While a few particularly severe instances of vicious attacks on French Jews, almost always perpetrated by immigrants from Muslim countries and their descendants, have garnered attention in the U.S.—for instance the brutal murder of Sarah Halimi in her own home in April 2017—countless others go unremarked. Guy Millière surveys some of these incidents, and the shocking indifference with which they are met:
Friday, January 12, 2018. Sarcelles. A city in the northern suburbs of Paris. A fifteen-year-old girl returns from high school. She wears a necklace with a star of David and a Jewish school uniform. A man attacks her with a knife, slashes her face, and runs away. She will be disfigured the rest of her life. January 29, again in Sarcelles, an eight-year-old boy wearing a Jewish skullcap is kicked and punched by two teenagers. . . .
On January 18, 2018, six days after the knife attack in Sarcelles, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Montreuil, east of Paris, was tortured all night by two men who broke open a window and assaulted him as he slept. . . .
Without the Jews of France, France would no longer be France, said then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls in 2016. But he did not do anything. . . . He added [on a later occasion] that in France, for at least two decades, all attacks against Jews in which the perpetrator has been identified have come from Muslims, and that the most recent attacks were no exception.
Valls, however, quickly suffered the consequences of his candor. He was elbowed to the margins of political life. Muslim websites called him an “agent of the Jewish lobby” and a “racist.” Former leaders of his own party, such as the former foreign minister Roland Dumas, said that Valls’s wife is a Jew and hinted that he was “under the influence.” . . .
Recently, the journalist Eric Zemmour [commented] that in Muslim neighborhoods, Muslims are now living “according to their own laws” and forcing non-Muslim people to leave. He was found guilty of “incitement” and fined. . . . At anti-Israel demonstrations, [by contrast], people shout, “Death to the Jews,” but those people are never arrested for “hate speech.”
Read more on Gatestone: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11903/france-islam-antisemitism