Friday, January 12, 2018. Sarcelles. A city in the northern suburbs of Paris. A 15-year-old girl returns from high school. She wears a necklace with a star of David and a Jewish school uniform. A man attacks her with a knife, slashes her face, and runs away. She will be disfigured the rest of her life.
January 29, again in Sarcelles, an 8-year-old boy wearing a Jewish skullcap is kicked and punched by two teenagers.
A year earlier, in February, 2017, in Bondy, two young Jews wearing Jewish skullcaps were severely beaten with sticks and metal poles. One of the Jews had his fingers cut with a hacksaw.
Before that, in Marseilles, a Jewish teacher was attacked with a machete by a high school student who said he wanted to "decapitate a Jew". The teacher used the Torah he was carrying to protect himself. He survived but was seriously injured.
In France, anti-Semitic attacks have been multiplying.
Most are committed in broad daylight; Jews know they have to be street-smart. Some attackers break into Jewish homes.
In September 2017, Roger Pinto, president of Siona, a leading pro-Israel organization in France, was beaten and held for hours by people who forced open his door.
Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jewish lady, was beaten and tortured in her Paris apartment, then thrown from her balcony.
On January 18, 2018, six days after the knife attack in Sarcelles, one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Montreuil, east of Paris, was tortured all night by two men who broke open a window and assaulted him as he slept.
Graffiti on Jewish-owned homes warn the owners to "flee immediately" if they want to live. Anonymous letters with live bullets are dropped into mailboxes of Jews, and state that the next bullet will be fired into the recipient's head.
The word "Jew" is painted in capital letters on Jewish shops and restaurants. On the third anniversary of an attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris, another kosher store was torched and destroyed.
"One racist act out of three committed in France in the last two years was directed against a Jew, while Jews now represent less than 1% of the French population", noted the most recent report submitted to the French government by the Jewish Community Protection Service.
"Anti-Semitism has grown so much recently," the report added, "that acts of aggression which cause no injury are no longer reported. Most victims feel powerless and are afraid of reprisals if they file a complaint".
Those French Jews who can leave the country, leave.
Those who have not yet decided to leave or who do not have the financial means, move to safer neighborhoods.
Most departures are hasty; many Jewish families sell their homes well below the market price. Some families end up in apartments that are too small, but prefer discomfort to the risk of being mugged or killed.
The French Jewish community may still be the largest in Europe, but it is shrinking rapidly. In 2000, it was estimated at 500,000, but the number now is less than 400,000, and sinking. Jewish districts that once were thriving are now on the verge of extinction.
"What is happening is an ethnic cleansing that dare not speak its name. In few decades, there will be no Jews in France," according to Richard Abitbol, president of the Confederation of French Jews and Friends of Israel.
Without the Jews of France, France would no longer be France, said Former Prime Minister Manuel Valls in 2016 . But he did not do anything.
Recently he said that he had done his best, that he could not have done more. "The problem," he said, "is that anti-Semitism today in France comes less from the far right than from individuals of the Muslim faith or culture".
He added that in France, for at least two decades, all attacks against Jews in which the perpetrator has been identified have come from Muslims, and that the most recent attacks were no exception.
Valls, however, quickly suffered the consequences of his candor. He was elbowed to the margins of political life. Muslim websites called him an " agent of the Jewish lobby" and a "racist." Former leaders of his own party, such as former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, said that Valls' wife is a Jew and hinted that he was "under the influence".
In France, telling the truth about Islamic anti-Semitism is dangerous. For a politician, it is suicidal.
French politicians, right or left, know that political correctness reigns, and that transgressing its unwritten rules leads to being excluded from the media and effectively ostracized. They know that some words cannot be used any more in France, and that "anti-racist" organizations ensure that no one can criticize Islam.
A new edition of a public school history textbook for the eighth grade explicitly states that in France it is forbidden to criticize Islam, and quotes a court decision to back up the claim.
Politicians see that the number of Muslims in France is now so large that it is virtually impossible to win an election without the Muslim vote, and that the difference in birthrate between Muslims and non-Muslims will make that arrangement even more obligatory in years to come.
