And now Stella and her family talk about moving to Israel, giving up their French lives, worrying about what France will be like for their children. The Muslims have won, they are indeed managing to terrorize these inoffensive people, and many others, too. “I have been made victorious through terror,” Muhammad claims in a famous Hadith. They are merely emulating him, the Perfect Man and Model of Conduct. Stella doesn’t want to leave. She has 23 years of seniority at her job; if she moves to Israel, all that seniority will be lost. Besides, France is their home. It is where all their relatives and friends live. It is where they grew up, were educated, started a family. They had many happy years living in Paris, without any troubles. One does not easily leave all that. But now many Muslims have arrived, and staked their territorial claim. This is now their neighborhood. No Jews should be expected to be safe, not here, not anymore. They find the Jewish families and target them: houses invaded, cars vandalized. They make sure the antisemitic nature of these attacks is clear; “JUIFS,” they scrawl, and “ISRAEL,” on the family car. They want the Jews to leave.
In France, Jews are now afraid to wear their yarmulkes in public, for fear of being attacked. “You can’t walk in Paris wearing a yarmulke. You’re taking your life in your hands,” says Steve Eisenberg, co-founder of the Jewish International Connection of New York. Cries of “Sale Juif” — “Dirty Jew” — can be heard in the Metro directed at anyone who “looks Jewish.” Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured over several weeks, and finally murdered by a Muslim gang. Four Jews were killed in cold blood at a kosher grocery. A rabbi and three small children — two of them his, shot in front of him before he too was killed — were murdered outside a Jewish school in Toulouse. An 8-year-old boy was beaten to the ground outside his Jewish day school in Sarcelles, and a 15-year-old girl wearing a Jewish school uniform was slashed across the face by an unknown man. An 85-year-old Jewish woman was stabbed eleven times and set on fire by her Muslim neighbor’s son, who had known her all his life and been befriended by her. Another elderly Jewish woman, Sara Halimi, was beaten and thrown out a window to her death by a young Muslim neighbor yelling “Allahu akbar.”
On January 9, 2018, fires roared through two kosher Paris markets, weeks after swastikas were painted on both stores. January 9 was the third anniversary of the Hyper Cacher supermarket massacre in Paris. Two yarmulke-wearing Jewish brothers were attacked in a Paris suburb by Muslims wielding a hacksaw.
As this rash of anti-Semitic attacks — I’ve merely given a handful of examples above — almost all at the hands of Muslims, has hit France, many Jews are fleeing. The United States is, after Israel, their main destination.
In France, the third-largest Jewish community in the world, after Israel and the United States, is under terrific stress. More than 60,000 Jews have left France since 2000. The number of antisemitic attacks increased by 69% in the first eight months of 2018 over the same period a year earlier.
What could be done to make Jews feel more secure? The police could establish more units dedicated solely to protecting Jews in areas where Muslims have been threatening, or attacking, Jews. Penalties for antisemitic crimes should be increased. They should be treated as a special category of hate crime. They should be judged in the context of recent history. Hate crimes against Jews bespeak eliminationism, a genocidal impulse. The French state should make it a priority to have undercover policemen and policewomen dressed as Jews, with everything from a simple yarmulke to the full garb of an Orthodox Jew for a policeman, and Orthodox wigs for policewomen. These people could patrol the streets in the neighborhoods where Jews feel most threatened, and ride, too, in the metro. They could be furnished with other identifying marks: a Hebrew-language newspaper, an Israeli book, a Star-of-David on a silver chain. Anything that might serve as a come-hither prop to attract Muslim toughs who would discover, much to their chagrin, that the unarmed Jew they thought they were attacking turned out to be a policeman with a gun.
But there has to be, as well, an understanding that the more Muslims there are, the more antisemitic acts there will be. Antisemitism is too much a part of Islam. What can France — or other European countries — do, aside from better policing? Will they monitor all the mosques, to make sure that antisemitism is not a part of the imams’ sermons? Will they promptly close any mosque where such anti-Jewish sentiments are expressed? These countries have insufficiently recognized the fear felt by their Jewish populations. Their governments should be making Muslim antisemitism the subject of constant public discussion, spoken about on every conceivable occasion, and not only just after there has been an antisemitic attack. Do they really want the Jews in their countries to be driven out by a Muslim population that, in contrast to the Jews, has contributed so very little to the general welfare? And is it fair to Europe’s Jews to allow so many Muslims into Europe, knowing that they are carriers of the virus of antisemitism? The German designer Kurt Lagerfeld summed up the situation most succinctly in addressing his own country: “You cannot kill millions of Jews and then take in millions of their worst enemies afterwards, even if there are decades [between the two events].”