Terrorists, Oui!
–
Jews, Non!

© David Burton 2021

     For the past few decades, France has been taking in Muslims and Arabs from North Africa and the Middle East without much regard to the philosophy and culture which the immigrants are carrying in with them. What has increasingly become obvious is that the overriding belief of many of these French newcomers is the following: Islam is the only true religion and all who refuse to accept and convert to Islam are infidels and its corollary, Death to all infidels!

     Jews have been part of France for centuries. By the beginning of the 20th century, the relatively small assimilated Jewish community was based mainly in Paris, and very well established among the city's business, financial, and intellectual elite. A third of Parisian bankers were Jewish, led by the Rothschild family. Many of the most influential French intellectuals were nominally Jewish, including Henri Bergson, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Emile Durkheim. The Dreyfus affair to some degree rekindled their sense of being Jewish. Jews were prominent in art and culture, typified by such artists as Modigliani, Soutine, and Chagall. The Jews considered themselves fully integrated into French culture.

     By the time Dreyfus was fully exonerated in 1906, anti-Semitism had declined sharply and it declined again during and immediately after the First World War, as the nation understood that many Jews had died fighting for France.

     France’s Jewish community was the oldest and largest in Europe and it had played a vital role in the nation’s history. Without French Jews, “France is not France.”[1]

     But today the situation for many of France’s longtime Jewish families and citizens is recognized as dire. The rising levels of anti-Semitism in France have reached a point where Jews are fleeing the country in droves, and yet French officials are doing little to combat the anti-Semitism that has permeated this supposedly enlightened European country. The resulting mass emigration of Jews from France has been described as essentially “an ethnic cleansing.” “In a few decades, there will be no Jews in France,” it is predicted.

     Although Jews represented less than 1 percent of the French population, 40 percent of all violent hate crimes in France were anti-Semitic. According to The Huffington Post, the three groups of people in France who harbored the most anti-Semitic views are the far-right National Front, the far-left Left Front and Muslims. Islamists in France frequently give anti-Semitic speeches in Mosques and disseminate anti-Semitic propaganda from selling the likes of the discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion to teaching it in various schools. And yet, French officials have done little to combat this. Journalists who try to expose the anti-Semitic and anti-Christian sentiments in certain Muslim neighborhoods in France get slapped with charges of “incitement.”[2]

     As an example of Islamic terrorism in France, on 6 October 2020, Samuel Paty, a popular history and geography teacher at a school in a quiet Paris suburb, presented a copy of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that provoked the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine five years previous. He had no idea of the tragic consequences to himself, to French society or to France’s relations with the Islamic world. What was intended as a classroom exploration of the freedom of thought turned into a mini-clash of civilizations.
     Ten days later, Paty was decapitated, allegedly by a Russian-born, Muslim teenager. [3]

     France is no longer the France of earlier days. France is overrun by Muslims from northern Africa and the Middle East who have turned the country into a text of Islamic terrorism. France is under terrorist attack. It is under attack by those who have been invited in by the French. France - at one time a welcoming home for Jews – has, at the same time, revived the anti-Semitism of the past. The result: Islamic terrorists are invading France in greater and greater numbers and France’s Jews are leaving in greater and greater numbers – Terrorists, OUI! - Jews, NON! Will France be better off when all this plays out or will France be worse off as have most countries that have treated their Jews badly? I refer readers to a previous article of mine - The Bitter Fruits of AntiSemitism, David Burton, Son of Eliyahu; Article 433, 1 September 2020.

     In November 2020, following Paty’s beheading, three people were murdered inside the Cathedral of Nice by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar!” The Jihadist threat weighing on France is spreading rapidly.

