Anti-Israeli Frenchmen assault Jewish students at Auschwitz

[Evilmav2]

Jewish students attacked at Auschwitz

By JENNY HAZAN

While on a tour of the museum at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland on Sunday, a group of around 50 Jewish university students from Israel, the U.S. and Poland were verbally attacked by a three-member gang of French male tourists.

Evidently incited by the presence of an Israeli flag wrapped around the shoulders of Tamar Schuri, an Israeli student from Ben Gurion University, the first assailant ran at the group while its members were being guided through a model gas chamber and crematoria and began swearing and hurling anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli insults.

"He told us to go back to Israel and said that we were stupid and should be ashamed to walk around with an Israeli flag," testifies Maya Ober, a 21-year-old Polish student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan and member of the Polish Union of Jewish Students (PUSZ), which organized the 16-day summer learning program along with the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS).

After the initial altercation, a second assailant grabbed Ober by the arm. "One of the guys held me by the arm and wouldn't let go," says Ober, who lost several members of her family at Auschwitz. "I was afraid. I couldn't move and I didn't know what he was going to do.

"I was shocked. Although I have met anti-Semitism many times, I never expected to meet it at Auschwitz, where so many of my relatives were killed," she says she spoke to the assailants in French and that in addition to being "brutish and vulgar," their sentiments "made absolutely no sense."

"Violence was narrowly averted," adds Laurence Weinbaum, Director of Research at the World Jewish Congress and resident scholar for the group, who says the Polish police were not notified of the incident because the assailants did not commit an actual crime.

"But, if the two sides hadn't been separated, it would have come to blows."

Weinbaum, who has been to Poland more than 30 times on educational tours, says he never before saw anything like what happened, happen. "It was simply shocking," he says. "In some way, I felt that these men were satisfied to visit Auschwitz. This was another reminder that in Western Europe there is sympathy for dead Jews; it's just the live ones that they cannot tolerate."

"This event shocked me," adds 24-year-old tour
participant Yigael Ben-Natan from Zichron Yaacov, a recent graduate from the University of Haifa. "But, it bought into focus a small part of what it's like to be a Jew in the Diaspora today and a little bit about what it was like to be a Jew in the Diaspora during the Holocaust.

"Auschwitz is a place where everyone who visits shows a certain degree of respect," he says. "These people's total disregard for the feelings of the people who come here, especially the Jews who come here to mourn, is horrible. But, I suppose some people don't come to mourn; some people come for completely different reason, which we cannot completely comprehend."

The students on the tour, which came as part of a year-long educational project funded by the Claims
Conference for Lost Jewish Property and the JDC, gathered together in Poland to learn about the history of its Jewish community, to participate in the revival of the country's contemporary Jewish community by strengthening its ties to Israel and the American Diaspora and to work to restore the Jewish cemetery near Krakow, Czchow, which unlike the neighboring Christian cemetery, hasn't been properly maintained since the Holocaust.

"These students went out there to learn what is happening and unfortunately, they learned a more practical lesson than we would have liked," says Peleg Reshef, Chairperson for WUJS. "The fact that someone could say all of the things that these men said at the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz, is unthinkable.

"But, we are trying to teach our students to learn from other cultures and to proud of who they are and I am proud to say that they stood up and said that they were proud to be Jewish, that they were proud to be Israeli and that they were proud to bear our national flag."

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[LRB]

Typical French behavior. [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-disgusted.gif[/img]

[madape]

How long before this is official French policy? Chriac continues to ignore events like this, almost encouraging them. Has has even actually BANNED the Israeli Prime minister from setting foot on French soil.

[Drbio]

Idiots. I wish the Jewish kids would have had the opportunity to adjust those frenchie attitudes.

[madape]

Jewish graves desecrated in France
Tuesday, August 10, 2004 Posted: 7:34 AM EDT (1134 GMT)

French government has condemned the desecration.

LYON, France (AP) -- Vandals scrawled anti-Semitic graffiti on dozens of tombstones in Lyon overnight, authorities said Tuesday, the third time a Jewish cemetery has been desecrated this year.

Swastikas and inscriptions with Adolf Hitler's name were painted on headstones in de la Mouche cemetery in this southern French city, the same burial site that was desecrated by skinheads in 1992.

Richard Wertenschlag, Lyon's chief rabbi, told France Info radio that the vandalism was an affront to the Jewish community and to France's values.

"How is it that after the Holocaust, someone can still attack Jews -- even those who are dead -- for the simple reason that they are Jews?" he said.

