Hmmm. What is so different about the France of today that there should be such a sharp rise in antisemitism? Have the National Socialists reoccupied France? Or has another group that hates Jews entered the country in large numbers? It’s a mystery!
“Antisemitic Incidents in France Up 200% This Year, Interior Minister Warns After Attempted Synagogue Arson,” Algemeiner, August 26, 2024:
There has been a “very significant increase” in antisemitic acts in France this year, according to outgoing French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who on Sunday warned incidents targeting the country’s Jewish community spiked by about 200 percent since Jan. 1.
Darmanin revealed the troubling surge in antisemitism one day after French police arrested a 33-year-old Algerian man suspected of trying to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte.
The attacker had set fire to several entry doors to the synagogue and cars nearby. One of the cars contained a gas canister that exploded, injuring a policeman who was securing the site. The rabbi and his family were inside the synagogue at the time of the attack but were unharmed.
“Deliberately setting fire to a synagogue where the rabbi and his family live while waiting with an axe … is an antisemitic act, and it must be denounced as such,” Darmanin said of the incident on French television, according to Euronews.
On Sunday, Darmanin continued to denounce what he described as a “vile antisemitic act” and the increase in anti-Jewish crimes across France more broadly.
“Two-thirds of anti-religious acts … are against Jews,” the interior minister added, according to French broadcaster BFM TV.
Darmanin’s comments came after he stated earlier this month that antisemitic acts in France have tripled over the last year. In the first half of 2024, 887 such incidents were recorded, almost triple the 304 recorded in the same period last year, he said.
France has experienced a record surge of antisemitism in the wake of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. Antisemitic outrages rose by over 1,000 percent in the final three months of 2023 compared with the previous year, with over 1,200 incidents reported — greater than the total number of incidents in France for the previous three years combined.
Amid the wave of attacks, France held snap parliamentary elections last month which brought an anti-Israel leftist coalition to power, leading French Jews to express deep apprehension about their future status in the country.
“It seems France has no future for Jews,” Rabbi Moshe Sebbag of Paris’ Grand Synagogue told the Times of Israel following the ascension of the New Popular Front, a coalition of far-left parties. “We fear for the future of our children.”…
Richard James says
I would hazard a guess that they are committed by immigrants or left wing activists, yet not one would have been done by the so called far right.
Rick Olsha says
Meanwhile, AM ISRAEL CHAI !!!!!!!