Politicians also see that the country's 600 "no-go zones" are growing; that radicalized Muslims may kill, and that violent riots can break out at any time. In France, more than 500 people were murdered or maimed by Islamic terrorists in less than four years.
Politicians also see that waves of migrants from the Middle East and Africa have created slums largely beyond the control of the police; that French prisons are on the verge of exploding, and that Jews have no electoral weight and are essentially powerless.
Politicians therefore choose inertia, denial, cowardice.
In French Muslim neighborhoods, Islamist imams denounce the "bad influence" of Jews and spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. French politicians stay silent.
Islamic bookstores in France sell books banned elsewhere, such as the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and CDs and DVDs of violent anti-Semitic speeches by radical preachers. For instance, Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who is prohibited from entering France and the US, says he regrets that Hitler did not "finish the job". French politicians stay silent.
Although synagogues in France have not been attacked since 2014, they all are guarded around the clock by armed soldiers in bulletproof vests who are protected behind sandbags, as are Jewish schools and cultural centers.
 Pictured: French soldiers guard a Jewish school in Paris. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images) |
Meanwhile, laws meant to punish anti-Semitic threats are now used to punish those who denounce the threats.
Six years ago, the author Renaud Camus published Le Grand Remplacement ("The Great Replacement"), a book noting that Jews and Christians are not only being replaced by Muslims, but that they are often harassed and persecuted. He lamented the destruction of churches and described attacks on Jews as a "slow pogrom". He was condemned for "inciting hatred".
Recently, journalist Éric Zemmour observed that in Muslim neighborhoods, Muslims are now living "according to their own laws" and forcing non-Muslim people to leave. He was found guilty of "incitement" and fined.
A reporter who recently made a documentary about French Muslim neighborhoods, concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist organizations are quickly taking hold of French Muslim communities while spreading hatred towards the Jews and the West, and that they own many schools where jihad is taught .
The French government, he added, is financing these schools and is therefore complicit in sowing the seeds of a devastation that could easily go beyond the destruction of France's Jews. "The occupation of the West," he said, "will be done without war but quietly, with infiltration and subversion." No French television station has broadcast it, nor plans to. The documentary was aired only in Israel.
Anti-Israel demonstrations support terrorism. People shout, "Death to the Jews," but those people are never arrested for "hate speech".
Polls show that the unhindered dissemination of Muslim anti-Semitism and the violence that results from it has led to the rise of widespread anti-Semitism that clearly recalls dark periods of history.
A growing percentage of the French say that the Jews in France are "too numerous" and "too visible."
Reports for the Ministry of National Education reveal that expressions such as "Don't act like a Jew", intended to criticize a student who hides what he thinks, are widely used in public schools. Jewish students are more and more often the object of mockery -- and not just by students who are Muslim.
A few days ago, the comedian Laura Laune was the winner on the reality television series "France's Got Talent". Some of her jokes make fun of the fact that there were fewer Jews in the world in 1945 than in 1939. Jewish organizations protested, but in vain. Now, she appears to packed halls. The anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonné also fills the stadiums where he performs.
Recently, France's prestigious publishing house, Gallimard, asked to republish the anti-Semitic writings of Louis Ferdinand Celine, a French admirer of Nazi Germany and a strong supporter of the extermination of Europe's Jews during France's Vichy regime. French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said he was in favor of republishing it, and stressed that one cannot deny Celine's "central position in French literature." Famous Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld replied that the writings that sent his parents to their deaths "must not be made available again." Gallimard postponed the publication temporarily.
A few years ago, the "duty of memory" -- what had been done to the Jews -- was the subject of many articles. Last month, on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, not a single French newspaper mentioned it.
French President Emmanuel Macron stayed silent. He published a tweet evoking "Auschwitz" and the need to "preserve peace, unity and tolerance". He did not say a word about Jews or the Holocaust. It is hard to see in France where "peace, union and tolerance" are today -- especially if you are a French Jew.
Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.
Patricia Walker