Why won’t you acknowledge that Israel -as its Arab neighbours- does share some responsibility in the decade-long Palestinian dead-end?

Why do you complain about anti US feelings in Europe & dismiss any Francophobic stance in the USA?

You may use phrases like your shallow stereotypes and pedantic, condescending lecturing to depict diverging opinions. Are you sure to be free from any arrogance or blindness?

Anti-americanism, on the other hand, is not only spontaneous, it is rational, and natural.

But of course.

Keep digging, Kodiak, keep digging. Very soon you’ll have a hole big enough for the whole coutry. Minus the Jews, of course.

Not that we needed any indirect confirmation of our worries, but it’s always nice to have. Cheers.

Your selective attention to what you designate as “French antisemitism” would be just disappointing if it weren’t also adding insult to unfairness & inaccuracy. Moreover you’re just a tiny -& very late- element of the whole brainwashing machine that’s producing Francophobia, a convenient mind manipulation intended to conceal US failures (no casus belli, repeated lies, killing of innocents, UN-law violation, oil stealing, infrastructure mismanagement or lack of management, astronomical incompetence in managing peace & State-rebuilding, staggering loss of credibility, economical problems, failure to fight terrorism, extraodinary ability to fight oldest allies & smile to terrorist States like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan etc).

There’s a parallel between your desperate attempt to depict France as a mean backstabber because she designed a new World order that suits more nations rather than the USA only, on the 1st hand, and your vicious, hate-salivating, revolting collaboration to witch-hunt against France out of forged moral reasons (alleged antisemitism), on the other hand.

France gave Jews full French nationality in 1791, well before any other western country. She also gave full citizenship to any Jews living under Napoleon rule. French Jewish community is the 2nd largest in the World (Israel excluded): ~ 650.000 French people of Jewish religion/background (not to mention foreigners). French Jewish community is also one of the oldest in the World: more than 2.000 yo. France’s Jewish community is also very complex & not monolithic. All Jewish diaspora may be found in France. French people of Jewish background are to be found in all scopes of public matters: presidents, ministers, ambassadors, high-profile civil servants, army generals, writers, musicians, top businessmen, scientists, and of course theologists or Talmud-students which are renown in the whole World. All of that to the exception of the infamous, sad tragedy embododied in Vichy Laws, a racist, criminal body of antisemitic legal texts intended to assasinate Jewish French & foreigners alike.

Sylvain: come to France! You won’t be able to spot a French citizen from another, irrespective of their creed or traditonal background. Real France isn’t the country you’re developping in your worst nightmares. If you want to do France harm, try something more elaborate. Otherwise you’re bound to fail miserably. Just like the peace-losing US army in Iraq.

******

Sylavain, allow me to change the topic & move from antisemitism to antiarabism, a form of racism thats isn’t that popular within your site (wonder why…).

Maybe you should utilise your overspilling mental energy to give a fair description of antiarabism nurtured by Sharon.

Do I have to remind you that Israel conquered:

1. the whole of what was to be Palestine:
a.the area covered by current Cisjordan (West Bank)
b. Gaza
c. Jerusalem

2. what eventually turned out to be the State of Israel

3. Syria, a regular UN-member (Golan plateau)

4. Egypt, a regular UN-member (Sinaï desert)

5. Lebanon, a regular UN-member (southern Lebanon).

Not to mention repeated UN-law violations, State-terrorism, Sabra & Chatila & the unhuman detention of the Palestinian people within a territory which is impoverished, disarticulated & always diminishing.

Yes pal, it’s your local experience vs. the facts and reports accumulated by every anti-racism and Jewish organization in the country for almost three years; not mine, theirs. Then comes the local knowledge of those people I know in the country who can confirm these facts. In other words, plenty of local experience that confirms the national facts and numbers (nobody claimed they were “global” so get off your soapbox).

And you have nothing that credibly contradicts them except a claim that everything is great where you live. And vague comments about CRIF agreeing with your view when a visit to their web site shows their President to believe this is the worst bout of anti-semitism since World War 2, no less. Never mind a toll-free number to report incidents with a page dedicated to tracking them.

