Juden!

Vandalism was discovered one morning on a Bagelstein store in the 4th District of Paris where the word “Juden!” was spray painted in yellow across the window of a bagel store in Paris.

An anti-Semitic tag in the heart of Paris, well that’s one too many for me, and it’s like the most terrible lessons in antiquity no longer illuminate our consciences.

The French League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism displayed a photo of the store graffiti beside a photo of a Berlin store that was marked in a comparable way in 1938 Nazi Germany, and on the day the graffiti was discovered, hooligans spraypainted more than 20 swastikas on sites across Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, but the people of Bondi and indeed all Australian’s of goodwill stood together in rebuking the hateful display.

Sadly, Hitler is not dead, and he exists in many people’s lives! And this is the famous district of the capital city where thousands of men, women and children were rounded up by colluding with French police and German soldiers throughout the Second World War.

Many had to don yellow stars distinguishing their religion, and their businesses were ‘marked’ with the word Jew before they were taken to their deaths in concentration camps, and we should do everything to make sure that these perpetrators of this abuse are prosecuted, and we should not let anything pass.

This is intensified deliberate destruction and incitement to racial hostility, and Far-Right parties in France including the National Rally which used to be called the National Front have a chronicle of anti-Semitism, and their members are frequently sentenced for offences including Holocaust denial, and those perpetrators of the assault were among those who were nostalgic for the Third Reich.

Some 67,000 French, Polish and German Jews were exiled from Paris between June 1942 and July 1944. They were dehumanised not only by the Nazis, but by French police and paramilitaries, and then herded on wagons belonging to SNCF, France’s national railway.

It’s only in current years that the French has started to acknowledge the role they executed in the Holocaust, and it was as recently as 1995 that the then conservative president Jacques Chirac eventually publically declared that French police and other authority figures had served to arrest 13,152 Jews on two days, July 16 and 17 1942 in Paris.

They included more than 4,000 children, and all were held at the so-called Vel d’Hiv cycle stadium before being taken to camps such as Auschwitz, and yes, French people, the French nation did help the occupier in its unlawful derangement, and this is the nastiest anti-Semitism on the streets of the city of light.

But despite years of government attempts to combat it, they’re pretty far from having ended anti-Semitism, but there was a particular concern because overall, the anti-Semitic act had been on a slump in recent years, and now each offence against one of the nation’s citizens, because he or she is Jewish, resonates like broken glass.

This is pretty distressing because why do some people have to be antagonists? Perhaps the Jews of France should have put a tag next to it where they put “Juden”, someone should have come along and put, “And proud of it.”