RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

March came in like a lion and maintained its “Big Cat” status for most of the month – four Nor’ Easters here in Connecticut! Only in its last few days did the month begin to resemble a member of the ovine race, and then more of a ram than a lamb. The month saw persistent, unprecedented attacks on Mr. Trump, like Joe Biden who threatened to beat him up (imagine two septuagenarians going at it!); andJohn Brennan who alluded to Trump’s venality and moral turpitude (talk of the pot calling the kettle black!).And then there were the gale-force winds of a morally deficient porn star “Stormy” Daniels, a temptress, certainly, but more a squall than a tempest, in her claim of being defamed.

It was not only gusty weather and blustery verbiage from Washington that made the month roar like a lion. Wall Street’s bears, who had emerged from hibernation in February, continued their selling in March. Islamic terrorists persisted in the killing and maiming of civilians in Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Pakistan, India, Yemen, Niger, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and France. Gun violence at home and deadly fires overseas found their way into the month.

Kim Jong-un, President of North Korea announced his desire to meet with President Trump. The President accepted the invitation. An hysterical Left expressed disbelief. How could the loud-mouthed braggart in the White House succeed where pin-striped savants from “Foggy Bottom” had failed? Should the meeting come off, it would be reminiscent of the anti-Communist Richard Nixon going to China in 1972. For Trump is a hard-liner when it comes to North Korea. He believes in negotiating from strength. Keep in mind, the ironic motto of the former Strategic Air Command (SAC): “Peace is Our Profession.” Mr. Kim met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, which was likely a command performance. It is stability in the Korean peninsula that the Chinese want, and the mercurial Mr. Kim’s antics have made them nervous. The mandarins in Beijing do not want a nuclearized Korean Peninsula. Two consequences of Mr. Kim’s parley with Mr. Xi: the announced visit of Kim Jong-un to South Korea and an overture made to Japan.

Elsewhere, in the Syrian city of East Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, rebels were forced out after months of combatting Assad’s troops and their Russian allies. Over a thousand civilians have become casualties in fighting that is reminiscent of Aleppo. Nerve gas was responsible for the near-deaths of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury. Without doubt, Vladimir Putin was responsible, even though he denied Russian complicity. Great Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats. President Trump ordered the Russian consulate in Seattle closed and told 60 Russian intelligence officers they had seven days to leave the U.S. By last Monday, more than 25 countries had acted in solidarity with Great Britain, in the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history. Russia retaliated, expelling diplomats and shuttering the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg.

“Levi Salomon, head of the Jewish Forum for Democracy against Anti-Semitism, a Berlin-based organization that documents hate crimes against Jews, says most violent incidents these days come from Muslim perpetrators.”

BERLIN— Solomon Michalski loved going to his new school on a leafy Berlin street because it was vibrant and diverse, with most students from migrant families. But when the teenage grandson of Holocaust survivors let it slip that he was Jewish, former friends started hissing insults at him in class, he says. Last year some of them brandishing what looked like a gun took him aside and said they would execute him.

It was no isolated occurrence. The police registered 1,453 anti-Semitic incidents in Germany last year, more than in five of the previous seven years, and organizations including the American Jewish Congress say fewer than a third of such incidents get reported. Their stubborn persistence in the country where the Holocaust was plotted and executed is raising concern that decades of work to eradicate anti-Semitism are slowly being undone as prejudice against Jews spreads beyond its traditional home in the far right.

“I fear that a new generation of anti-Semites is coming of age in Germany,” Josef Schuster, head of the country’s chief Jewish organization, told journalists on Wednesday.

German police attribute more than 90% of cases nationwide to far-right offenders. But Jewish activists and victim representatives say the data are misleading because police automatically label any incident where the perpetrators aren’t known as coming from the far right.

The problem goes beyond Germany. The murder of an elderly Holocaust survivor in Paris in March in what prosecutors said was an anti-Semitic attack has fueled a perception that anti-Jewish acts—from casual insults to brutal violence—are on the rise across Europe and that governments appear unable to do much about it.

Levi Salomon, head of the Jewish Forum for Democracy against Anti-Semitism, a Berlin-based organization that documents hate crimes against Jews, says most violent incidents these days come from Muslim perpetrators. CONTINUE AT SITE