There Is Growing Alarm Among French Jews

There is growing alarm among French Jews: “Consistory VP: ‘Jews are beginning to lose hope for a future in France’ – interview,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, September 2, 2024:

The French Jewish community is vigilant in its protection of what Cohen Tenoudji described as a “serene” but “worried” Jewish life, with synagogues equipped with secure entrances, video and electronic surveillance, and the close collaboration of groups like SPCJ with law enforcement.

The government is investing a great deal of resources into protecting its Jewish citizens, according to Cohen Tenoudji, keeping watch and adapting according to security threats.

Yet the government itself has been in a state of turmoil since the second round of July elections, which saw the success of the left-wing New Popular Front coalition, which included Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI). With the center and right-wing blocks almost having an equal share of the National Assembly’s seats, political deadlock continued last Monday as President Emmanuel Macron refused to accept NPF’s Prime ministerial candidate.

Rising extremism amid political uncertainty

Amidst the country’s political uncertainty, French Jews are concerned about the role of “extreme” political parties like LFI, which Cohen Tenoudji says have been brandishing anti-Zionism in their rhetoric….

The leader of La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is an out-and-out antisemite, who has accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.”

In 2016, the then-Prime Minister of France, Manual Valls, declared that “France without its Jews would not be France.” How much less rich would the intellectual, artistic, and entrepreneurial life of the country be without “the Jews of France.” Do the French want many of the 550,000 Jews to feel they must leave, driven out by the 5.7 million Muslims, whose religion forbids all paintings and sculpture of living creatures, forbids all instrumental music, forbids all books which encourage skepticism and freedom of thought — whose wretched cultural life, in short, consists almost entirely of reciting and memorizing that mind-numbing book, the Qur’an, properly described by Thomas Carlyle “as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; — insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran.” An ever-more islamized France, devoid of its Jewish population, would be as barren of intellectual life as Algeria, or Yemen, or Afghanistan, or Iran.

If the French want Jews to remain in the country, they ought to enforce measures to halt the rise in the country’s Muslim population.

First, they must call a halt to all Muslim immigration. Not just because of the effect of that population on Jews, but because of the expense of providing those economic migrants with the French welfare state’s generous benefits, which is why these economic migrants came to France in the first place, posing as “asylum seekers.” Furthermore, non-Jewish French people also must endure the staggering effect of Muslim criminality; close to 50% of prisoners in French jails are Muslims, even though Muslims make up only 10% of the population.

Second, the French state should immediately deport any immigrant convicted of a crime, no matter how minor. Most of these will be Muslims, who far outnumber other immigrants — Hindus, Chinese, Vietnamese, eastern Europeans — in their rates of criminality. No need for French taxpayers to pay for their upkeep in French prisons; let them be sent back to the hellholes from whence they came.

Third, pass laws putting time limits on the receipt of benefits by immigrants. First, immigrants should be required to live in France, gainfully employed, for five years before they can qualify for any benefits. Second, for those who do finally qualify, allow those benefits to be received for a fixed time — say, three years — after which they will stop. No more living on the French state for years and years. Both of those measures will make France a much less attractive place for the Muslim economic migrants who have been battening on a cornucopia of benefits.

As for the sense of isolation now reported by some – too many — French Jews, let us have more politicians and others of note (public intellectuals, actors, musicians) take part in solidarity marches for Israel against antisemitism. French Jews should no longer feel that they have been abandoned to conduct their marches alone. Let Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the head of the far-left La France Insoumise, know that his blatant antisemitism and anti-Israel animus — he accuses Israel of “genocide” – are rejected, that French Jews, and the Jewish state, will be forthrightly supported by most of their countrymen, who agree with Manuel Valls that “France without its Jews is not France.”