But of course, they’re all imagining things. It’s all a “foreign-fueled conspiracy theory”, an invention of the “anglo-saxon” media.

Since all is well where you live, France as a whole is doing great.

When you can see pass your own prejudice long enough to actually read what people are writing and address their questions and points instead of dismissing them with no basis whatsoever, let us know.

In the meantime, you are welcome to keep your head up your own arse as much as you want. Just go do it somewhere else. Thank you.

Bye.

My “local “experience vs your “global” background.

Be serious.

Take care.

One last time, please stop distorting what I said or making up things I did not say. I know English is not your first language; it’s not mine either but I think I manage to be pretty clear, most of the time.

What I said, is that you cannot take your own local experience – your neighborhood, the people you know – and freely assume it’s the same everywhere else. Which is what you did by repeatedly claiming I was wrong about France as a whole, with no basis except your own limited local experience.

Which is standard, flawed extrapolation. Your asserting there is no anti-semitism in France based on your local experience is no different from me asserting there is no crime, poverty or racism in America based on my local experience of the little bit of New England paradise I happen to live in. The former is every bit as silly as the latter.

So yes, I need more than my friends and my neighbors to know what’s going on. And yes, most people I know aren’t different from most people you know, and don’t go far beyond taking the media feed and regurgitating it. That’s OK, I don’t hang out with them to be informed. Most ‘real people’, after all, have busy lives and families and don’t have the time, or the inclination, to be informed beyond mainstream media. Most “real people” I know in France know next to nothing about life in America beyond the stereotypical cliches, myths and superstitions they have been spoon-fed all their lives. So yes, when it comes to information and figuring out what is going on a large scale, most “real people” are not better, collectively, than the media that informs them.

Where “real people” matter is when you need local, on-the-ground information. Your friends and neighbors matter if I want to know what things are like where you live. If I want to know what things are like in France, they are no more relevant or representative a group than any other tiny sample of a population of 60 million.

So a few “real people” don’t cut it if I want to know what’s going on with respect to anti-semitism in France as a whole. Sorry.

What then ? Well, you got to find the data somewhere. And Google is quite a valuable tool to find those reports – like the Simon Wiesenthal report mentioned and linked above, which you obviously avoid reading or mentioning – and various data I need to come to an understanding.

I can’t trust the media so I need to find sources. And Google is the best free tool available for that, whether you like it or not.

Claims of “worship” are silly. I use Google – among others – to find out the facts, the ones I can’t know about from personal experience and the daily media. You, on the other hand, extrapolate your own experience to an entire country, you want to believe you can speak for the whole nation based on your own comfy little world. Who’s the worshipper running on blind faith here ?

And no, Google is not media anymore than the index in your local library is media. Google returns links to media and lots of other data, but that does not make it media. It’s a tool, and an exceedingly good one. If you don’t want to use it, fine. Your loss.

Now, regarding CRIF. I offered a link to a Simon Wiesenthal report above. Obviously, the facts related in that report are of no interest or consequence to you. All you have to offer in return is a phone # in Paris to the one organization in France that supposedly disagrees with everybody else.

And you have nothing else to offer. Like, why exactly is the CRIF’s opinion more authoritative or relevant than the Simon Wiesenthal Center ? Or LICRA’s ? It’s pretty obvious CRIF matters to you because you think they agree with your view.

Let’s see for ourselves, which is what people who use Google can do very quickly. Let’s check the home page for LICRA. The first reason they give to join them ? “La recrudescence des actes antisemites”. Interesting.

On its home page, the first link SOS Racisme has in its “Education against racism” menu is “Antisemitism”. Funny how in a country with no widespread anti-semitism, everybody who deals with racism puts it first on the list. Probably because it’s quaint or something…

Next, let’s go to CRIF’s web site, http://www.crif.org/. Excellent site, and it turns out there is such little anti-semitism in France they have a toll-free number to report incidents. Funny how people set up free phone lines to report a non-existent, or anecdotal, problem.

If you look around, you can then find a speech by CRIF’s President that says lovely things such as : “Hatred for Jews is back. And for the first time in half a century, screams of ‘Death to the Jews’ are resonating in Parisian streets, and synagogues burn”.