The vandalized graves were at the back of the cemetery, a distance from the guardian's house, and among its oldest tombs. A monument to Jewish World War II soldiers was also covered with graffiti, the French Veterans Affairs Ministry said.

The crime drew the swift condemnation of the French government.

"The perpetrators of this outrage are being actively pursued," President Jacques Chirac said in a letter to Marcel Dreyfus, a local Jewish leader in Lyon. "They will be punished to the maximum extent the law allows."

In the Czech Republic, dozens of tombstones have been found toppled at a Jewish cemetery in the eastern of town Hranice, police said Tuesday.

Spokeswoman Michaela Sedlackova said that some 80 tombstones were overturned in the cemetery in the town 187 miles east of Prague. She said it was not clear when the incident happened. The cemetery dates to the 17th century. Sigmund Freud's brother, Julius, was buried there in 1858.

In France in May, swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti were scrawled on 127 headstones at a Jewish cemetery in the Alsatian town of Herrlisheim. And last month, vandals painted swastikas and Satanic symbols on 32 tombstones at a Jewish cemetery in Saverne, also in Alsace. Muslim and Christian cemeteries have also been vandalized.

Despite a series of government measures, anti-Semitic violence has increased in recent years in France, coinciding with rising tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. Authorities have blamed young French Muslims for some of the violence.

A recent report by the French Interior Ministry found 510 anti-Jewish acts or threats in the first six months of the year, compared with 593 for all of 2003.

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The only thing surprising about this terrible event is that it France openly condemned it.

[Drbio]

French government has condemned the desecration.

I'm just sure that old Jew hater Chiraq is all torn up about this.

[Chiwas]

Sometimes I think that the French liked the boot of Hitler over their necks -saying it with decent words.

[Mavdog]

An interesting article on how France is dealing with those who advocate violence. It seems the French don't like radical islamist either.
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Fighting Words
France Moves Fast To Expel Muslims Preaching Hatred
In Bid to Pre-Empt Terror, Nation Targets 8 Imams; Law Hits Legal Residents

Sent to Turkey After 28 Years

COURTRY, France -- Mihdat Guler was 17 years old when he moved here from his native Turkey to find work in 1976. Over time, he saved enough money to buy a tidy house in this middle-class Paris suburb, where he lived a quiet life as a legal immigrant with his wife and five children.

One afternoon three months ago, Mr. Guler learned he had overstayed his welcome. Police stopped his van as he was returning from selling sewing supplies at an outdoor market and arrested him. Within a few weeks, he was on a flight to Istanbul, unsure when he would see his family again.

The French government's accusation: Mr. Guler was preaching hatred and violence against the West at a Muslim prayer room in Paris. It also alleges that he belongs to a group that seeks an Islamic state in Turkey. Mr. Guler denies the government's allegations.

If Mr. Guler had been French, he would have had the chance to defend himself at a trial. But as a foreigner, he fell under a 1945 law that allowed the government to deport him as an urgent security threat.

France has taken one of the hardest lines of any Western country in fighting Islamic extremism. Other democracies, including the U.S., have been criticized for excessive methods, such as holding prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But few have been as systematic and zealous as France in attempting to stamp out Islamic militancy.

Mr. Guler is one of eight Muslim men France has expelled this year on the ground that they are preachers who foment anti-Western sentiment and violence in their sermons. These imams often have little religious education but a big influence over Muslim youths, the French government says.

"Today, one can no longer separate terrorist acts from the words that feed them," Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin recently told the French Council of the Muslim Faith, an organization created last year to represent the interests of France's Muslims.

Earlier this year, France passed a law that bars Muslim girls from wearing head scarves at public schools. Its counterterrorism magistrates often round up suspects in broad sweeps and detain them for years without trial. With its new practice of expelling Muslim preachers, France is taking its campaign against extremism one step farther.

France's hardball approach comes as Europe faces stark questions about how to integrate its surging Muslim population. Once tiny, it has grown exponentially, fueled by immigration from North Africa and the Middle East and from countries such as Turkey and Pakistan, as well as by higher birth rates in Muslim families. France, with a population of about 60 million, is now home to an estimated five million to seven million Muslims, the most in Western Europe.

Other Western European countries with large Muslim communities, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, haven't gone as far as France for fear of undermining basic civil liberties. But the U.K. has recently begun threatening to hold Islamic preachers accountable for their words. In Germany, expulsions require court orders, and courts have been unwilling to send radicals back to countries with questionable human-rights records. Some of the preachers France has deported have challenged their expulsions in court, but only one has had tentative success.

