Letter from Paris: Looking for the Resistance

[Mediocrates]

From last month's Hadassah magazine
http://www.hadassah.org/pageframe.as...er=per&size=50

Letter from Paris: Looking for the Résistance
By François Dreyfus

The number of assaults on Jews by Arab immigrants has risen; so has French aliya. Can France defuse the destructive Arab anger?

“They must have known where we lived. They waited for Haniel when he arrived from school, hurled anti-Semitic insults at him and then beat him with their fists before kicking him when he was on the ground. It lasted for nearly 10 minutes and they even broke a portable radio over his shoulder in their fury.”

Rabbi Victor Belhassen was describing the May 30 attack on his 16-year-old son by six adolescents—four Arabs and two blacks—in a quiet street of Boulogne-Billancourt, a middle-class Paris suburb. Attacked when he was parking his motor scooter, Haniel was severely bruised but escaped serious injury because he was wearing his helmet. The assault was just one of 46 such offenses against French Jews in the first six months of 2004.

Such incidents have become so common that French Jews are seriously worried about their future in the country. Immigration from France to Israel, which was fewer than 1,000 a year for the past several decades, jumped to around 2,500 in 2002, fell to 2,300 last year, but could reach 3,000 this year. The Jewish Agency believes 35,000 French Jews might be interested in leaving France, though many would settle in French-speaking areas of Canada.

Especially shocking about the Boulogne attack was that the attackers, ages 14 to 16, were released from jail the following day. (French law prohibits minors from being imprisoned pending trial, except in cases of death or serious injury.) No immediate date was set for a hearing and it could be months before the case works its way through the clogged juvenile court system.

Most galling was that one of the six, a 14-year-old of North African Arab origin, was involved in an anti-Semitic attack five months earlier. His punishment then, meted out by a children’s court magistrate, was that he write an essay about the evils of anti-Semitism!

“Since the start of the second intifada in September 2000, French Jewry has been subjected to a wave of violence of the sort we had not witnessed since the Shoah,” says Roger Cukierman, president of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juifs de France (CRIF), the Jewish umbrella group. “About 95 percent of the perpetrators are youths from North African Muslim immigrant families.”

There are 600,000 Jews in France, making the community the world’s third largest. But the Muslim community—Europe’s largest at six million strong—is in the throes of transformations that are painful for Jews as well as for French society in general.

“Because of the age of most of those involved in anti-Semitic violence, there is virtually no real punishment meted out so they have a feeling of impunity,” the 67-year-old Cukierman explains.

During his presidency, there have been hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents ranging from graffiti and anonymous telephone threats to firebomb attacks against synagogues; 20 synagogues have been damaged by arson.

Official figures compiled by CRIF and the Ministry of the Interior show there were 195 physical attacks and 737 other acts of vandalism and threats in 2002; 125 attacks and 463 other incidents in 2003; and 46 attacks and 134 other incidents in the first half of 2004.

The only person seriously injured was a 17-year-old yeshiva student, Yisrael Iffrah, who was stabbed in the chest last June 4 by an Arab man shouting Allah Akhbar. Whether anti-Semitism was the attacker’s main motivation has not been established—he went on to stab non-Jews, including an Arab, in the 48 hours it took police to track him down.

“People say he was deranged,” says famed Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld. “Well, they used to say that the Russian mujiks who killed Jews were also deranged.”

The motives of the attackers may be complex, but they boil down to feelings of solidarity with Muslim Palestinians and anger against French society, which is often hostile toward them. There is housing discrimination, difficulty in finding jobs and rampant delinquency. While making up only a tenth of France’s population, Arabs comprise close to 60 percent of its prison inmates.

“It’s a problem for society as a whole,” says Sammy Ghozlan, a retired Jewish police captain who served nearly 30 years in some of the toughest areas of the north Paris suburbs. “The failure to integrate them and now the refusal of many to be integrated just makes matters worse.

“The Arabs have the feeling that they are humiliated by French society and they want their revenge. Therefore, they take pride in Osama bin Laden and they have singled out for nastiness the Jews who live near them because they are jealous of what they perceive to be the success of Jews in French society,” says Ghozlan, who himself hails from North Africa.

