WATCH: Shocking Antisemitism in France, Yellow Vests accost philosopher Alain Finkielkraut in Paris, “Dirty Zionist sh*t” “break you” “Go back to Tel Aviv” “**** your mother” “dirty sh*t”

“Prompts soul searching.” That soul should have been searched during the Dreyfus affair, Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, and of course the Vichy government. Note the religious beards on the savages.

Anti-Semitic Taunts by Yellow Vests Prompt French Soul-Searching

By Adam Nossiter, The NY Times, February 18, 2019:

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PARIS — He was one of France’s few public intellectuals to express support for the Yellow Vest movement at the beginning, but last week he said the protesters “devastate without regard for anything or anybody.”

Over the weekend, they turned their ire on him.

As Alain Finkielkraut, one of France’s leading essayists and critics from the right, walked by a Yellow Vest demonstration, protesters at its edge shouted insults widely condemned as anti-Semitic.

“Fascist!” they yelled.“Palestine!” “Go home to Israel!” “Tel Aviv, back to Tel Aviv!”

By Monday, the affair had snowballed into another episode of anguished national soul-searching over the problem of persistent anti-Semitism in France, and the evolution of the Yellow Vest movement from gas-tax protest to violent street revolt with hints of menace and hooliganism.

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Some politicians and intellectuals accused others of not condemning the insults to Mr. Finkielkraut firmly enough. President Emmanuel Macron telephoned him to express his anger, but said he would not be attending a march in Paris scheduled for Tuesday to condemn anti-Semitism.

The march, the accusations and counteraccusations, and the insults themselves are a recurring feature of public life in France, where the Interior Ministry last week reported a 74-percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents nationally.

The extreme sensitivity of the issue was evident again Monday in the recriminations that poured down on those whose condemnation was judged not severe enough. A lawyer with connections to Mr. Macron was forced to apologize for seeming to take the epithets too lightly in a television interview.

The affair crystallizes a number of dark elements bubbling to the surface in a climate of public tension in France, even beyond the Yellow Vest protests, now in their 14th week, whose economic resentments sometimes elide with anti-Semitism

Mr. Finkielkraut, the son of an Auschwitz survivor and a member of the Académie Française, one of the country’s oldest cultural institutions, is a polarizing figure. His views on politics and France’s immigrants put him well to the right in the country’s political spectrum.

Apart from displaying his erudition as a critic deeply knowledgeable about French literature and philosophy, Mr. Finkielkraut regularly inveighs, on a popular weekly radio program, against what he considers the lack of respect for traditional French culture in France’s immigrant communities. He has lamented the incursion of these communities into hitherto all-French zones, and often speaks out about the anti-Semitism in France’s Muslim suburbs.

Some of the virulence directed at him Saturday could perhaps be explained by these positions, though analysts said there was no doubt that anti-Semitism also played a role. The Yellow Vest movement has been criticized for its lack of diversity and for not raising the problems of longstanding poverty in France’s heavily immigrant suburbs, or banlieues.

The movement has been fueled by economic and class resentments, particularly over elitism and inequality, and mostly among white working-class French in small towns and rural areas.

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Muttering about the “Rothschild bank” can frequently be heard at the edges of the demonstrations, mixed in with expressions of hatred toward the president.

Mr. Macron was a banker at Rothschild and Company. But the invocation of Rothschild has also become a kind of anti-Semitic code for the supposed influence of Jews over the economy.

Mr. Finkielkraut was in the cross hairs of several of these currents on Saturday, as he stepped out to take his mother-in-law home from lunch and crossed the now-weekly Yellow Vest demonstration near his home on the Left Bank.

Citizen videos, which have run continually on French television, make clear what happened next: Several in the crowd, recognizing Mr. Finkielkraut from his frequent television appearances, began yelling insults.

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