Is this anti-semitism?

anyway, off-topic. news from france is terribly depressing and france obviously has a long history of anti-Semitism - Dreyfuss etc. when my parents went to France on vacation about a decade ago they told my dad not to wear his yarmulke in public but to keep it under a baseball cap or something. anyway, right after shabbos they were walking back to their hotel and he was wearing his yarmulke and ppl shouted "Juif" at them.

france has become such an intolerant place in recent years

is this true? compared to what?

are you kidding

I think "become" might be questionable -- it's always been a somewhat intolerant culture in general on many levels, not just in terms of religious/ethnic minorities.

friend of mine who works in France gets a lot of casual anti-Semitic stuff under the guise of "but why won't Jews respect French culture" - e.g. given a lecture on French "secularism" when he said actually he couldn't come in and do overtime since it was a Jewish holiday (as if they'd ask an xtian for overtime on Easter Sunday), or people telling him off because kosher butchery is ~so cruel~ (from the country that brings us foie gras), etc.

xp I don't think the kind of stuff he faces is particularly a recent development tbh

there is a difference between white ppl anti-semitism in france and muslim anti-semitism in france

xpost yeah my sister-in-law who lived in france said that a lot of it is this refusal to understand why anyone would want to identify in any way as anything other than "French," coupled, ironically, with making it fairly difficult to assimilate.

yeah i'm saying that figuring what is going on with intolerance in france is complicated, and vague "woe is france" statements like "has become such an intolerant place" need clarification if you're going to tie them into an apparently crazy person with a gun shooting people

i don't know that "intolerant" is the world. france has become a minefield of ethnic tension and antipathy.

what did france used to be, exactly

I think you maybe had less ethnic tension when you had fewer ethnicities?

or rather when the ethnicities were confined to the colonies more, then the tension was in the colonies more?

You know, when I vent you don't need to pick apart the exact language of it all.

what did france used to be, exactly

a bit less diverse, i.e., "for the french"

not to be "my irish ancestors had it rough" about this, because to be a jew or an algerian was always outside any ideological definition of what could be 'french', but "fewer ethnicities" strikes me as loose talk. gascons, bretons, occitan-speaking folx, basques, german alsatians, etc. the central/republican state kind of did a number on identities like that.

i wonder if the lingering blithe insistence on "secularism" and "french culture" doesn't speak to a suppressed knowledge that to be "french" means to take part in a constructed identity? i.e. to have something jewish or otherwise ahem mediterranean in you is something unconstructed, idk

this is like the only thing i know about france btw, thanks benedict anderson

There's a vein of anti-semitism on the left in France that isn't comfortable with ethnic identity (or responds to French ethnic chauvinism by championing post-racist 'universal' identity politics) and isn't comfrotable with the religiosity of many French Jews. Add to that the widespread criticism of Israeli policies and it can get ugly. It's by no means helped by the anti-racist crowd having as its largest constituency North African muslims. There's populist 'traditional' Xtian anti-semitism and right-wing racist and ultra-Catholic anti-semitism though that has become a little more complicated since, similar to the American extreme right, parts of the French extreme right sometimes pretend to like Israel since it gives them a better place from whence to beat up on Islam and Arabs.

also u know

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lQsC-7_wBSU/TdlKwdwP-oI/AAAAAAAAABk/NK9LezvJK_0/s1600/d08_aurore_janv_98.jpg

Yeah, goole, francity is an invention. During the ancien régime it was mostly aspirational and after the Revolution increasingly imposed by a more and more centralized State often in opposition to the old aristocracy and the Church.

Dreyfuss wasn't all that religious, Mordy. The Right hated him for being Jewish not for practicing Judaism. If you really want to see the worst of anti-semitic bias in France, look to Drancy and Vel d'Hiv round-up, etc...

all identities are constructed. no more true of "frenchness" than anything else.

xp I don't know what his level of religiosity has to do with... if anything it's a good indication that France anti-Semitism is not rooted in secularism so much as in historical anti-Semitism.

