- Jewish leaders in France yesterday demanded urgent government
action after an unprecedented wave of attacks on synagogues and Jewish-owned
property around the country.
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- A synagogue in Marseille, destroyed by fire along with
its Torah scrolls and other sacred books on Sunday night, was the third
to be hit by arson since Friday, prompting the central consistory of French
Jews to compare the violence to the Nazi-led Kristallnacht, or Night of
Broken Glass, in Germany in November 1938.
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- President Jacques Chirac issued a call for "dialogue,
respect and tolerance". In a statement, the president urged the government
to increase police protection at Jewish places of worship and "employ
every means necessary to ensure the perpetrators of these acts are tracked
down and severely punished".
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- In signs that anti-semitic violence, apparently linked
to escalating Arab-Israeli violence in the Middle East, was spreading in
Europe, Belgian police said minor damage was caused to a synagogue in the
Brussels district of Anderlecht when a petrol bomb was thrown through a
window late on Sunday.
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- "We are living through a new and deeply dangerous
period of anti-semitism, of increasingly violent commando operations carried
out against Jews and Jewish interests," said Alain Jakubowicz, president
of the Jewish community in Lyon.
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- "If anyone wanted a demonstration of the reality
and the gravity of what the Jews of France live through, they have it now."
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- Late on Friday, some 15 masked youths rammed two stolen
cars through the main gates of Lyon's La Duchere synagogue, and set light
to one of the vehicles inside the prayer hall in what Mr Jakubowicz called
"an act of war". The doors and facade of another synagogue in
Strasbourg were badly damaged in another arson attack.
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- Also this weekend, a gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher's
shop in Toulouse, a Jewish school was broken into in Sarcelles north of
Paris, and a Jewish couple in their 20s were beaten up by five youths in
Villeurbanne in the Rhone region. The woman, who was pregnant, was kept
in hospital overnight.
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- A book published a fortnight ago by the anti-racist organisation
SOS Racisme and UEJF, the Union of Jewish Students in France, described
405 acts of anti-semitic violence reported in France between September
2000 and January 2002. The incidents included insults, spitting, stone
throwing, physical violence, racist graffiti, desecration of Jewish graves
and arson attacks.
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- Many were recorded in autumn 2000, after the start of
the second intifada in the occupied territories. But a new wave came after
the September 11 attacks in America and the ensuing explosion of Israeli-Palestinian
violence. The current encirclement of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat
seems to have prompted this weekend's attacks.
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- "Most of these acts seem to be committed by youngsters
of Arab origin who identify with the Palestinian cause but who don't really
know what they're doing," said a spokesman for the EUJF. "But
there's clearly a difference between that kind of kids' stuff and the organised,
extremely effective and dangerous attacks in Lyon and Marseille."
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- France's large Muslim and Jewish communities have on
the whole co-existed peacefully and government officials as well as community
leaders have sought to play down the recent wave of anti-Jewish violence
for fear of inflaming racist feeling. But Jean Kahn, president of the central
consistory, said yesterday the French authorities "must take this
new threat very seriously indeed".
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- The prime minister, Lionel Jospin, said he was "revolted
by the cowardly and absurd" attack in Lyon which appeared "organised
and premeditated".
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,677316,00.html
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