Posted on 01/20/2005 6:23:27 AM PST by veronica
PARIS, Jan 20 (Reuters) - "Filthy Jew!" schoolchildren howl at a classmate. "Jews only want money and power," they tell their teachers. "Death to the Jews" graffiti appear on school walls outside Paris and other French cities.
These are not scenes from the wartime Nazi occupation or a fictional France where the far-right has taken control. Outright anti-Semitism like this is a fact of life these days in the poor suburbs where much of France's Muslim minority lives.
After a slow response when this "new anti-Semitism" flared four years ago, France has made fighting prejudice against Jews into a national priority. Holocaust education in state schools now starts with pupils as young as nine years old.
But even the best plans for teaching about the Nazi massacre of Jews can fall short when confronted with an Islamic identity spreading among a minority of France's five million Muslims.
"It works with those who are ready to listen," said Iannis Roder, a history teacher in the tough northern suburbs of Paris. "But it doesn't work with those who won't listen. They have their minds made up."
Roder is one of several history teachers who sounded an alarm in 2002 about a wave of anti-Semitism among Muslim pupils, much of it a reaction to the uprising by Palestinians against Israeli control of their lands.
Their outspoken book "The Lost Territories of the Republic" opened France's eyes to classrooms where some Muslim pupils openly denounced Jews, praised Hitler and refused to listen to any non-Muslim teacher talking about the history of Islam.
Such tension has prompted Jewish pupils in these areas to switch to private Jewish or even Catholic schools.
"Muslim pupils react less now to what happens in the Middle East," Roder said. "But the situation hasn't really changed. As soon as you talk about Jews in some historical event, there are (anti-Semitic) comments."
ONLY A MINORITY PRESENTS PROBLEMS
Both Roder and Claude Singer, head of Holocaust education projects at the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Centre (CDJC), underlined that most schools had no problem teaching about the Holocaust and most pupils learned the lesson being put across.
"A national survey of history and geography teachers showed that only 15 percent of them had problems teaching about the Shoah," Singer said, using the Hebrew word widely used in French for the Nazi massacre of six million Jews.
"The problem concerns not only the Shoah but anything to do with religion," he said. "Some Muslim pupils don't accept being taught about Christian religious life, which is very important to understand the Middle Ages.
"The Algerian War is difficult, too, as is slavery," he said. The French slave trade is taught in French overseas territories but not in mainland France, which prompts some black pupils here to ask why they study the Holocaust but not slavery.
"In general, I think that Shoah education is going well. It's certainly much better than before," Roder said.
France's centralised state education system began teaching about the Holocaust in junior and senior high schools in 1983. Three years ago, faced with the wave of "new anti-Semitism", it added special classes for pupils as young as 9 or 10 years old.
Last September, all 5,500 lycees (high schools) around the country received DVDs with excerpts of the classic Holocaust film "Shoah" and related texts to give pupils a hard-hitting lesson in where hateful prejudice can lead.
Centres like the CDJC also offer subsidised day trips to Auschwitz with a French survivor of the death camps. Auschwitz is located near Krakow in southern Poland, just over two hours' flight from Paris, and the trip costs only 50 euros ($65.20).
"We'll bring several thousand pupils there in 2005," said Singer, who also guides visits to the Shoah Memorial at the CDJC's headquarters near the old Jewish quarter of Paris.
FOREIGN JEWS PRAISE FRANCE
After being heavily criticised for its initial slow reaction to rising anti-Semitism, France has cracked down on anti-Semitic violence and multiplied efforts to teach tolerance in schools.
The American Jewish Congress (AJC) lauded France in September for its toughened stand on anti-Semitic crimes and its plan to ban the virulently anti-Jewish satellite television Al-Manar, run by Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrillas.
After meeting Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Justice Minister Dominique Perben, AJC Executive Director David Harris said they were "people who understood the magnitude of the problem and were determined to do something about it."
Harris said he understood the difficulty teachers had with Muslim pupils: "Focusing simply on Holocaust education does not necessarily resonate with children from immigrant communities who say they have no historical or cultural connection with it."
