France May Finally Be Getting Serious About Anti-Semitic Violence A hate-crime law has been in effect since 2003, but until recently prosecutors hesitated to employ it. By Eliora Katz
https://www.wsj.com/articles/france-may-finally-be-getting-serious-about-anti-semitic-violence-1506637993
Seventy-eight-year-old Roger Pinto was sitting in his suburban Paris home the night of Sept. 7 when three young men broke in and cut off the electricity. They knocked Mr. Pinto unconscious, according to his account, and when he came to, one of them said: “The Jews have lots of money, and you will give us what you have.”
They tied up and beat Mr. Pinto, his 72-year-old wife and their son, held them for several hours, and eventually ran off with jewelry, cash and credit cards. The Pintos were treated for minor injuries. Authorities are investigating the attack as a hate crime: “The motivation for this cowardly act seems directly related to the religion of the victims,” said Interior Minister Gérard Collomb.
Such an acknowledgment is unusual in France. Parliament enacted a hate-crime law in 2003, in response to attacks on Jews during the height of the second intifada in Israel. But the idea of crimes motivated by bias sits uncomfortably with the French Republican model, based on the notion of integration into a uniform national identity. France officially does not classify its citizens according to race, religion or ethnicity.
Thus officials have often equivocated about designating anti-Semitic attacks as hate crimes. In 2014 four armed burglars allegedly broke into a young Jewish couple’s residence and raped the 19-year-old woman while pinning down her partner. As in the Pinto case, the suspects demanded money, asserting: “Jews, you have money at home, you do not put it in the bank.” Prosecutors charged the suspects with group rape, robbery and abduction but dropped hate-crime charges this past February.
French authorities initially denied anti-Semitic motives in the brutal 2006 kidnapping, torture and murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi by a band of Muslim thugs styling themselves the Gang of Barbarians, only to acknowledge them at trial three years later. The clues weren’t hard to find: When the working-class Halimis couldn’t pay the ransom his captors initially demanded, the gang replied: “Go and get it from your synagogue.” They also contacted a rabbi and told him: “We have a Jew.”
This past April Sarah Halimi, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jew (who had no direct relation to Ilan Halimi), was killed when a neighbor allegedly broke into her third-story Paris apartment, beat her and pushed her out the window. The suspect was captured in another neighbor’s apartment, where he was holed up chanting verses from the Quran. (The suspect has claimed insanity.) Only last week, after months of pressure from the Jewish community, did French prosecutors classify Sarah Halimi’s killing as a hate crime.
Jews have also been prominent public targets. A man pledging allegiance to Islamic State killed four at a Parisian kosher supermarket just after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015, and Mohammed Merah’s 2012 shooting rampage at a Jewish school in Toulouse also took four lives. Pro-Palestinian protesters chanted “Death to the Jews” and “ Hitler was right” in 2014, as they marched through Paris setting Jewish shops ablaze and besieging synagogues. Street assaults, graffiti and taunts are common.
The violence and hostility are taking a toll on the community. Whereas 30 years ago most French Jews enrolled their children in public schools, only about one-third do today. Some 40,000 French Jews have emigrated since 2006, more than 20,000 of them between 2014 and 2016. After the 2015 supermarket murder, 12,000 soldiers were deployed to protect Jewish institutions. But there are half a million Jews in France, and the army isn’t big enough to guard all of their homes. CONTINUE AT SITE
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