The New York Times is having a moment of lucidity in its fog of political correctness. It took a murder of an 85-year-old French woman to bring about this temporary connection with reality. Enjoy it while it lasts. Tomorrow they will be denouncing Trump’s racism and calling for open borders in Europe.
Bari Weiss wrote Jews Are Being Murdered in Paris. Again.
Mireille Knoll as a girl escaped the Nazi round-up of Jews in France and fled to Portugal. She returned to France, married an Auschwitz survivor and raised a family. Her grandchildren moved to Israel.
She remained in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement when, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, she was stabbed 11 times. Her apartment was then set on fire. Firefighters found the burned body on Friday night.
She was murdered by men apparently animated by the same hatred that drove Hitler.
Two suspects, a 29-year-old and a 21-year-old, have been arrested. The older man is a neighbor Ms. Knoll has known since he was a child. The younger, according to reports, is homeless. One of the suspects told the investigators that the other had shouted “Allahu Akbar” while killing Ms. Knoll, according to Le Monde.
It’s a neighborhood that has already borne witness to a nearly identical crime. Almost exactly a year ago, a 65-year-old Jewish widow named Sarah Halimi was murdered by her neighbor, 27-year-old Kobili Traoré. Other neighbors said they heard Mr. Traoré scream “Allahu Akbar” as he beat Ms. Halimi, a retired doctor, to near death in the early hours of April 4, 2017. He then threw her body into the courtyard below.
The Times and the Post have been frothing about the revival if Antisemitism on the Right, but Weiss admits
Anti-Semitism was supposed to be a disease of the far right. But the people actually killing Jews in France these days are not members of the National Front. They are Islamists.
“The major crimes against the Jewish community — Ilan Halimi, the Toulouse killings, the Hyper Cacher killings, Sarah Halimi — all of them have all been carried out by radicalized Muslims,” Robert Ejnes, the executive director of CRIF, an umbrella organization of French Jewish groups, told me in a call from Paris. “These young people have French identity cards, but they hate what France stands for. This is the nature of the problem we are facing. And it’s very hard to talk about.”
Here are some facts that are very hard to talk about: Jews represent less than 1 percent of the population in France, yet in 2014, 51 percent of all racist attacks were carried out against them, according to the French Interior Ministry. A survey from that year of about 1,000 French respondents with unknown religious affiliation and 575 self-identified Muslims, conducted by the AJC Paris and the French think tank Fondapol, found that the Muslim respondents were two or three times more likely to have anti-Jewish sentiments than those from the random French group. Nineteen percent of all respondents felt that Jews had “too much” political power. Among Muslims, the number was 51 percent. As for the idea that Zionism “is an international organization that aims to influence the world and society in favor of the Jews,” 44 percent of Muslims surveyed approved of this statement.
Few Muslims, even if they are anti-Semitic, have murderous intent to Jews; but it only takes a few murders a year to terrorize a community into leaving a country. And there is the constant harassment Jews face,
the violence on the streets — a 15-year-old girl wearing the uniform of her Jewish school slashed in the face; an 8-year-old boy wearing a kippah assaulted; teenage siblings called “dirty Jews” before being beaten — hasn’t abated. On Wednesday, hours before a march in honor of Mireille Knoll, the office of the Union of French Jewish Students at the Sorbonne was ransacked and defaced with graffiti like “Viva Arafat” and “death to Israel.”
France can gave a Muslim minority, or it can have a Jewish minority. It cannot have both. At least 6% of French are Muslims; less than 1% are Jews. Anti-Zionism is widespread on the Left (including Jeremy Corbyn). Macron has described “anti-Zionism as a “reinvented form of anti-Semitism.” But will he do anything? Politicians rely on votes, and in the eyes of the Left Muslims can do no wrong. If I were a Jew in France, I would scout out Montreal.