In the bleak housing project where a young Jew named Ilan Halimi was held captive and tortured before being dumped in a vacant lot to die, there's scant sympathy for the victim.'It's too bad this happened, because we immigrants are always blamed,’ said Ibrahim Ag Ahmalou, a lanky man of West African heritage who shares his girlfriend's apartment in the project. '’But Jews have all the money and power. Everyone knows this and resents them. That's why they have these problems.’
Last week there were three more attacks on Jews by Arab and African immigrants in suburban Paris, according to police. None of the latest victims was seriously injured, but the attacks heightened the nervousness of French Jews. There is alarm that the antipathy of French Muslims toward Jews, long based on opposition to Israel, is reverting to the even more sinister prejudices that once pervaded Europe, making Jews the scapegoats for all social ills. ‘Anti-Semitism is rising in our country,’ said legislator Dominique Strauss-Kahn...
France is no stranger to anti-Semitism. Thousands of French Jews vanished in Nazi death camps with hardly a murmur of protest from their Christian countrymen. Hatred of Jews is the subtext of the shrill ultranationalism that still has a following among white French. Meanwhile, the past decade has seen a surge in ‘ideological’ anti-Semitism among Muslim immigrants -- based on opposition to Israel and support for the Palestinian cause, but often expressed with swastikas spray-painted on synagogues or desecration of Jewish graveyards. But more recently, analysts say, anti-Semitism in France has taken an uglier turn as young Arabs and West Africans have adopted loud hatred of Jews as a proclamation of cool, an attitude powered more by rap music, ultraviolent jihadist videos, and radical Islamic rhetoric -- although with little or no adherence to Islamic religious practice -- than by any coherent stand on events in the Middle East. Equally alarming, the anti-Semitism appears to be spreading among non-Muslim Africans and Caribbean blacks in France, and even gaining ground among white immigrants from European backwaters who find it difficult gaining a place in French society. Said Sammy Ghozlan, a retired police chief and activist against antisemitism: 'It's all mixed up: gang stuff, violence, and a glaze of ideology -- they hate Jews, they hate the West, they hate France. The Jews are the face they put on their generalized anger at the world.’
