The media in France reported on two antisemitic incidents this week, one involving a Jewish woman who said she’s now decided to “leave France” and another befalling a non-Jewish teenager who was targeted for attending a Jewish school.
A teenage girl lured the teenager to meet her for a date on June 18 in the Toulouse area in France’s southeast, Le Figaro reported on Tuesday. She arrived accompanied by a boy. Two other teenagers, aged 14 and 16, also arrived at the site.
The alleged conspirators cornered the victim into a confined space and proceeded to humiliate him by forcing him to undress, dance, kneel and pray as they filmed themselves calling him antisemitic pejoratives, according to the report.
The assailants later shared the videos on social networks, Le Figaro reported. They allegedly threatened the victim with a knife and threatened to kill him if he complained to police, which he did nevertheless, the newspaper reported.
Two of the four conspirators were arrested on Friday, and prosecutors are looking into putting them on trial in juvenile court for assault aggravated by hate and abduction, among other charges.
Philippe Bodin, a prominent French right-wing activist, noted on X similarities between the case and the abduction and murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006, a harbinger of the antisemitic murders and assaults that have been directed at French Jews for about 20 years.
“Same fake-date setup that led to Ilan Halimi’s murder, fortunately without the fatal outcome. Macron’s France, anti-white or antisemitic racism,” Bodin wrote on X.
And near Nantes in western France on May 28, a Jewish woman was accosted, Cnews reported on Thursday. She complained to police, who arrested the suspected assailant, but he was released pending prosecution after denying the allegations against him.
The woman, who spoke to Cnews under the condition of anonymity, had entered a café bar near her home, whose owners knew her and that she was Jewish, that evening. The owner’s son asked her whether she was “not ashamed of her origins” in light of “the genocide in Gaza,” she told Cnews.
She told him she was not ashamed of being Jewish and an Israeli citizen and that the only act of genocide happened on Oct. 7, 2023, she recounted. She then left the place but the owner’s son followed her out, calling her a “dirty whore” and “dirty Jew,” she said. He also said: “We need to finish Hitler’s job,” she said.
She entered a nearby shop to get away from the owner’s son but he followed her in, where she filmed him screaming, “Dirty whore, I will f***k your mother. You’re filming? We’ll steal your cell, you dirty whore,” according to the recording viewed by Cnews.
Turning to another person, the assailant is heard saying: “Walid, take her cell, wallah [‘by God’ in Arabic].”
The woman, her husband and her children have decided to leave France, she said. “I don’t want the violence anymore. I live in fear and don’t want my children to experience this,” she said.
Cnews did not say where the family intended to move.