You’re right. I should call CRIF. They, at least, have a bit of a clue about the seriousness of the problem.

Unlike “real people” like yourself.

Now, please go play somewhere else with those “real”, “decent” people that are worthy of your time and your sophisticated, properly educated, well-thinking, politically correct consideration. Thank you kindly.

I can see you’re worshipping Google. I grant more relevance to human contact. Here are the contact details for CRIF:

Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF)
39, rue Broca
75.005 Paris
FRANCE
tph: + 33 (0) 142 171 111
fax: + 33 (0) 142 171 113.

You’re nonsense per minute rate is astounding.

According to you, meeting real-life people is like reading brainwashed media and, above all, irrelevant per se. Even Googled information comes from real people. Don’t you know that? Google is a media.

Good luck.

PS: I’m not your PA either >>> I assume you’re mature enough to hang up the telephone & have a discussion with the “brainwashed” people of the CRIF.

Unsubstantiated ? See the link above from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris. Again, anything that disagrees with your view is dismissed for no objective reason.

And as you point out, the CRIF is but one french organization; and there is no such thing as a “US Jewish decision”. There are a lot of Jewish organizations in the US and none speaks for the entire community. And by the way, speaking of unsubstantiated, could you provide a link to this information ?

PS: Of course you don’t need Google. Such things are beneath sophisticated people like you. Better to talk to a few people in the neighborhood and extrapolate to the entire country rather than researching events and trends for yourself beyond what you get around you and in the superficial media. This allows you to flatly contradict people who have done the research, and whose acquaintances thoroughly disagree with you. A comfortable position, when one is intellectually lazy enough to maintain it.

PPS: And since you talk to decent people, I guess the ones you don’t talk to, and who disagree with you, such as my friends who do see a serious problem, are not decent. Thank you.

PPPS: “You appear to think I’m a fool at best, a despicable coward with a Munich attitude at worst.” Took you a while to figure that one out. A bit slow, aren’t we ?

Your comments are rather rude, always unsubstantiated & positively disappointing.

Let’s say we disagree. You appear to think I’m a fool at best, a despicable coward with a Munich attitude at worst. I think you’re not fair at best, and hypocritical & cynical at worst.

My last sentence will be a mention of the CRIF (an independent, representative, high-profile French Jewish comittee dealing with French officials). The CRIF went to the USA to firmly oppose the US Jewish decision to boycott France further to the alleged “rampant antiSemitism in France”. The CRIF won the battle: all US Jewish organisations, but one I reckon, decided that punishing France wasn’t vindicated.

PS: I don’t need Google to go & talk to decent French people of all walks of life.

Confirms the rising violence, and the general and predictable nature of the denial from the government and everybody else. I even found some Le Monde article that, like our friend Kodiak, claims there can’t be any anti-semitism in France since 87% of some polling sample claim they are “against it”. Well, there you go; since the same proportions of Americans are probably “against racism”, there is no racism in America either. Ain’t the world wonderful ?

Believe it or not, this line of reasoning is common currency to justify the status quo. And the fact that 13% did not say they were against it, in France in 2003, bothers no one, of course.

And you can be certain 1/10th of the attacks in this report would not be tolerated if the targets were Arabs. There would be a huge media uproar. If a couple of mosques burned, the press would call France racist and all the so-called intellectuals would call for a big demonstration in Paris.

But Jews ? Nah. They have money so they can’t be victims, right ?

No anti-semitism there. Move right along.

Anyone got a barf bag ?

The “burden of proof” is all around you. Numbers mentioned in previous comment come from a collection of sources. Of course, you won’t read them in your average newspaper. They don’t give a hoot about it. That’s the very problem I am denouncing. So the average idiot can indeed fool himself thinking there is no problem, when every other Jewish association begs for help. The data from MRAP or LICRA is rather damning.

And please don’t give me “guarantees”. That’s ridiculous. You’re hardly in a position to guarantee anything around here.

