Mick Hartley

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, reporting from Paris at UnHerd – How France became the most anti-Semitic country in the West:

[T]he 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Things have got so bad that a yet-unpublished report commissioned by Ronald S. Lauder, the former U.S. Ambassador to Austria, rates France as the most dangerous place to be a Jew among 11 European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).  […]

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….