Hate Crime in Toulouse: The Guardian’s Callous Disregard Towards Antisemitic Ideology

Police outside Ozar Hatorah school in France. Photo: screenshot via AFP.

In the Guardian’s 472 word editorial on Tuesday, France: republican ideals, published before the identity of the perpetrator was known, a few gnawing facts, evidence of simply unmistakable leftist intellectual ticks, stand out.

The word “Jew” is only used twice.

The word was used in the opening passage, regarding the Dreyfus Affair – a polemical device employed by the unnamed Guardian author (perhaps Seumas Milne?) to argue that the values of the French Republic are more on trial in the recent attacks than the individual perpetrator.

As he was held in prison on Devil’s Island, the only prayers that Alfred Dreyfus offered up were those to the president of the republic. Piers Paul Read points out in his new account of the most infamous miscarriage of French justice that the ideals that sustained the Jewish army officer falsely accused of espionage were those of republican France. Read quotes from one of the letters Dreyfus wrote from his Caribbean gulag to his wife Lucie: “However atrocious may have been the tortures inflicted on me … I have never forgotten that, far above men, far above their passions, far above their errors, is our country. It is she who will be my final judge.”

The other time the word “Jew” was used was in the following passage:

A similar sentiment is re-emerging in a France [is] stunned by the Toulouse shootings. And it will pour out on to Paris’s streets on Saturday when the French – Jews and Muslims and everyone else – will march in their thousands together. Their message stands repetition: the republic will come together in the face of such an assault on its minorities.

Note that the murder of four Jews outside a Jewish school is merely referred to as the Toulouse shootings.

The word “antisemitism” is never once written, not even when speculating on the possible motives of the brutal attack.

It is dangerous to speculate on motives. They may have no connection with the 17th Parachute regiment of Montauban, three of whose members were filmed in 2008 making Nazi salutes. We simply do not know whether the shootings are connected to the anniversary of the end of the Algerian war, or whether France is on the brink of its own Oslo moment, when Anders Behring Breivik massacred 77 people at a Social Democrat summer camp last year.

Innocent Jews in Toulouse are targeted for no other conceivable reason other than their faith, and the Guardian simply can’t acknowledge that antisemitism is even a possible motive!

Guardian then pivots to its desired villain:

The first to say what was on everyone’s mind was not the Socialist challenger François Hollande but the centrist François Bayrou. He said the killings were the product of a sick society, with politicians who pointed the finger and inflamed passions. No prize for guessing whom he was talking about. Nicolas Sarkozy’s lurch to the right has included such claims as there being too many immigrants in France

France’s main concern, like Britain’s, is jobs. Its problem, like ours, is curbing the super-rich not immigrants

No, the murder of four innocent Jews is not “the product of a sick society.” An abstraction (or systemic oppression) can’t pull the trigger and murder innocents. Only a very particular individual, who possesses free will and moral agency, blinded by murderous racism, can engage in such sociopathic behavior.

Such callous disregard for Jewish life – a pathos so severe that children are fair game – was the product of a very particular, and especially odious, brand of religious extremism.

Can morally sober adults truly deny that radical Islam’s antipathy towards Jews represents the complete antithesis of liberal values – an obstacle to the noble Western aspiration of building truly tolerant, multicultural societies?

The Guardian Left political orientation increasingly defined by this egregious, supremely dangerous, ideologically inspired moral blind spot.

A seven-year-old Jewish girl by the name of Miriam Monsonego wasn’t murdered by France, or Nicolas Sarkozy.

The man who cornered a no-doubt petrified little girl, grabbed her by the hair and fired a bullet at point-blank range through her brain was named Mohammed Merah.