European Document / The Paris Synagogue Bombing
Aron, Raymond
"European Document / The Paris Synagogue Bombing" - Is there a new anti-Semitism in France? This question has been the subject of some rather heated debate in the past'two or three years. As Raymond Aron points out...
...I suppose he is referring to the new Right...
...Both r e s e a r c h e r s hold undergraduate and g r a d u a t e degrees in the field of mechanical engineering...
...Since the same International is being blamed for the attacks in Bologna, Munich, and on rue Copernic, we are dealing with an attempt at destabilization which is terroristic in its essence and anti-Semitic by accident...
...The Times obviously didn't think it was worthwhile...
...But the Minister of the Interior, to judge from his words if not from his acts, had clearly underestimated the growing threat of violence from the extreme Right...
...French Jews, or Jewish Frenchmen, have the same right to criticize the foreign policy of their government as do all other citizens...
...PR represents a pressure ratio accounting for combustioninduced compression of the unburned mixture...
...full development (II1): termination (IV...
...Instantaneous velocities were calculated from the anemometer signals and simultaneous measurements of gas temperature and pressure...
...He r e f e r r e d to the p a , ' , s e r s - b y as " i n n o c e n t , " as i f the intended victims, the .Jews, were n o t . - - E d . THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 27 confusion and excitement of public opinion...
...Hot-wire anemometry was applied to measure the turbulent flows while the e n g i n e was operated without combustion...
...We Jews were deeply encouraged by Francois M i t t e r a n d ' s remarks [after the attack...
...After recounting the story of our article and the Times (terming the newspaper's behavior a "pre-emptive s p i k e " ) , Accuracy in Media pointed out that the Times had neglected to inform its readers about other aspects of the Billy Carter saga in the past...
...killers of Henri Curiel and Pierre In 1968 the police was unfamiliar Goldman have not been found any with the tiny groups on the extreme more than those who placed bombs in Left which played an important role the apartments ofMourousi, Boiteux...
...They divided the combustion event into four stages...
...The initiation stage begins with ignition and ends as the flame grows to consume one percent of the fuel mass...
...He would demean himself were he to exploit a national tragedy f o r electoral ends and lend himself to the s i n i s t e r comedy of an anti-fascist front with Communist party leader Georges Marchais...
...But which opinion leaders...
...PI.[s PRINT ADI)Rt!SS CITY STATE ZIP by Michael Ledeen meantime, the story was front-page news all over the country, and indeed worldwide (it was the cover story in Now/in England, for example...
...Sincere or not - - a n d most were s i n c e r e - - t h e s e expressions of solidarity saved the Jewish community from a sense of alienation, a feeling of being abandoned, which would have led it to despair...
...I n conclusion, I wish to recall one essential fact: We do not know who the killers are...
...Frederic Matekunas and Edward Groff...
...Perhaps...
...Four hundredattacks concentrated on the OAS, in other have been recorded in Brittany, for words, on the right-wing movements...
...9 pR:ESSWA~C~ BILLY LIE I got a real insight into the way the news business is manipulated in late October, following publication of a story by Arnaud de Borchgrave and myself in the New Republic...
...Some people suspected that the Times had bought it in order to kill the story in New York, at least for a while...
...For about twenty years after the wa U for obvious reasons, there was general silence on the Jewish issue...
...Inevitably, they blamed the authorities, not so much for what had just happened as for the obvious ineffectiveness of the officials responble for public order who must have known of the increase in recent months and even years in the number of anti-Semitic acts (desecrations of cemeteries, attacks on synagogues, threatening letters, etc...
...The French authorities are not unaware of the sources of the funds and weapons used by e x t r e m i s t s - - b y Irishmen, Basques, Corsicans...
...The present community, numbertng some 700,000 souls, counts a growing mayor,ty of Jews from North Aft*ca...
...Almost all the newspapers have discussed the themes of the new Right, with no result other than to give it an importance which it does not deserve...
...the Jews of France themselves are very different from those of the thirties...
...Neither the instructions given to the Minister of the Interior by President Giscard d'Estaing nor even his letter to the chief rabbi was appropriate to the situation...
...But this leaves us with the question, why did they buy it (for a r e p o r t e d $500...