A month earlier, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said in Paris that France was doing all it could to fight anti-Jewish prejudice -- a calming statement coming only weeks after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had urged French Jews to move to Israel to flee what he called "the wildest anti-Semitism."
LINK TO CAMBODIAN AND RWANDAN GENOCIDES
While some progress has been made, both Roder and Singer said teachers had to work hard to counter anti-Semitic views that pupils pick up in their disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
"I wouldn't say any Islamic groups are behind this," Roder said. "I hear things like, 'Don't buy Coca Cola, it's Jewish'. They hear that sort of thing at the mosque or in their neighbourhoods and they repeat it now and then."
"I'm convinced it's not just a problem of Jews and Arabs," Singer said. "There is a wider problem, one of identity. The (Muslim) pupils feel under attack for their identity so they reject out of hand anything that could put them down."
One way to get around this could be to introduce pupils to survivors of other mass killings, for example in Cambodia or Rwanda, Singer said. He has already arranged one such meeting for teachers to help them understand the problem of genocide.
"The Shoah cannot be allowed to hide all the other horrors concerning other groups," he said. "That's not our goal here."
This has to be done carefully, Singer said, because inviting witnesses to other genocides to speak with Jewish survivors runs the risk of diluting the unique nature of the Holocaust.
"We must not make comparisons," he said firmly.
France is going to be a problem down the road.
======
Down the road???
What planet are you on??? ;-))
Nothing. I wrote that it had been already posted, because I had read it before - nothing more.
France is probably a perfect microcosm of the problem of liberalism.
Mushy "let's all get along" philosophy which includes "don't dare any1 criticize or reprimand the minority, or any1 who does wrong", because they probably had a "rough life", leads to those wrong-doers gaining power over those mushy nice-nice philosophers, and then every1 else.
They are the seed of Amelek...
Little muslim monsters become big muslim monsters, a fact that imams and mullahs and the rest of those goofballs have figured out.
Its already happening. The EU China axis is forming. China historially has always sided with muslims. Just look at Pakistan, Iran, Libya, and Saddam's Iraq. france-funded palestinians kill Israelis and chirac allows his own muslim population to join the insurrection in Iraq. And of course there is the whole EU-China arms thing.
Muslims are a problem for alot of people around the world. My hubby spoke with a man from India who explained how hated the Muslims are in his country. He also went on to say that he supports the war in Iraq and that we should not allow the United States to become totally infested with Muslims. His regret is that India should have reacted more quickly to the influx of Muslims and he fears it may be too late to help his country.
I always knew Hindus were the same as Moslems. ;-) All religions are really the same, you know.
This is probably the kind of thing that will happen to France. Moslems will take advantage of the lily-livered gov't officials and someday overrun the gov't as well as the land.
Lion had a point about the EU attacking us economically. It was only a few short days ago when the EU unveiled it's new passenger plane and made slight remarks towards the United States. What does that say about the EU's intentions in the future?
I do not care about those things. That does not change the fact that the EU is trying to lift the ARMS EMBARGO and sell weapons to the country that threatens to attack Taiwan and the US.
DID you actually read this article? Apparently not, Mr. Soros.
Sure let's install religious bigotry here, then we can build a nation that could compete for call center jobs from Canada.
Aside from the goose-steping part, the above statement is not nearly as ridiculous as you might think.
They hate our wonderful George Bush and think he is threat to world peace. The nerve of those basturds!
Just think, France, a BIG EU SUPPORTER, believes that Israel is a villian and a rogue state.
The FRANCE is a dangerous outfit. THEY ARE A THREAT TO ISRAEL'S SURVIVAL!!
FRANCE... bunch of stinky whiner wimps.
Sadly, I think that one day our children will have to kill these children.
My husband and I watched a documentary on Aushwitz last night on PBS. It was truly horrifying and heartwrenching. I thought for sure I'd have nightmares. I can not even imagine the suffering those people went through, little children being ripped out of their mothers arms, being gassed, shot, tortured, experimented on, burned. It's hard to believe that Europe just sat by and did nothing, that we did nothing... in the beginning.
If 'aliyah' is the term for Jews coming home to Israel, I'm going to coin a new term: 'alseeyah', the act of Jews leaving France.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.