Jews were the canary in the coalmine of France

Let's see - "North African youths," "Paris suburbs"; where have we heard those terms before?

Has it already been three years since the outbreak of anti-semitism in France that the world softpedaled for months? And then the EU commissioned a report on French anti-Semitism, only to decide not to release it, because it showed that Muslims (the M word that is so often missing in the articles about the current French "Intifada") were usually the perpetrators. (After Jewish groups published it anyway, the EU reluctantly did the same.)

Here are excerpts of that report:

As the second Intifada began, the number of anti-Semitic criminal offences rose drastically; out of 216 racist acts recorded in 2000 146 were motivated by anti-Semitism. The peak was reached during the Jewish High Holidays in October 2000; one third of the anti-Semitic attacks committed worldwide took place in France (between 1 September 2000 and 31 January 2002 405 anti-Semitic incidents were documented). The perpetrators were only seldom from the extreme right milieu, coming instead mainly from non-organised Maghrebian and North African youths. After interrogating 42 suspects, the police concluded that these are “predominantly delinquents without ideology, motivated by a diffuse hostility to Israel, exacerbated by the media representation of the Middle East conflict (…) a conflict which, they see, reproduces the picture of exclusion and failure of which they feel victims in France”. Beginning in January 2002, but mainly from the end of March till the middle of April 2002 , there was a wave of anti-Semitic attacks. In the first half of April attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions in Paris and surrounding areas were daily occurrences. This was a repeat of the situation of October 2000. In reaction to the anti-Semitic mood the number of the French Jews who immigrated to Israel in 2002 doubled to 2,566, the highest number since 1972.
[...]The fact that anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish acts in France are presently being committed mainly by youngsters from North African immigration, apparently acting in an isolated manner, brought many observers to the conclusion that a far right anti-Semitism has been superseded by a form of anti-Semitism rooted in urban decay and social deprivation. The French term for this combination of urban decay and social deprivation is “banlieue”, literally “suburb”, which functions in roughly the same way as “inner city” in English.

The report was ignored then and now the French are paying for ignoring the problem. Once again, Jews are the lightning rod for hate against all of Western civilization, and the West ignores anti-semitism at its own peril.