...As for Jacques Fauvet, the election of his successor should give him pause, With Claude Julien at one extreme and Robert Hersant at the other, we are in great shape.t A substantial number of people in the Jewish community have been critical of the government's policy towards Israel...
...They are asking for nothing more than other Frenchmen...
...Theirs is a legitimate expectation, but no state has been able tO satisfy it entirely tany, Corsica, and among the exwithout sacrificing freedoms...
...We know full well that neither the Prime Minister nor the Minister of the Interior can be suspected of harboring mental reservations on this issue...
...To be sure, Pierre Brisson would turn in his grave were he to contemplate the fate of his newspaper, particularly the weekend Figaro magazine...
...Spokesmen of the community, including the chief rabbi and the leaders of CRIF [the central body of major French-Jewish organizations], issued dignified s t a t e m e n t s and called upon young people to exercise moderation...
...I am even more surprised that colleagues of Pierre Brisson, or a man like Jean d'Ormesson, should give their support to the metamorphosis of Le Figaro...
...High-speed films were analyzed frame by frame to validate flame speeds and to characterize how gas motions influence the initial flame...
...It is said, and I agree, that we must be prudent in our relations with the Arab countries...
...was aimed in France at.Jews, and by that very fact took on a svmbolit meaning...
...If a country goes beyond these limits, it runs the risk of losing its soul, and also of losing its life...
...The nation was swept by a wave of indignation: 35 years after Auschwitz, terrorists had tried to kill Frenchmen--about to leave their synagogue after praying together~simply because they were Jews...
...In Antwerp, the site of another anti-Semitic attack [earlier this year], the bomb was thrown by Arabs led by a Palestinian organization...
...grants from Eastern Europe joined this communtty...
...To foresee an increase in violence is one thing...
...Do the writings in question encourage, whether wittingly or not, the neo-Nazis ? Maybe...
...During the seventies, the police was chiefly concerned, with left-wing extremism, and it learned little and still knows very little about the terrorists who follow the swastika, not to speak of those who may be manipulating them from abroad...
...The dimensionless factor fl accounts for the effect of spark timing on geometric distortion of the flame which occurs during the first Combustion stage and persists into the later stages...
...But Giscard, to whom anti-Semitism is foreign, perhaps even because it seems foreign to him, failed t4~ understand that the attack was not a trivial news item, but a hi,,tofical event whose echo would bc heard around the world...
...Matekunas to its staff in 1973, and Dr...
...2~ TIIE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 well taken...
...To prevent it, without adequate and precise information, is another...
...But blind t e r r o r i s m - no less despicable in haly and German...
...We are analyzing French antiSemitism when the true authors of these crimes may belong to terrorist organizations that can be traced to Libya, and probably beyond...
...The situation of 1980 has nothing in common with that of the thirties...
...Groff, "as a significant step toward optimizing fuel economy in automotive engines" THE MEN BEHIND THE WORK Drs...
...No elected official, either in the National Assembly, or in the Senate, or in the regional and local assemblies, would ever admit to being an anti-Semite...
...I n a style which Pascal would have termed jesuitical, the editor-in-chief of Le Monde, while leaving to his staff the job of dragging the authorities through the mud, has taken on the intellectuals: "Certain writings are circulating which, although they should not be banned, are benefiting from silence and tolerance on thepart of the powerful media, and even of the leaders of opinion...
...Between the world wars, a large number of emi...
...There is nothing new to the notion that ideas are dangerous, but ideas and acts should not be lumped together...
...from Purdue University, where he completed graduate work in advanced optics applications...
...Along with many others, 1 expected him to a p p e a r immediately on televi.',ion...
...The story bad it that Billy Carter had met in Libya with Yasir Ararat--the head of the PLO--and George Habash-the most extremist Palestinian terrorist leader, and head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine...
...Finally, we wrote that Jimmy Carter had prevailed upon Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to call off an Egyptian operation designed to topple the Qaddafi regime in Libya, and that Billy had received an extra $50,000...
...In the first phase, they measured turbulence in the engine cylinder...
...Especially since, in the long run, this demagoguery would not help him...
...THE PARIS SYNAGOGUE BOMBING I s there a new anti-Semitism in France...