And if you were an authority on “Anglo-Saxon” press & TV, you wouldn’t be making the comments you’re making. Starting by calling them ‘anglo-saxon’, another of these silly, pedantic, anachronistic terms only we use and that make everybody else in the world laugh.

And no, you’re not listening. Again. I am not mixing anything up. The fact that whatever majority is not anti-semitic is indeed irrelevant. The fact that they are not willing to recognize growing anti-semitism, nor to deal with it, or are willing to spend so much time denying the severity of the problem in some online space, is, however, quite relevant and exactly what we’re talking about here. So I’ll make a deal with you : if your neighborhood is representative of France, then my bit of New Hampshire is representative of the all US from now on. Which means there is no crime, no racism and no poverty in the US. And the opinion of my neighbors takes precedence over anyone else who says otherwise. Allelujah.

Problems solved.

And by the way, I know enough Jews in France who think there is a serious problem so I don’t need your friends to confirm anything for me, or not. I lived in France for 22 years and still go there on a regular basis. Thank God, I don’t need you to know what is, and what isn’t going on. Because you obviously have no idea what is happening in your own backyard.

I suggest you bury your head deeper and hope for the storm to pass without disturbing your nice little life and your comfy little assumptions. There is no anti-semitism in France. And Hamas and Islamic Jihad are no terror groups since Jacques said so.

Good luck to you.

I am done here. Not worth the pixels anymore.

“Nobody here makes connections between France and suicide bombers. And since I never heard Israeli or anyone here blame Palestinian bombings on the French, your “Francophobia” comment is nonsensical”

Although the lack of Frenchmen amongst antiIsrael terrorists goes without saying, it is never “nonsensical” to remind France-haters this basic bit of truth. The Francophobic Zeitgeist is so well entertained -although some have already started to calm down given the blatant iraqi failure that the French have announced from day 1, that it is never superfluous to draw the line.

******

“And blame it all on “Francophobia”, of course. This has become the leitmotiv, the perfect excuse to dismiss any opposition to French views on pretty much anything these days”

You mentioned “leitmotiv”. I suggest you gather a thorough anthology of Anglo-Saxon press & TV in 2003.

******

As for your denials of the problem, that’s just what they are”

I’m not denying anything. I’m not even denying the unstoppable propaganda fuelled by Anglo-Saxon rightist media that are owned by Murdoch, a free thinker, or financed by US militaro-industrial complex (launching the Iraqi circus).
I live in my country, France. I know what’s going on. There’s no rampant antiSemitism in France. That’s guaranteed. I wouldn’t be afraid to denounce it should the situation be such as you described. It isn’t though.

I find it quite cheeky that you are demanding detailed evidence of what isn’t existing. The burden of the proof is all yours.

******

“When it’s against Jews, there is no problem. Move along”

That isn’t true. How can you assert such nonsense? Do you think all people of goodwill prefer antiracism A rather than antiracism B? There isn’t such a thing as antiracism for this or for that. There’s antiracism. For everything.

******

“You can claim the facts are “absolutely false” but that only makes you look like a silly ostrich with its head buried in the sand, screaming it’s too dark to do anything”

I’d be a “silly ostrich” if your wanton assertion happened to be true. As I said previously, there are antiSemitic misdeeds perpetrated in France. Still claiming France to nurture “rampant antiSemitism” is archiflase. In this very respect, you haven’t substantiated none of your claim so far.

******

“I also have news for you : the fact that a majority “grant consideration to the French republic” is utterly and totally irrelevant to those Jews who get insulted, attacked or beaten at random”

Now you’re mixing one of my statements (the fact that a vast majority harbour greater consideration to the French Republic than to radicals of any background) with the trauma that assaulted people have been experiencing.
You’re trying to minor my point of view by associating it with a poignant reality -yet unrelated to the fact that almost all Frenchmen aren’t antiSemitic.

That said, I’m very much concerned by the sufferring those innocent people have endured. I am equally concerned by the lack of bona fide of those, located abroad, wishing -only dreaming- to stimulate hatred in my country.

******

For heaven sake, Sylvain!

I myself live in a mixed Jewish/Muslim area.

I know people from both religions.

None of them confirmed what you said: “rampant antiSemitism in France”.

