How can anyone be allowed to paint a swastika on the statue of Marianne, the goddess of French liberty, in the very center of the Place de la République?”
That was what the chairman of one of France’s most celebrated luxury brands was thinking last July, when a tall man in a black shirt and a kaffiyeh leapt to the ledge of Marianne’s pedestal and scrawled a black swastika. All around him, thousands of angry demonstrators were swarming the square with fake rockets, Palestinian and Hamas flags, even the black-and-white banners of ISIS. Here, barely a mile and a half from the Galeries Lafayette, the heart of bourgeois Paris, the chants: “MORT AUX JUIFS! MORT AUX JUIFS!” Death to the Jews. It was Saturday, July 26, 2014, and a pro-Palestinian demonstration turned into a day of terror in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods of the city.
“Do something! Do you see what is happening here?” the chairman said to a line of police officers watching the demonstration build to a frenzy. “What do you expect us to do?” one officer said, then looked away. For years, the chairman, a longtime anti-racism activist, has turned up at rallies like this one to see which politicians and which radical groups were present. (For reasons of personal safety, the chairman asked not to be identified for this story.) France’s endless demonstrations are a mainstay of the republic, a sacred right rooted in the legacy of Voltaire. But hate speech is a criminal offense—people may express their opinions, but not to the extent of insulting others based on their race, religion, or sex. The protest—against Israel’s Gaza policies—had been banned by the government, fearful of violence, following flare-ups in the preceding weeks. But if the police were to move in too quickly, the riots might continue all summer long—suburbs in flames, mobs in central Paris.
Photographs and videos of the swastika and its perpetrator, of protesters chanting “Kill the Jews,” and of the Palestinian, Hamas, and ISIS flags were sent in a rush to various groups in the Jewish community who assess threats. By early afternoon, some of these reached Sammy Ghozlan, a 72-year-old retired police commissioner who has spent his career working the banlieues, the belt of working-class, racially mixed suburbs that surround Paris. Ghozlan is a folk hero of the banlieues and has a nickname that is impossible to forget: le poulet cacher—“the kosher chicken.” (Poulet is slang for cop.) For 15 years, he has overseen France’s National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism—known by its French abbreviation, B.N.V.C.A.—a community hotline he founded that is funded by his police pension and whatever small donations he can come by. Its purpose is nothing less than to protect the Jews of France. [...]
Almost immediately afterward, the reports of the July 13 demonstration would be challenged and debated. The numbers would be skeptically parsed—were there really so many?—and questions would be asked about actions that might have provoked the violence, as if carrying iron bars and axes around central Paris might be normal. In some circles, there were even accusations that the Jews “brought on the behavior,” as they always do.
In the crowd—and many others that would turn the summer of 2014 into a summer of hate in Paris—were representatives of France’s political parties, both left and right. France’s Muslim population is estimated to be around 5 million, a potential voting bloc in a country of 66 million. (The Jewish population of France is in the neighborhood of 500,000.) Shimon Samuels, the director for international relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris—which combats anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and extremism, and, through a foundation, helps to fund Ghozlan’s hotline—witnessed some of the events of July 13. Among those he recognized in the crowd were a local concierge and bank teller, along with members of the current Socialist government.
Monitoring the footage later, Ghozlan was sickened to see the faces of political allies he had worked with for decades, mostly in what is known as Le Neuf Trois (“9–3”), the area of northern Paris suburbs that he once presided over as a commissioner of police. Le Neuf Trois is the rap name for this district, which has the honor of being, by reputation anyway, the most violent in France. (The name derives from the area’s postal codes, which all begin with “93.”) It is also where Ghozlan lived for 30 years in a spacious house surrounded by hedges on the Avenue Henri Barbusse in the relatively calm community of Le Blanc-Mesnil. [...]
Ghozlan has been awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest tribute. But his urgency has always made him an outlier, an annoyance to the assimilation-conscious, largely secular Jewish establishment concentrated in Paris’s preferred arrondissements, who still view him as a publicity hound from the banlieues, a Jew who does not know when not to react. However noble Ghozlan’s motives, he makes a nuisance of himself with his incessant press releases, I was told a decade ago. That sentiment hasn’t changed in some quarters.
When I originally met Ghozlan, he railed that his jerry-rigged detective agency had to deal with a rigid French justice system. To register a hate crime in France—which comes with a higher level of punishment than an ordinary crime—he would have to appear in front of a magistrate, who was generally loath to call the beating of a rabbi in the Métro an act of anti-Semitism. For them, Ghozlan said, it was a “simple assault,” usually committed by an unemployed French Muslim acting out of frustration. This enraged Ghozlan. “I wanted to start a Jewish defense force,” Ghozlan told me. Judge after judge told him, “There is no anti-Semitism charge applicable unless someone dies.” The party line of the Establishment Jewish organizations in Paris was always “Sammy, stop rocking the boat.” Back then, even David de Rothschild, the banker, told The Jerusalem Post that the wave of attacks was likely coming from “neo-Nazis, a hostile, aggressive, antisemitic, right-wing population … ” He soon changed his mind. More.
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