For Jews in France, a 'Kind of Intifada'

[Muddleoftheroad]

Escalation in Hate Crimes Leads to Soul-Searching, New Vigilance

By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 16, 2003; Page A01

PARIS -- The phone message is one of 10 waiting for Sylvain Zenouda at the local office of the Jewish Community Council of greater Paris: A gang of 15 North African teenagers, some of them wielding broom handles, had invaded the grounds of a Jewish day school on Avenue de Flandre in northeast Paris the previous evening. They punched and kicked teachers and students, yelled epithets and set off firecrackers in the courtyard before fleeing.

Zenouda is a commandant and 30-year veteran of the Paris police, but on this day, he is performing a different role: coordinator for the Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, a volunteer group. He phones the school, makes certain the principal has called the authorities and has insisted that the attack be recorded as a hate crime in the police report, then scribbles the details of the attack in his own battered blue notebook and on a red-and-white declaration form for the Jewish Community Council's burgeoning file of anti-Semitic assaults.

Elsewhere on this steamy July afternoon, he will meet with a businessman whose kosher restaurant was torched recently, a young man assaulted for wearing a Star of David necklace and a congregation of frightened synagogue-goers, some of whom are talking seriously of emigrating to Israel.

The file grows almost daily: 309 incidents in the past 15 months in the Paris region, according to Jewish council officials, and more than 550 since the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in September 2000. The National Consultative Committee on Human Rights, a government-funded body, reported a sixfold increase in acts of violence against Jewish people and property in France from 2001 to 2002.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61915-2003Jul15.html?nav=hptoc_w

[drdon326]

1. Anti-semitism in France ??

I find that hard to believe.

[papau]

2. a 'Kind of Intifada' = kill all Jews?.... Well, it is an honest Arab defin

And kill all who do not choose to kill all Jews.

Ann Coulter has an Arab Twin, I see.

[Muddleoftheroad]

3. Where are all those people who think there is no anti-Semitism

in France?

[newyorican]

5. Where are all those people that think France is in the ME?

:crazy:

[Muddleoftheroad]

7. Correlation

If you don't see the correlation, then you didn't read the article.

[bemildred]

4. This doesn't seem to be I/P affairs ..... nt

.

[Muddleoftheroad]

6. Read the article

It talks about a direct correlation between the rise in French anti-Semitism and actions in the I/P conflict. Add to it, it also discusses the rise of emigration from France of French Jews to Israel.

[bemildred]

8. OK.

I guess it taints everything it touches.

I don't think the fact that there is anti-semitism in France
is new, or has much to do with Israel per se, but it
seems to be the case that this is related in the sense that
local French morons dump on local French Jews because they are
annoyed with Israeli government policies. It would probably wind
up in the dungeon anyway, as most any thread that mentions Israel
or Jews or Sharon or Arafat etc., etc., does.