2018: The war against the Jews of France
2018: The war against the Jews of France

There have already been 11 anti-Semitic murders in France since 2000. But now, for the first time since the Second World War, a Jewish Holocaust survivor has been horribly murdered because she was Jewish. Two men have been arrested over the killing of the 85-year-old Jewish woman Mireille Knoll, whose stabbed body was found after her Paris apartment was set ablaze.

The news that Muslim neighbors stabbed the senescent body of a French Holocaust survivor, stabbed eleven times and burned to death, should have exploded on all over the Western media. Instead, it gained little attention.

Do we really think that it will stop with the Jews? Two days before the police discovered Knoll's body, in Trèbes a jihadist killed a butcher, a pensioner and a policeman. France is now witnessing scenes the world learnt to see in Palmyra, Syria, where the Islamic State orchestrated some of its mass executions.

In France, deadly anti-Semitism began with Ilan Halimi, a Jewish mobile phone salesman, tortured and burned to death by the “gang of barbarians”. Then French Islamists attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse, where they killed four people, including three pupils. One of these, the eight year old Miriam Monsonego, was cornered and shot in her head in a Nazi-style execution. Then came the siege at the Paris' Hypercacher, where four Jews were killed, and a retired doctor and orthodox Jew, Sarah Halimi, was thrown from the window of her apartment by a Muslim neighbor.

There has been not only this deadly anti-Semitism, but also the daily “banal anti-Semitism” made of insults, intimidations, physical violence and tags. “Death to Jews” is the new daily French reality.

A few weeks ago, the idea to republish the 1903s anti-Semitic pamphlets of Louis-Ferdinand Céline by the leading publishing house Gallimard sparked a row, with the intervention even of the PM.

Then the French debate was dominated by the news that another writer, Charles Maurras, had been included by the government in its annual project to mark the anniversaries of notable figures. Like Céline, Maurras was a strident nationalist and anti-Semite. Unfortunately, the French establishment chose two wrong, easy targets as their fight against anti-Semitism. The deadly attacks against the Jews today don't come from these dead French writers, but from the French Islamists, alive and determined to target the Jews.  

In the last decade, 40.000 Jews packed their bags and left France. It is a mass exodus of one tenth of the total Jewish population. According with a report, of the half-million Jews currently living in France, 40 percent or 200.000 Jews are also considering the possibility of moving to Israel.

Half of the French military contingent has been located to protect the Jewish sites, expecially schools. The security at Jewish schools, synagogues and centers absorbed most of the resources France had to invest in the home front after a series of lethal Jihadist attacks.

The most recent figures available show that anti-Semitic violence increased by 26 percent last year in France. Attacks on Jewish minors have also increased by 40 percent compared to 2016. Half of all racist attacks in France have Jews as their target, even though Jews number less than 1 percent of the population. There were 4,092 anti-Semitic acts in France in the period 2005-2015. 70 percent of French Jews are now worried about harassment and 60 percent about physical abuse. Panic and fear today dominate the third world's largest Jewish community.

Many historic French Jewish areas have been emptied of their Jews. The number of Jewish families in Aulnay-sous-Bois fell from 600 to 100, in Le Blanc-Mesnil from 300 to 100, in Clichy-Sous-Bois from 400 to 80, and in La Courneuve from 300 to 80. This has been called an “internal exodus”. In Pierrefitte, the community has recorded a 50 percent of decline in the number of faithful.

All these statistics of deadly attacks, selective hate against one specific minority, incresing violence, mass exodus and general indifference have only one name: a war against the Jews is being waged by the Islamists.

Last September, French feminist and author Elisabeth Badinter published an appeal to “not let the Jews fight alone”. Unfortunately, that seems exactly to be France's deliberate choice. According to an Ipsos poll, 60 percent of the French are “indifferent” to the flight and plight of their Jewish brethen.

As Alexandre Mendel wrote in his book “Partition”, “in 1939 we did not want to die for Danzig. In 2017, we do not want to die to rescue La Courneuve!”.

And its Jews!