Les gilets jaunes et la vague d'antisémitisme (John Lichfield)

John Lichfield, journaliste, @ The Local France:

Paris was contaminated last weekend by a rash of anti-Semitic graffiti. There was a 74 per cent increase in reported anti-Semitic behaviour in France last year.
The graffiti, including swastikas, were daubed during the night of Friday to Saturday, just before the latest Gilets Jaunes protest in Paris. The boom in anti-Semitic acts was concentrated at the end of 2018, which coincided with the rise of the yellow vests from mid- November. […] 

The rash of anti-Semitic actions coincides with a series of desecrations of Catholic churches. It coincides with a sudden upturn in the random violence by extremist groups at the Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris last Saturday (Act XIII, or the 13th Saturday putsch since the movement began). It coincides with an attempt to burn down the country home of the president (speaker) of the national assembly. 

I revile conspiracy theories. But I suspect that a concerted effort is being made to ramp up the atmosphere of crisis in France as grass-roots support for the Gilets Jaunes in their rural and outer provincial heartlands declines.  

The graffiti campaign in Paris last weekend included the daubing in yellow paint of the word “juden” – Jews in German – on a bagel restaurant on the Ile Saint Louis. It also included the daubing of swastikas over images of the late, great Auschwitz survivor and former French health minister, Simone Veil. 

Since the 1990s, there have been two strands of anti-Semitism in France. 

There is the historic, far-right, French nationalist or ultra-Catholic strand. This goes back far beyond the Dreyfus affair of the 1900s, the Vichy government collaboration with the Nazis in the early 1940s or the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in the 1970s and 1980s. 

It can still be found, in mild but disgusting, form in the casual comments of well-heeled, well-educated French people from the “beaux quartiers” of Paris. I know because my children went to school with them.

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