Posted on 03/31/2002 9:41:52 PM PST by Prodigal Son
A fire destroyed a synagogue in the southern French city of Marseilles later on Sunday, in what appears to be the latest in a wave of attacks against Jewish targets across the country.
Police have yet to comment on the cause of the blaze which destroyed the building in the Mediterranean port city, the French news agency AFP reports.
In attacks in other cities, shots were fired at a kosher butcher's and two other synagogues were damaged in what Jewish leaders are seeing as a pattern of violence.
A leader of France's Jewish community said the attacks were warning signs that anti-Semitism reminiscent of the Nazi era could sweep the country.
The fire in Marseilles on Sunday night was condemned by Clement Yana of the French Jewish Representative Committee.
"This is not an accident," he said. "The fire took hold in several places. It was done with petrol. This is an anti-Semitic act."
The earlier attacks all came within 24 hours each hours of each other at the weekend in or near major cities.
'Profoundly worried'
No-one has been hurt in the attacks, though there was a report of a Jewish couple being assaulted in the town of Villeurbanne, in the Rhone region, causing the woman to spend the night in hospital.
Jean Kahn, president of the Central Board of French Jews, said events were reminiscent of "Kristallnacht" - the name given to the night of 9 November, 1938, when German mobs embarked on a rampage of anti-Semitic violence with the backing of Adolf Hitler's Nazi government.
The Jewish Central Consistory in Paris said it was "profoundly worried by the repeated attacks on French synagogues," and called on the government immediately to step up protection of Jewish buildings and institutions.
The attacks came during the Jewish festival of Passover and followed a surge of violence in the Middle East.
Prime Minister Lionel Jospin condemned the Lyon attack as "spineless and absurd".
"I will not accept the spread of racism and anti-Semitism in our country," he said.
President Jacques Chirac also denounced the violence but denied there was a spirit of anti-Semitism in France.
Police in various areas have strengthened security around Jewish buildings.
Israeli leaders - including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon - have said French anti-Semitism is on the rise, but the government in Paris argues that the attacks are mainly the work of Muslims of North African origin and must be seen in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Marseilles has a particularly large Muslim community.
Marseilles is also the city with the highest support for the Front Nationale. Every Muslim born in France also gives birth to another Front Nationale voter.
kinda reminds one of CALIFORNIA, where for the last coupla years WHITES are less than 50% of population....
An understanding that I find credible is that at the time, circles within circles existed in the French army, to keep practicing & devout Catholics out of the officers' corps. The fear was that their loyalty to Rome transcended that of faith and morals. The affaire des fiches, in the early 1910s, during the course of which it was revealed that a NGO outside of the army had or had access to files on all the soldiers whose main content was their religous beliefs come to mind. In the time of Ultramontagnism and the like this was a prudent, if very controversial, policy.
Anyway, the gist of this alternative explanation is that there was clear evidence that someone had been selling out aux Boches, and the politicians demanded that someone go to Devil's Island. The perp, being a member of this unofficial army within an army whose protection went all the way to the top, threatened to spill the beans, and thus someone else had to be a fall guy. Captain Dreyfuss just happened to be semi-plausibly linkable with the crime, less-connected, and have a German surname.
Rather than to open the can of worms of an unreligious republic having circles within circles to prevent a "Catholic" takeover, Dreyfuss' defenders, rightfully aghast that an innocent man was found guilty, chose, in the spirit of the times, to portray his struggle as part of the struggle for Jewish emancipation, which it was not.
The idea of having a reactionary pope of the likes of Pius X, installed at the request of the Habsburgs, command his minions in the French government gives me the shivers; I can comprehend at that time the need for religious discrimination. I do, however, wonder at the same time, if World War 1 would have been the same senseless meat-grinder had there been Catholics in the officers corps who had the informal means to confer with their counterparts in the other armies, and declare que ca suffit! France's victory in that war was greatly Pyrrhic.
In my opinion, it is not an irony of history, but a correlation of cause and effect that Pius X, installed against the wishes of the conclave during a time of anarchists, lived to see the war that would destroy the empire whose mouthpiece he'd been erupt. His kingdom should not have been of this world.