...The old French jewish community traces its roots back to the early Middle Ages, when it was concentrated in the East (Alsace) and the Southwest, long before the people of Brittany, Burgundy, Corsica, and other regions f e l t themselves to be French...
...To alienate it from the French nation would be the best way" to tear France apart...
...But those who keep saying, "I warned that there would be an increase of violence and they paid no attention," are being demagogic...
...Matekunas and Groff are senior engineers in the Engine Research Department at the General Motors Research Laboratories...
...These are committed Frenchmen, o f course, but they are also more aggressively assertive of themselves and of their communal mter...
...totally run by East Germany, and that the head of the Libyan Foreign Liaison Office--the person who aN ranged for the $220,000 " l o a n " to Billy--was himself a high intelligence official...
...His doctoral thesis explored the combustion of liquid metals...
...The terms of syndication provide that only one newspaper in each area may purchase rights to the article, and this meant that the Post and the News--along with Newsday --could be effectively blacked out for at least 24 hours, by which time the story might be " d e a d . " I'm nor sure about this, but the subsequent behavior of the "news" s t a f f of the paper certainly indicates a guilty conscience...
...General Motors welcomed Dr...
...Matekunas (right) received his M.S...
...In the final stage, the thick flame interacts increasingly with the chamber walls and decelerates...
...Testing took place in a specially designed, single-cylinder engine equipped with a transparent piston to permit high-speed filming of the combustion event...
...in the events of May of that year, for and Jean Dutourd...
...If one is to believe him, then "an entire intellectual class, which dominates certain news circles and the big media, has forgotten [through a habit of attacking Marxism] to reply to, and even to pay attention to, the articles and books which express a doctrine that is fundamentally auIn the combustion phase, tests were performed at over one hundred operating conditions of varied spark timing, spark plug location, engine speed and intake valve geometry...
...The form of our burning equation," says Dr...
...Policy in the Middle East...
...That Louis Pauwels should be running the cultural section o f a great, middle-road, and national newspaper is something which surprises me and, I am sure, many others as well...
...The New Republic syndicates these articles through the New York Times' syndicate, and we were surprised to learn that one of the first newspapers to buy the story from the syndicate was the Times itself...
...This in turn suggests that the Soviet secret services could be involved...
...On the following day, the government had no minister representing it at a memorial service o n the rue Copernic, although the first secretary of the Socialist party, Fran~,ois Mittcrand, was present...
...To be sure, books and newspapers have turned new attention to the Jewish community and have noted that this community has been transformed by the arrival of Jews from North Africa...
...OVER THE RANGE of turbulent intensities encountered in engines, the researchers were able to describe the turbulent burning velocity, ST, during the critical third stage of combustion with the expression: ST = 2.0 St...
...copies of' 'Radical S h e i k s " . . . . . . . copies of " P r e v e n t i n g Medicine' l'incl(,sed is my the'ok fi~r...
...est, less interested in assimilation, more active(}, concerned with the security of Israel, than many (though not all) of their coreltgionists...
...It may be that a new anti-Semitism is arising because of the settling of refugees from Algeria in a number of cities where they are viewed as a threat to certain interests...
...The Jews complain that the authorities have not been guaranteeing their personal and material security...
...Matekunas, "shows a satisfying resemblance to expressions for non,engine flames...
...Having said all this, I must say that I was not impressed by the "moderation" of the demonstrators who shouted, "Giscard is an accomplice," and I regret that the French flag was not carried in the march along the Champs-l~lys~es, next to the blue flag with the Star of David...
...THE AMERICAN...
...T o m a k c i t t l e a r that there had been no reh,rth of anti-Semitism in France, the t hwf of s t a t e should have It)st no t,mc in saying what needed to be said to The Jews and in ostracizing the criminal attackers from the nation...
...It ts some of the younger hotheads among these North-African-French .]ews whom Raymond Aron takes to task for notmarching under the French flag, and quite rtght& so u,hen one remembers that it was Charles De Gaulle who warned a group of.Jeu'tsh ufficerv, after the liberation of France: "We've beaten them...
...This taboo no longer exists...
...It has taken years for the It may be that today we are police to neutralize activists in Brit- witnessing a similar phenomenon...
...1 would like here to distinguish between criticism which I believe one can legitimately make of the men in power, and, on the other hand, the partisan exploitation of this tragedy...
