EUROPE: Exploring France’s anti-Semitic attack problem.
The attack on Monday against a Jewish schoolboy indicates France’s growing problem with anti-Semitism. In the latest incident, an 8-year-old boy was walking to an evening class just outside Paris when he was set upon by two teenagers.
It’s far from an exceptional case. Earlier this month, a Jewish store in Paris was targeted by arsonists and a 15-year-old Jewish girl had her face slashed around the same neighborhood as where this boy has now been attacked. In another incident last September, a Jewish family was held hostage as a gang ransacked their home looking for hidden jewelry and money (a typical anti-Semitic trope is that Jews horde expensive items).
More brutal attacks have also occurred. In 2012, three children and a teacher were killed in an attack on a Jewish school in southern France. Four innocent people were also murdered in January 2015, when a terrorist stormed a Kosher supermarket.
All of this has led French Jews to take special precautions to protect themselves. They travel in groups for added security and sometimes conceal the testaments of their heritage; avoiding wearing kippahs or Stars of David. In some areas, Jewish community activists have organized self-defense groups to protect their friends and family.
This speaks to something. While we talk much about no-go zones in France, the real problem is not no-go zones, but rather no-man’s-land zones: areas free to travel but fraught with perceivable risk. The challenge here is not so much a threat to life, but a perishing of the French right to the pursuit of happiness.
Why does France, a modern democratic society, have such a problem here? A few reasons. First off, France has a distinct problem with the integration of its Muslim youths. The blending of France’s generous welfare state and the relative disinterest of the French social establishment in Muslim social mobility has led young French Muslims to feel detached from their own society. They keep to themselves in homogeneous communities; often poor, run down, gang-controlled tenements, basking in a narrative of victimhood and anger.
In contrast, the relative social success and successful integration of French Jews makes them a target for Muslim youths. The same underlying element of anti-Semitism is at play here: jealousy.
Well, that’s some of it.