Israel Matzav

Difficult to watch video of Paris anti-Semitic attack victim

Here's an interview with the victim of last Thursday night's anti-Semitic attack on a French school teacher.

Let's go to the videotape. More after the video.



Here's part of a summary of the interview.

Speaking on camera a day after his assault, the victim – a 59-year-old Jewish teacher only identified as David – said he was attacked by three North African “Maghreb men” at 10 p.m. on March 20 after leaving a kosher restaurant in Rue Manin, Paris, and making his way to a subway station.

“They started to curse me out: ‘dirty Jew,’ ‘death to the Jews,’ ‘son of a b***,’ etc. Then they started to beat me up,” David says in the clip before breaking down in tears. “I was hit on my face, I got my nose fractured… And then one of them took something out of his pocket, I thought it was a knife… It was a marker… And this is what they did to me (showing his chest), a swastika as they were screaming ‘dirty Jew.’ ”

David then shows the Nazi symbol drawn on his bare chest by the attackers. When members of the public started coming close to the scene of the attack, the assailants ran away and yelled “we are not finished, we’ll get back to you!!” he said.

The assault happened in the 19th district in Paris, which I believe has a large Jewish population and is one of the newer areas in which Jews live (the oldest Jewish community in Paris is in the 4th district; the last two times I have been to Paris I stayed in the relatively old Jewish community in the 9th district). Here's an interview with Rabbi Levy Djian, a Parisian living in New York who finds himself asked often to help French Jews emigrate to the United States and Canada.

“It happened right near the main Jewish neighborhood of the 19th district of Paris where I grew up. Often my family and friends who are still in France tend to ignore the rise of anti-Semitism and its danger, but this recent video shows that it’s real,” he added. “It’s the first time that we get to actually see and hear the victim of such a brutal and obvious anti-Semitic attack perpetrated by young uneducated Muslims and it makes us realize what it really feels like.”

Jews - it's time to leave France. Please come home!

Labels: French anti-Semitism, Paris

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:31 AM