French anti-Semitism

Editorial

A Montreal synagogue has been defiled with anti-Semitic, Nazi graffiti twice in the past week. Meanwhile, a study in France indicates that anti-Semitism is "ubiquitous" in 61 of 61 schools surveyed. Jew-hatred – and violent acting out associated with that emotion – has been rising in terrifying degrees across France.

In last Sunday's New York Times, the murderous anti-Semitism in France finally garnered some of the attention it deserves. Jews and others have been warning for years that the atmosphere in France is verging on the terrible – even the grisly abduction, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi last month has not motivated public opinion to universally condemn and confront the hatred.

The blindness to this rampant Jew-hatred is due in part to the insistence, or at least the quiet assumption, that any anti-Jewish violence is merely an unfortunate but understandable byproduct of the Middle East conflict.

This misstates the genesis exactly. While not underestimating the homegrown racism inherent to France – Jean-Marie Le Pen is "pur lain français," after all – the contemporary problem appears to be caused mostly by immigrants to France and the children of immigrants, who are scapegoating Jews for their economic difficulties.

This phenomenon is not a result of anything inherently anti-Semitic in the DNA of Arab or Muslim people. It is because many of them are products of education systems run by regional dictators who employ the vilest anti-Jewish rhetoric and imagery in pursuit of an anti-Zionist foreign policy. It is not a complex equation, though it seems to confuse international observers who, because of a combination of media neglect and wilful ignorance, are unaware of the Jew-hatred that passes for education, news, weather and sports throughout the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

The Times article notes that a classroom battle broke out in one school after the teacher showed Nazi propaganda films, the sort depicting Jews as rats, vampires, demons and various other subhuman species. The argument, it seems, stemmed from the insistence by some of the students that the Nazi propaganda depicted Jews accurately. Why wouldn't it? Across the Arab world, depictions of Jews are cast from the moulds created by Hitler's PR team. Since almost all Jews have been forced to flee for their lives from Arab and Muslim countries over the past six decades, most people in those countries have never met a Jew – until perhaps they arrive in France, already preprogrammed to view Jews as subhuman enemies of all things good.

The equation between violence in France and the education and cultural infrastructure of the Arab world remains almost completely ignored or misunderstood. Mountains of translated material is available illustrating the blatant incitement to murder that is being purveyed as education in most of the countries nearest Israel. Somehow, the people of Western Europe and North America have largely decided to reject these reams in favor of an interpretation that, as anti-Semitism has done throughout millennia of history, blames the Jews for their own unpopularity. Anti-Semitism will wane, many seem to conclude, when Israel concedes.

France is the place where the most egregious and violent discrimination is taking place because it is the place where Jews and Muslims interface in the most direct way. But as populations of Arab-educated immigrants expand in other places, conflicts with Jews seem likely to increase. Again, why wouldn't it? Graduates of these "education" systems learn to view Jews the way graduates of our schools view hard drugs. It does not preclude independent thinkers from concluding an alternative view – some Arab immigrants have no problem with Jews; some graduates of our system ignore their teaching and take up crack – but the intent of the education system and peer attitudes in many Arab and Muslim societies is to turn their products against Jews.

And, as much as Canadian activists carefully differentiate between Zionists and Jews, the Arab world decidedly does not.

Until North Americans and Europeans acknowledge and confront the educational programming of some of our immigrants, we will fail to understand the growth of anti-Jewish violence in our own societies.

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