Over 60 percent of France’s Jews came from or are descendants of those who came from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco between 1956 and 1962 when those former French colonies became independent. Those likely to get into harm’s way are those who have not been successful and continue to live in blue-collar areas where immigrant populations are particularly large.

One such area, Garges-les-Gonesses in the high-rise north Paris suburbs, has sizeable Jewish and Arab populations. “There are no Arabs in our building,” says Joelle Benguigui, a religious Jewish mother of eight “and we nod politely [to] those Arabs who live farther down the street. Nonetheless, a month ago someone scrawled swastikas and the words ‘Death to the Jews’ on our mailbox. We are extremely careful when we move about and our boys now wear baseball caps instead of kippas when in the street. We have not encountered any direct violence on our street but our synagogue is in an area surrounded by Arab-inhabited tenements.

“When we came out after Yom Kippur services, eggs, water and a few glass bottles came flying out of nearby windows, and police intervened and made arrests. Two of my older boys and one teenage daughter who were already Zionists said they felt they had no future in France, and they went to study in Israel.”

[Mediocrates]

Most of the incidents take place in the often dreary Paris suburbs, in the port of Marseilles and the city of Lyon—far from the eyes of the French upper and middle classes.

“The result is that, as far as public opinion is concerned, this is a conflict between Jews and Arabs and something foreign to the French in general,” says Cukierman. “Of course that is untrue, because the violence is unilateral. There has never been a case of Jews attacking an imam or a mosque.”

Some community figures—whose views reflect those of the traditional Israeli left—say that the Jewish community turns a blind eye to the bullying tactics of the local branch of the Jewish Defense League (banned in Israel but legal in France), which adopts the same tactics used against them if they catch any Arab youth mindless enough to enter the small Rue des Rosiers Jewish quarter of central Paris. In one instance several months ago, an Arab student leader near the Jewish quarter was chased by some 20 young Jews who beat him with baseball bats, causing multiple injuries and nearly blinding him in one eye.

Cukierman bemoans the general indifference of the French public. He contrasts it to the nationwide outpouring of sympathy in 1990 when nearly half a million people, mostly non-Jews, marched through the streets of Paris to protest against the desecration of a Jewish cemetery by a handful of neo-Nazi skinheads who extracted a corpse from its coffin.

Well-to-do Paris resident Didier Bloch, a graduate of an elite business school and a senior executive in a large construction firm, does not feel anti-Semitism in his day-to-day contacts with colleagues. “Nonetheless, I do hear virulently anti-Israel or anti-Zionist statements,” he says. “The real problem is with the six million Muslims—who absolutely petrify the authorities who fear that the ghettos where the Arab underclass lives may explode. [French President Jacques] Chirac is certainly sincere when he expresses sympathy for the problems of French Jewry, but solving the problem of anti-Semitic violence means integrating the Arabs into French society by solving their housing and employment problems, and that will take decades.”

Alain Finkielkraut, one of France’s best known philosophers, describes it like this: “The French population has not suddenly become pro-Arab and anti-Jewish. But people who demonstrate in public in France traditionally come from the left. And the left is paralyzed because this anti-Semitism comes from people who are themselves victims of racism. The inhibitions of the left are such that they just do not want to recognize that the enemy has changed, that it is no longer the ultra-right that is anti-Semitic, but it is local downtrodden immigrant Arabs.

“And when liberals finally do own up to what is happening, they turn things around and say it is all Israel’s fault. They say that if Israel gave up the occupied territories and negotiated with the Palestinians, there would be a peaceful solution in the Middle East and the situation would calm down here, too. Well, I believe that Jews in France should not accept such accusations. Criticism of Israel under [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon has become a metaphysical phenomenon among the left. It is a question of dignity and of honor for us to nonetheless back Israel.”

Klarsfeld is more cynical. “The French just don’t want trouble,” he says. “They don’t want their prosperity and security threatened by Arab terror attacks like those elsewhere. They’re not indifferent to what is happening to the Jews, they just don’t want to provoke the Arabs….”

