The Obin report

When I went to Paris back in 2005 to visit with an old friend who lived there, I visited the Jewish day schools. I was struck by the fences, the gates, the fortress-like apparitions surrounding the schools. It stuck out in pretty Paree. It reminded me of the schools constantly under attack in Sderot in Israel (but no bomb shelters, and the gates at the French schools were makeshift at best).

I wrote this at the time:

The Jewish quarter is alive and thriving, religious, orthodox. I could not go into the synogogues (see sign on the left on the front doors of the synogogues) or Jewish day schools, as security is elevated there (as it should be) because the Paris that surrounds them thinks the sun is shining and it's all going to be fine — denial, major denial……… Honestly, I wish those Jews weren't there.

And that was before the horrifc torture and Islamic ritual murder of Ilan Halimi. Front Page Magazine has this (thanks to Jane):

Several years ago, the French Ministry of Education appointed a team led by one Jean-Pierre Obin to investigate the impact of Islam on the country’s schools.  Obin and his colleagues traveled to sixty-one schools around France, observed student life, interviewed school employees ranging from the principal to the cook in the cafeteria, and produced a report entitled “The Signs and Manifestations of Religious Affiliation in Educational Establishments.”  Their conclusions were so sensational that the ministry, instead of releasing the report to the public, shelved it.  Fortunately, there exists such a thing as the Internet, and in March 2005, the report – dated July of the previous year – was leaked online.  It is now available at the ministry’s own website.

Every one of the 18,000 words in the Obin report is worth reading.  And sobering reading it is.  As I observed in my 2006 book While Europe Slept,

The report was in large part a catalog of refusals: increasingly, Muslim students were refusing to sing, dance, participate in sports, draw a face, or play an instrument….They refused to eat school cafeteria food that isn’t halal (that is, prepared according to sharia law) and refused to draw a right angle in math class because it looks like part of the Christian cross. They refused to swim because they didn’t want to be polluted by “infidels’ water.” They refused to read Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Rousseau because they’re antireligion, Cyrano de Bergerac because it’s too racy, Madame Bovary because it promotes women’s rights, and Chrétien de Troyes because it’s, well, chrétien. They refused to accept basic facts of Christian and Jewish history and they rejected outright the existence of pre-Islamic religions in Egypt.

Many Muslim students refused, quite simply, to identify themselves as French: when told that they were French, they said that this was impossible – they were Muslims!  They explicitly rejected laïcité (the concept of public secularism that is at the very heart of modern French society), calling it anti-religious.  Indeed, they rejected Western values tout court.  And they had deliberately disrupted moments of silence for the victims of 9/11 and of the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, many of them openly expressing admiration for Osama bin Laden.

But perhaps the most sobering revelations contained in the Obin report concerned the attitudes of Muslim students toward Jews, and the effect of this on their Jewish classmates.  In history classes, Muslim students objected to anything having to do with Judaism.  Holocaust denial was common.  And of course the entire history of the Middle East, especially the Israeli-Palestine question, was a minefield.  Aside from a “routine” use in schools of the wordsJew and fuij (kike) as insults, Obin and his colleagues reported an increase in threats and assaults directed “by students of North African origin” against classmates known or suspected to be Jewish.  “In the testimonies we collected, events in the Middle East as well as a chapter of the Quran are frequently cited by students to justify their words and aggression.”  Muslim kids spoke positively about the persecution and extermination of Jews; praise of Nazism and Hitler was “not unusual”; anti-Semitic graffiti, including swastikas, abounded.

As a result, in some cities, Jewish students were separated from their classmates and transported to and from school together for their own safety.  In many cases, at the request of Jewish parents, only the school principal was informed of their children’s Jewish identity, which was concealed from teachers and other students – although, as Obin and his team noted, “the surnames of students do not always allow” for such concealment.  (Seen Au revoir les enfantslately?)  In drawing their conclusion about the effect of all this on Jewish students, Obin and company did not mince words.  I will first quote from the original French: “Il est en effet, sous nos yeux, une stupéfiante et cruelle réalité : en France les enfants juifs – et ils sont les seuls dans ce cas – ne peuvent plus de nos jours être scolarisés dans n’importe quel établissement.”  In other words: “It is, in effect, in our view, a stupefying and cruel reality: in France, Jewish children – and this statement applies only to them – can today no longer be educated at any institution.”

That was in 2004.  I have no illusion that the situation for Jewish children in France has improved in the slightest since that report was written – on the contrary, I am sure that things have only gotten worse.  I imagine that this is at least part of the reason why some Jewish parents send their children to Jewish schools such as the one in Toulouse: presumably they think their children are safer there than they are in public schools.  Perhaps the parents of at least one of the children slain in Toulouse enrolled their child in that school for precisely that reason.  But this massacre, carried out by a young man (aged 23) who was himself presumably only a few years out of the classroom, only confirms that Obin was absolutely correct: there is no school in France – not even a Jewish school! – where Jewish children are safe from the pernicious evil of Muslim Jew-hatred.  It also underscores the fact that, in all the years since Obin sounded the alarm, nothing significant has been done by French authorities to address the atrocious state of affairs he on which Obin and his co-workers so boldly pulled back the curtain.  After Toulouse, the question is this: Will anything be done now to make it possible for Jewish children to receive a safe education in France?  What’s your guess?

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dsinc

12 years ago

This is not only bad news for the Jews because, in the not too distant future, unless there is a sudden awakening in the West, we will all be Jews.

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cooldude9366

12 years ago

Put this in the context of Islamofascists and their water carriers that Israeli Jews (and only Jews) should go back where they came from. Presumably to countries like France where they are a minority and can be picked off at will.

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