22 Briefing Terror and Islam The Economist January 17th 2015

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Anti-Semitism in France

J’accuse, eventually

IN EARLYDecember 2014 three armedmen broke into a flat in Créteil, south-

east ofParis, tied up a young woman andher boyfriend, raped the woman, androbbed them both. “You Jews, you havemoney,” they told the couple. A few dayslater, Bernard Cazeneuve, the interiorminister, along with a thousand or soother people marched against anti-Sem-itism; President François Hollande calledthe attack“intolerable”. But the eventpassed offto wider indifference.

Long before the recent supermarketattack, in which four Jewish men werekilled, France’s Jews have been con-cerned at what some see as the banal-isation ofanti-Semitism. Fatalities grabheadlines, as did the kidnapping, tortureand murder of Ilan Halimi near Paris in2006, or the shooting in 2012 ofsevenpeople, including three Jewish childrenand a rabbi, at a Jewish school in Tou-louse. Low-level anti-Semitism does not.

A vast French majority (89%) hold“favourable” views about Jews, accord-ing to a Pew Global Attitudes poll lastyear. Yet anti-Semitic acts nearly doubledin France in the first seven months of2014, compared with the previous year.Two events prompted an uptick. One wasa planned tour a year ago by DieudonnéM’bala M’bala, a stand-up comedian,whose hallmark is the inverted Nazisalute he called the quenelle. The govern-ment banned the performances on the

ground ofpublic security. The other surgefollowed a pro-Gaza rally last July thatturned into a violent riot; cries of “Deathto Jews” were reported.

Last week’s terror attacks haveprompted much introspection. Already,French Jews made up the single biggestcontingent ofemigrants to Israel in 2014,according to the Jewish Agency for Israel:7,000 moved there, more than double thefigure in 2013. In Paris on the eve of themarch, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeliprime minister, said that “all the Jewswho would like to immigrate will bewarmly welcomed with open arms.”

The government has now stepped upsecurity outside synagogues and Jewishschools, as well as mosques. On January14th Mr M’bala M’bala was arrested forcondoning terrorism after he posted amessage on Facebooksaying “Je me sensCharlie Coulibaly” (“I feel like [the su-permarket killer]”). In a speech the previ-ous day Manuel Valls, the prime minister,condemned anti-Semitism, declaringthat, without its Jews, “France would nolonger be France”.

Some Jewish leaders caution thatleaving France would be ceding to terror.And many, including Mr Netanyahu,have acknowledged that on January 9thwhen a number of Jewish shoppersfound refuge from Mr Coulibaly in afreezer, the man who led them to safetywas a young Muslim.

PARIS

Belated attention for the dangers faced by French Jews

in 2014. Mr Nemmouche grew up in fosterhomes, like Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, theorphaned brothers who murdered 12 peo-ple at Charlie Hebdo. Amédy Coulibaly,who last week killed Ms Jean-Philippe, thepolicewoman, as well as the Jewish shop-pers, was raised on one of the Paris ban-lieue’s most notorious estates. Like Mr Me-rah he served time for robbery beforebecoming drawn to radical Islam.

Yet, as Malek Boutih, a Socialist deputy,put it thisweek: “It’snot justaboutpoverty;social questions do not explain murder.”Nobody knows what exactly pushes theaggrieved towards terror, or the newly de-voted Muslim to jihad. Traditional net-works have worked through hardlinemosques and Islamic bookstores to recruitradicalsand converts in the banlieues. Suchlinks helped Saïd Kouachi, who was on theAmericans’ no-fly list, to travel for trainingby al-Qaeda in Yemen.

More recent “self-service” channelshave also drawn some from the middleclass to fight for IS. Recruited via the inter-

net, Facebook and Twitter, aided by low-cost flights via Turkey, more than 1,200 arethought to have headed off to the war.Dounia Bouzar, who runs an early-warn-ingcentre forparents, says that the numberof young girls, converts and those whoknow little about Islam is striking.

Schools forcriminalityIf there is a common thread among thosewho become jihadists, it seems to be thequest to transform small, angry lives intopowerful ones. But there are other factors,too. Perhaps the most toxic is prison. Ché-rifKouachi seems to have been radicalisedduring his time at Fleury-Mérogis prisonsouth ofParis in 2005-06. Aone-time pizza-delivery driver, he was jailed in a case in-volving the organisation of jihadists tofight Americans in Iraq. But prison hard-ened him further, particularly throughlinks he made to Djamel Beghal, a jihadistconvicted for attempting to bomb theAmerican embassy in Paris in 2001. MrBeghal connects Mr Kouachi to a third in-

mate, Mr Coulibaly, who boasted in a clan-destine video filmed in 2007 that prison is“the best school for criminality”. For hispart, Merah, in Toulouse, spoke of experi-encing “divine inspiration” behind bars.

Although the French do not collect eth-nic statistics, some 60% of France’s prisonpopulation of 68,000 is Muslim, accordingto a parliamentary report last year. Theproportion is higher in big prisons near cit-ies such as Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Stras-bourg. Once inside, the message of moder-ate Islam dims. The report found only 178Muslim chaplains working in prisons, nextto almost 700 Catholic chaplains. “Manyof these criminals arrive with little reli-gious culture,” says Farhad Khosrokhavar,a sociologist. “But the less you know aboutIslam, the more you are likely to be drawnto radicalised religion.”

After prison comes politics. ChérifKouachi’s rage was first aimed againstAmerica, at a time when France vigorouslyopposed the invasion of Iraq. Since thenFrance itself has attracted more Islamistfury. The country has successfully pushedbacka jihadist incursion into Mali, and car-ried out air strikes on IS targets in Iraq.

Moreover, France is unapologetic aboutits secular rules, including its 2004 ban onwearing Muslim headscarves or other reli-gious symbols in public institutions, aswell as its criminalisation of hate speechand anti-Semitism. That this does not cov-er blasphemy, thanks to France’s history ofbloody anticlerical struggle which led tothe separation of religion and state in 1905,is a point of anger among some Muslims.Some Muslim schoolchildren reportedlyrefused to observe the minute’s silence forthe terror victims last week.

Such points of controversy are readilyexploited. The objective of IS, says GillesKepel of Sciences-Po university, “is to iden-tify fractures within European society, and

Mais jamais oublié

Issue Date: 17-01-2015 Zone: APSI Desk: BriefingA Output on: 15-01-2015----10:34 Page: FB2 Revision: 0