The president of the Jewish consistory in Marseilles, Zvi Ammar, has asked Jews there to stop wearing the kippa, the symbol of their Jewish identity, “until better days” following a machete attack on a Jewish teacher.
Benjamin (35) was walking to the Hebrew institute in Marseilles on Monday morning, wearing orthodox Jewish clothing, including a kippa or skullcap.
A youth stabbed the religion teacher in the back with a 30cm machete. Benjamin fell to the ground, kicking and holding up a Torah, which took most of the blows. The boy fled when a passerby intervened.
Police caught up with him as he was about to board the metro. The assailant will turn 16 next week and is the son of Kurdish Turkish immigrants. His parents, who both work, were shocked when police turned up to search their apartment.
The boy did not attend mosque, and had shown no sign of psychiatric problems.
He “self-radicalised in front of his computer”, police said. Inside the satchel he abandoned next to his victim, police found a report card with high marks.
French intelligence services have shown themselves incapable of predicting mass, concerted jihadist attacks. A lone youth is impossible for them to detect.
Butcher’s cleaver
On January 7th, a Tunisian (initially misidentified as a Moroccan) charged policemen outside a Paris commissariat with a butcher’s cleaver. He and the Marseilles teenager acted alone, used bladed weapons and claimed their attacks on behalf of Islamic State.
Eleven months ago, the French jihadist Salim Benghalem posted a video from Syria in which he urged French Muslims to "defend your religion where you are. Kill them with knives".
In detention, the Kurdish youth "repeated several times that he had acted in the name of Allah and Islamic State," the prosecutor of Marseilles, Brice Robin, told journalists. "He said the Muslims of France dishonour Islam and the French army protects the Jews."
The youth said he had intended to use the 20cm blade hidden in his clothing against police.
“He said as soon as he gets out of prison, he’ll get a gun to kill cops,” Mr Robin continued.
The teenager has been charged with “attempted murder because of religious affiliation and defending terrorism”.
The prosecutor’s office says since jihadist attacks killed 130 people in Paris on November 13th, 70 people have been charged in Marseilles with defending terrorism, incitation to hatred or making death threats, “an exponential increase” which “mainly targets the Jewish community”.
‘Multiple knife attacks’
Michèle Teboul, a Jewish leader, said Marseilles is seeing “a duplication of what happened a few months ago in
Israel
, with multiple knife attacks”.
A man who attacked three Jews on their way to a synagogue was sent to prison for wounding one in the stomach. A Jewish history professor was stabbed on his way home.
And a Marseilles lycée student was sentenced to 10 months in prison for claiming Jews were responsible for the Paris attacks, and for threatening to "Kalash the Jews".
In a memorial service at the Hyper Cacher supermarket where four Jews were murdered on January 9th, 2015, prime minister Manuel Valls said "without the Jews of France, France would not be France". He spoke of the "immense anguish" of French Jews "to which we must respond".
Like the former president Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr Valls is a staunch supporter of Israel. "There can be no explanation [for anti-Semitic acts], for to explain is the beginning of an excuse," he said.
He linked anti-Semitism to what he called “compulsive hatred of the state of Israel” and asked: “How can we accept that there be boycott campaigns?”
Afraid
Attitudes towards the Muslim community have hardened. A year ago, Mr Valls said “I do not want there to be Jews who are afraid and Muslims who are ashamed in our Republic.” Since November 13th, France’s Muslim population, the largest in
Europe
, are rarely if ever mentioned by officials.