     “. . . a note from the French Interior Ministry had announced that, the risk of terrorist attacks against churches was . . . ‘very high’.
     “ ‘It is freedom of religion and conscience that is under attack’, said French Prime Minister Jean Castex.
     “In a dispatch dated October 25, in L'Express, Interior Minister Gérard Darmanin talked about the latest threats aimed at France. Al Qaeda, it appears, had asked its followers to attack ‘the churches and symbols of Christianity.’
      - - -
     “Even before these events, in 2016, in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Normandy, two Islamic State terrorists had slaughtered the elderly priest Jacques Hamel during mass. The shock was immense. Then more terrorists unsuccessfully struck Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris with a car filled with dynamite. Another terrorist murdered three visitors to a Strasbourg Christmas market, and a terrorist plan against the churches of Villejuif, in the Val-de-Marne, was thwarted by the police.
     “After {the} attack in Nice, terror attacks were also registered in Avignon and in Lyon. . .
      - - -
     “. . . Not a single political head of state in Europe . . . dares to face . . . Islamist penetration and separatism. Denmark surrendered in the battle over freedom of expression (the Jyllands Posten newspaper has embraced programmatic self-censorship on Islam). After Samuel Paty's beheading, will Macron's France offer its head to the Islamist guillotine?
     “France is at an existential crossroads. Islamist beheadings are now taking place in its streets and churches. Stopping radical Islam or facing a ‘civil war’, as the former Chief of Staff of the French army Pierre de Villiers declared. They cannot run away and hide.” (Ref. 4)

Jews and France

     In 2015, following the deadly assault on a kosher supermarket in Paris, a brief history of France’s Jews was contained in an article appearing in Times Magazine. A summary of the article follows.

     The deadly assault on a kosher supermarket in Paris at the start of 2015 confirmed the fears of many French Jews that anti-Semitism was a persistent and growing threat in France. By then, thousands of Jews had already departed for Israel in the wake of the 2012 shooting at a Jewish day school and an attack in 2014 on the Jewish museum in Belgium. The flood has continued to this day.
     The history of the Jewish community in France has, in some ways, always been shaped by anti-Semitism. On the other hand, following the 2015 attack, Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared that “France without Jews is not France”. Some of the key periods that have shaped the history of French Jews are described in the following.

1. The French Revolution

     Within two years of the Revolution, France became the first country in modern Europe to grant Jews equal rights under the law, setting a precedent for France and a new standard for Europe as a whole. At the time, there were only about 40,000 Jews in France.

2. Napoleon and the Great Sanhedrin

     Still, the question of if and how to integrate the Jewish community into French society - a problem known at the time as “the Jewish question” - persisted after the Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was named French Emperor in 1804.
     Proposing to put the question to the Jewish people, in 1806 Napoleon convened an assembly of important leaders in the Jewish community to clarify their political and religious loyalties. A year later, Jewish religious leaders gathered for what was called the Great Sanhedrin. Through this process, Napoleon effectively asked whether the allegiances of French Jews lay in the Jewish community or in the larger society. Jews declared themselves first and foremost French citizens, and that’s where their primary political allegiances were. After that, over a period of decades, successive generations of Jews integrated more fully because now they were citizens.

3. The Dreyfus Affair

     The assumption that Jews had become an integral part of French society was rocked in the late 19th century. In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish, was convicted of spying for Germany, spawning a decade-long scandal. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated, but the period was marked by anti-Semitic riots and a vocal anti-Semitic press.

4. The Holocaust

     The Second World War had a devastating impact on Jews in France. Even before the war, the influx of Jewish refugees and immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe had sparked an anti-Semitic backlash. At the turn of the century, there had been about 80,000 Jews in France; by 1939, there were about 300,000. In the wake of the German invasion, the newly installed Vichy government willingly helped the Nazis round up Jews in France, particularly from recent immigrant communities. By the end of the war, more than 70,000 Jews were deported from France, of whom only about 2,500 would survive. On the other hand, the high number of Jews in France who did survive the war spoke to the reluctance of many French to participate in the Nazi deportation.

5. Jewish Migration from North Africa

     In the decades following the war, as France pulled out of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, large populations of Jews in those countries fled. Many left for the newly established state of Israel, but others went to France. The migration north was most pronounced in Algeria, where 90% of Jews in that country headed for France. The influx from North Africa doubled the Jewish population in France.

6. Jewish-Muslim Tensions

     The arrival of Jews from North Africa coincided with a massive influx of Muslim migrant laborers, also largely from North Africa. Jewish and Muslim immigrants often lived peacefully side-by-side in the early years. Beginning in the 1980s, however, tensions began to emerge, especially as the state failed to fully integrate the Muslim community into French society. Those tensions were only heightened by the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
     The more recent high profile attacks against Jews have fueled fears of escalating anti-Semitism since the 2000s. Those attacks are linked to global Islamic terrorism. Supposedly, that phenomenon does not run through France’s very diverse and large Muslim population but is caused by one fringe element. [5]

     Meanwhile, French Jews – who, in the early 2000’s, were the third largest Jewish population in the world after America and Israel – now, more and more are leaving what was once their homeland for safer climes.

