France: Antisemitism expert: is "shocked by what is happening in France"

The "quenelle" a kind of nazi salute
made popular in France by Dieudonné

[Dr. Charles Asher Small, director of the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy] recalled a recent visit to France, whose Jewish community has been plagued by attacks emanating from the country’s growing Muslim minority and how things have changed since he lived there during the 1990s. “Even I who research and engage in the issues of anti-Semitism internationally was shocked by what is happening in France,” he said.

In Europe today the intellectual elites and the media have been silent on the issue of growing threat of radical political Islam, he stated, calling such discussions taboo. “Once you start engaging in that you are dismissed as being right-wing or neoconservative or Zionist and the like.”

Paris (2014): "Death to the Jews"

Today in France and England you see “Islamists who are using the rhetoric of anti-Semitism to promote their reactionary agenda so they focus on the Jew and the Zionist and they dehumanize and delegitimize Israel, the Zionist and the Jew [who] are making inroads into their societies.” 

Meanwhile, a backlash against this trend has fed the growing success of right-wing nationalist movements, he said. “The silence of the intellectuals and the media of record in defending liberal values has created this vacuum in which the Right or the nascent nationalist movement has begun to express itself with an anti-immigrant sentiment,” he said. “There is anti-Semitism involved, but I would say that the focus is anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim.”

This is “a reawakening of the majority that feels like it’s been marginalized economically, politically and even culturally,” he said, adding that he believes that he believes that far-right leader Marine Le Pen will ride such sentiment to become president of France. “You now have the bubbling of racist nationalist sentiment which expresses a deep frustration and malaise about this crisis that Europe is finding itself [in],” said Small.

More: Jerusalem Post