France: More Anti-Semitic Attacks In Wake Of Toulouse Massacre

One week after a massacre killed four Jews in southwestern France, another anti-Semitic attack was reported in the country on Monday afternoon.

A twelve-year-old Jewish boy was assaulted by youths shouting anti-Semitic slogans -- including “dirty Jew” -- in southeast Paris.

The child was not seriously injured.

The incident occurred near an Ozar Hatorah school (the four people murdered last week in Toulouse also attended a school of this same network).

Jean-Paul Amoyelle, president of the Ozar Hatorah in France, told Associated Press: There was a feeling of solidarity for our schools after this drama [in Toulouse]. Now I fear that this has provoked a hostile reaction, shown by the attitude of these boys who called him ‘dirty Jew’ and beat him up.

Amoyelle added: We have to be vigilant, because this could lead to more aggression.”

Mohammed Merah, the French-Algerian Islamic gunman who killed four Jews near the Toulouse school, as well as three paratroopers in an earlier incident, was himself killed by policemen after a long siege outside his apartment.

In the wake of the killings, both Jewish and Muslim schools across France have enacted stricter security measures under orders from President Nicolas Sarkozy.

According to reports, the Jewish school in Toulouse has now been subject to death threats and hateful email even after the massacre.

Le Parisien, a French newspaper, said that messages to the school warned of more attacks. Such emails were apparently signed the Justiciar of France and real French people.”

BBC reported a spate of other anti-Semitic incidents since the Toulouse massacre, including an gun attack on the Yitzhak-Rabin music school in Sarcelles, Paris; a business owner in Dijon who received death threats and demands for money from someone claiming to be linked to al Qaeda; pro-Merah graffiti found near a synagogue in Toulouse; obscene anti-Jewish graffiti on a wall in Sartrouville in Paris; and the desecration of dozens of Jewish graves in the city of Nice.

Ironically, Tuesday marked the 70th anniversary of the initial deportation of Jews from France to concentration camps during World War II. A ceremony in Drancy, a Paris suburb, honored the 1,112 Jews sent to Auschwitz, of whom only 19 survived. A total of 76,000 French, mostly Jews, died in Nazi death camps.

Serge Klarsfeld, the Nazi hunter who attended the Drancy ceremony, told reporters: The anti-Jewish hate that led these tens of thousands of victims to an atrocious death remains, alas, persistent and alive, even if it has changed its vector and Hitlerian ideology has been substituted by the most extremist fringe of Islam.”

Marc Laffineur, a junior defense minister who also attended the Drancy memorial said: “in attacking, with incredible cruelty, children and soldiers of the nation, Mohamed Merah was targeting each one of us.