Tidligere denne måneden gikk anti-terrorpolitiet til arrestasjoner av 11 personer mistenkt for å stå bak angrepet på matbutikken i forstaden til Paris, Sarcelles. En tolvte person ble drept under politiraidet mot den mistenkte terrorcellen.
Franske jøder forklarer selv hatet mot dem fra muslimsk hold, men sinte, arbeidsløse, fremmedgjorte menn som trenger en syndebukk for sin egen miserable situasjon, og som oppmuntres fra religiøst hold, skriver Washington Post Samtidig har myndighetene sviktet jødene ved ikke å agere kontant: temaet anses som ”sosialt sensitivt”. Terroristene kommer ikke utenfra, de kommer fra nabolaget.
Som en ledende jøde formulerer situasjonen for jødene i Europa generelt: de er den eneste religiøse gruppen som må ha politibeskyttelse når de ber. De er den eneste religiøse gruppen som må ha politibeskyttelse for barna på vei til skolen.
Egentlig er tilstanden knapt til å tro, og man kan bli vettskremt av mindre hvis man forestiller seg den mulige situasjonen om fem til ti år, om 20 år… Et Europa uten jøder, som har emigrert til USA og Israel?
President Francois Hollande has promised the head of an umbrella group of Muslim organizations that the government would not stigmatize all Muslims for anti-Semitic acts committed by a radical fringe.
Interior Minister Manuel Valls urged respect for all religions in a country that has Western Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim communities. France has about 5 million Muslims and 500,000 Jews.
«These are not terrorist networks that come from outside. They are from our neighborhoods,» Mr. Valls said on the TF1 television network.
Haunted by the Holocaust
The French government remains haunted by its complicity in sending tens of thousands of French Jews to their deaths in the Holocaust. Two days after the Sarcelles attack, Mr. Hollande traveled to a place used during World War II as a transit point for people destined for concentration camps.
Anti-Semitic groups «don’t have the same face as yesterday, but they have the same goal,» he said.
The recent attacks have unsettled Jews, many of whom thought that anti-Semitism had faded since the 1980s when members of the far-right fringe tipped over gravestones and defaced synagogues with graffiti.
«Anti-Semitism previously came from the extreme right, and the movements expressed their attitudes toward Jews with posters, words, perhaps by desecrating a cemetery,» said Yossi Malka, a Moroccan Jew who settled in Sarcelles in the 1980s.
«Today, we have an anti-Semitism that doesn’t end with words but goes into the realm of action.»
Mr. Malka blames conflicts overseas as well as the wave of post-colonial immigration from North Africa that has left a generation of struggling young Muslims.
Mr. Malka, who works with a French organization dedicated to tracking anti-Semitic acts nationwide, says violent and harassing acts spiked after the March shootings in Toulouse, climbing from two or three a month to seven.
The Toulouse shooter, Mohamed Merah, had admirers online even before his death in a shootout with police, according to Abraham Cooper, an American rabbi in Los Angeles who has worked with the French government and Jewish community.
«To those disaffected Muslims in France and elsewhere, he is someone to be emulated,» Mr. Cooper said.
Mr. Hollande said the jihadist network that was broken up this month had been ready to strike again in coming weeks.
Officials said the man killed in the raids had been under surveillance since last spring – around the same time as the Toulouse killings.
France’s Jewish population was decimated by the Holocaust, and many in the generation that followed come from former French colonies in North Africa or the Middle East.
The real question
Serge Cwajgenbaum, secretary-general of the European Jewish Congress, said France’s problems are similar to those elsewhere in Europe, but they are more notable because of the larger Jewish population.
«The only group of people, of citizens in Europe, who go and pray under police protection are the Jews. The only group who sends its kids to a school under police protection are the Jews,» he said. «That’s a real question – Why?»
Many French Jews say it is impossible to separate anti-Semitism from Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians or France’s problems with disaffected youth and the up to 50 percent unemployment in some heavily immigrant housing projects.
Sarcelles, a short train ride from central Paris, is relatively new by French standards, with most of its population of 60,000 living in high-rise apartment complexes dating to the 1970s.
Mr. Malka finds himself speaking Arabic to Muslims from his native Morocco, moving easily between the Jewish quarter that was attacked to the enormous open-air market across the street, where hundreds of stalls sell meat, clothes and knickknacks and he can find the fruits and vegetables of his childhood.
Mr. Malka said the tensions in Sarcelles became progressively worse as the year progressed.
First, anti-Israel posters from an unknown group appeared during France’s election campaign, followed by anti-Semitic graffiti, and then a young Jewish man was roughed up in July.
Muslim leaders have condemned the attacks.
Mohammed Moussaoui, head of the umbrella group of Muslim organizations CFCM, said the group «assures the French Jewish community of its support and fraternal solidarity in the face of all attacks.»
The government also changed anti-terrorism laws to more severely punish anyone trained abroad who commits terrorism in France.
Mr. Hollande said authorities should show «intransigence» toward racism and anti-Semitism.
«Nothing will be tolerated. Nothing should happen,» he said. «Any act, any remark, will be prosecuted with the greatest firmness.»