France, Today: A Threat To Jewish Existence

"I came to say no to this massacre. 'Boycott Israel, Racist State' [on his jacket]."
"They are bombing innocent people. There are missiles being launched by Hamas, but the Israeli response is disproportionate. They are attacking the civilian population and not Hamas officials."
Amid Hamadouch, 30, Paris, France 

The Sunday protest in Paris began with several thousand demonstrators calmly marching through the streets of Paris with a large banner reading "Total Support for the Struggle of the Palestinian People". It was a young crowd, infused with anger against Israel, shouting slogans such as "We Are All Palestinians!", and "Only One Solution, End the Occupation!".

Many of them carried banners which held photographs printed off the Internet, purporting to show Palestinian children killed or injured, photographs of houses destroyed, others of clouds of smoke rising from bombed-out Gaza districts. No banners appear to have been sighted demanding an end to Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets over the border from Gaza into Israel.

Needless to say, the "occupation" is meant to protect Israel and its population from being destroyed by Palestinians themselves, both Fatah and Hamas; one secular the other theocratic, but both whose militancy is engaged in "resisting" not merely the occupation resulting from an Israeli defence against the last combined Middle East Arab offensive, but to remove Israel from the soil it occupies and restore it to Palestinian Arabs.

For Israel to simply walk away from defending itself would be tantamount to informing the Palestinians and the armies of the Muslim Middle East that they may re-commence their half-Century-long preoccupation in removing a nation of Jews (and incidentally, Muslims and Christians, Druze and Bedouin) from the landscape they claim as their own.

A paraphrased remark attributed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says it all: "Arabs can surrender their weapons and war will end; Israel can surrender its weapons and it will fall."

When the protesters ended their march on Bastille Square, people began throwing projectiles toward a cordon of police, who then responded with tear gas. In the resulting melee hundreds of Jews were trapped within an area synagogue, requiring police units to be dispatched to rescue them. One person emerging from the synagogue described stones and bricks being hurled at the building "like it was an intifada".

The protesters as good as their words; the importation of Palestinian methodology to France. They are all Palestinians.

A protester wearing a kaffiyeh and wrapped in a Palestinian flag raises his fist on July 13, 2014 in Paris, during a demonstration against Israel and in support of residents in the Gaza Strip. (photo credit: AFP/KENZO TRIBOUILLARD)

While French Prime Minister Manuel Valls condemned the synagogue storming "in the strongest possible terms", adding that "Such acts targeting places of worship are unacceptable", it seems more like an anaemic censure than a blistering denunciation of political-religion-inspired hate-mongering, failing to address the larger issue that French Jews are French, while Jews, and are entitled to safety and security in their country of origin.

Perhaps it is time for French Jews to consider that their homeland is no longer theirs; that an inundation of immigrants from the near and Middle East has altered their place in French society irreparably, making it simply too dangerous to remain French Jews.

Women hold a banner as they take part in a demonstration against Israel and in support of residents in the Gaza Strip, on July 13, 2014, Paris. (photo credit: AFP/ KENZO TRIBOUILLARD)

"What we are witnessing in Paris today is extremely, extremely serious. Jews are in peril for their lives. French authorities acted like amateurs in failing to predict collateral violence against the Jewish community. I am outraged like I never have been against the government for being so careless when they knew how radical this demonstration against Israel was going to be. To see so many French people, most of them Muslims, calling for a pogrom against Jews and supporting a criminal and terrorist organization is the most troublesome situation. French Jews are in serious danger", stated French Jewish artist and activist Rom Agam, from his New York base.

France may have enacted a law outlawing the wearing of the Burqa and the Naqib, a prophylactic social act denying the wholesale alteration in the country's demographics. But the presence of the deadly banlieus where even French police are fearful of entering to uphold law and order speaks volumes about the alteration in cultural, social, judicial values of a country that has so long prided itself on equality, fraternity and liberty.

Equality is a mirage, fraternity is on its death-bed and liberty prevails for those who despise the liberal democratic values of a country that has lost its way into the future.

Marseilles