The Meaning of France’s March Against Anti-Semitism The murder of a Holocaust survivor is forcing the country to embrace a new, unfamiliar kind of religious and ethnic solidarity. Rachel Donadio see note please

Posted By on April 2nd, 2018

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/the-murder-of-mireille-knoll-in-france-might-be-the-last-straw-for-french-jews/556796/

MARCHING IS STREET THEATER IN FRANCE…AFTER CHARLIE HEBDO AND THE BOMBING OF THE KOSHER DELI….THEY STRUTTED, ARMS CROSSED…POSEURS WHO THEN DO NOTHING …..RSK

PARIS—On April 4 of last year, a 67-year-old Jewish woman in Paris named Sarah Halimi was beaten to death and thrown off the balcony of her third-story apartment in a public housing complex by a neighbor who shouted “Allahu Akbar.” It took 10 months and a public outcry that began with France’s Jewish community, the largest in Europe, before prosecutors officially called the attack an anti-Semitic hate crime. 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.”

A lot took place between the death of Halimi and the death of Knoll. It may seem cynical to point it out, but one of them is an election, whose winners and losers seem freer to call out anti-Semitism when they’re not trying to win the support of Muslim voters in the banlieues, or the working-class suburbs that are home to generations of France’s immigrant underclass. Another is a growing sense, one that has been compounded by every terrorist attack here in recent years, that something has gone wrong in France, and its institutions are struggling to keep pace. While there have been concerns about new strains of anti-Semitism in Sweden and Britain, to say nothing of Poland and Hungary, France’s challenges are unique. It is a nation founded on deeply held universalist republican ideals, on the notion that citizens are citizens, not members of individual ethnic or religious groups—no intersectionality, no American-style identity politics, no interest groups—and it has struggled to develop a vocabulary for religiously motivated violence, let alone a solution. The problem defies Cartesian logic and transcends traditional divisions between left and right.

The murder of a woman who had narrowly escaped deportation as a child in Nazi-occupied France at the hands of a young Muslim neighbor unlocked something here, a sense of public outrage that seemed to transcend even the horrible facts of the case. On Wednesday evening, thousands of people, including French political leaders, held in a march through eastern Paris to Knoll’s public housing complex. I went to see for myself. Some held signs that read, “In France, we kill grandmothers because they’re Jewish.” Others wore buttons with Knoll’s picture. It had been an intense day. That morning, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a eulogy at the state funeral of Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, a gendarme who had served in Iraq and was hailed as a national hero after he took the place of a hostage in a jihadist attack in southwest France last Friday, the same day as Knoll’s death.

As people began gathering at the start of the march, I ran into Alain Finkielkraut, one of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, a philosophy professor who had participated in the French student uprisings in 1968 but shifted rightward over the years and whose 2013 book, L’Identité Malheureuse, or The Unhappy Identity, is about immigration and its discontents. “It wasn’t even a question for me to come and express my fear and my anger,” Finkielkraut told me. In 2006, there had been a large demonstration after a Jewish man named Ilan Halimi (no relation to Sarah) was tortured and killed by a violent band in what French authorities were loath to call an anti-Semitic attack. “Only Jews came to the demonstration in memory of Ilan Halimi’s barbarous assassination. They had been abandoned by the international community,” Finkielkraut told me. Today, he said, things were changing. “I think the denial is slowly disappearing, the denial about a new anti-Semitism,” he told me. “For a long time, we didn’t want to stigmatize fragile youth from bad neighborhoods, so we minimized the effect. We looked for excuses—in exclusion, in discrimination, in segregation, in all the ‘-ations’ you can find. I think this narrative is in the process of extinction, and I think, in this sad moment we’re living, that that’s good news.” CONTINUE AT SITE

I reminded Finkielkraut that I’d last met with him—to discuss Michel Houellebecq’s best-selling novel Submission, which imagines a Muslim president of France—in early January 2015, a few days before the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher supermarket. Those attacks, followed by the bloodbath of November 13, 2015, when jihadists killed 130 people and wounded 400 more in a series of attacks in the same area of eastern Paris where Knoll and Halimi lived, were a major turning point—for France, but also for the Jewish community. Leaders of the organized Jewish community said they had felt a lack of national empathy after Ilan Halimi’s death, but also after Mohammed Merah murdered three French Arab paratroopers and, later, a rabbi and three children outside a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012. The 2015 attacks gave a sense that all of France was in this together, whatever this was, exactly.

Wednesday’s rally drew thousands, not the massive outpouring that took to the streets after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, but not small, either. “We’re not Jewish, but we’re revolted by what happened,” a woman in the crowd named Mariethé Bernard told me. She said she hadn’t been at the march in 2006 after Ilan Halimi’s death, but she now regretted that. Nearby, Carolina Camacho Cruz, who is Mexican but has lived in Paris for 20 years, teared up when I asked her why she had come to the march. “It’s devastating to see this in 2018,” she told me. “The way she was killed, especially since she was Jewish.”

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