Friday, August 15, 2014

Coming Face-to-Face with Anti-Semites in Paris

Well, I've come face-to-face with anti-Semites in Los Angeles. It's not for everyone but somebody's gotta do it.

In any case, from Cnaan Liphshiz, at the Times of Israel:
My friend Alain Azria gave me a puzzled look when I told him, with some indignation and disbelief in my voice, that I had just heard talk of killing Jews at an unauthorized anti-Israel demonstration last month in Paris.

A young black man with a Parisian accent told a dozen friends loudly, but without shouting, “OK, guys. Let’s go hunt some Jews.”

His friend answered, “Let’s break their heads.” To which the first speaker replied, “Catch them fast, kill them slow.”

The group blended into a mass of thousands of people who were marching toward the Gare du Nord train station while shouting slogans accusing Israel of genocide.

My shock stemmed from the fact that while anti-Semitic violence accounts for a fair share of my reporting here in Europe, I have personally been insulated from it — perhaps because I live in Holland, where such occurrences are rarer, or maybe because I had lived most of my life in Israel, where one receives only a theoretical understanding of the phenomenon.

But for Alain, a freelance news photographer who specializes in documenting France’s anti-Semitism problem, this was just another day at the office. Which is to say he didn’t really have time for my astonished discovery of the banal.

“OK, OK, welcome to Paris. Now let’s move it along,” he said as he took us on a shortcut designed to reach the station before the procession...
Heh, from the mouths of babes.

Keep reading.


0 comments: