When All Is Said and Done in France…

I thank the four respondents to my Mosaic essay for their perceptive remarks. Their comments provide me with a welcome opportunity to clarify parts of my analysis about the Jewish situation in contemporary France.

In “The Ferment that Feeds Anti-Semitism in France,” Michel Gurfinkiel, a well-known specialist in this area, rightly highlights the constantly rising numbers of the French Muslim population—especially in the youth cohort under twenty-four—of whom 27 percent admire or approve of the barbaric Islamic State (IS). This is in itself a frightening statistic. He also notes that although a few French Muslim leaders did condemn recent jihadist brutalities, the rally they organized after the beheading of a French hiker in Algeria found little echo within their own Muslim constituency.

Equally troubling is the escalation of intra-Muslim violence on European soil. Earlier this month, in the center of Hamburg, Salafists savagely attacked a peaceful Kurdish demonstration. Although this act of violence had no Jewish dimension, the Islamist fanaticism that drove it also happens to be the most lethal element in the “new anti-Semitism.” Unfortunately, we can expect more proxy wars of this kind, sometimes wholly unrelated to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, in an already fragile European Union.