NYT: France Has Not Freed Itself of Festering Anti-Semitism

The murder of 85-year-old Mireille Knoll in Paris last week is a reminder that France has still not freed itself of festering anti-Semitism 70 years after the deportation and murder of its Jews, columnist Bari Weiss writes in The New York Times. 

Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, was stabbed 11 times and her body was burned in her apartment in eastern Paris. Two men, age 21 and 29, are being held for committing an anti-Semitic murder. One reportedly told investigators that the other had shouted "Allahu Akbar" while killing Knoll. 

Her death came one year after Sarah Halimi, a French Jew, was beaten to death in her apartment and thrown out the window. Halimi, 65, lived just two miles from Knoll's neighborhood. 

Knoll was the 11th French Jew murdered in an anti-Semitic attack over the course of the last 12 years, according to Time. 

The Jewish community doesn't feel safe in France, as anti-Semitic acts continue to grow there — 851 in 2014 — and many Jews have been leaving for Israel. The 2015 Paris terror attacks doubled the figure of departures, from 3,000 to 7,000. And Weiss writes that the people "actually killing Jews in France these days are not members of the National Front. They are Islamists."

“The major crimes against the Jewish community — Ilan Halimi, the Toulouse killings, the Hyper Cacher killings, Sarah Halimi — all of them have all been carried out by radicalized Muslims,” Robert Ejnes, the executive director of CRIF, an umbrella organization of French Jewish groups, told the Times. “These young people have French identity cards, but they hate what France stands for. This is the nature of the problem we are facing. And it’s very hard to talk about.”