'Jews in France are stand -ins for Israeli targets'

"Days after demonstrators, angry over the latest Israeli bombardment of Gaza, tried to storm two Paris synagogues, leaders of Jewish groups in France tell The Local that the community is braced for more anti-Semitic attacks.

Leaders of other Jewish groups in France told The Local of the fear felt among their community.

“Today many French Jews are afraid of being subjected to attacks because in France, under the context of defending the Palestinian cause, there are those who go after people of the Jewish faith,” Sacha Reingewirtz, President of the French Jewish Student Union  told The Local. “French Jews serve as a stand-in for Israeli targets.”

In the weeks since the latest surge in Israeli-Palestinian violence, sparked by the killing of three Jewish teenagers, there has been a sudden increase in expressions of ant-Semitism and hatred towards Jews on social media sites in France, according to Jewish organisation CRIF.

“We are seeing a massive rise in extremely violent anti-Semitic statements online that we don’t usually see in ordinary times. There are many threats and there are many violent words on the internet,” Marc Knobel, head of studies at CRIF (the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions) told The Local. “From the statements made online one can quickly proceed to violent words and finally violent acts.”

This worrying spiral towards violence comes at a time when the subject of growing anti-Semitism in France has made headline news around the world.

A recent, widely published study from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that over a third of France’s population, some 18 million people, harbor anti-Semitic ideas of varying degrees. The study revealed France had the highest percentage of people holding anti-Semitic views in northern and western Europe.

Only Greece had more worrying stats, with the study saying 69 percent of Greeks were found to hold anti-Semitic attitudes of some sort, which put them top of the rankings for the whole Europe.

France’s strain of anti-Semitism draws its strength from various sources, including the persistence of negative stereotypes of Jews and the rise of the far-right National Front, whose founder Jean-Marie Le Pen has numerous convictions for hate speech. However the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been a motor for anti-Jewish feelings and violence for over a decade, Knobel said… Read the complete article.