And blame it all on “Francophobia”, of course. This has become the leitmotiv, the perfect excuse to dismiss any opposition to French views on pretty much anything these days. After making fun of Bush for his “you are with us or against us” line, it’s fun to watch France fall unanimously into this frame of mind; Chirac ahead, with his ridiculous and pathetic remarks to the Eastern European countries. And after decades of strident, constant, stereotypical anti-americanism, France finally gets to taste some of its own medicine and surprise : we don’t like it. Well, duh.

As for your denials of the problem, that’s just what they are. Denials. No matter the evidence, there is no widespread anti-semitism. Just like there is no evidence Islamic Jihad and Hamas are terror groups, regardless of the number of terrorist bombings they claim. Typical, really.

And never mind that a rate of racist incidents against Arabs about a third of what the French Jewish population has suffered in the past couple of years used to be qualified as “rampant and widespread racism” by the well-thinking Parisian elites about a decade or so ago. It’s racism when it applies to Arabs. When it’s against Jews, there is no problem. Move along.

You can claim the facts are “absolutely false” but that only makes you look like a silly ostrich with its head buried in the sand, screaming it’s too dark to do anything.

And whatever you think of the opinion of some overwhelming majority of people – a totally subjective statement -, it doesn’t change anything to the problem. It’s just a standard excuse to do nothing : since a majority are OK, we don’t need to worry about that little minority over there, however nasty their actions. How convenient. The overwhelming majority of people don’t vote Le Pen, Kodiak. So why has it been such a concern over the past 20 years ?

I also have news for you : the fact that a majority “grant consideration to the French republic” is utterly and totally irrelevant to those Jews who get insulted, attacked or beaten at random. What is however quite relevant to them is that it is happening, and that the “overwhelming majority” can’t be bothered to worry about it.

Again, not to belabor the point, but I don’t understand why we react with outrage for years when Arabs or Africans get this kind of treatment, yet deny there is a problem when Jews are the target. In fact, given that the number of incidents is at least as high and the Jewish population a lot smaller, Jews are targeted even more than Arabs ever were in the past two or three decades, on a per capita basis. In other words, the odds of being attacked as a Jew in Paris today are most likely higher than they ever were for a young beur. This double standard hints to a more serious underlying problem. Good old racism through neglect.

And your denials, regardless of the mounting, painful evidence, only confirm this. And due to the nature of the facts, I can’t really thank you for the confirmation.

There is no blinder man than the one who does not want to see, Kodiak.

Everybody’s entitled to have their views about Israel, France etc.

My oopinion is that what you’re saying is nonsense.

You think France is an antiSemitic country, hence her antiIsraeli policy.

I think France is neither antiSemitic nor antiIsraeli. The fact is that Israel is confrontated with a very difficult situation right now. This country is utterly tensed, and it’s really easy to single out a scapegoat (thus following US steps in the Iraki affair): Francophobia will do, won’t it? Hopefully some Israelis are smarter than that. They know that suicide bombers are not antiSemitic French people. They do know that the bombs are due to their very neighbours: Palestinians.

As for the situation in France which, I remind you all, is a country different from Israel or Palestine, there isn’t such a thing as “rampant antiSemitism” or racism. That’s absolutely false. Again there are some Jewish or Muslim radicals, each of which desperate for radicalisation. But that won’t work. I’m positive the overwhelming majority of French citizens of Jewish/Muslim background grant more consideration to the French Republic than to radicals of any sort.

“The growing number of anti-Semetic violence is France is a problem that just won’t go away” >>> why? Can you explain?

“It’s a failure at the most basic and fundamental of governmental responsibility: that of providing physical security to the citizens” >>> Exactly like this extreme-right Jewish militia that’s haunting Parisian streets at night & beat every Arab-looking person they can find.

“So far the French and German governments have utterly failed in this most basic of duties” >>> So now it’s Germany too. I suspect that if Berlusconi, Blair & Aznar would have supported the French option for UN-led peace, no doubt that “anti-Semetism” would have been “rampant” in Italy, in the UK & in Spain & you’d have thought “that’s a pretty fair assesment”.