Muslims and France

     France has the largest number of Muslims in the Western world. Today, Islam is the second-most widely professed religion in France. The deleterious effects of Muslim immigration into France has become increasingly obvious.

     “France is probably the worst affected of all western nations by immigration, since it is on the brink of losing its European identity to the insistent Muslims increasing in numbers within French borders. As they grow in population, they come to believe they can impose the will of Islam on the French people, who seem rather unconcerned with the transformation.
     “With a population of five million Muslims, France is holding a tiger by the ears. The threat of violence from radical Islamic elements cannot be far from politicians' minds. Wherever there are large numbers of Arabs, there is crime and violence, particularly against women.
     “France should be seen as a cautionary tale of immigration run amok, and how quickly things get out of control. Muslim immigration to France is a post-war phenomenon for the most part: just a few decades of high immigration of a group with high fertility has put France in the unenviable position of being the European nation thought most likely to be the first to introduce sharia (Islamic) law.” (Ref. 6)

French Anti-Semitism

     “In July 2004, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon caused a bit of an international incident when he told French Jews to move to Israel immediately to escape Antisemitism.  . . . he said Jews around the world should relocate to Israel as early as possible. But for those living in France, Sharon added, moving was a ‘must’ because of rising violence against Jews there. He was correct, and it’s still happening.
     “On Saturday, June 13th {2020}, anti-racism protesters in Paris shouted ‘Dirty Jews’ at a group of counter-protesters - not because they were Jewish but because it was the most repulsive label Parisians could think of to call someone. [Emphasis mine]
      - - -
     “A November 2019 National Geographic report about Jews in France warned about French Antisemitism:
     “From the expulsion of Jews in 1306 to the Dreyfus Affair of 1894 to the Vichy government’s cooperation with the Nazi extermination of 75,000 French Jews, France has a long history of anti-Semitism. Today hate comes from both the far right and far left. Some Yellow Vest protesters have accosted prominent French Jews and called President Macron ‘a whore of the Jews.’
     “(…) France’s interior minister has warned that anti-Jewish sentiment is “spreading like poison.” President Emmanuel Macron declared that anti-Semitism was at its highest levels since World War II. Amidst a string of attacks, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe admitted that anti-Semitism is ‘deeply rooted in French society.’ [Emphasis mine]
     “Sixteen years ago, the late Ariel Sharon told French Jews to save themselves and move to Israel. His words still ring true. They feel threatened. And when a French group wants to call their opposition names, they conjure up the most offensive term a French citizen can use against a rival, Sales Juifs, Dirty Jews! They don’t use the term because their rivals are Jewish, but because to the French, a Jew is an ugly thing.
     “Its time that French Jews heed Ariel Sharon’s warning and leave their anti-Semitic country before it’s too late.” (Ref. 7)

     Today, in France, in what was once one of the most civilized nations in Europe:

• ”Suburbs have become transformed into one of the most visible signs of the Islamization of France. Anti-Semitism is devouring the French Republic.
• ”While Jewish symbols disappear from France, Islamic symbols proliferate, from burkinis on the beaches to veils in the workplace. Jews who have not fled France are trying to become ‘invisible’.
• ”France's suburbs are rapidly becoming apartheid societies. Hatred of Jews has become the gateway to "la France soumise" -- the submission of France.

1. A France Without Jews Is No Longer Unthinkable, Robert Zaretsky, Foreign Affairs, 4 February 2020.
2. Jews Are Fleeing France in Droves As Anti-Semitism Goes Unchecked, Aaron Bandler, Jewish Journal,
   2 March 2018.
3. Macron’s clash with Islam sends jolt through France’s long debate about secularism, Patrick Wintour,
   The Guardian, 26 October 2020.
4. France must stop radical Islam or face a civil war, Giulio Meotti, Arutz Sheva, 4 November 2020.
5. The History of Jews in France in 6 Key Moments, Noah Rayman, TIME, 15 January 2015.
6. How France Has Fallen, Brenda Walker, www.limitstogrowth.org, 2004.
7. French Anti-Racism Protesters Scream At Counter-Protesters Calling Them ‘Dirty Jews’, Jeff Dunetz, THE LID, 14 June 2020.
8. France: Muslims In, Jews Out, Giulio Meotti, Gatestone Institute, 15 November 2017.