I still can't believe there's not one mention in the media about the perps. One thing that interests me is that to this point nobody has claimed responsibility. So, maybe it isn't an organized effort and more of a spontaneous thing from individuals copy-catting off one another. I wonder if the press will try to let this one smoulder out in hopes that we get interested in something else?
But you're showing some historical amnesia yourself. For most of the centuries after that period, French kings were often unofficially allied with various Islamic states. These alliances allowed France to tie up the various Hapsburg states that threatened French kings on almost every border. Hapsburg princes in Vienna, Madrid and Naples were forced to spend money and forces on dealing with the Turks instead of Paris.
Contrary to what was posted earler, France is only about 12% Muslime at this point, but the immigration continues and Muslimes tend, paraphrasing Charles De Gaulle, breed like rabbits. I give France 50 years before the French are a minority in their own homeland.
Guess why
the French are
at best
lukewarm supporters
of the war on terrorism.
With very view exceptions nationally, the only "peaceful" muslim, is one who is asleep, visiting allah permanently, or so secular they have one wife, who wears miniskirts in public, and drinks beer, watches TV and goes to movies or eats barbequed pork, like the rest of us... in other words... a NON practicing one.
Now you know why I inserted the word "radical"... and now, I can go have a beer. Cheers!
OK. So there should be plenty of mosques to burn down in retaliation.
If the Jews of Marseille have any balls, they should would down every mosque in town, and shoot to kill any Arab approaching a synogogue in the future. Only then will they be left alone.
I studied this period of French history with Roger Williams, a noted historian of the Second Empire (his best known book was Gaslight and Shadow: The World of Napoleon III) and Third Republic (he published an anthology on the Dreyfuss Affair). His view, which seemed pretty well thought out to me at the time, and which I have no reason to doubt, was that while anti-semitism may not have triggered finding a scapegoat to protect the actual criminal (though some evidence suggests otherwise), certainly was the reason the Affair took the course it did.
British Petroleum now owns Amaco. The next stockholders meeting in April will be held in London. I'm curious to know how many of our natural resources are owned by foreign interests -- notably the British and Scotts. Granted, Amaco relies on foreign oil -- it's just that I was surprised to see Sir This and Sir That now on the Amaco Board of Directors.
Hmm. China: 1.2 billon people and rising. Russia: 145 million and falling daily. Assuming China and Islam divvy up Russia, China gets the Aussies and Kiwis, Islam gets Europe, and the Hispanics get North America, the future looks pretty grim for whitey.
You have just described most of the Turks I know.
Islamic states, that seek to advance, must follow the example set by Turkey. Turkey, I believe is one of Israel's closest military allies.
God forbid that we let Russia and Turkey become better allies to Israel, than we are.
Good point you raised. There ARE moderate muslims. Smart ones who realize that fundamentalist jargon, needs to be jettisoned, ignored, or cut out of the Quran for good.
you express it well-hope i can afford a choice as to the milieu for my progeny; expect it not to be stateside, unfortunately....
Before I'd dare contradict your teachers I'd want to read a lot more about the affair.
An analogy, perhaps flawed, that comes to mind, is that of the fate of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The official version, of which much has been made, was that he was the subject of a witch hunt during a time of hysteria about American Communists. Left unsaid is that at the time the Army and Air Force were wrangling about which service should control our nuclear arsenal, and which defense contractors should stock it. JRO had stayed with the army after the air force was spun off and was seen as being the army's ranking scientist or close to that; all his detractors, (Bethe, Rabi and Teller) who testified against him were air force men, his defenders army men. While the words spoken on Capitol Hill were all about the political theories of a man versed in nuclear physics and Hindu vedas, the unspoken battle, which historians by and large ignore, was about which keiretsu should arm us with fissile materials.
The idiocy of the entire Dreyfuss trial, and the absurdities to which the French army went, makes me suspect something similar was afoot. I feel that somewhere in that courtroom, there was an elephant.
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