeed other analysts, it must be difficult to coherently report on what is happening inside an incoherent government…
OT:
Can someone explain to me the difference between “The post” and “Unherd”?
/OT
“Unherd” has a teal background and the Post” has a light green background.
Hahahahaha. Very true indeed!
I *think* the idea is the articles in The Post are more like a blog post (shorter, more immediate) whereas the rest of UnHerd is more like a paper with published articles etc. I appreciate that’s a fine distinction but it feels like that’s what they’re going for. Maybe.