France acts against anti-Semitism
Following an arson attack against a Jewish school outside Paris, the French government has announced a new programme to combat growing anti-Semitism in the country, writes David Tresilian from Paris
French President Jacques Chirac last week summoned members of the French government to the Elysée Palace in Paris to discuss how to combat what was being described as a rising tide of anti-Semitism in France following an arson attack on a Jewish school in the northern Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis on 15 November.
The meeting, designed to reassure France's Jewish community that the government was acting to combat the high number of attacks on French Jews and on Jewish property seen over recent years in France, brought together the French prime minister and the ministers of justice, education and the interior.
An official statement issued by the Elysée said that President Chirac had been "profoundly shocked by this intolerable criminal act" of burning down the school, signalling his "absolute determination, along with that of the state as a whole, to ensure that the perpetrators of the act be found and severely dealt with".
Following the meeting, an urban regeneration programme was announced designed to improve living conditions in the so-called "sensitive areas" surrounding many French cities where rates of unemployment are many times the already high national average of 10 per cent.
Such areas, containing a high proportion of North African and other immigrants to France, have been the focus of much discussion in recent years due to the social and economic exclusion suffered by their inhabitants and the high levels of crime and disorder believed to have been caused as a result, especially among young people.
The new programme, described by the minister responsible as an attempt to heal the "social fracture and ghettoisation that encourages hatreds of every sort", is a response to a widespread perception in France that many anti-Semitic attacks have been committed by North African youths excluded from mainstream French society and tempted to take out their frustrations on the country's Jewish community.
According to an editorial that appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde on 18 November, "few weeks now pass without examples of hostility [towards Jews]: stones thrown at a synagogue in Villepinte, a group of Jewish youths beaten up with baseball bats in Paris, swastikas appearing in graffiti at Pantin...without mentioning the fact that the word feuj [slang for Jew] has now become an insult and not only among young Arabs."
"It is undeniable," the newspaper continued, that the increase in anti-Semitism in France has "happened at the same time as the second Intifada" launched in the occupied territories against the Israeli occupiers three years ago. "Criticism or condemnation of the policies carried out by Israel in the Palestinian territories has, it seems, lowered the barrier, already unclear for some, between anti-Zionism and anti- Semitism."
Meanwhile, spokespersons for the French government were at pains last week to point to measures already taken to combat anti-Semitism in France even before the Seine-Saint-Denis attack.
In December 2002, a law was passed to make racist, xenophobic or anti-Semitic acts a specific criminal offence. The ministry of education also introduced measures to discourage what is described as "communitarianism", or the expression of ethnic or religious affiliations in French schools.
France has a long history of anti-Semitism, including the Dreyfus case in 1894 when a French army officer of Jewish origin was unjustly court- martialed for a crime he did not commit, provoking novelist Emile Zola's famous denunciation of anti-Semitism in France, J'accuse, and the Vichy government's sending tens of thousands of French and foreign Jews to the Hitler regime's death camps during the Second World War.
Designed in part in response to criticism from the Jewish community in the United States that France is not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism, the French government's new initiative is also designed to meet persistent criticism from France's Jewish community of the "indifference" of public opinion faced by the amplitude of the problem.
Reports appearing in French newspapers last week contained shocking stories of members of France's Jewish community being unable to take public transport in some areas for fear of being attacked, as well as of the need to take off the kippah, or Jewish head- covering, before going out in the street for fear of being targeted by gangs of youths.
Nevertheless, the number of anti-Semitic acts reported in France in 2003 has sharply fallen from the high recorded in 2002, which saw a series of widely reported attacks on France's Jewish community, including an arson attack on a synagogue in Marseilles.
While 184 attacks of an anti-Semitic character were recorded in France for the first 10 months of 2002, this figure had fallen to 96 for the same period in 2003.