...From our April 1980 issue...
...Not always...
...from California Institute of Technology and a Ph...
...All the political parties, trade unions, and religious and moral authorities denounced the crime and declared t h e i r solidarity with the wounded community...
...They were the first ones turned over by the collaborationist author,ties to the Nazis, on the grounds that this would protect the "real Frenchmen...
...The challenge is to quantify this relationship-a complex task made more difficult by the requirements of measuring a transient event occurring in a few milliseconds within a small, confined space...
...There is no proof that the killers, the tiny fascist or neo-Nazi groups, have come out of this defused, latent, unavowed anti-Semitism...
...In those days, which seem so distant and yet so close to me, the appearance of Leon Blum on the screen of cinemas in good neighborhoods provoked cries of "Dirty Jew" and " K i k e . " The daily, L 'Actionfran~aise, actively nurtured in Parisian intellectual and political circles an anti-Semitism which was based on a theory different from Hitlerian racism but which could hardly be considered inoffensive...
...SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 29 a cover for anti-Semitism...
...The life of a Jew is worth no more or less than that of any other Frenchman, or any other man Killcrs had also struck in Bologna and Munich...
...If anti-Semitism exists, it is camouflaged--which at least proves that it has not yet become respectable again...
...flame growth (lI...
...As Raymond Aron points out in the editorial taken from L'Express o f 18 October which we are reprinting here, the social basis of anti-Semitism is today radically different from that which obtained in the 1930s...
...General Motors oo ,e to eQ ,e thoritarian, elitist, and racist...
...William E. Simon PREVENTING MEDICINE An examination of National Health Insurance...
...Today, no party or newspaper openly professes antiSemitism...
...WITHOUT TURBULENCE, the highly agitated motion of cylinder gases, combustion would take place too slowly for the gasoline engine to function...
...We should not make the mistake of confusing anti-Semitism and terrorism...
...Groff in 1977...
...Do these writings inspire passions in young people which their authors claim they do not share...
...Roger Kaplan M i l l i o n s of Frenchmen were horrified by news of the attack on the rue Copernic Synagogue...
...But the next day we found that the story bad not been run at all, but was buried on the very last page of the first section (page 34, for the record), under a headline proclaiming that Billy denied meeting with Arafat...
...In the denial the ~o THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980...
...Not only are there practically no overt antiSemites in France today, whereas in the thirties it was perfectly possible to make a political or journalistic career on the basis o f anti-Semitic ideas...
...The r e s e a r c h e r s also observed that the burning velocity in the second stage increases in proportion to flame radius, and that in predicting the energy release rate from the burning velocity equation, it is necessary to account for the finite flame-front thickness...
...New knowledge of how turbulence affects flame speed has been revealed in fundamental studies conducted at the General Motors Research Laboratories by Drs...
...There is no mo,,cment or ideolog), which singles out travelers on trains or beer-drinkers...
...The American S p e c t a t o r Reprint Department P.O...
...Box 1969 Bloomington, IN 47402 Ph'asc send...
...In the second stage, the flame accelerates and thickens in response to the turbulent field...
...The significant measure of turbulence is its "intensity," defined as the fluctuating component of velocity...
...Nothing yet has been proven, but it would hardly be the first time that the KGB, or another service from the Bloc, has used fascists for its own ends--the creation of instability and political chaos in every non-Communist country, as M. Aron duly notes...
...Anti-Zionism sometimes serves as _9 I'M...
...On this point criticism is High-speed photographs showing flame evolution (lasting six milliseconds} through four stages: initiation (l...
...They would be doing themselves an injustice, however, if they were to harbor the illusion that they can have greater influence with the government through the exercise of a lobby...
...Aron is referring to the fact that Le Monde's next editor-in-chief, elected by the staff, will be Claude Julien, a man well-known for his leftist, anti-American views, while Robert Hersant, publisher of Le Figaro, is a man of the old Vichy Right...
...the writings of Alain de Benoist and Louis Pauwels are a matter for discussion...
...1 Available V Douglas 1. Feith RADICAL SHEIKS A fr('sh l.()k at U.S...
...The variable u' is the turbulence intensity...
...example...
...Jacques Fauvet does not wish to see these articles and works banned...
