‘Death to the Jews:’ Europe’s Anti-Semitic Intifada
"For the first 40 years after the Holocaust, there was a sort of protective Teflon against blatant anti-Semitic expression. Now, due to the process of Holocaust denial, that Teflon has become eroded and we've moved from where anti-Semitism was a crime to anti-Semitism being distasteful to it simply being another opinion." -- Dr. Shimon Samuels, Simon Wiesenthal Center
July 23, 2002
By George Thomas. CBN News Sr. Reporter
Much of the violence is related to events in the Middle East.
CBN.com – PARIS, France — Since the start of the Palestinian "Intifada," or uprising, 21 months ago, the Middle East conflict has unleashed a wave of attacks against Jews in Europe. The most widespread anti-Jewish acts have happened in France where a climate of hostility is on the rise.
Barely 60 years after the Holocaust, renewed anti-Semitic vandalism has rekindled painful memories among Europe's Jewish communities. Synagogues have been burned to the ground while Nazi and Islamic graffiti is scrawled on homes and businesses. One particular message read: "Long live the Arabs. Death to the Jews."
Today, the daily threats in more than a dozen European countries have left Jews feeling vulnerable.
Sammy Ghozlan, a Jewish community leader in Paris, explained, "A large segment of the Jewish community feels uncomfortable and is wondering about its future and what the future will be like for their children."
Much of the violence is related to events in the Middle East. The suspects are most often young radical Muslims who believe it is their duty to defend the Palestinian cause. So they target Jews on European soil.
Amir Taheri, a prominent Arab author and journalist based in London, told CBN News, "They think that Muslims are being brutalized by the Israelis in the occupied territories so ... they think that this is the only way to avenge themselves. And of course there are radical Islamic groups and governments that encourage these activities and sometimes finance them."
Across the Middle East, the battle cry of "Death to America, Death to Israel" is being exported into European capitals. That message, and the images of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians, has aroused strong passions among Muslims.
"The massacres by the Israelis are inhuman, it is unacceptable," one Palestinian supporter said.
An Arab Muslim named Zouheare Bouhagar said he wants to help the Palestinians. "Why not? If I can help Palestinian people in my country in France, I will do it," he said.
And they are helping. Jewish leaders warn that there is an Intifada brewing in Western Europe.
Ghozlan said, "We see today a large number of young Muslims displaying the same behavior like those in the Palestinian Intifada — throwing stones, attacking Jewish school buses and attacking Jews in the streets."
Many of these incidents have happened in France, home to Europe's largest Muslim and Jewish communities.
Dr. Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris said, "A person who is identifiably Jewish by his garb, by the literature he is carrying, or by the institution that he has frequented, from a synagogue or Jewish quarter to a Kosher restaurant, is doing so at risk in France."
Dr. Samuels has the facts to back-up that claim. Between September 2000 and April 2002, his group recorded more than 1,000 incidents against Jews around the country.
In the first three months of 2002 alone, 400 attacks took place against Jews and their religious sites. Most were blamed on young French Muslims of North African descent.
One of those incidents involved an attack on a Jewish soccer team. In April, a gang of 40 youths wearing masks and the black-checked Palestinian headscarves attacked the players during soccer practice. Shouting "Allah akbar," which means "Allah is great," and "Death to Jews," they swarmed onto the field carrying baseball bats and metal bars.
The coach, Lionel Levy, described what happened next. "They said, ‘You are Jewish, we are going to kill you, we are going to kill you!’"
Yoel Cohen, one of the players said, "I thought I was in Israel, in Ramallah or Gaza, in the Intifada."
Another player said, "I thought they were going to kill the whole team."
A few ended up with minor injuries, but most of the Jewish players ran from the field unhurt. No suspects have yet been arrested.
A heightened level of fear has gripped France's Jewish community of 700,000 souls. The almost daily attacks have crippled the authorities' ability to stop the violence. So some are hiring their own private security, and others are choosing to leave the country.
Rabbi Abenaim Prosper of the Ahavat Chalom Synagogue says he knows Jewish families who are so scared to live in France they have decided to move to Israel. "Yes, of course. I have one family they are going soon from La Courneauv, and in Paris I know many families," he said.
Rabbi Prosper’s synagogue is in the town of La Courneauv, a suburb north of Paris. Some in his small congregation are thinking of leaving after anti-Semitism recently hit too close to home. Three months ago, a surveillance camera captured footage of four young men throwing a gasoline firebomb at the synagogue.
Today, the outside walls of the synagogue bear the scars of many other attacks. Rabbi Prosper says Muslims have repeatedly threatened to take-over the congregation and turn it into a mosque.
Rabbi Prosper said being a Jew in France today is not what it used to be. "I can't say it is dangerous but it is difficult to be a Jew." The difficulties have increased along with a phenomenon some call the partial Islamicization of France.
Michel Gurfinkiel, a French author and journalist, recently wrote: "The Muslim population, already ten times the size of the Jewish community, is growing rapidly, and the thorough transformation it is wreaking in France's ethnic and religious fabric obviously has much to do both with the increase in anti-Semitism and with the official denial of it."
Polls show growing sympathy for the Palestinian cause in France and the rest of Europe.
Dr. Samuels said, "French people, with remaining pangs of conscience, for active or passive collaboration with the Nazi occupant, are finding that it eases them by projecting guilt if you can say that the Israeli is the new Nazi and the Palestinian is the new Jewish victim. Then in that case we weren't so bad after all."
Though Jews are well integrated into French society, they are caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they are faced with the rise of fanatical Islamic fundamentalism and violence.
Amir Taheri is concerned that high unemployment among young Muslims is forcing some to find a new identity in gangs.
"They are run by people who are called the ‘Kayet,’ which means the chiefs, who have the gangs," Taheri said. "And usually the gang consists of a sheikh, somebody with a beard to give you the religious authorization to steal and kill and murder and do whatever you like...and bands of youth who have nowhere to go, who have no jobs. This sense of desperation is a flame that is being nurtured by professional radical militants, some of them paid by foreign governments."
Those governments include Saudi Arabia, Iran and Algeria.
On the other hand, Jews also face a revitalized culture that denies the Holocaust. It is a culture that says the gas chambers of the Nazis were a Zionist invention and that Jews do not have any Biblical ties to the Holy Land.
"For the first 40 years after the Holocaust, there was a sort of protective Teflon against blatant anti-Semitic expression," Dr. Samuels said. "Now, due to the process of Holocaust denial, that Teflon has become eroded and we've moved from where anti-Semitism was a crime to anti-Semitism being distasteful to it simply being another opinion."
Serge Cwajgenbaum of the European Jewish Congress said, "The future lies in the past, if you don't know the past, if you don't remember history, history will repeat again."
Cwajgenbaum accuses European politicians and authorities of not doing enough to stop the growing tide of anti-Semitism. "They are doing too little, and whatever has been done, has been done too late. The time has come now to react seriously to protect all European citizens, particularly the Jewish ones," he said.
In the end, Dr Samuels says, hate against Jews threatens everyone. "What starts with the Jews does not end with the Jews, there is always collateral damage and it becomes a scourge of general society," he said.
For the Jewish community here in France and across Europe, the climate of hostility has made one thing crystal clear: the violent conflict in the Middle East no longer runs only through the towns and cities of the West Bank.
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