Anti-Semitic attacks remained at a high level in 2015, ” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in an interview with daily newspaper La Croix. ”We note a drop of 5 percent in anti-Semitic attacks which nonetheless remained at high level with 806 recorded,’’ he said.

Since 2005, anti-Semitic violence and threats were exceeded only twice the threshold of 800 acts in 2009 and 2014 (851 cases recorded that year) every time echoing a hardening of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

810 attacks occurred against places of worship and Christian cemeteries.

Cazeneuve said Islamophobic threats or assaults “tripled to some 400 for the year 2015,” noting that more than half occurred in the first quarter of the year after terrorist attacks against the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January which claimed 17 lives.

“I cannot accept such acts – they must be severely punished,” the minister said. France is home to the largest Muslim population in Europe, estimated at between 4-5 million. The French Muslim community represents approximately 6 percent of the total population of the 58.5 million that live in France.

Cazeneuve has also held that “the Christian roots of France are indisputable in terms of its history,” but that we should not make “a reason for exclusion of those who are not Christians” or “forget their contribution also to the history of our country.

A new survey indicates that most French people think Jews should continue to wear the kippah in spite of a rise in antis-Semitism.

According to the survey, conducted for French digital channel iTélé and the weekly magazine Paris Match, 70 percent of the French population do not think Jews should refrain from wearing kippah, though 71% say anti-Semitism is increasing in France.

The poll comes on the heels of the January 11  attack against a Jewish teacher in Marseille which led to the leader of the city’s Jewish community to call on Jews to “remove their kippah during this difficult period, until better days.”

Rabbi Zvi Amar’s positionaroused controversy among the Jews of France and spurred French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia to take the opposite position, asserting that “removing yarmulkes would be giving in to the terrorists.”

Mentioning terrorist attacks in Israel along with attacks by the Islamic State, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said they showed “we are in a world war,” in a statement made at an event organised by CRIF, the umbrella representative group of French Jewish institutions. In explaining the reasons for the existence of a terrorist threat in France, he noted “upheaval in the Arab world” and “the reality in certain neighborhoods in France, where young people are being radicalized.” “There are more and more terrorist attacks all over the world. In France, Burkina Faso, in Jakarta, in Israel, it keeps happening and it shows we need to learn to live with it,” Valls said. Asked whether the government was doing enough to protect French Jews from attacks following the murder of four Jews in January 2015 at a kosher supermarket, Valls said: “Yes, we are doing 100 percent, employing all measures, and we will continue to do so, but the risk is not negligible.” Valls, a Socialist who became Prime Minister in 2014 after a two-year stint as Interior Minister, enjoys considerable popularity among French Jews for his outspokenness against anti-Semitism and his rejection of attempts to boycott or isolate Israel, including through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

(Source: EJP)