Europe

  • Print Friendly, PDF & Email
  • Send to Kindle

French Jew Stabbed by Attacker Shouting “Allahu Akhbar”

A Jewish man wearing religious garb was stabbed by an attacker shouting “Allahu Akhbar” in the French city of Strasbourg on Friday, Agence France-Presse reported.

French Chief Rabbi Rene Gutman told AFP that witnesses heard the assailant shout the Arabic phrase as the man was stabbed in the abdomen outside his home. The assailant was immediately arrested. The victim is recovering at a local hospital and his injuries are not considered life-threatening.

Gutman noted that the attacker, who French authorities said has a history of mental health problems, had previously assaulted another member of the Jewish community.

Friday’s stabbing comes in the wake of a series of fatal Islamist attacks in France. Two Islamic State-affiliated terrorists killed a Catholic priest in a Normandy church last month. Less than two weeks earlier, a terrorist drove a cargo truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 85 people and injuring over 300.

France declared a state of emergency last November after 130 people were killed following a series of coordinated ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks at a Paris concert venue, soccer stadium, and restaurant. Other ISIS-connected terrorist attacks took place in Paris in January 2015, when 12 people were killed at the headquarters of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and four more killed at the Hypercacher kosher grocery store.

In Charlie Hebdo and the Future of Europe, which was published in the February 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, associate editor Benjamin Kerstein quoted French Prime Minister Manuel’s address on the issue of anti-Semitism in his nation.

On January 13, 2015, a major European politician finally said what every major European politician should have been saying for the past 15 years. In the wake of the January 7 slaughter of nearly the entire editorial staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, followed by the January 9 hostage stand-off at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket that left four hostages dead—both committed by members of the same terror cell—French Prime Minister Manuel Valls rose to address the National Assembly on not only the threat of Islamic terror, but its connection to a hatred that, thus far, has dared not speak its name.

“History has taught us,” he said, “that the awakening of anti-Semitism is the symptom of a crisis for democracy and of a crisis for the Republic.” He then reiterated the butcher’s bill of atrocities that have been committed against French Jews since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, including the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi, the slaughter of a rabbi and several children at a Jewish school in Toulouse, and a series of brutal pogroms last summer in which rampaging mobs attacked a synagogue and trashed a Jewish neighborhood in Paris.

“Anti-Semitic acts in France have grown to an intolerable degree,” Valls asserted, and admonished his fellow citizens for failing to express “the national outrage that our Jewish compatriots expected.” With a sweeping overview of modern French-Jewish history, and breaking the unspoken taboo on discussing French collaboration in the Holocaust, he asked,

How can we accept that in France, where the Jews were emancipated two centuries ago, but which was also where they were martyred 70 years ago, how can we accept that cries of “death to the Jews” can be heard on the streets? How can we accept that French people can be murdered for being Jews? … This time it cannot be accepted … we must stand up and say what’s really going on.

Valls speech broke another, even more potent taboo when he connected what he called “a new anti-Semitism” to “loathing of the State of Israel,” a loathing that “advocates hatred of the Jews and all the Jews,” echoing an earlier statement he made to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, in which he spoke of a “radical criticism of the very existence of Israel, which is anti-Semitic. There is an incontestable link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Behind anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.” And Valls did not shrink from speaking the very uncomfortable truth that much of this anti-Semitism is coming from France’s Muslim community, from “the difficult neighborhoods, from immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, who have turned anger about Gaza into something very dangerous. Israel and Palestine are just a pretext. There is something far more profound taking place now.”

But perhaps Valls’ most pointed statement was also the simplest. “Without its Jews,” he said, “France would not be France. … When the Jews of France are attacked, France is attacked, the conscience of humanity is attacked. Let us never forget it.”

[Photo: Ikar.us / WikiCommons ]