Facets of French Anti-Semitism

...The editor of a revisionist periodical gloated recently that the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe would result in 20th-century history, particularly that of World War II, being rewritten and stripped of all its "lies...

...As for Western Europe's Jews, while they are understandably disconcerted by the Carpentras incident and copycat acts of vandalism, and by Le Pen's noisome rhetoric, the majority do not appear to be panicking...

...He also is a staunch opponent of closer European cooperation...

...It is significant as well that French lawer Jacques Verges (himself a fringe Leftist) has successively defended Klaus Barbie, the senior Gestapo officer known as the "butcher of Lyons," and Anif Naccache, a Palestinian terrorist imprisoned in France...

...In the wake of the Carpentras desecration, skulls and bloodstains have appeared in a number of other French cemeteries and even in a school...

...But two recent television documentaries—one produced in France, the other in Belgium—have revealed to a shocked public that in addition to their fondness for grotesque skullstyles, "trash rock" and battles with other urban tribes, skinheads frequently delight in racist abuse of Jews, Arabs and blacks...

...Observers here note that this is also surfacing elsewhere in Europe, not least in the countries where Communism has collapsed...

...A skinhead who caused damage and spray-painted Stars of David in a Christian cemetery told police that he had tried to make it look as if Jews were responsible...

...The slide from anti-Israel feeling to anti-Semitism is all too easy when, forinstance,themedia uncritically quote PLO spokesmen describing Israel as "a fascist state...

...Le Pen's blunt style and simplistic views appeal to many unskilled workers, insecure small businessfolk, policemen, and soldiers, regularly winning him 12-14 per cent of the vote...

...Just prior to the Carpentras incident, the leader of the extreme Right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, complained before television cameras about "all those Jews in the media...

...A few leading columnists and politicians have gone to the extent of calling for the party tobebanned because of its leader's anti-Semitism...

...He also has supported Muslim fundamentalists who want Arab girls to wear religious headcloths in French schools...

...A rally in central Paris that drew nearly 100,000 people was joined by President François Mitterrand...

...Members are taught to consider the National Front "an army" to which they owe unquestioning obedience...

...Several of the incidents have carried Nazi connotations, with swastikas, stenciled portraits of Hitler and anti-Semitic slogans being emblazoned on tombstones and shop windows...

...The European far Right, despite its dislike of massive Arab immigration, maintains an unavowed alliance with Arab propagandists regarding Jews and Israel...

...Le Pen, of course, did not attend...

...One index of rising tension has been the number of French Jews applying to emigrate to Israel...

...In June he questioned the validity of the Nuremberg Trial in the light of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's admission that Soviet soldiers, not Nazis, were responsible for the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn...

...In the French city of Royan, a nonJewish teacher who had denounced anti-Semitism in her class reported later that she was beaten up in her home by masked men...

...Besides drawing attention to the macabre tastes of a segment of the teenage population, theprofanationoftheCarpentras cemetery has brought into the open a latent strain of ultra-Rightist anti-Semitism...

...Le Pen's organization has revived attitudes and ideas associated since the late 19th-century with nationalist Catholic circles...

...Onto these he has tacked apprehension about France's 3 million or so Arab and African immigrants (an issue that has had democratic politicians floundering for months), and about unemployment, drugs and delinquency...

...This leaped from an average of 50 a week to 2,000 during the second half of May, before tapering off again...

...Most French people had hitherto dismissed skinheads as a British phenomenon notable mainly for its moronism...

...Far from expressing outrage, he has described the Carpentras attack as a plot to discredit him, blaming it successively on Socialists, Communists, Arabs, and Jews (somehow, he forgot the CIA...

...Suddenly, in mid-May, a dark note sounded: Vandals smashed tombstones and exhumed the corpse of an elderly man in France's oldest Jewish cemetery, outside the small southern to wn of Carpentras...

...According to a Jewish editor, Henri Amar, the reason for this is that Israel gives them a strength their pre-1947 forebears lacked...

...Years of Arab propaganda and Palestinian lobbying have made many Europeans prone to consider Israel the oppressor in the Middle East...

...Police raids on their hangouts in France have produced Nazi insignia, pictures of Hitler, and copies of Mein Kampf and other extremist texts...

...National Front propaganda uses the phrase "the cosmopolitan enemy" as a coded reference to Jews...

...Saudi Arabia has financed the distribution in many countries of translations of the Russian-fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and backstage contacts between Right-wing and Arab extremists are known to have taken place...

...At the same time, they are instructed to cultivate a respectable façade of "propriety, discretion and self-control" so as to "give a good image of the movement...

...Le Pen himself has echoed the revisionist claim that the Nazi concentration camps never existed by dismissing them "as a detail of history"—aremark that ultimately resulted in drawing a fine from a French court...

...Since then French society has been in a daze, wondering what can drive human beings to such vicious, hideous acts...

...Their aim is to glorify the " Celtic" race, as they have renamed the Aryans (interestingly, some skinhead banners bear Celtic crosses), and to rewrite the record of the Hitler period...

...Today," says Amar, "every Jew can feel reassured by the existence of a state, Israel, which can provide asylum and combat anti-Semitism...

...Janice Valls-Russell -writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...

...Massive television coverage appears to have set off something of an imitative chain reaction: Culprits in one town proved to be two small boys who said they "wanted to do as on television...

...Yet Le Pen's snide remarks about Jews are not mere süps of the tongue...

...Some Jewish doctors and lawyers have received abusive telephone calls, as have newspaper offices...

...His persecution complex has grown as local authorities throughout France have refused to allow National Front rallies in their towns...

...Party texts refer to the need to "identify [and] diabolize adversaries," meaning to portray the Front's critics as some sort of devils...

...Throughout France, demonstrations have taken place in support of the Jewish community and in memory of Holocaust victims, with banners proclaiming "We are all Jews" and "Never again...

...Those who cast ballots for him emphasize that he addresses issues of concern to them that the other parties do not discuss, and try to downplay his anti-Semitism...

...Events in Eastern Europe were renewing the average citizen's faith in democracy, not to mention opening up prospects of economic and cultural exchanges...

...But Jewish journalists, disturbed as they are by the National Front's campaign against Jews in the Civil Service and the media, feel this would only make a martyr of Le Pen...

...His party's think tank, in many respects more sinister than the skinheads it occasionally employs as bullyboys, includes self-styled "specialists of Indo-European studies" and "revisionist historians...

...One heard the usual grumbling about selfserving politicians, but the economy was expanding and the franc was strong...