Posted on 04/01/2002 8:14:53 PM PST by goody2shooz
Jewish leaders in France yesterday demanded urgent government action after an unprecedented wave of attacks on synagogues and Jewish-owned property around the country.
A synagogue in Marseille, destroyed by fire along with its Torah scrolls and other sacred books on Sunday night, was the third to be hit by arson since Friday, prompting the central consistory of French Jews to compare the violence to the Nazi-led Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, in Germany in November 1938.
President Jacques Chirac issued a call for "dialogue, respect and tolerance". In a statement, the president urged the government to increase police protection at Jewish places of worship and "employ every means necessary to ensure the perpetrators of these acts are tracked down and severely punished".
In signs that anti-semitic violence, apparently linked to escalating Arab-Israeli violence in the Middle East, was spreading in Europe, Belgian police said minor damage was caused to a synagogue in the Brussels district of Anderlecht when a petrol bomb was thrown through a window late on Sunday.
"We are living through a new and deeply dangerous period of anti-semitism, of increasingly violent commando operations carried out against Jews and Jewish interests," said Alain Jakubowicz, president of the Jewish community in Lyon.
"If anyone wanted a demonstration of the reality and the gravity of what the Jews of France live through, they have it now."
Late on Friday, some 15 masked youths rammed two stolen cars through the main gates of Lyon's La Duchere synagogue, and set light to one of the vehicles inside the prayer hall in what Mr Jakubowicz called "an act of war". The doors and facade of another synagogue in Strasbourg were badly damaged in another arson attack.
Also this weekend, a gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher's shop in Toulouse, a Jewish school was broken into in Sarcelles north of Paris, and a Jewish couple in their 20s were beaten up by five youths in Villeurbanne in the Rhone region. The woman, who was pregnant, was kept in hospital overnight.
A book published a fortnight ago by the anti-racist organisation SOS Racisme and UEJF, the Union of Jewish Students in France, described 405 acts of anti-semitic violence reported in France between September 2000 and January 2002. The incidents included insults, spitting, stone throwing, physical violence, racist graffiti, desecration of Jewish graves and arson attacks.
Many were recorded in autumn 2000, after the start of the second intifada in the occupied territories. But a new wave came after the September 11 attacks in America and the ensuing explosion of Israeli-Palestinian violence. The current encirclement of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat seems to have prompted this weekend's attacks.
"Most of these acts seem to be committed by youngsters of Arab origin who identify with the Palestinian cause but who don't really know what they're doing," said a spokesman for the EUJF. "But there's clearly a difference between that kind of kids' stuff and the organised, extremely effective and dangerous attacks in Lyon and Marseille."
France's large Muslim and Jewish communities have on the whole co-existed peacefully and government officials as well as community leaders have sought to play down the recent wave of anti-Jewish violence for fear of inflaming racist feeling. But Jean Kahn, president of the central consistory, said yesterday the French authorities "must take this new threat very seriously indeed".
The prime minister, Lionel Jospin, said he was "revolted by the cowardly and absurd" attack in Lyon which appeared "organised and premeditated".
Links and citations please.
I don't remember that. Link to the thread?
If you're right, is it OK to firebomb Synagogues because of some asshole (no *, whoever cheered the destruction of a mosque deserves it) on FR? Really think thats the reason? Think the anti-semites in France read FR to pick their targets?
Hell only time they can win a war is when they declare it on another Muslim nation. Even then, as in Iran vs Iraq, sometimes neither one wins. Recent history shows us lessons of Arab nations being gone thru like soft cheese (Gulf War, Yom Kippur War, 7 day war)
???????????????
Can you read?
I called those who cheer assholes (without the *).
Do you think calling someone an *sshole (time to use it) is flattering? Someone attacks a house of worship, I call them an *sshole, and you tell me I think its OK? Did you forget to read the post before attacking, mv1? Perhaps you are floating in the sea of hatred, blinds you to what others say.
Puh-leeze!! That old saw is so-o-o overused.
They're learning from the European press that Isreal is not granted the same rights that other nations are accorded: namely, the right to exist.
Also that the United Nations is like a weathercook, spinning whichever way the political winds blow.
French toast? French fries?
What about all the cheerleaders that posted on the thread about the guy that drove his truck into the mosque in Florida last month saying how great it was?
Shocking, isn't it?
How do you dialog with a mad dog??
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