"France's Scarlet Letter"

Marie Brenner has penned a dispatch from France on the growing anti-semitism there. The handful of anti-semitic incidents in Canada pales by comparison with what is happening in France. There have been over 1,000 attacks against Jews and their synogogues since 2001. The response of the French to these has been tepid, to say the least. While a handful of these incidents have been motivated by the neo-nazi right, the majority come from the enormous Muslim population, who now make up 10% of the nation. Large numbers of these North Africans are unemployed or under-employed. Mainly, they have settled in the slum suburbs of the major cities, in what the French police call "Lawless zones". While their hatred of Jews is visceral, they are aided by the "soft anti-semitism" of the native French. Because the French support the Palestinians over the Israelis, it is easy to turn a blind eye to the violence of the Muslims against even their own Jewish citizens. In one incident, the author reports that the French police did nothing as thousands of Arabs stormed down the center of Paris, screaming "Death to the Jews"--notice, not the Israelis, but Jews in general. It reminds me of how ineffective the Montreal police were in controlling the Muslim students who rioted at Concordia.

Brenner puts this French denial of the impending danger this will create down to a perverse political correctness. Maybe they feel guilty about their colonial past in North Africa. But slowly it is dawning on the average Frenchman that something must be done soon to control this lawlessness. I have previously read that over 1,600 cars in Strasbourg are stolen by Muslim youths and then burned -- each year. Many of the imams are fundalmentalists who preach anti-western ideas. The author mentions Muslim students who revile their female teachers in class and tear out their pictures from their notebooks and replace them with pictures of Bin Laden. And finally, Jacques Chirac is seen as so pro-Saddam and pro-Arafat, that his nickname on Muslim school yards is "King of the Arabs". How long this mentality can play out, when the nickname for the Muslims is les jeunes--so-called because they represent a large number of France's youth population--remains to be seen. After a while the genie cannot be put back into the bottle. Canada should take note, before this chilling scenario becomes commonplace here.

Note: Based on an article from Vanity Fair (June 2003)

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