Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France says the increasing anti-Israel and anti-Israel sentiments in French society have all the elements necessary to categorize them as anti-Semitism.
"In the 1970s, a new type of Jew-hatred emerged among elites," Valls told The Wall Street Journal, "one that expressed itself primarily as hostility to Zionism and Israel. This new bigotry has all the [old] components of anti-Semitism, [including] a 'plot'-based view of imagined Jewish conspiracies.’’
Valls said that this anti-Semitism of the elites has gradually "followed a migration, [impacting] young people in the poor neighborhoods."
He said he fears that the anti-Semitism prevalent in today's French society is "much deeper [than just] a couple of idiots who desecrate Jewish cemeteries." He continued with incredulity: "In 2013 or 2014, you have people in the streets of Paris chanting ‘Death to the Jews!’ And in all the attacks in Paris or the attacks in Copenhagen, targeting the Jews is really at the heart of their motivation.”
Valls has also termed the recent terror attacks against Jews in Paris and Copenhagen as acts of "Islamo-fascism."
Valls, among Europe’s most vocal advocates for the Jewish community, was recently the target of an anti-Semitic smear himself: A former Socialist-party Foreign Minister of France claimed that Valls' policies were influenced by the fact that his wife was Jewish. The accusation became a major controversy, and was labeled "bigotry" and an example of "conspiracy theories claiming invisible Jewish control over governments."