Home > Jewish man arrested over arson at Paris Jewish center
by Craig S. Smith NYT
PARIS The police have arrested a Jewish man in connection with an arson attack on a Jewish community center here last week, suggesting that the attack was not the neo-Nazi act it was originally believed to have been.
If the man, 52, is found guilty of setting fire to the ground-floor center, it will be the third case in a month in which apparently anti-Semitic acts have turned out to be the work of disturbed individuals seeking attention rather than of committed neo-Nazis or others pursuing an anti-Semitic agenda.
A sharp rise in anti-Semitic acts over the past four years, some committed by avowed neo-Nazis and others by Arab youths, has bred anxiety among the country’s estimated 600,000 Jews. The pace of such acts has accelerated since April, raising fears that the two strains of anti-Semitism are spreading among a new generation of people in France.
The recent incidents add a third unsettling stream, spreading confusion and threatening to overshadow the hundreds of real acts of anti-Semitism that have occurred this year.
"If people are simulating anti-Semitic acts, it’s because we are in a climate in which anti-Semitic acts are believable," said Roger Benarrosh, the vice president of France’s Representative Council of Jewish Institutions, or CRIF. He argued that the hoaxes should not detract from the fact that there has been a resurgence of anti-Semitism in France. "As soon as there is an act, people believe it is true because the climate has prepared them," he said.
By the end of July, France’s Justice Ministry had registered 298 anti-Semitic acts across the country, nearly double the number reported during the period a year ago. The French branch of the World Jewish Congress said its figures put the number of incidents so far this year at 375.
The hate is coming from several directions. Some analysts say the encroachment of globalization on national cultures has reawakened Europe’s latent anti-Semitism among France’s alienated white youth. Others attribute the growing anti-Semitism to a pro-Palestinian bias in French media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some people say it is spreading from Germany.
"One source is the traditional extreme right, which is represented in the French political arena by the Front National, then you have the extreme left, which are anti-Zionist and give a kind of legitimacy to anti-Semitism," said Roger Cukierman, CRIF’s president.
"Then you have pro-Palestinian Muslim youths who are facing the problem of nonintegration in French society and they are looking for scapegoats," he said.
The trend has alarmed French politicians and tainted the country’s carefully cultivated postwar identity as an increasingly multicultural land of tolerance.
In July, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, urged French Jews to move to Israel to escape the growing anti-Semitism, and last week his foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, called on France to be stricter in punishing perpetrators of anti-Semitic acts.
France has passed a stiff new law that threatens up to life imprisonment for religious or racially motivated crimes, and after last week’s fire at the Jewish center, the city’s mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, asked for more money to secure Jewish sites.