...This helps link complex engine combustion phenomena to the existing body of knowledge on turbulent flames: "We see this extension," adds Dr...
...Terrorism is not during the preceding years it had easy to stop...
...The "story" mentioned our article, carried a grudging acknowledgment from Billy (who had never responded to our phone calls) that he had met Habasb, and also a denial of meeting Ararat or of receiving the extra money...
...The murderers from the rue Copernic are a matter for the police...
...More than 400,000 pieces of data were processed for each ten-second measurement period...
...France contains the largest, most active, and most visible Jewish community in Western Europe...
...Detailed thermodynamic analyses were applied to the recorded cylinder pressures to calculate flame speeds throughout combustion...
...An authoritarian doctrine is not necessarily racist...
...Groff (left) received an M.S...
...But when he spoke of the Near East, he recognized both the right of the Israelis to " l i v e in peace within secure and recognized b o r d e r s , " and the right of the Palestinians to have a nation...
...The third stage exhibits peak flame speed...
...But, in the final analysis, everyone must act in accordance with his own conscience, and we are still very far away from the rue Copernic...
...One week after publication, Reed Irvine's gadfly operation Accuracy in Media bought half a page in the Times to raise these and other questions openly...
...In addition, we revealed that the Libyan intelligence organization was Michae/ Ledeen is Executive Editor o/the Washington Quarterly...
...No more than Giscard d ' E s t a i n g , who also recognizes these two rights, does Mitterand hold the miraculous secret of how to reconcile them...
...in the second phase, they determined flame speeds over a broad range of operating conditions...
...At any rate, if all those who object to certain aspects of Israeli policies should pass for anti-Semites, Israel itself would have more of them than France...
...If Jacques Fauvet is aiming at someone, he should name him...
...The researchers used these measured flame speeds, turbulence intensities, and the conditions under which they occurred to formulate a burning law for engine flames...
...Predicting combustion behavior in order to design engines with greater fuel efficiency depends upon understanding the relationship between vital, turbulent gas motions and burning rate...
...hut beware: they will come back" Since there is no reason to believe that anti-Semitism will ever disappear, Jews of the Diaspora must be prepared to combat it not only as Jews but also, like De Gaulle's compagnons--one of whom was Raymond Aron, although he often criticized De Gaulle in later years--as citizens of the countries to which they belong...
...As for the attack on the synagogue in the rue Copernic, what clues'have been found strongly suggest some kind of Libyan or PLO connection...
...Why shouldn't the government say that the Corsican independence fighters are being supplied by Libya...
...If they d i d n ' t intend to print it, they could have saved money, a f t e r all, by simply ignoring it in the first instance, and then picking it up from the wires later on for sake of completeness...
...1.2 u' Pt~ ~ fl SL, the laminar flame s p e e d - a known function of pressure, temperature and mixture composition-is the flame speed that would exist without turbulence...
...Their investigative results have been incorporated into a model that successfully predicts the effect of engine design and operating conditions on power and fuel economy...
...In Paris, however, indiscriminate terrorism did discriminate and chose neither a t r a i n - s t a t i o n nor a fair, but a synagogue...
...The Prime Minister', by an unfortunate turn of phrase, opened himself to attacks whose tow character can scarcely be excused by the Raymond Aron is a columnist for the French weekly L'Express, from whtch this essay is reprinted...
...The government, to be sure, has given the impression that it did not consider the threat from the Right to be serious...
...In the Reprints V...
...The Times reacted by placing the ad in the second section, and resorted to the unusual device of placing a denial--masqueraded as a news story - - n e x t to the ad...
...The treme left-wing groups...
...From our April 1977 issue...
...But one's complacence toward the oil producers--who are also buyers of our weapons--has its limits...
...Because conditions in the cylinder are both transient within cycles and variant between cycles, separating the fluctuating and mean components of velocity is inherently difficult...
...Spoiling a perfect chance to keep quiet, the Prime Minister of Israel declared that French diplomacy in the Near East has encouraged the growth of antiSemitism...
...D. from The Pennsylvania State University...
...and Ph.D...
...The researchers overcame this problem by using a probe with two orthogonal wires properly aligned with the direction of the mean flow...
...The researchers separated their experiments into two phases...
Vol. 13 • December 1980 • No. 12