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".
Most of tough troops of Caliphs were Turks. Since the 10the century on, all wars of Mid-East muslims were fought by Turkish slave soldiers. They were neither Arabs nor Persians. The famous defeat of Mongols by muslims was by Mamelukes of Egypt, another group of Turkish slave soldiers settled in Egypt. It was a battle between two groups of steppe nomads from Central Asia. Without the help of Turks, muslim empire would had been gone much earlier.
Or are you just some liberal that bases his facts on hearsay such as "I got the impression that...." or "Somebody told me that they heard...."
Sigh....
Case in point: Suppose, because I don't like what Mugabe in Zimbabwe is doing to white farmers there, I just go out and burn down a couple of black churches here in Alabama, or take pot shots and any random black person walking down the street. What would that make me? A Racist. A hate criminal. Jessee Jackson, Kwasai Mfume, Al Sharpton and Morris Dees would all be going nuts with outrage. So, one has to wonder, where is there outrage now?
Theses Jews in France are NOT Israelis. They are French. Regardless of what the Israelis do, they can not be blamed simply because they're Jews. For their government to immediately not come to there aid is unforgivable.
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