[BRIEF NOTE] Gwynne Dyer on Anti-Semitism in France

[rfmcdonald]

Gwynne Dyer has an interesting article in the Toronto Star, the salient portions of which I reproduce below.

There is no doubt that anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise in France: from 593 reported attacks or threats against France's 600,000 Jews in 2003 to 510 in only the first six months of this year.

[. . .]

We spend a lot of time in France, too. Some of it is in Paris, looking after my wife's almost-bag-lady aunt, who lives in the rougher part of town and is now pretty much alone in the world.

She's an unashamed racist — she's in her late 70s, and she lost her husband in the Algerian war — but people of every race in the neighbourhood are very good about looking after her. She tolerates it, and they tolerate her tolerating it. It doesn't feel like a racist hell.

So how to explain the gulf between these personal observations and those alarmist headlines?

Start with this wave of anti-Semitism in France. Even Sharon conceded that this is not a revival of traditional Christian anti-Semitism. "In France today, about 10 per cent of the population are Muslims," he explained, and "that gets a different kind of anti-Semitism, based on anti-Israeli feelings and propaganda."

What has been happening in France is ugly.

In the low-cost, high-rise tracts of housing that ring the big French cities, gangs of poor immigrant kids have begun to harass poor Jewish families that live in the same vicinity.

They are not exclusively Arab gangs. They will usually include Turks, Eastern Europeans, West Africans, and Afro-Caribbeans, as well as white French working-class kids whose families have been dumped in the same high-rises.

But all these kids have adopted the stone-throwing Palestinian children of the intifada as their model of defiance to "the power" that marginalizes them. French Jews, redefined as honourary Israelis, then become the targets of their wrath.

Only one French Jew in a thousand has reported a threat or an actual attack this year, and the notion that they must all flee France immediately is just Sharon trying to drum up some new immigrants for Israel, where total immigration fell to 25,000 last year.

President Jacques Chirac has launched a national appeal for racial and religious tolerance in France, and the number of French Jews who will actually leave for Israel this year is estimated to be around 2,500 — less than half of 1 per cent of the French Jewish community.

So, not specifically French, and not specifically Muslim either, but specifically connected to the banlieues. This makes a surprising amount of sense.