Well, actually, you should have picked something else, because the stabbing of the rabbi is something quite, say, curious.
Here is an article from Haaretz on this. I don't want to take sides because I really don't know the final word of it.
"French Jewry Stunned By Allegations That Rabbi Faked Stabbing", in Haaretz, January 23, 2003.
The French Jewish community is in an uproar over allegations that Reform Rabbi Gabriel Farhi, who was stabbed on January 3, may in fact have faked the stabbing. The allegations surfaced in a report this week by the right-wing weekly Marianne, which was then picked up by Le Figaro. The journal reported that police officers investigating the stabbing said it is not clear whether Farhi was actually stabbed by an unknown assailant, and they are not ruling out the possibility that Farhi in fact stabbed himself. The report stunned French Jewry, which for the past two years has been hysterically protesting law enforcement agencies' failure to take effective action against the hundreds of anti-Semitic attacks the community has suffered.
One Zionist activist noted: "You can imagine what a destructive effect this affair could have on the Jewish community. For two years we have been screaming about the attacks against us and the rise of anti-Semitism in France. If, God forbid, it turns out that the stabbing was staged, not just Rabbi Farhi is in trouble, all the Jews are in trouble. Who will take us seriously? And that is without even mentioning the enormous shame caused by the thought that four former prime ministers took the trouble to support the rabbi and the Jewish community. What will we do now? Apologize to them? Unthinkable!"
The rumors that the rabbi was lying about the attack began to surface immediately after the attack, when police came to investigate. "I've seen assaults and stabbings as part of my job, but I must say that this was a rather strange stabbing," Marianne quoted the officer who led the investigating team as saying. A few days later, the doctor who examined Farhi submitted a report to the police in which he wrote that "the wound does not match the rabbi's version of the assault" and noted that the stabbing seems to be self-inflicted. On Wednesday, Farhi and his lawyer, Michel Zaoui, held a press conference to refute the allegations and accused the police of deliberately trying to frame the rabbi because they are all anti-semites. Zaoui, for instance, charged that it was not the doctor's job to draw conclusions about the attack, and doing so was an act of anti-semitism.
Francis Lentschner, newly elected president of the Reform Jewish lobbying group, also cast doubt on the police's motives: "The very day after the attack, rumors circulated in Paris that the rabbi was responsible for his own injury. The rabbi himself told me that during his interrogation, the police treated him as a suspect rather than as a victim. It is enough to look at what has happened in France and other countries in the world over the last two years to understand how we reached this pass." Lentschner notes that the cause of this new anti-semitic outrage by the French police is the wave of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic feeling that has swept Europe since the outbreak of the intifada.
It speaks volumes about the plight of the French Jews that so many of them, record numbers of them, feel less threatened in a land full of Palestinian suicide bombers than in a land full of Frenchmen.
Ivan
Anti-Semitism: France’s National Shame
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 10, 2002DANIEL BERNARD, the French ambassador to Britain, recently uttered an ugly anti-Semitic remark at a party hosted by newspaper publisher Conrad Black. He called Israel a "shitty little country" and then asked, "Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?"
Those people.
The key here is that Bernard’s remark is not a reflection of one individual’s racist mindset; it is a manifestation of an entire nation’s social pathology.
Anti-Semitism is a disease from which France has long suffered. The hatred of Jews experienced a drastic rise in that country in the 19th century, particularly during the reign of Napoleon III in the 1850-1870 period, which was known as the "Second French Empire."
France was the first nation to emancipate the Jews. During the Second French Empire, a period in which France underwent rapid modernization, Jews enjoyed civil rights and liberty. They were permitted to enter the state structure and the highest levels of administration and politics. French Jews became one of the most assimilated and the best-integrated communities anywhere in the world.
Modernization became synonymous, in the eyes of the French, with Jewry, since many Jews headed the finance capitalism that modernized France. French Jews were associated with leading banking institutions and they were prominent exponents of economic growth and modernity.
French anti-Semitism, therefore, became an expression of the hatred of modernity. This hatred was primarily expressed by two camps. The first camp was the socialist Left, which confused its hatred of capitalism with hatred of Jews. The second camp was the Catholic Right, which hated Jews because they weren’t Christians. Catholic anti-Semitism was also the voice of an angry religious community that resented its loss of direction of, and status in, French society. Thus, many rightwing Catholic theorists insinuated that Jews could only be French -- and human -- if they converted to Catholicism.
Paradoxically, therefore, the freedom that enabled Jews to achieve success and "equality" in France led to their demonization. Yes, they enjoyed "official" acceptance and they excelled in upward social and economic mobility. It was for this very reason, however, that anti-Semitism skyrocketed in France.
The French Revolution of 1789 had fertilized the soil in which this phenomenon grew. The French Revolutionaries granted Jews full emancipation. Jews were given the rights that were accorded to other Frenchmen, including religious freedom. Yet this apparent kindness to Jews was a camouflage of darker motives. Historian Arthur Hertzberg has demonstrated that the granting of full equality to Jews was rooted in the hope that through emancipation the Jews would disappear as a separate and distinct group.
This explains why Napoleon Bonaparte allowed Jews religious freedom but simultaneously initiated a determined effort, like many French liberals, to culturally assimilate Jews into French life.
Thus, Jews achieved "official" equality in French society, and they were able, by the mid-1840s, to utilize French liberty to gain prominence and entry into French economic and political life. Yet they were vilified for doing so. Those Jews who did not assimilate, meanwhile, and who remained orthodox and poor, were also subjected to prejudice.
The French Jew, therefore, was always in a no-win situation: he was hated if he successfully assimilated, and he was hated if he did not.
It is clear that there was a basic contradiction in French liberty: while it gave equality and rights to Jews, it did so while fuelling anti-Semitism. The rights of the Jew were protected as long as the Jew rejected his Jewry.
It becomes understandable, therefore, why, in Vichy France during World War II, the French did much more than just cooperate with the Nazis. French security forces took it upon themselves to round up and hand over 61,000 Jews to the Nazis -- without even a request from the Nazis to do so. Those Jews ended up in Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka.
In the 1970s, France could not suppress its anti-Semitic appetite. With few Nazis around, the French reached out to Arabs for a rendezvous with anti-Semitism. France distinguished itself by promising the PLO that it would not arrest its terrorists who used French territory as a base for attacks on Israel. All France required was that the PLO did not inflict its violence on French soil.
Charming.
In this historical context, we begin to understand that Daniel Bernard’s recent ugly outburst is not the reflection of a singular distorted mind; it is part of a larger pathological national illness. It is France’s illness -– and pathetic shame.
And you say it's "no longer a problem". Liar.
Ivan