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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, October 17, 1980
Page 12
The most troubling outbreaks of neo-Nazism, coupled with anti-Semitism,
has been in France. Tensions came to a head on Friday, October 3 when
a bomb exploded outside a Jewish synagogue in ?aris. Intended to kill
and maim the 600 Jews assembled inside, the bomb went off prematurely
and killed four Frenchmen outside the building. Afterward, 150,000
French people representing
the
full political spectrum para�ed in support
of a crackdown on mounting anti-Semitic activity.
Responsibility for the blast is still uncertain, and may in fact be
attributed to underground Arab extremists. Nevertheless, the attack
came after a disturbing series of anti-Semitic outbreaks which h3ve
erupted--unchecked--all across France (120 incidents since 1975 with no
arrests). In the week before the explosion, two synagogues and two
Hebrew schools in Paris were machine-gunned. In a town southeast of
Paris, a brick painted with a swastika was hurled through a display
window of a Jewish-owned clothing store. A kosher butcher shop was
vandalized in Nice and Jewish stores were targeted in Paris and
Marseilles. In other places, walls of public buildings and synagogues
have been smeared with ugly graffiti proclaiming "Dirty Jews" and "Hitler
was Right."
President Giscard d'Estaing and his government have come under public
fire for not doing enough to stamp out the attacks. It did President
Giscard's image no good when he left Paris for a weekend holiday the
very night of the synagogue bombing. And Premier Raymond Barre was
heavily criticized for his thoughtless remark to a television reporter
concerning the bombing, saying that the bomb was ''aimed at Jews worshipping
in a synagogue, but struck four innocent Frenchmen...." Barres
1
comment,
said the rabbi of the synagogue on ABC's "Nightline," only proved once
again that the average Frenchman still does not consider his Jewish
compatriot as a Frenchman.
Leaders of France's 700,000-strong Jewish corrununity--largest in Europe-
have been cautious in trying not to exaggerate the incidents. Yet they
are disturbed by what seer.is to be an official "Gallic shrug" toward the
vio�ence. Also disturbing them is a police union official's claim that
30 members of the force are known neo-Nazis. Memories of World War II,
when the Nazi puppet Vichy government actively corroborated in rounding
up 85,000 French Jews to be sent +-.o German death camps, die hard.
No Popular Groundswell for the Radical Right
Yet, Raymond Aron, the most distin9uished of the French political commen
tators, himself a Jew, has tri�d
to
keep a balanced perspective on the
terrorism. He says:
"There ls 1:ot
2n
important anti-Semitic movement
in France. There are little groups of killers. It is not the same
thing."
William Pfaff, one of the best Aiuerican foreign affairs analysts today,
noted in a column from Paris, published in the Los Angeles Times of
October 12, 1980 that there is quite a difference between Fascism of
the 1930's and the neo-Fascist terrorists of today:
"Europe
1
s new fascists--those who bombed the October Festival in Munich
and the rail terminal in Bologna--as well as those in France, need to
.
.