The French Connection – To Anti-Semitism

Posted By Ari Lieberman On November 29, 2012 @ 12:46 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments

When it comes to the Jews, the French have a long, checkered history of treachery. French anti-Semitism is well known and deeply embedded in French culture. It therefore comes as no surprise that France will likely be the first major Western power to recognize Palestinian statehood, according to a statement released by the French Foreign Ministry.

No doubt, the continued Arab migration to France and the influence Muslims wield in that spineless country played a role in shaping France’s disastrous foreign policy decision. Yet the French decision is consistent with their perfidious past and it is likely that they would have embarked on the same trajectory with or without indigenous Muslim influence.

The French prefer to think of themselves as an enlightened people but the sad fact is that French cultural anti-Semitism is among the most insidious and embedded of all of Europe. Assimilated or not, Jews have always been the preferred target of the French cultural elite and French history is peppered with such examples.

Consider the infamous case of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French artillery corps and fully assimilated Jew, falsely accused by the French military establishment of passing military secrets to the Germans. Dreyfus was arrested and charged with treason by French authorities in 1894. He was found guilty by a French kangaroo court and spent the next four years of his life on Devil’s Island. Despite overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence of his innocence, French authorities, infected with anti-Semitism from the top down, refused to budge. It was not until 1906 that a French military commission fully exonerated Dreyfus.

It is no secret that among the Western nations occupied by the Nazis during World War II, the French were the most willing collaborators going well beyond what was requested of them by their Nazi masters. It was not until 1995 that the French acknowledged their dastardly role in their systematic efforts to exterminate French Jewry. The stench of French collaboration and the role they played in the murder of their own citizens, simply because they were of Jewish decent, will remain a permanent stain on France.

In 1967, when Israel was under existential threat from her Islamic neighbors, French President Charles de Gaulle initiated an arms embargo on Israel and refused to deliver 50 Mirage Vs, which had already been paid for by Israel. Adding insult to injury, the French sold the aircraft to Qaddafi’s Libya, a sworn enemy of the Jewish State.

Iraq under the murderous Saddam Hussein maintained close relations with France. Indeed, France among all the Western powers, stood out as Iraq’s closest ally. French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac even referred to Hussein – the man who threatened to “burn half of Israel” and who provided cash for the families of homicide bombers – as his “personal friend.” France was also instrumental in providing Hussein with a nuclear reactor despite justifiable fears that such a reactor would be used by Hussein to produce WMDs.

France has a long history of cozying up to anti-Western characters. She provided safe haven to Ayatollah Khomeini and embraced arch terrorist Yasser Arafat as well as Syria’s former President and serial killer Hafez al-Assad.

As recent as this year, France’s consul general in Jerusalem engaged in historical revisionism by issuing an asinine statement that attempted to sever the historical Jewish nexus with the Land of Israel. In a speech on archeology in Israel, Consul General Frederic Desagneaux made repeated references to “Palestine’ and “Palestinian archeology” without once referencing Israel or Jews, as if the history of that region began and ended with so-called Palestinian Arabs.

The French now come full circle with their recently announced intention to recognize Palestinian statehood. The French ambassador to London once referred to Israel as “that shitty little country.” Judging by France’s collaborationist past and its associations with less than reputable characters, the ambassador’s pejoratives accurately describe France to a T.

This posted article, while historically quite accurate in terms of the antisemitic events in France which are mentioned, lacks a balanced perspective. France's history with respect to its Jews also has much more benign aspects which aren't discussed at all.

Amongst these are (1) the granting by Napoleon of full citizenship status to Jews within his realm (a major advance for some European Jewry at the time), (2) the anti-Nazi activities of a strong underground French resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of WWII, which helped to prepare France for the Allied success in driving the Nazis out of the country, beginning with the Normandy D-Day invasion, (3) the rise of some French Jews to positions of influence in arts, sciences, and politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and (4) the support of the French government for the state of Israel in its early years, including the Suez crisis of 1956.

Currently, even with the French government often pandering to Islamic extremism, there is only a relatively small outmigration of French Jews, and the French Jewish population has remained relatively stable for decades and they seem in general to have a fairly good standard of living. This would seem to be a sign that most French Jews do not feel that there is any urgency to get out of a dire situation. Are they oblivious to a coming disaster? Please feel free to comment.

Not something to generally brag about.

It’s in the standard (complete) Rashi on Exodus 10:22 and 13:8, explained more clearly in the Midrash on Parshat Bo and Beshallach, plague of darkness.

http://weeklytorahmessage.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html

...After sharing the literal reading of the word Chamushim, Rashi offers his famed alternative interpretation.

Basing himself on the Midrash Mechilta and Tanchuma, Rashi suggests that the word Chamushim is derived from the Hebrew word Chamisha, five, and implies that only one of five Israelites departed from Egypt. The other four fifths, died in Egypt during the three days of the plague of darkness.

Apparently, the vast majority of the Jews were so assimilated that they refused to leave Egypt. In response, the Al-mighty eliminated them during the plague of darkness so that the Egyptians would be unaware of what happened, sparing the surviving Israelites embarrassment...

...I find a strange parallel between present day France’s Jewish population and Nazi Germany.

I was tempted to view it along the same lines, but there are obvious differences between the two situations. One would be that the Nazis publicly proclaimed their antisemitism before coming to power in no uncertain terms. They came up with antisemitic decrees that crippled Jewish life in Germany as early as the first few months of their reign. The exodus rate of Jews out of Germany during the period when getting out was possible (1933-39) was approximately 70%. (With few exceptions, the remaining 30% did not survive the Holocaust.)

In current-day France, the antisemitism in the government is much more subtle, and there are few laws if any that restrict the Jewish population from religious or economic freedom. The main problem is not with the direct relationship of the government vis-a-vis the Jewish population, but the pandering of the government to a large antisemitic minority immigrant group, the Islamic population. The Jews of France, at least thus far, have not left in anywhere near the percentages as they did in Nazi Germany, because circumstances are not - at least not yet - anywhere near as threatening to their well-being as they were in Germany back then.

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