Free Republic

A widely distributed political cartoon by Ranan Lurie, published after the massacre of four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris, depicts a tiny shrub above ground, and just below the surface, supporting the plant, is a web of thick twisted roots spread in the design of the swastika. These Nazi roots are more than a cartoonist's imagination, carefully tended by the anti-Semites of France, exposed when the French rounded up their Jews, men, women and children, and shipped them to the death camps of World War II. If the cartoonist had dug deeper, he could have drawn the roots...

With a degree from the prestigious HEC Paris business school, five years at a global consulting firm, and a three-floor “dream apartment” in the French capital’s 10th arrondissement, Mickael Nadjar had a comfortable and prosperous life in his native France. Four years ago, he left it all behind and headed for Tel Aviv. While he initially came to lead a business project in Israel, Nadjar ended up staying because he was tired of the daily frustrations and slights endured by practicing Jews in France. After the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket this month, Nadjar says,...

The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, has emerged over the past tumultuous week as one of the West’s most vocal foes of Islamism, though he’s actually been talking about the threat it poses for a long while. During the course of an interview conducted before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he told me—he went out of his way to tell me, in fact—that he refuses to use the term “Islamophobia” to describe the phenomenon of anti-Muslim prejudice, because, he says, the accusation of Islamophobia is often used as a weapon by Islamism's apologists to silence their critics. Most of my...

In 2014, the year before the murder rampages at the Charlie Hebdo offices and the kosher supermarket in Paris, about seven thousand French Jews (out of a community of about half a million) emigrated to Israel.With Muslim and other antisemitic harassment and violence constantly intensifying in France, that was twice the number of the previous year, and a record high.Even before this monthÂ’s terror attacks, a higher number of French Jewish immigrants to Israel was expected for 2015. Now, after the attacks, a higher number yet is expected, possibly fifteen thousand. There is even talk of the Jews leaving...

It is nothing short of chilling. A video, taken on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, shows masses of French protesters marching down a Paris thoroughfare chanting openly anti-Semitic slogans and calling on Jews to get out of France. Chants include “Jews, France is not yours!” “Jews out of France“ and “The story of the gas chambers is bull***!” At one point, in a show of raw, seething hatred, the crowd simply spits out the word “Jew, Jew, Jew!” Many of the marchers can be seen giving the “quenelle” inverted Nazi salute popularized by anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonné. …

A record-breaking 5,000 people from throughout France have thus far visited an aliyah fair taking place in the heart of Paris today, the same day as the French run-off election. The fair, organized and run by the Jewish Agency, is being attended by Jewish Agency Chairman of the Executive Natan Sharansky, as well as by representatives of various Israeli local authorities and government bodies, who are meeting with participants and presenting them with various opportunities for settling in Israel. Jewish Agency Chairman Sharansky noted emotionally that thousands of members of the French Jewish community had visited the fair. “I cannot...