The only positive point as far as Cukierman is concerned is the government’s taking an increasingly hard line against anti-Semitism. “When all the trouble began,” he says, “the French government denied there was anything unusual happening and just hoped it would all die down. Today, many measures are being taken, community premises are highly protected and…Chirac is quick to say that attacks against Jews are attacks against France and its society itself.”

That attitude does not extend to Israel, however, creating “a bad climate in which the current troubles just fester on,” Cukierman says.

Sarah Elbez, a teacher in a religious Jewish primary school near Paris, is blunt: “French Middle East policy is violently anti-Israel,” she asserts. “The government tries to differentiate between being friendly to the Jews in France and unfriendly to the State of Israel or, in any case, to its present policies. The authorities never talk of the fence Israel is building...as a security barrier but as a ‘separation wall.’ The implication is that this harkens back to apartheid in South Africa. How do you expect the Arabs...who come from the least educated segments to understand any nuances?

“Jews feel increasingly isolated from French society. What is our future if our country—to which we contributed who knows how many Nobel Prizes, including the only Nobel Peace Prize that ever went to a Frenchman [René Samuel Cassin] no longer defends us?” she asks angrily.

François Dreyfus is a journalist who lives in Fontenay-aux-Roses, France.

[Mediocrates]

From last month's Hadassah magazine
http://www.hadassah.org/pageframe.as...er=per&size=50

Letter from Brussels : Looking to History
By Neil Asher Silberman

Anti-Semitism was already ancient in Roman times, and you can still feel the threat in every country in the European Union.

Today an ominous change is in the air all across Europe. The dramatic rise in anti-Semitic attacks here in Brussels, the bustling capital of the European Union, is just a localized symptom of a far wider phenomenon. In the last three years, reported incidents of firebombed synagogues, vandalized Jewish cemeteries and direct assaults on Jews and Jewish institutions throughout the Continent have become frighteningly common, calling to mind the mounting waves of anti-Semitic attacks that led up to Europe’s twentieth-century Holocaust horrors and evoking dark memories of the thousand-and-one burnings, lootings, hangings, pogroms, and violent preludes to expulsion or massacre that run like a scarlet thread through many centuries of European history.
Visible signs of insecurity and defensiveness within European Jewish communities are also spreading. You can see them in the heavy concrete barriers dragged up onto sidewalks outside the Jewish primary school in Antwerp, one of Europe’s oldest and most traditional enclaves, clustered in the half-mile or so around the busy Diamond Exchange. You can see them in the lights and security cameras outside the famous Rashi synagogue and yeshiva in the French city of Troyes, where the great Jewish sage composed his timeless commentary on the Torah 900 years ago. And you can sense the feeling of threat in both new and ancient Jewish communities in every country of the European Union, in the nervous, darting eyes of the police patrols and hired security guards posted outside Jewish institutions—and in the slack canopies of metal netting set above the entrances to neighborhood synagogue courtyards to protect them from tossed gasoline bombs.

The problem defies easy or quick solutions. Yet it has been placed squarely on the international agenda. In the last two years, two major conferences of the 55-nation Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and an unprecedented United Nations conference in New York highlighted the growing dangers of anti-Semitism—and suggested practical steps to counter the threat. At the OSCE conference in Vienna in July 2003, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani proposed to the nations and governments of Europe a no-nonsense plan to combat the rising tide of hate crimes, focusing on heightened law enforcement and wider public education programs to combat the problem in an aggressive and uncompromising way. And the OSCE conference of Jewish leaders, national officials and representatives of international organizations meeting in Berlin in April 2004 issued the Berlin Declaration urging European governments to institute a wide range of legislation, educational programs, and initiate a reliable statistical recording of incidents of anti-Jewish attacks across the Continent.

Even as the attacks and vandalism directed toward Jewish communities continued, the president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, declared in March 2004 that “there is no place for racism or anti-Semitism in the European Union.” And United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, at the June 2004 UN conference in New York, declared that “we are witnessing an alarming resurgence of this phenomenon in new forms and manifestations. This time, the world must not—cannot—be silent.” To that end, he appealed to Jews and non-Jews all over the world to support the efforts of the United Nations in fighting all forms of hate.

