French Jewish Leader: “The Number of Anti-Semitic Acts Has Exploded”

That quote comes from Richard Prasquier, the head of CRIF, the largest group representing France's 600,00 population.

“In the last 13 years the number of anti-Semitic acts has exploded. French citizens, because they are Jewish, must be protected when they study, gather or pray,” he said in a statement.

According to the Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (SPCJ) CRIF's security unit, there was an increase of 58 percent in anti-Semitic incidents in 2012 in France compared to 2011:

The report showed that 614 anti-Semitic acts were documented in the country last year compared to 389 in 2011.

Incidents in which the victims were accosted physically or verbally on the street increased 82 percent, to 315 last year from 177 cases in 2011, SPCJ said. A fourth of the 96 physical anti-Semitic assaults involved a weapon.

The report also noted that there were two spikes in the attacks in 2012: following the murder of three schoolchildren and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse , when 90 acts were recorded within 10 days, and after the Oct. 6 bombing of a kosher supermarket in Sarcelles in which two people were lightly wounded, when 28 acts were recorded in the next eight days.

In other words, France's Jew haters were actually emboldened by the attacks.Nor, apparently is youth any protection.

Almost all of the incidents originated with France's restive Muslim population, now estimated at between 3-6 million, between 5 and 10% of France's 64,400,000 population.

In the case of the Toulouse killer Mohammed Mera, even his own brother cited the influence of Islam and a family where hatred of Jews was a normal and encouraged attitude. Pay particular attention to the last paragraph in the linked article, a quote from Mera's brother:

Mr Merah also recalls visiting his mother's house for a wake for Mohamed . There were whoops of joy, he said. People were congratulating his mother and saying "Be proud. Your son brought France to its knees". "I screamed: 'My brother is not a hero. He is a common assassin.'"

Given that 90% of France's Muslim population voted for the Socialists and the present Hollande government,French authorities are quite reluctant to single out Muslims or Islamic anti-semitism as the cause of the surge in attacks on Jews. After a gang of 10 Muslims armed with iron rods and hammers attacked three young Jews wearing skullcaps in a town near Lyon and hospitalized two of them last May, French Prime Minister Jean-Marie Ayrault simply hedged and characterized it as a "serious case" of "unexplained violence."

With that being the prevailing attitude, the problem is unlikely to abate and will only increase as France's Muslim population continues to grow.

The heart rending part of this is that most of France's Jews are of North African origin. For instance, after Algeria achieved independence in 1960, the first thing they did was to expel the country's Jews, after appropriating their wealth and property. While most of them went to Israel, a number of them (who were, after all, French citizens) returned to France to make a new start, thinking they were safe at last from Muslim persecution.

Instead, it has simply followed them. And it's being aided and abetted by the 'anti-Zionist' skew of many Europeans, including politicians who see catering to Muslim sensibilities as a way to get elected.

This brings me back to something I wrote back in 2006, when I saw this trend coming:

If I were a Jew living in Western Europe or Scandinavia today, with the possible exceptions of Switzerland, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, I would seriously think about relocating to Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Canada or America.

It's that bad, and the danger signals are that clear.

I dislike having to write this, because it means conceding the racist notion that Jews somehow should be proscribed from living in certain places merely because of their ancestry, but I'm primarily interested in saving lives here. And with the possible exceptions of the countries I mentioned above, none of the countries of Western Europe and Scandinavia are likely to do much to protect the Jewish populations of their countries from what I'm pretty sure is just over the horizon.

They will be too busy dealing with internal unrest and what may even amount to a virtual civil war in some places. And it isn't all that far off.

Sixty years after the Holocaust, with living survivors still among us, we are looking at the end of most Jewish life in much of Western Europe.

There's very little of it I would change today.

A lot of Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. As the Muslim population grows, life is going to become more intolerable for Europe's Jews in many countries, and a lot of EU politicians are going to be less and less willing to identify the actual cause of what's happening in order to reverse the process.

Europe has essentially traded 6 million Jews for 20 million Muslims. And will have to live with the results unless things change radically. It remains to be seen how they end up liking the results.

If I were a Jew in most of Western Europe, and particularly in France or the UK, I'd be packing.