September 29- On scurrilous letter re: France as anti-Semitic

Have you been receiving the same internet nonsense I have? It purports to inform of the horrors afflicting the Jews in France. In Lyon a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire; the Jewish religious center in Montpellier was firebombed; on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris the words “Dirty Jew” were painted. Other atrocities are listed. All of this happened in the past week, we are told. No wonder French Jews are fleeing to the relative safety of Israel. We are urged to boycott French products and its shores. We can exert amazing pressure, the broadside reads, “and whatever else we may know about the French, we most certainly know that they are like a cobweb in a hurricane in the face of well directed pressure.” We are urged to send this message along to our family, our friends and co-workers.

OK, friends and family and co-workers, you can stop sending me this; I’ve seen it.

Is any of it true? Well, yes, the specific events did happen. But they happened not this week, but in April 2002 at the height of the Intifada. The culprits were not French Frenchmen; they were Muslim immigrants, or the children of immigrants, mostly poor, religious and susceptible to violence. Some few of them saw what their co-religionists were doing in Israel, they felt solidarity with them, and they acted. Once the attacks began the French police protected Jewish institutions throughout the country and prosecuted captured felons and the attacks ceased.

Did French Jews panic? No. They took reasonable precautions, as did the Jews of Rhode Island after the recent shooting at the Seattle Jewish Federation, and continued to live their lives. There was no mass Jewish emigration from France to Israel.

When Muslims rioted in France in the fall of 2005, again the Jewish community did not panic. “Manek Weintraub, of the Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) told the British website TotallyJewish.com, ‘So far nothing has happened. There was a Molotov cocktail that seems to have been hurled at a small synagogue but nobody really knows about it. It [the riots] will concern the public authorities but Jews are largely absent from the story, which is welcome.’”

This does not sound like panic to me.

So who wrote the “Jews are being led to the slaughter in France!” piece that has crossed your desk and mine? Answer: Not my cousin, not my friend, my not my co-worker, they just took the bait, believed the hype and passed it on. Who does that leave? Someone with an agenda, perhaps? One source could be Arutz Sheva (Channel Seven), a right wing Israeli online media network banned by the Israeli government because of racist incitement. In fact, a quick Google search confirms that it was broadcasting this material in 2005. But where did it get it? As early as April 2002 there was a similar piece going around the internet, purportedly from Senator Joseph Lieberman. It contained the same information. But Lieberman didn’t write the letter; it was a forgery. So who’s responsible for that? Perhaps someone who is angry at France for not supporting America’s attack on Iraq, someone angry enough to object to the fact that France was right (as the government in Washington now fully admits) that there never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein never cooperated with Al Qaeda, that he and Osama hated each other. The French knew all this and spoke up. They must be punished.

Is France, after all, the only country recently to experience anti-semitic acts? “Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, Inc.” (no, I’m not making this up) issued a broadside on December 8, 2003 listing thirteen recent acts of anti-Semitism in Europe (two in Belgium, four in Britain, two in Italy, one each in Germany, Ukraine, Greece, Holland, Slovakia.) And then it comes to the point: “But nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France” and then it gives the usual old examples. What does “Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership” advocate? My initial guess (considering the source) was “Pack a Rod, Plug a Frog” but no, boycott etc. just as the original letter with the identical words urges.

Am I the only one smelling a rat here? Aren’t there anti-Semites in all countries, including or own? (Seattle, anyone? The LA nursery school shooter?) Bad things happen in even the most wonderful places. Vive La France.