Yet, in light of its extraordinarily deep historical roots, anti-Semitism cannot be so easily homogenized with other forms of intolerance. Giuliani perhaps put it best when he insisted that the problem of anti-Semitism is a problem that goes far deeper than the present waves of attacks and harassment. It is, he said, a moral and social “burden that has held Europe back for two millennia.” This historical observation itself highlights an even more difficult challenge in combating contemporary European anti-Semitism. For even a brief reflection on the long development of anti-Jewish hatred in Europe reveals that it is not a single, readily identifiable social problem, but a deeply embedded and constantly mutating aspect of Europe’s own self-perception throughout its troubled history.

Just over 1,900 years ago, when Josephus Flavius sat down to write his accounts of Jewish history and tradition, hatred against Jews within the Roman Empire was already widespread and ancient. But it was very different from the anti-Semitism we face today. Josephus lived at a time when the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem was still horrifyingly fresh in memory and Jewish communities all across the Empire were attempting to adjust to diaspora existence within an empire that demanded the public worship of pagan gods and the veneration of the deified emperor as the requirements of full citizenship. Josephus devoted one of his major works—Against Apion—to the refutation of the familiar calumnies against his people, systematically disproving, with quotations from classical historians, the lack of a factual basis for the grotesque charges of leprosy, -worshiping and secret conclaves that had been used as the basis for Greek and Roman suspicion of the Jews. But mere facts did little to disperse suspicions about such a distinctive people in an imperial world that demanded of its subjects absolute allegiance and cultural conformity.

By the fourth century C.E. a new metaphysical concept transformed the negative image of the Jews in a far-reaching way. With the gradual conversion to Christianity, a new kind of obedience was required by the emperors and bishops of the Christian Empire, which Jews—as Jews—had no possibility to accept. Though they continued to contribute to urban life, craftsmanship and international trade, the Jews were now reviled for their rejection of Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospels and decried from a thousand pulpits from Constantinople to Athens to Gaul. For the peasants and laborers throughout the Western Empire who were now being brought into a religious system ruled by physical force and the threat of eternal damnation, the Jews, as a people apart, were perceived as the demonic enemies of the great drama of messianic redemption and spiritual hierarchy on which the divinely ordained Christian Empire was based. Blood libels were only a matter of time.

Yet even as outcasts and religious pariahs, the Jews of Europe survived and continued to play a formative role in the development of society. With the establishment of the early European kingdoms and the slow expansion of international trade, scattered Jewish communities, drawn together in ever closer bonds of mutual support, scholarship and personal relations, were found useful to princes and prelates all across Europe. In the muddy market towns—fated to become the great cities of Europe—Jews provided the international contacts and credit notes that made commerce possible.

[Mediocrates]

No less important, they could provide the hard currency gained from their business activities to tide over the overdue tax bills or debts of local farmers, tradesmen and even kings. But when misrule, exorbitant taxes or a sharp economic downturn turned up the pressure on both royal and private debtors, the arbitrary confiscation of Jewish money, expulsion or violent persecution were convenient solutions that could be justified with a new kind of hatred: the image of the Jew as the avaricious moneylender, wallowing in lucre and rejoicing in the misfortunes of hard-pressed customers.

The grotesque images of venal Jews descending to Hell with their gold coins and the personified image of Synagoga humiliated before the noble figure of the Church Triumphant—still to be seen among the figures of Cathedral façades throughout Europe—masked the reality of Europe’s own deep and not always honest or healthy obsession with wealth.

The waving flags and anthems of European national movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought changing forms of anti-Semitism (based, of course, on the earlier libels), but now adding the elements of biological racism and patriotism—always a dangerous mix. For despite the proudly and loudly declared European Enlightenment commitment to the rights of the individual, group identity remained supreme. And how ironic it was at a time when European nationalism and national chauvinism were growing that the Jews were now branded with that very quality they were criticized by the Greeks and Romans for lacking: cosmopolitanism.

