“We are not experiencing residual anti-Semitism, but heavy, visible, palpable anti-Semitism. Our daughter experienced it in her flesh. » Those who speak like this are the parents of this 12-year-old child raped last week in an abandoned premises in Courbevoie.
An act of such inconceivable savagery that it has become, a few days before the first round, one of the key events of this lightning campaign for the legislative elections in France. The child was raped, tortured, threatened with burning and subjected to an attempted extortion by three young Muslims aged 12 and 13 for the sole reason that she had concealed from her boyfriend that she was Jewish. He allegedly “clearly reproached her for being Jewish, stating that she was necessarily pro-Israel and complicit in a genocide in Palestine,” according to her lawyer, Muriel Ouaknine-Melki, president of the European Jewish Organization.
Fearing reprisals since the October 7 pogrom, her mother had advised the young girl to keep a low profile. The little girl had already lost friends because of her parents’ religion.
This anti-Semitic rape is not a news item. It is a social fact which illustrates the growing fear in which thousands of Jews in France live. Anti-Semitic acts recorded jumped by 300% in the first quarter of 2024, compared to the same period in 2023, a year when they were already on the rise.
Some will pretend to be surprised, although many have warned us. This goes from Boulaem Sansal to Kamel Daoud, via Smaïn Laacher and Georges Bensoussan, who had been prosecuted for having affirmed that, in a number of families influenced by Islamism, “anti-Semitism is suckled with the milk of mother “. Brought before the courts, he will be acquitted in 2019 “of all charges of racism and incitement to hatred”.
We can quibble with the wording, but anti-Semitism is consubstantial with this Islamism which is spreading in France. Many Jewish families flee the suburbs to protect their children; some are even considering leaving the country.
Who could have imagined that 80 years after the Second World War and 37 years after the anti-Semitic declarations of Jean-Marie Le Pen, France would again be torn apart by such a debate? The difference is that this anti-Semitism is today associated with the left.
For months, La France insoumise (LFI) has refused to qualify Hamas as a “terrorist” organization. One day, its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, accused the prime minister of Jewish origin, Élisabeth Borne, of defending a “foreign point of view”. The next day, he criticized the President of the Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, also of Jewish origin, of “camping in Tel Aviv”. According to him, anti-Semitism is “residual in France”. A statement described as a “scandal” by socialist Raphaël Glucksmann, himself a victim of anti-Semitic tags.
Is this complacency the result of a deep conviction or a simple electoral strategy? One thing is certain: for months, LFI has been sending out numerous signals to the Muslim electorate, where, according to an IFOP survey published in 2020, 57% of young people aged 15 to 24 believe that Islamic law should take precedence over that of the Republic.
Yesterday symbols of “Money”, have the Jews become that of “Colonialism”, as we say in woke vocabulary? It would not be the first time that a part of the left has colluded with anti-Semitism, an attitude that in his time, the social democrat August Bebel had described as “socialism of imbeciles”. Examples range from Jean Jaurès, who said that “the work of socialist health culminates in the extirpation of the Jewish being”, toHumanitywho called Léon Blum “Shylock”, through to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who designated “the Jew” as “the enemy of the human race” and wanted to “abolish the synagogues”.
A little history shows that no one has a monopoly on virtue. It also allows us to put into perspective this astonishing assertion, to say the least, by the lawyer Arié Alimi and the historian Vincent Lemire, according to whom the anti-Semitism of the National Rally is “ontological” while that of LFI is only “contextual”. History shows that there is no anti-Semitic atavism. Didn’t Jaurès ultimately defend Dreyfus? Didn’t the writer Georges Bernanos, disciple of the anti-Semite Drumont, courageously fight Francoism and the Vichy regime?
We understand why, by refusing to participate in the major united demonstration against anti-Semitism on November 12, Emmanuel Macron committed one of the most serious mistakes of his five-year term. As for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he never stops flattering his electorate. “Certain political speeches have made Jews legitimate targets,” said the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), Yonathan Arfi, who was also called “extreme right” by Mélenchon. According to a recent study carried out by the IFOP, 35% of young people aged 18 to 24 believe that it is justified to attack Jews because of their support for Israel.
The parents of the young martyr from Courbevoie rightly denounced a sordid “mimicry” between the acts perpetrated by Hamas terrorists and what their daughter suffered. There is no doubt that these events will weigh on next Sunday’s results.