Europe s Jews fear new wave of anti-Semitism

Scotsman ^ | April 3 2002 | SUSAN BELL

[knighthawk]

AFTER a wave of attacks on Jewish targets, the French government warned yesterday that Europe ran the risk of becoming a battleground where Jews and Muslims re-enact the bloody violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A Jewish prayer house in Strasbourg was partially destroyed yesterday in what appeared to be the latest in a string of arson attacks against France’s Jewish community.

The building’s wooden doors were burnt through. It was the fifth Jewish site to be attacked in the country in less than four days and the second in Strasbourg, where the doors of a synagogue were destroyed in a fire over the weekend.

On Sunday night, the Or Aviv synagogue in Marseilles was burnt to the ground while on Saturday a gunman fired on a kosher butcher shop in Toulouse. In the early hours of Saturday morning, 15 masked youths stormed a synagogue in Lyon, ramming open the gates with two stolen cars, which they set ablaze in an inner courtyard. No-one was hurt in the attack and firefighters extinguished the cars before they caused serious damage to the building.

In Berlin, two Jewish American tourists were attacked yesterday in one of the capital’s most fashionable streets by a gang who followed them from a local synagogue. The attackers asked the tourists, who were wearing orthodox Jewish clothing, if they were Jewish before beating them to the ground.

The assailants, whom police described as being of North African or Middle Eastern origin, fled after the attack. No arrests were made.

In Brussels, unknown assailants hurled firebombs at a synagogue in the Anderlecht district on Monday, causing damage but no injuries. "There really is a climate of hostility which is resulting in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being transposed into the most troubled districts of our capital," said the local mayor, Jacques Simonet.

French officials agree that the escalating conflict in the Middle East has stirred hostility towards the country’s 700,000-strong Jewish community. However, Jewish leaders have blamed politicians’ complacency for the attacks, saying they have failed to react to a rising tide of anti-Semitism.

Jewish leaders say the attacks might signal a fresh wave of anti-Semitism. One warned of a new Kristallnacht, referring to a night of Nazi attacks on Jewish people, shops and businesses, in Germany in 1938.

The Israeli ambassador, Elie Barnavi, said young Arabs were behind recent attacks. The daily Le Figaro expressed concern yesterday about rising tension between France’s Jewish community - Europe’s largest - and its four to five million Muslims, suggesting the country could become "an annex of the battleground in the Middle East".

Right-wing pro-Israeli activists clashed yesterday with Palestinian supporters waiting to welcome the militant French farmer José Bové at Orly airport in Paris after he was deported from Israel after visiting Arafat in his besieged office.

[knighthawk]

Right-wing pro-Israeli activists clashed yesterday with Palestinian supporters

And the left accuses the right of racism!

[knighthawk]

Ping

[LarryLied]

The French Front National has been warning for years this would eventually occur if immigration was not put under control. Their thanks was to be smeared as antisemites, fascists and Nazis by liberals and most Jews(even though some Jews are leaders in the FN).

. Now those "antisemites" are the ones out on the streets protecting Jews from Muslims. I doubt they will get much thanks for it however. Some people never learn.

[Shermy]

This is challenging the affected superiority of the French. How does one put it - the dismissive attitude that the Americans are overreacting or are unsophisticated? I think you know what I mean - the French elite groupthink which I see as a form of mass denial. Contructed on the creeping fear of Civil War with the domestic Islamists. I do sense they have this fear and in the great French tradition of doing business as usual, are denying it.

A chink in the armor of this mentalite' is the local jews as targets for the Islamists. What to do, what to do. Blame Israel?

[Shermy]

Um, Le Pen did make anti-semitic remarks. His views on immigration doesn't necessarily make him a racist, but he is one, no?

[Inkie]

Calling Bernard Goldberg! Big bad "RIGHT-WING pro-Israeli activists" vs meek little "Palestinian supporters." Time for a major visit to the vomitorium.

[eureka!]

"Calling Bernard Goldberg! Big bad "RIGHT-WING pro-Israeli activists" vs meek little "Palestinian supporters."

Sickening, isn't it?

[LarryLied]

I know little about Le Pen or the National Front. Do they actually oppose people because of what they are and cannot change or did Le Pen simply comment on where most in a group are politically? That is the usual case behind charges of antisemitism.

[10mm]

Time for European Jews to learn their lessons from history and start shooting their attackers dead. Otherwise, it's Railroad Cars and Ovens, Part II.

[Map Kernow]

This is the fruit of the sheer idiocy of uncontrolled immigration into Europe from Muslim countries---the very thugs that are now shooting Jews and burning synagogues will be abusing and outraging non-Jewish Europeans tomorrow.

Luckily, we in America don't have to worry about that with all our uncontrolled and illegal immigrants.

Do we?

[Procyon]

The insufferable French:

When can we expect France to begin expelling their Jews in order to protect French cultural treasures from attacks by muslims?

[Phillip Augustus]

America is much farther down the tubes than is Europe. Check the demographics.

[Phillip Augustus]

Not exactly, he believes in this concept of "France for the French". Makes a great deal of sense to me, and, while he has indeed tossed around a few anti-Semetic comments from time to time, he does not exclude Jews from being French. In fact, there are far-seeing Jews in his own movement.

[mrustow]

Time for European Jews to learn their lessons from history and start shooting their attackers dead. Otherwise, it's Railroad Cars and Ovens, Part II.

Exactly. The French government had weeks to get at the Arab thugs, did nothing, and is still doing nothing. No arrests, etc. Ther Jews will either defend themselves -- and get arrested by a suddenly energized, French government -- or slowly get picked off.

[mrustow]

This is the fruit of the sheer idiocy of uncontrolled immigration into Europe from Muslim countries---the very thugs that are now shooting Jews and burning synagogues will be abusing and outraging non-Jewish Europeans tomorrow.

The Europeans are hopeless; they have no learning curve. The question -- which you implied -- is, do we?

[AnnaZ]

Right-wing pro-Israeli activists clashed yesterday with Palestinian supporters waiting to welcome the militant French farmer José Bové at Orly airport in Paris after he was deported from Israel after visiting Arafat in his besieged office.

 

Ah hahahaha.

 

Now the right wing is pro-Israel? I thought if you were right-wing you were automatically KKK. The press morons are scrambling like eggs.

 

(Right-wing, baby, 'cause I don't wanna be wrong.)

 

 

Demonstrations in Support of Israel This Weekend

[aristeides]

C-SPAN Radio recently rebroadcast its interview of Peter Brimelow in connection with the publication a few years ago of his book Alien Nation, which was an attack on slack immigration policies. Brimelow said that he had heard Jews defend Third-World immigration with the idea that it made impossible a Nazi-like, Aryan government that might threaten them. Ironic that those Jews did not see that the greater danger to them came from the Third World and colored populations that they welcomed.

But I suspect you're right, that the people guilty of that misjudgment are incapable of admitting that they were disastrously wrong.

[knighthawk]

Yes!