I am totally pulling this out of nothing more than a motorcycle and a face tatoo but I suspect this guy is a white racist as much as an anti-zionist or whatever, esp if he is the same killer who shot the legionnaires last week.

Like trying to explain French anti-Semitism as somehow being a result of French secularism, or French anti-religious sentiment is an attempt to elide historical trends in inexplicable French anti-Semitism that span political movements, cultural shifts, and chronicity.

The kind of crypto-Monarchists who filled the general staff of the French Army during the Dreyfuss affair had as their special bugbears destroying the soul of France: Jews, Freemasons, Protestants and, of course, atheists.

Like trying to explain French anti-Semitism as somehow being a result of French secularism, or French anti-religious sentiment is an attempt to elide historical trends in inexplicable French anti-Semitism that span political movements, cultural shifts, and chronicity.

^ otm

is an attempt to elide historical trends

I'm not eliding it at all, merely pointing out newer expressions of anti-semitism in French culture that don't fit into the traditional, Catholic kind.

I've heard ppl openly sneer at someone for sounding like he was from the Sentier (working-class area of Paris which had a large Jewish population) and even heard batshit things like Jaguars are a Jewish (and therefore uncool) vehicle. There's a lot of snobbery in white French anti-semitism but it's not that often that it turns murderous.

historical trends in inexplicable French anti-Semitism that span political movements, cultural shifts, and chronicity.

what are these?

seems like contemporary french anti-semitism originates from several overlapping but not entirely related zones, the "ugh why can't you just be a normal agnostic french person" secular-chauvinist sentiment is just one of them

start here, read down to bottom of the page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_France#Expulsions_and_returns

i'm not sure that stuff is all that "inexplicable" - seems like a lot of power plays

http://www.amazon.com/Lantis%C3%A9mitisme-France-dans-lentre-deux-guerres-Pr%C3%A9lude/dp/2804800504

This is the older French anti-semitism

thanks michel xp

The police think our killer was not a 'pro'. He used a 9mm and then a 45 caliber after the first gun jammed.

Thirty years of anti-semitic attacks in France (in French)

Our killer, if these can be linked, has killed 4 Jews, three Arabs and a black guy.

Is there any reason to believe it's the same person behind all three?

France only has one murderer at a time

There's a very strong suspicion that the killer is the same guy who killed some Foreign Legionnaires in Toulouse and Montauban recently.

Really this statement is only interesting if you associate with the French criminal underground and they're speculating in whispers about who the killer is, and this is a Batman movie and Christian Bale is currently interrogating you.

Is there any reason to believe it's the same person behind all three?

It's being reported that the same weapon was used, although i'm not sure that's 100% confirmed.

Live reports are saying that it's the same calibre weapon, rather that the same weapon necessarily, but the same stolen scooter.

same caliber weapon is meaningless, same scooter is hmmm

Ok, The Guardian is now saying it was the same gun.

when i was in France during the mid-1990s, i was struck by how open many French people were wr2 their dislike of and bigotry towards Arabs. so it isn't only the Jews that the French appear to dislike.

Same modus operandi, same scooter, same gun (according to the police) - it looks very much like the same guy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17446999

Police hunting a gunman suspected of killing seven people in southern France are laying siege to a flat in Toulouse.

The man, named as Mohammed Merah, 24, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, has said he belongs to al-Qaeda and acted to "avenge Palestinian children".

This is gonna be awful.

I was in Toulouse when the first killings were happening, fwiw. I had an interesting if unconnected conversation with a local who said things like what Michael White & goole have been saying here.

http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/65425/ken-livingstone-jews-wont-vote-labour-because-they-are-rich

anti-semetic and stupid. i don't know if it's true in the UK (i imagine it is) but Jews love voting for labour parties!

i think what mr livingstone meant to say was that Jews won't vote for him because he's an anti-semite