Mick Hartley

France again, this time from Marc Weitzmann in Tablet. He'd been struggling to make sense of the extraordinary outpouring of Jew-hatred that we've seen across America, the UK, Europe, since the Oct 7 Hamas massacre. Then it hit him – "The whole planet had become France, and Mohamed Merah had returned". France’s Nightmare Is Yours Now:

Merah was the 23-year-old killer of Algerian descent raised and born in the city of Toulouse, France, who on March 19, 2012, entered the local Ozar Hatorah school with a Parabellum 9-millimeter and a .45 ACP and shot at close range one of the rabbis in the school along with his two sons, Gabriel, 3, and Aryeh, 6. He then chased little Myriam, age 9, across the courtyard, grabbed her by her hair, put his weapon’s barrel against her head and pulled the trigger, before walking back quietly toward his scooter. Like the Hamas pogromists of Oct. 7 he had equipped himself with a GoPro camera so the slaughter could be filmed and widely seen. Since social media was still relatively new, he sent his videos to the offices of Al Jazeera, where—Qatar being Qatar—the journalists waited for the emir’s orders to know whether they should air the images or not. Under pressure from the French government, the videos were not aired.

Merah’s murders changed everything in France—for the worse. It also provided a sickening preview of how the massacre of Oct. 7 is likely to change the lives of Jews in other Western countries….

What I remember best about those days is the shame that France felt that it was now the one country in Europe since WWII where Jewish kids could be killed in broad daylight simply because they were Jews. The worse part was the feeling of recognition that this realization entailed. Our nightmarish fantasy, which we had buried away somewhere, as part of the process of becoming adults and leading normal French lives, had come true before our eyes. It was a shock, but in a sick way, it wasn’t a surprise. It was a scene that we all recognized. Only this time, it was real.

How naïve we were. In retrospect, only the second feeling—the recognition—still makes some kind of sense. Here is why.

Like today’s global pogrom, Merah’s 2012 murders in France gave narrative form to what had expressed itself until then as a babbling impulse. It provided the random aggressions and free-floating hatreds with a narrative and gave them meaning. In a word, it was an epiphany—an epiphany of murderers. Here it is! Here is what we’ve been trying to do all along, without even knowing it!

Jailed in Toulon for burglary, a petty delinquent named Mehdi Nemmouche watched, transfixed, the night police captured Merah on TV. “Merah’s the greatest guy France ever produced,” he is reported to have said the next day. “I feel great this morning, I could shoot a little Jew girl today.”

Nothing was the same in the country after that. 2013 saw an insane viral epidemic of the “quenelle,” the antisemitic Nazi salute in reverse popularized by the Black, Tehran-backed comedian Dieudonné. The gesture became so popular that people actually invited TV show audiences to do it live in front of the cameras. January 2014 saw the “day of wrath” demonstration during which far-right, anti-abortion activists, Salafis, and royalists united to do the quenelle and chant “Jew, France is not yours.” Five months later in Brussels, Mehdi Nemmouche, back from Syria where he had joined ISIS after being released from jail, killed three people in the Brussel’s Jewish Museum. Meanwhile, random antisemitic incidents were hitting the roof. France counted more than 800 antisemitic incidents in 2014—more than two a day. Then began with the Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher kosher market killings on Jan. 7, which marked the start of a terror wave that would culminate with the Bataclan massacre.

In other words, lots of people in France felt “energized” and “exhilarated” by Merah’s murders, just like the Cornell professor Rickford did after the Hamas pogrom. This month, in France alone, the number of antisemitic incidents has reached an astonishing 650, 30% higher than the total for all of 2022. Jews in France now remove mezuzas from their doors and hide their Jewishness to whatever extent they can. They’ve learned that killing Jews provokes an enthusiasm that tends to become strangely contagious.

This is now the 21st century….

Worth reading in full.