Roger Cohen
NY Times, June 20, 2024
“The National Rally supports the Jews, supports the State of Israel, and it’s quite normal given the activity I’ve had over the past 60 years, that between an antisemitic party and a pro-Jewish party, I’ll vote for the pro-Jewish one.”
The alleged rape last weekend of a 12-year-old Jewish girl by boys who hurled antisemitic abuse at her has ignited simmering tensions in France over attitudes toward the largest Jewish community in Western Europe.
President Emmanuel Macron, a centrist whose decision to call snap elections this month shocked even his closest allies, responded by denouncing the “scourge of antisemitism” in French schools. The prime minister, Gabriel Attal, urged politicians to “refuse the banalization” of hatred toward Jews, a thinly veiled attack on Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the ardently pro-Palestinian leader of the left who on June 2 called antisemitism in France “residual.”
There were more than 360 antisemitic episodes in France in the first three months of this year, or an average of four a day, an increase of 300 percent over the same period last year, the government said. In the most recent one that shocked the country, the three boys are said to have dragged the girl into an abandoned building where she was repeatedly raped and insulted.
The three boys, ages 12 and 13, one of them previously known to the girl, are being investigated for rape, death threats and insults “aggravated by their link to the victim’s religion,” a prosecutor’s statement on Wednesday said. Two of them have been placed in pretrial detention, it added. .. [To read the full article, click here]