France argues that its tough stance pays off: There has been no terrorism on French soil since Algeria's Armed Islamic Group conducted a wave of bombings in Paris in 1995. And France harbored none of the cells that plotted the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. or the March 11 train bombings in Spain.

Yet France's expulsions of preachers raise thorny questions about how far Western democracies should go in trying to pre-empt Islamic terrorism. Some of the men, like Mr. Guler, who is 45, have legally lived in France for decades. Their families are integrated in French society and many of their children are French citizens.

The first contingent of Muslims arrived in France in the 1950s and 1960s from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. They helped fill France's demand for cheap factory labor amid the country's post-World War II economic boom.

A turning point came in the late 1970s when the government of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing allowed those workers to bring their families to France. That took away an incentive for them to return to their impoverished home countries. Many settled in France for good, sending the number of Muslims soaring.

France became aware it had an integration problem in the late 1980s when Muslim girls started coming to school wearing head scarves. That sparked a 15-year debate about whether the country's secular society should tolerate obvious signs of religious affiliation at its public schools, culminating in this year's ban. The new law also prohibits wearing large Christian crosses, Jewish skullcaps and other visible religious symbols.

With hundreds of mosques springing up across the country, the government took to promoting the notion of a "French Islam," in harmony with France's republican ideals and devoid of foreign theological influences. As a rule, France wants its immigrants to leave their languages and cultural origins behind and become primarily French.

But this French Islam has been a difficult concept to put into practice. Of the more than 1,500 imams who lead Friday prayers across France, fewer than 300 have formal religious educations, according to the National Federation of French Muslims. Many hail from countries such as Algeria that are hotbeds of extremism. Schools created in the past decade to educate French imams have produced few graduates. The government has become increasingly concerned that the poorly trained foreign imams are radicalizing people with their virulent sermons.

The Madrid train bombings, the first massive Islamist attack in the heart of Europe, convinced Mr. de Villepin, the interior minister, that drastic measures were needed to root out preachings that could spark terrorism, aides say. He ordered a crackdown, building on a few expulsions already carried out by his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Expulsion has been legal in France since 1945. But the procedure is usually used against illegal immigrants. Last year, France sent home more than 11,000 illegal aliens. Since the Muslim men it was now targeting were mostly legal residents, the Interior Ministry invoked another part of the 1945 legislation.

'Absolute Emergency'

That clause allows the state to expel "in absolute emergency" any foreigner deemed a threat "to the security of the state or public safety." In the past, the clause was mainly used to expel foreigners convicted of violent crimes such as rape or murder who had finished serving their prison terms.

The eight preachers France has expelled this year hail from four countries: Algeria, Turkey, Morocco and Egypt.

In April, the Interior Ministry expelled Abdelkader Yahia Cherif, a 35-year-old Algerian who preached at a prayer room in Brest, a port city on France's northwestern coast. France alleged that Mr. Cherif was recruiting young Arab men to a radical brand of Islam known as Salafism, which advocates a literal, inflexible interpretation of the Quran. The government contended Mr. Cherif had incited violence in his neighborhood since arriving four years earlier, including a fire at a town hall.

The order justifying his expulsion said Mr. Cherif had rejoiced over the Madrid bombings in sermons, and cited an interview he gave to a newspaper in which he said there was "no absolute proof" Islamists had been involved in either the Sept. 11 or the Madrid attacks.

David Rajjou, Mr. Cherif's lawyer, says his client acknowledges being a Salafist but denies the other accusations. Mr. Cherif didn't intend to excuse the Sept. 11 or Madrid attacks but only to question whether Islamists were really behind them, the lawyer says.

The Beating of Women

As the expulsions accelerated, one drew special notice: that of Abdelkader Bouziane, an Algerian from Lyon. Mr. Bouziane, who has fathered 16 children by two Algerian wives, triggered a public uproar by endorsing polygamy and the beating of women in an interview with a French magazine shortly after the Madrid attacks.

Mr. Bouziane, 52, was already the subject of a pending expulsion order for allegedly issuing a religious order on March 28, 2003, calling on Muslims to target U.S. interests in France, and for having links to suspected terrorists. After the interview, the government rushed his expulsion, sending him out of the country in April. But within a few weeks he was back, after a French court deemed the reasons for expelling him as too vague.

