Although politicians are keen on proclaiming the importance of the fight against anti-Semitism, they often focus on the extreme right, and completely ignore the Muslim, left-wing and stubbornly anti-Israeli voices. It shows that anti-Semitism has not disappeared from Europe after the Nazi era, but has merely changed its appearance. As long as there is no real political will to put an end to it, it will continue to ruin society, eroding the remains of the fundamental pillars of security, human rights and justice, whose access seem to be increasingly limited to European citizens, the V4 news agency reports.

University of Paris Professor Guy Milliere has presented an analysis of the situation on the Gatestone Institute’s website, which was reviewed by the Neokohn news portal. As Professor Milliere writes, the French National Assembly adopted the International Holocaust Memorial’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism on 3 December. The text was passed by a very narrow margin in the absence of “political courage”. The definition classifies hate speech against the State of Israel as “anti-Semitic”, if it is directed against the country as a Jewish collective.

MP Meyer Habib, who is forced to live under 24-hour police protection with his family because of anti-Semitic death threats, voiced his strong opinion on the matter in the following statement:

Since 2006, twelve French citizens were murdered because they were Jewish. Half of the racist incidents in France are against Jews, even though [Jews] represent less than 1% of the population. Anti-Zionism is an obsessive demonization of Israel and an abuse of anti-racist and anti-colonial rhetoric to deprive the Jews of their identity, Habib says.

French political leaders often declare that fighting against anti-Semitism is of utmost importance; they say it every time a Jew is murdered in the country. The only anti-Semitism they seem ready to fight, however, is right-wing anti-Semitism. They seemingly refuse to see that all the Jews killed or assaulted in France since 2006 were victims of Muslim anti-Semites, the professor writes. French political leaders also seemingly refuse to see another form of anti-Semitism that is on the rise: leftist anti-Semitism, which uses the mask of anti-Zionism to spread anti-Jewish hatred, Milliere continues.

Their position may be explained by the way the French mainstream media talk about Israel, or the consequences of those articles and reports. They constantly describe Israel as an evil country whose soldiers “cavalierly kill” Arabs on a daily basis and whose citizens “illegally occupy” territories that might belong to another people whom they “cruelly deprive of everything”. However, when Israeli Jews are murdered in a terrorist attack, the French government urges Israel to “show restraint” and avoid “starting a cycle of violence”. It is a way of saying that Jews should not be there, that the victims are the guilty party, and that those who attack them had good reason to do so.

But the spoken word has power, so one should not be surprised at the increasing tide of hatred against Jewish people. France’s government rejected US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement that Jewish communities in the disputed (“occupied”) territories do not contravene international law, and also protested when US President Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. An official statement by France’s government said that France is “the friend of Palestine” and supports “the creation of a Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital.”

According to the professor, the murders of Jews in France had a common trait: the perpetrators identified their victims with the “criminal Israel”. Mohamed Merah, who murdered Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse, told a police officer that he killed Jewish children because “the Jews kill Palestinian children” and that he saw “many reports on French TV showing it”. What he said did not prompt French television stations to be more careful to avoid whatever could be regarded as incitement to hatred and murder.

As demographic change is rapidly taking place in France, the country’s media, political leaders and government are behaving accordingly. Jews have become a shrinking part of the population – 0.6 % – and carry no political weight. The French Muslim population is quickly growing – to more than 12% of the total. It has become virtually impossible to win an election in France without now counting on the Muslim vote.

The few people who still criticise Islam and Muslim anti-Semitism in France are mercilessly harassed by Islamic organisations and even more harshly condemned by the courts. On 4 December, a prosecutor asked the court to sentence Christine Tasin, president of the anti-Islamic movement Republican Resistance. In June 2017, she warned in an article of “a Muslim invasion” and wrote that the “Islam may be incompatible with Western civilisation”. She could be the first person in France to be sent to prison for the “crime” of “Islamophobia”.

It is also disconcerting for many that on October 30 in Paris, when President Macron inaugurated the European Center for Judaism, he named all the Jews recently murdered in France, but he did not name the murderers. He merely denounced “those who want to sow hatred and division”. He spoke positively of a time when a large part of Spain was Muslim, and said that there, in Andalusia, “the Jews, despite their dhimmi status, developed an extraordinary culture.”

Macron seems to have accepted the barely tolerated status and subordination of the Jews under Islamic rule as normal. According to some French intellectuals, it casts a dark shadow on the future of the Jewry in the light of Muslims’ growing proportion in the population. France’s position is by no means an exception in Europe. Anti-Semitism is advancing throughout the continent and often has a Middle Eastern cast. Yet, the authorities focus only on “right-wing anti-Semitism”.

In Germany, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution conducted a study analysing Muslim attacks perpetrated against the Jews, but it explicitly refused to say that these attacks were anti-Semitic, and instead attributed them to “religious and cultural beliefs that Muslim immigrants bring with them” to Germany. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas added, as if it were an excuse, that Muslims arriving in Germany “come from countries in which the powerful incite hatred toward Jews and Israel.”

According to a survey, only published by the Jewish media in the UK, anti-Semitism is far more common among Muslims than among other citizens of Britain. The rampant left-wing anti-Semitism, also represented by Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour Party, may be well-known by now, as it has been widely covered during the British elections.

Most major European media are as anti-Israel as the major French media, a Spiegel article used anti-Semitic clichés to vilify Israel.

Shuli Davidovich, an Israeli press attaché in London, said a decade ago: “the human face of the Israeli does not exist. It’s always the helmet, the rifle, the aggressor, the occupier.”

Most of Europe’s political leaders are as hostile to Israel as France’s political leaders are. Former European Commission Vice President Federica Mogherini’s successor, Josep Borrell, advocates for unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood.

Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that. You have to live with it, Borrell said this February.

Anti-Semitism on the continent is growing markedly with the Muslim immigration. Another study made in Germany in 2011 showed that 40% of European adults agreed with the statement, “Israel behaves toward the Palestinians like the Nazis behaved toward the Jews.”

American political commentator Joel Kotkin wrote that all available data show that anti-Jewish hatred and anti-Israel prejudices could mean the end of Jewish presence on the continent: “For millennia, following the destruction of the Second Temple and the beginning of the diaspora, Europe was home to the majority of the world’s Jews. That chapter of history is over. As Jews continue fleeing the continent, by the end of this century all that’s left will be a Jewish graveyard.”