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Man Wears ‘Anti-Jew’ Jersey on Paris Metro as French Jews Decry Public Indifference to Surging Antisemitism

A man wearing a sports jersey with the words “Anti-Jew” written in French while riding the Paris metro on line 13 at the Saint-François-Xavier station, Oct. 21, 2024. Photo: Screenshot

A man wearing a sports jersey with the words “Anti-Jew” written in French was photographed this week riding the Paris metro, prompting an investigation by law enforcement and outcry from Jewish leaders who lamented what they described as public indifference to surging antisemitism in France.

The photo was taken on line 13 at the Saint-François-Xavier station on Monday and later shared on X/Twitter by Sandrine Sebbane, an editor at RCJ radio station.

Photographie prise le 21/10 vers 17 h15-30 dans le métro parisien ligne 13, station Saint-François Xavier, direction Saint-Denis. @RATPgroup @vpecresse @othmannasrou @JeanCASTEX pic.twitter.com/6L2fQ30DQP

— Sandrine Sebbane (@s_sebbane) October 22, 2024

“I was alerted today about a photo of an individual wearing a shirt with a sinister ‘Anti-Jew’ slogan on a metro train,” tweeted Valérie Pécresse, president of the Île-de-France region. “We are currently proceeding with the RATP Group [France’s state-owned public transport operator] teams to check and identify this individual and to initiate the necessary criminal proceedings. Antisemitism has no place in our country.”

RATP said that a complaint would be filed with the French authorities, adding that the Paris transport authority “condemns racism and antisemitism in the strongest possible terms and is making itself available to law enforcement to help identify and arrest any person responsible for this type of act.”

Laurent Nuñez, prefect of the Paris Police, similarly condemned the antisemitic clothing and said an investigation had been opened.

“As soon as I was informed of these facts of an antisemitic nature, I immediately instructed my services to contact the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office, who opened an investigation for incitement to racial hatred,” Nuñez posted on X/Twitter. “The regional transport security of the police headquarters is responsible for investigations in order to identify and arrest the perpetrator. Zero tolerance for hate mongers.”

The incident on the metro has also alarmed French Jewish leaders, who decried that antisemitism has seemingly become normalized in France.

“Before, antisemites had shameful antisemitism. Today, they wear it with pride,” tweeted Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF). “Previously, antisemitism aroused indignation among passengers. Today, [it’s met] with indifference. When values ​​are reversed, the whole Republic is in danger.”

France has experienced a record surge of antisemitism in the wake of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel last year. Antisemitic outrages rose by over 1,000 percent in the final three months of 2023 compared with the previous year, with over 1,200 incidents reported — greater than the total number of incidents in France for the previous three years combined.

This year, anti-Jewish hate crimes in France have continued to skyrocket.

Last week, a visibly Jewish teenager was assaulted by two youths as he was leaving a metro station in the northwest suburbs of Paris.

Days earlier, on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 atrocities, three men brutally attacked a Jewish woman at the entrance to her home in Paris. The victim stated that the assailants threatened her with a box knife, made antisemitic threats, and mentioned the events of Oct. 7.

Last month, a kosher restaurant in Villeurbanne, near Lyon in eastern France, was defaced with red paint and tagged with the message “Free Gaza.”

The incident came days after French police arrested a 33-year-old Algerian man suspected of trying to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte.

Two months earlier, an elderly Jewish woman was attacked in a Paris suburb by two assailants who punched her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and kicked her while hurling antisemitic slurs, including “dirty Jew, this is what you deserve.”

In another egregious attack that has garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a different Paris suburb on June 15. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack. In response to the incident, French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing his country.

Around the same time in June, an Israeli family visiting Paris was denied service at a hotel after an attendant noticed their Israeli passports.

In May, French police shot dead a knife-wielding Algerian man who set fire to a synagogue and threatened law enforcement in the city of Rouen.

One month earlier, a Jewish woman was beaten and raped in a suburb of Paris as “vengeance for Palestine.”

Such incidents are part of an explosion of antisemitic outrages across France that has continued since last Oct. 7.

In August, then-French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin warned that incidents targeting the country’s Jewish community spiked by about 200 percent since Jan. 1.

“Two-thirds of anti-religious acts … are against Jews,” he added, according to French broadcaster BFM TV.

Darmanin’s comments followed him stating weeks earlier that antisemitic acts in France have tripled over the last year. In the first half of 2024, 887 such incidents were recorded, almost triple the 304 recorded in the same period last year, he said.

Amid the wave of attacks, France held snap parliamentary elections in July which brought an anti-Israel leftist coalition to power, leading French Jews to express deep apprehension about their future status in the country.

“It seems France has no future for Jews,” Rabbi Moshe Sebbag of Paris’ Grand Synagogue told the Times of Israel following the ascension of the New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of far-left parties. “We fear for the future of our children.”

The largest member of the NFP is the far-left La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) party, whose leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, has been lambasted by French Jews as a threat to their community as well as those who support Israel.

Despite widespread concern among French Jews, senior officials including Macron have repeatedly said they are committing to combating antisemitism and supporting the country’s Jewish community.

