Jews and Money. It’s the lie that just keeps on giving. A couple of weeks ago an Italian Senator from the Five Star Party posted on twitter about the protocols and Rothschilds banking dynasty. That’s the headline grabbing stuff. But every day you will hear anti-Semitism about Jews and money, often in casual conversations. We are sure you have experienced it yourself.
Right now, across Europe, and just as Deborah Lipstadt coined it (no pun intended) in her new book, there is a “perfect storm” of anti-Semitism.
On the right it exists from the usual forces, but now increasingly on the left too, where accusations of Jewish capitalists as the root of all evil has taken root once again. Call it changing demographics, or that the left has been hi-jacked by extremists, or put it down to social unrest, or call it a combination of all 3, ‘peu importe’, when anti-Semitic attacks go up 74% in one year, as the French government just reported, it’s usually down to this big, ugly lie. Money.
As the yellow vests protest started, we began to see graffiti appear that Macron was the Jews whore. Disgusted, we shrugged it off. But we can no longer shrug when it comes to France anymore.
Let’s take the last few days as a snapshot” A tree planted in a Paris suburb in memory of a young Jewish man who was tortured to death in 2006 has been chopped down, authorities said Monday. Ilan Halimi was kidnapped by a gang that demanded huge sums of money from his family, believing them to be rich because he was Jewish. After being tortured for three weeks, the 23-year-old cellphone salesman was found dumped next to a railway in the southern suburb of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois. He died while being brought to hospital.
In two separate incidents swastikas were drawn on Paris postboxes containing portraits of late Holocaust survivor Simone Veil and the word Juden (German for Jews) was sprayed on the window of a bagel bakery in the capital. The founders of French bagel bakery chain Bagelstein said vandals had sprayed the word "Juden" in yellow paint on the window of an outlet in the Ile Saint-Louis island in central Paris.
In recent years, French jihadists have targeted Jews in a number of attacks. In 2011, an Islamist gunman shot dead a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse and in 2015 an extremist claiming allegiance to the Islamic State group killed four people at a kosher supermarket in Paris.
There’s something seriously wrong in France at the moment, and worryingly, as recent reports have shown, this fetid sickness is spreading across Europe.
For Jews, it is hard to stomach watching the mainstream countries obsession with vilifying and lecturing other countries as illiberal when their so-called bastions of democracy and civil liberty are as bad, or often worse for us to live in than the countries they are scolding.
