Monday, April 2, 2018

France: "I have no idea how we’re going to fight this cancer of anti-Semitism" says French Jewish intellectual


Via The Atlantic:
(...) Last Friday, Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, was stabbed 11 times and set alight by a neighbor and a homeless man. This time, authorities immediately, perhaps even prematurely, called it an anti-Semitic attack. Gérard Collomb, France’s interior minister, said this week that before killing Knoll, one of the two men arrested for the murder had told the other, “She is a Jew, she must have money.”  
Last week, before Knoll’s death, I had met with Elisabeth Badinter, one of France’s most influential intellectuals and old-school feminists, and had asked her what she thought could be done to stop anti-Semitism, radicalization, terrorist attacks, everything we’re seeing in France today. “To be very frank with you, I don’t know, and I’m worried,” she told me. Her blue eyes were piercing, her composure formidable. She weighs in on French public life only selectively, and had given an interview last September decrying what she saw as a media silence around Sarah Halimi’s death.

“I think that the more immigrants who arrive in Europe from Muslim countries, the more difficult it will be,” Badinter continued. Integration will be difficult, and they’ll be unhappy, she said. “And who does one immediately point the finger at? Americans and Israelis, with this radical conflation between Israeli citizens and diaspora Jews, which they see as the same. So I have to confess that one, I have no idea how we’re going to fight this cancer of anti-Semitism. And two, I’m worried.”

She’s not alone.
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