France: Jews are targets of 30 percent of violent hate crimes

Via Mosaic Magazine (Ben Cohen):

(...) Or look at France, whose 750,000 Jews [a more realistic figure is 500,000] , despite constituting less than 1 percent of the population, were the targets in 2016 of 30 percent of violent hate crimes in the country. Over the last decade, there has been a growing trend of young criminals, frequently from immigrant backgrounds, targeting Jews for kidnapping and robbery as a consequence of the genuinely-held view that all Jews are rich. In one especially ugly instance last September, Roger Pinto, a Sephardi leader, was tied down by intruders in his Paris home who beat his wife and son as they demanded the liquid cash and jewelry that they knew, for sure, were stashed somewhere.

Where do these ideas come from? In the French case, there is a toxic blend of native anti-Semitism and streetwise Islamist loathing of the snooty Jews, most of which can in fact be traced back to the Protocols. In the case of Erdogan and the others, anti-Semitism is a political strategy, based on deeply-held convictions about how Jews, as a global collective, manipulate power. In the other cases in Europe and America discussed by Laqueur, any charge of anti-Semitism, after being instantly characterized as merely another tool in the armory of the Jewish lobby, is countered with a seemingly inexhaustible stream of novel and inventive conspiracy theories: that Hitler “supported Zionism,” that the IDF “smuggles human organs,” that Jews stand in equal measure behind, on the one hand, “globalists” like George Soros and, on the other hand, “fascists” like Donald Trump, that the hand of Israel lies behind the barbarians of Islamic State—and so on and so forth.

In the final analysis, anti-Semitism is a dirty case that can be advanced only by dirty means. The anti-Semites of Tsar Nicholas’ time may not have been entirely convinced of that, but any lingering doubts have long since been dispelled.

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