French police investigate anti-Semitic attacks in Paris
PARIS - French police are investigating a spate of antiSemitic acts in Paris and the surrounding area in the past few days, as the government announced a 74 percentrise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents last year.
In separate incidents in recent days, swastikas were drawn on Paris postboxes bearing portraits of the late politician and Holocaust survivor Simone Veil. The word Juden (German for Jews) was sprayed on the window of a bagel bakery on the Île Saint-Louis in the heart of the capital.
The French government’s special representative on racism, antisemitism and discrimination said the graffiti was sickening. A tree planted in the southern Paris suburb of Sainte-Genevieve-du-Bois in memory of a young Jewish man who was tortured to death in 2006 was also chopped down, authorities said. “Antisemitism is spreading like poison,” the interior minister, Christophe Castaner, said near the spot where the tree was vandalized. He vowed that the government would take action. The number of anti-Semitic acts in France increased by 74 percent last year, from 311 in 2017 to 541 in 2018, he said. In Paris, the incident involving the postboxes was reported by the artist Christian Guemy, who painted the portraits of Veil on the boxes in the city’s 13th district to mark her burial last year at the Pantheon, the final resting place of France’s most illustrious figures.
The government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux linked the graffiti on the bagel bakery to an arson attack last week on the home of the parliamentary speaker, Richard Ferrand, which some have blamed on France’s gilets jaunes protest movement. But Gilles Abecassis, the cofounder of the bakery, said he did not believe that antigovernment demonstrators, some of whom have shown support for a comedian convicted of antisemitism, were responsible.
(The Guardian)