Mr. Bouziane's lawyer, Mahmoud Hebia, says his client denies the government's allegations. He adds that Mr. Bouziane, who remains in France, maintains his comments were distorted in the magazine and doesn't personally condone beating women.

Angered by his return, France's parliament has since amended the 1945 law to allow expulsion of any foreigner who incites "discrimination, hatred or violence against a certain person or group of persons."

In the absence of trials, it's hard to determine the danger posed by the expelled men. After ordering the expulsion of another Algerian imam from Lyon in January, the Interior Ministry appeared vindicated when, within days, he was arrested by counterterrorism magistrates for allegedly aiding a plot to stage a chemical attack. That imam, Chellali Benchellali, is now in prison in France.

The expulsion of Mr. Guler, the Turkish sewing-supply salesman, was a "very efficient and expedient tactic" for the government compared with prosecuting a case, says his lawyer, Thierry Meurou.

Prayer and Caliphate

Mr. Guler declined to comment for this article. He is one of 400,000 Turks who live in France. Though he immigrated 28 years ago, he never sought French citizenship. Instead, he obtained a residency card renewable every 10 years. All five of his children were born and raised in France. "France is our country," says his oldest son, Abdurrahman, 22.

In 1988, the elder Mr. Guler became president of an organization that rents a prayer room in central Paris. The prayer room, in a rundown building in a racially mixed neighborhood, initially catered to Turkish immigrants. It now draws a diverse crowd that includes Arabs.

On Saturday, May 1, policemen pulled over Mr. Guler's white Ford van and jailed him. He soon learned that the Interior Ministry had ordered his expulsion. With help from a lawyer, he filed a request for political asylum. Though denied, it delayed the government's plans by forcing a review of his case.

On May 19, Mr. Guler appeared before a judge in an administrative court. There, the Interior Ministry laid out its case. It rested on a 10-page memo by the Renseignements Generaux, a domestic intelligence service. There were no wiretaps, pictures, witness testimony or other evidence in the case file. Such memos are called note blanches, or white notes, because they aren't signed or dated and don't cite their sources.

The memo didn't implicate Mr. Guler in terrorist acts or plots but made a number of accusations, including: that he incited hatred of Western societies and Israel in sermons; that he allowed to be distributed at the prayer room Islamist newsletters that glorified jihad; and that he is a member of the Caliphate State, a group that seeks to overthrow Turkey's secular government and replace it with an Islamic state.

Mr. Meurou and Mr. Guler's son, Abdurrahman, deny that Mr. Guler ever preached at the prayer room. He didn't consider himself knowledgeable enough to be an imam, they say. Mr. Meurou acknowledges jihad newsletters made their way around the prayer room but says Mr. Guler can't be held responsible for everything that went on there. He says Mr. Guler admits knowing the Caliphate State's leader, Metin Kaplan, as a family friend, but denies any involvement in his group.

Based in Cologne, Germany, the Caliphate State calls for the restoration of Turkey's Caliphate, the Islamic theocracy that ruled much of the Muslim world until the Ottoman empire collapsed after World War I. It is banned in Turkey and Germany. Its leader, Mr. Kaplan, was arrested by German police in 1999 for inciting the killing of a rival Islamic cleric. He served four years in prison.

Since his release last year, Turkey has been seeking Mr. Kaplan's extradition on charges that he masterminded a failed 1998 terrorist plot, but Germany's courts have balked.

At the hearing, the judge asked Mr. Guler whether French law took precedence over Islamic law. Mr. Guler gave an ambiguous answer, according to people present. "There's a polemic there, Your Honor," he said. "In Quranic law, God is higher than French law but, if I say that, I know I'll be punished by French law."

The judge ruled in the government's favor. Mr. Guler made plans to return to Turkey on his own, but the Interior Ministry moved faster. Three days after the hearing, policemen seized him at his house and put him on a flight to Istanbul.

Upon arrival, Mr. Guler was briefly questioned by Turkish police, then released. He now lives in his native town of Yozgat. A representative of the Turkish embassy in Paris says Mr. Guler wasn't a wanted man in Turkey and hadn't been convicted of any crime in France, so there was no basis to detain him.

Mr. Guler's wife and children remain in France and hope he will be able to return. He missed Abdurrahman's wedding in June, but the family called him on a cellphone during the reception. The son has taken over his father's sewing-supply business to help support the family and pay the mortgage on their house. Mr. Meurou has gathered 50 affidavits from friends, neighbors and customers and plans to fight the government's decision. The appeal process could take years.

Write to John Carreyrou at john.carreyrou@wsj.com