The cry for the “purity” of each individual European people, expressed in the scientistic language of racism, led to an unprecedented anti-Semitic horror across Europe in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The Holocaust came to be recognized by the nations of Europe and the West as the unspeakable culmination of the ancient European tradition of Jew-hatred that must never be allowed to be replayed again.

So the nature of European anti-Semitism has been constantly changing over the centuries, and another disturbing change is perceptible today. The tides of twenty-first century politics, technology, communications and commerce have begun to erode Europe’s cultural autonomy and traditional national identities.

We now live in a global village, and a new kind of anti-Semitism has arisen—springing not only from the hypernationalist, racist elements within European society, but also from the huge and growing population of recent immigrants from North Africa and the Arab world to Europe, who have seized on European Jews and Jewish institutions as a target on which to act out their economic frustrations and political rage.

The fact that a damning 2003 European Commission report on anti-Semitism was shelved for fear of heightening intra-European tensions is a sign of its bankrupt moral leadership over a patchwork of regions and populations where growing diversity is the reality.

Jewish vulnerability in Europe has always sought protection in the kindness of strangers, but today’s calls to European governments for enhanced public education and increased law enforcement against acts of anti-Semitic harassment are only the first step. Despite its demographic realities of a fragmented mosaic of old and new cultures, the New Europe of the early twenty-first century remains highly stratified and culturally rigid.

The new wave of anti-Semitic attacks throughout Europe from both the far right and the new immigrant communities—along with the thinly veiled anti-Semitic sentiments often implied in radical leftist critiques and academic boycotts of Israel—are real and dangerous and must be ended. But they are also a deflection of attention from the real cultural conflict endangering the construction of a truly multicultural European Union and European society in the twenty-first century.

Anti-Semitism must be viewed not only as a “Jewish” problem but a struggle for the cultural soul of Europe itself. Without acknowledging and addressing this larger historical issue—of the Jews’ central role in and countless contributions to European civilization—even the most forceful political pronouncements and ad hoc legislation can, at best, bring about only a temporary lull in the centuries-long campaign of hate. “Europe” must be redefined to include all of its peoples, not merely its political boundaries. Otherwise, the ugly sidewalk cement barriers that now mark Jewish acceptance of a besieged and different status will condemn us to suffer through yet another tragic chapter in both Jewish and European history.

[Olivier]

the last time I posted that quantity of words in a row ... they were all deleted in minutes....

I guess french bashing has some kind of immunity

[philingraham]

Olivier, You never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity...

[Olivier]

btw, I am more and more convinced by the "peak oil" scenario you mailed me a while ago. It does seem the documents and data that I used to make my opinion underestimated the growth of oil demand.

so let it be know I do not miss *all* opportunities to be positive


... As for the opportunities to defend my country and humanist values, I'm afraid I miss much more than what I can grab, considering the awesome flow of hatred pouring out of here.

[TheyAre]

do a search for Eugene Island 330 if you're so convinced in peak oil.

[philingraham]

do a search for Eugene Island 330 if you're so convinced in peak oil.

I agree that just because we CALL oil," fossil fuels," it doesn't mean that it couldn't be something else. Hopefully, you're right about this. But after looking at multiple links, I didn't see one of them referring to "abiotic oil". They all seemed to be talking about Pleisctone and Jurrasic levels. This is not to suggest that oil comes from dinosaur remains. But your suggestion about Eugene Island is like grasping for straws.

Let's assume that you're right and there is an inexhausible source of oil. How do you access it ? Assuming that we can drill successfully, some 20,000 ft plus
and extract it profitably, do we have enough time to save Industrial Civilization, you know, North America, Japan, Europe, China, India, Indonesia, The Middle East, Austrailia, South America, etc. from imploding because of a lack of immediately available Oil ? In the face of this implosion, will the oil companies continue to drill ?

The World's population is currently at about 7 billion, and growing. All of this is a function of cheap and immediately available oil. I have no doubt that mankind is extremely clever. Maybe we will find a way out of this and Eugene Island may yet be the cure. Maybe...

But in the meantime we HAVE to look hard at the implications of Peak Oil and act accordingly...And the clever people on the Israel Forum should weigh in.