PARIS, Feb 19 — Around 80 graves were daubed with swastikas at a Jewish cemetery in eastern France, authorities said today, hours ahead of nationwide marches called to denounce a surge in anti-Semitic vandalism and hate speech.
The damage was discovered at a cemetery in the village of Quatzenheim, close to the border with Germany in the Alsace region, a statement from the regional security office said.
Photos show the Nazi symbols in blue paint on the damaged graves, one of which bears the words Elsassisches Schwarzen Wolfe (“Black Alsacian Wolves), a separatist group with links to neo-Nazis in the 1970s.
The top security official for the region, Jean-Luc Marx, condemned “in the strongest possible terms this awful anti-Semitic act and sends his complete support to the Jewish community which has been targeted again”.
“It just doesn’t stop, it’s shock after shock,” Maurice Dahan, the regional head of France’s main Jewish institution, the Israelite Central Consistory of France, told AFP.
In December nearly 40 graves as well as a monument to Holocaust victims were desecrated at another Jewish cemetery near Strasbourg in Herrlisheim, about a half-hour drive from Quatzenheim.
President Emmanuel Macron will travel to the cemetery to inspect the damage today, before visiting the Paris Holocaust memorial, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner told RTL radio.
Rallies are planned for later today in Paris and other cities to denounce a flare-up of anti-Semitic vandalism in recent weeks, often coinciding with “yellow vest” anti-government protests.
Politicians on both the right and left have called for a massive turn-out after a prominent French writer was the target of a violent tirade by a protester in Paris on Saturday.
A video of the scene showed the protester calling the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut a “dirty Zionist” and telling him “France belongs to us”.
‘Deep roots’
Police have recorded a 74 per cent surge in anti-Jewish acts last year in France, home to Europe’s biggest Jewish population.
Germany has also seen a sharp rise in anti-Semitic crimes, with more than 1,600 cases recorded last year.
And tensions flared again this week between Israel and Poland after Warsaw pulled out of a summit over comments by Jerusalem officials referring to alleged collaboration by “many Poles” with Germany during the Holocaust.
The Polish government has long bristled at any suggestion of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers during World War II — a claim Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu was accused of making last week, though his office said he had not intended to implicate all Poles in the Holocaust.
In France, several officials have accused the grassroots yellow vest movement of unleashing a wave of extremist violence that has fostered anti-Semitic outbursts among some participants.
“It would be false and absurd to call the yellow vest movement anti-Semitic,” Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told L’Express magazine in an interview published today.
“But certain guardrails or dikes have fallen during the yellow vest crisis,” he said. “Anti-Semitism has very deep roots in French society.
“We would like to think differently, but it’s a fact,” he said.
Philippe, who has promised a tough new law targeting online hate speech by this summer, will be among several ministers at a Paris march starting at 7pm (1800 GMT).
‘Republic is targeted’
“Each time a French citizen is insulted, threatened or even worse, injured or killed, because he is a Jew, it’s the Republic which is targeted,” Macron said at a press conference today.
He added that he would lay out his plans to combat anti-Semitism during a speech at the annual dinner of the CRIF umbrella association of French Jewish groups tomorrow.
But he has resisted calls by some lawmakers to explicitly penalise so-called anti-Zionist statements calling into question Israel’s right to exist as a nation.
Macron himself has been targeted in some of the anti-Semitic graffiti found in the wake of recent protests, though many prominent yellow vest demonstrators have said they plan to participate in the anti-racism marches.
But a recent Ifop poll of “yellow vest” backers found that nearly half those questioned believed in a worldwide “Zionist plot” and other conspiracy theories.
“The yellow vests aren’t an anti-Semitic movement,” said Jean-Yves Camus of the Political Radicalisation Observatory in Paris.
“But it’s a leaderless, horizontal movement... and extremist elements have been able to drown out the voices of its high-profile figures in the media,” he said. — AFP