The post Man Wears ‘Anti-Jew’ Jersey on Paris Metro as French Jews Decry Public Indifference to Surging Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Treasure Trove salutes the Jewish-Canadian woman who made the first Remembrance Day poppies

The poppies that we wear at this time of year are our visual pledge to remember the brave Canadian soldiers who served and sacrificed to preserve and defend our democracy.  […]

The post Treasure Trove salutes the Jewish-Canadian woman who made the first Remembrance Day poppies appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Hasidic Man Attacked in Third Antisemitic Assault in Brooklyn in Eight Days

Illustrative: New York City Police Department (NYPD) vehicles are seen in Brooklyn, New York, United States, on Oct. 13, 2024. Photo: Kyle Mazza via Reuters Connect

An antisemitic hate crime spree in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York struck its latest victim on Wednesday, wreaking an “excruciating” beating on a middle-aged Hasidic man.

According to Yaacov Behrman, a liaison for Chabad Headquarters — the main New York base of the Hasidic movement — the victim was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cell phone in compliance with what appears to have been an attempted robbery.

“The victim is in excruciating pain and is currently in the emergency room,” Behrman tweeted. “The police are investigating the incident.”

The perpetrators were two Black teenagers, according to COLlive.com, an Orthodox Jewish news outlet.

Tuesday’s attack was the third time in eight days that an Orthodox resident of Crown Heights was targeted for violence and humiliation. In each case, the assailant was allegedly a Black male, a pattern of conduct which continues to strain Black-Jewish relations across the Five Boroughs.

On Monday morning, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish Crown Heights neighborhood

Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.

Numerous antisemitic hate crimes have occurred in Crown Heights in recent years. In July 2023, for example, a 22-year-old Israeli Yeshiva student, who was identifiably Orthodox and visiting New York City for the summer holiday, was stabbed with a screwdriver by one of two men who attacked him after asking whether he was Jewish and had any money. The other punched him in the face. Earlier that year, 10- and 12-year-olds were attacked on Albany Avenue by four African American teens.

According to a report issued in August by New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, antisemitic incidents accounted for a striking 65 percent of all felony hate crimes in New York City last year. The report added that throughout the state, nearly 44 percent of all recorded hate crime incidents and 88 percent of religious-based hate crimes targeted Jewish victims.

Meanwhile, according to a recent Algemeiner review of New York City Police Department (NYPD) hate crimes data, 385 antisemitic hate crimes have struck the New York City Jewish community since last October, when the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas perpetrated its Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, unleashing a wave of anti-Jewish hatred unlike any seen in the post-World War II era.

Beyond New York, anti-Jewish hate crimes in the US spiked to a record high last year, and American Jews were the most targeted of any religious group in the country, according to a report published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in September.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Hasidic Man Attacked in Third Antisemitic Assault in Brooklyn in Eight Days first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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‘Huge Victory’: Netanyahu Calls Trump to Congratulate Him on Election Win

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with US President Donald Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, Sept. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Tom Brenner

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called US President-elect Donald Trump to congratulate him on his victory in the US presidential election earlier this week.

“Netanyahu spoke to President-elect Donald Trump and was among the first to call to congratulate him for his victory,” the Prime Minister’s office said on Wednesday. “The conversation was warm and cordial, and the two agreed to work together for Israel’s security and discussed the Iranian threat.”

During Trump’s first term, his administration had a “maximum pressure” policy with regard to Iran, aimed at making it more difficult for the country to make a nuclear weapon and fund its terror proxies — such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — across the Middle East.

However, some observers are concerned the incoming US administration will not be as strong on the Iranian threat as it was in its first term. Late last month, US Vice President-elect JD Vance said on a podcast that the US and Israel can at times have conflicting interests and warned that Washington should seek to avoid a war with Iran, the Jewish state’s chief adversary in the Middle East.

“Israel has the right to defend itself, but America’s interest is sometimes going to be distinct — like sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests. And our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran,” Vance said.

He then argued that a war with Iran “would be [a] huge distraction of resources; it would be massively expensive to our country.”

In addition to the phone call, Netanyahu’s office will also reportedly announce “the appointment of a new ambassador to Washington who will work with the new Trump administration” within the next 24 hours, according to Axios reporter Barack Ravid.

Netanyahu was the first world leader to congratulate Trump on his victory.

“Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!” he wrote on X/Twitter. “Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.”

He added, “This is a huge victory!”

During Trump’s first term, he and Netanyahu were close allies, working together to sign the Abraham Accords and move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. However, their relationship reportedly strained when Netanyahu congratulated then-US President-elect Joe Biden on his victory against Trump while Trump was still actively disputing the results of the election.

“The first person that congratulated [Biden] was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with,” Trump reportedly said at the time. “Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake.”

“I liked Bibi. I still like Bibi. But I also like loyalty,” he added. “The first person to congratulate Biden was Bibi. And not only did he congratulate him, he did it on tape.”

Heading into Trump’s second term, there have not been indications that this tension still lingers.

The post ‘Huge Victory’: Netanyahu Calls Trump to Congratulate Him on Election Win first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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