On Tuesday morning, local officials in eastern France discovered that 80 graves in a Jewish cemetery had been defaced with swastikas and other vile symbols and phrases. As noted by France 24, France’s top security official for the region, Jean-Luc Marx, condemned “in the strongest possible terms this awful anti-Semitic act and sen[t] his complete support to the Jewish community which has been targeted again.”
The Times of Israel reports:
The damage was discovered on Tuesday morning 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 spray-painted 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 attacks may well have been intentionally timed — France had already been set to host on Tuesday nationwide marches against a rise in anti-Semitic attacks. Last year, French authorities recorded a massive 74% increase in reported anti-Semitic offenses. For decades, following World War II, France has had the largest Jewish population in Europe.
“I don’t know how long we are going to carry on [in France]… It makes me feel sick,” Maurice Dahan, the regional head of France’s Israelite Central Consistory of France, told AFP, according to The Times of Israel.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, French President Emmanuel Macron paid an emergency visit to Quatzenheim to stand in solidarity with the grieving local Jewish community:
“I’m here to show the support of the entire nation,” Mr. Macron said. “We will take actions, we will pass laws, we will punish,” he added.
For several minutes, he stood silently in front of the Quatzenheim graves beside the chief Rabbi of France, Haim Korsia, who spoke a prayer. The president then took a walk around the cemetery alongside members of the Jewish community.
Such despicable anti-Semitic vandalism acts are hardly rare in contemporary France. As The Wall Street Journal also notes, it was only two months ago when “several dozen Jewish graves were vandalized in another town near Strasbourg.”
The timing of the bigoted attacks, considering that France had already been planning to hold nationwide marches against anti-Semitism on Tuesday, was more than a little suspicious. President Macron had already been planning to visit the Shoah Memorial, a Parisian Holocaust memorial, later on Tuesday. Macron also gave a nationally televised address against anti-Semitism on Tuesday, in which he said, “Anti-Semitism is the complete opposite of the Republic and what France stands for. Every time a French person is insulted, threatened, or worse, wounded or killed, because he or she is Jewish, it’s an attack against the entire Republic.”
France is hardly the only Western European country currently dealing with a ubiquitous pandemic of anti-Semitism. As The Daily Wire has reported, Britain is facing a very similar spike in reported Jew-hatred:
On Wednesday [February 6], the United Kingdom’s Community Security Trust (CST) released its survey on nationwide anti-Semitic incidents for the year 2018. …
In total, the CST found a whopping 173 anti-Semitic incidents in 2018 that were motivated by anti-Israel sentiment; by contrast, the year 2017 featured only 70 such incidents.