Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?

By Jeffrey Goldberg

For half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against Jews. Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from radicalized Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice.

All comes from the Jew; all returns to the Jew.” — Édouard Drumont (1844–1917), founder of the Anti-Semitic League of France

I. The Scourge of Our Time

The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the son of Holocaust survivors, is an accomplished, even gifted, pessimist. To his disciples, he is a Jewish Zola, accusing France’s bien-pensant intellectual class of complicity in its own suicide. To his foes, he is a reactionary whose nostalgia for a fairy-tale French past is induced by an irrational fear of Muslims. Finkielkraut’s cast of mind is generally dark, but when we met in Paris in early January, two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he was positively grim.

“My French identity is reinforced by the very large number of people who openly declare, often now with violence, their hostility to French values and culture,” he said. “I live in a strange place. There is so much guilt and so much worry.” We were seated at a table in his apartment, near the Luxembourg Gardens. I had come to discuss with him the precarious future of French Jewry, but, as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo killers seemed to be reaching its conclusion, we had become fixated on the television.

Finkielkraut sees himself as an alienated man of the left. He says he loathes both radical Islamism and its most ferocious French critic, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s extreme right-wing—and once openly anti-Semitic—National Front party. But he has lately come to find radical Islamism to be a more immediate, even existential, threat to France than the National Front. “I don’t trust Le Pen. I think there is real violence in her,” he told me. “But she is so successful because there actually is a problem of Islam in France, and until now she has been the only one to dare say it.”

Suddenly, there was news: a kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes, in eastern Paris, had come under attack. “Of course,” Finkielkraut said. “The Jews.” Even before anti-Semitic riots broke out in France last summer, Finkielkraut had become preoccupied with the well-being of France’s Jews.

We knew nothing about this new attack—except that we already knew everything. “People don’t defend the Jews as we expected to be defended,” he said. “It would be easier for the left to defend the Jews if the attackers were white and rightists.”

I asked him a very old Jewish question: Do you have a bag packed?

“We should not leave,” he said, “but maybe for our children or grandchildren there will be no choice.”

Reports suggested that a number of people were dead at the market. I said goodbye, and took the Métro to Porte de Vincennes. Stations near the market were closed, so I walked through neighborhoods crowded with police. Sirens echoed through the streets. Teenagers gathered by the barricades, taking selfies. No one had much information. One young man, however, said of the victims, “It’s just the Feuj.” Feuj, an inversion of Juif—“Jew”—is often used as a slur.

I located an acquaintance, a man who volunteers with the Jewish Community Security Service, a national organization founded after a synagogue bombing in 1980, to protect Jewish institutions from anti-Semitic attack. “Supermarkets now,” he said bleakly. We made our way closer to the forward police line, and heard volleys of gunfire. The police had raided the market; the suspect, Amedy Coulibaly, we soon heard, was dead. So were four Jews he had murdered. They had been shopping for the Sabbath when he entered the market and started shooting.

I asked Finkielkraut a very old Jewish question: Do you have a bag packed?

France’s 475,000 Jews represent less than 1 percent of the country’s population. Yet last year, according to the French Interior Ministry, 51 percent of all racist attacks targeted Jews. The statistics in other countries, including Great Britain, are similarly dismal. In 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, chased, harassed, spat on, and insulted for being Jewish. Sale Juif—“dirty Jew”—rang in the streets, as did “Death to the Jews,” and “Jews to the gas.”

The epithet dirty Jew, Zola wrote in “J’Accuse …!,” was the “scourge of our time.” “J’Accuse …!” was published in 1898.

The Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood of Paris in the aftermath of the January 9 attack that killed four Jews.

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ISIS steps up use of chemicals on battlefields in Iraq and Syria

By Samira Said and Tim Lister, CNN

(CNN)—ISIS recently used devices filled with chemical agents against Kurdish forces and civilians in both Iraq and Syria, a joint investigation by two independent organizations has found.

The findings build on previous reporting that ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) has begun to adapt both suicide bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to include chlorine and other chemicals and may seek to exploit the use of chemicals as it develops new weapons.

The two U.K.-based groups — Conflict Armament Research (CAR) and Sahan Research — sent teams to investigate allegations that ISIS used chemical munitions on three occasions last month. Two of the incidents occurred in Hasakah province in northern Syria, where ISIS is locked in battle with the Kurdish YPG group. The third involved a 120 mm mortar that landed near Kurdish positions at the Mosul Dam in northern Iraq but failed to explode.

CAR said this was “the first documented use by (ISIS) forces of projectile-delivered chemical agents against Kurdish forces and civilian targets.”

Evidence found

James Bevan, executive director of CAR, said the group’s investigators went to the scene of the Mosul Dam attack a week after it occurred. Even then, the dark yellow liquid leaking from the mortar emitted a powerful odor. “The investigation team also experienced headaches and nausea when in close proximity to the projectile/agent,” Bevan said, symptoms consistent with exposure to a chlorine chemical agent.

The device was sent for further testing by the Kurdish Regional Government. A senior official with the Kurdish Region Security Council told CNN Sunday that they expected to confirm the device contained chlorine. The official said there had been several other instances in which ISIS had used chlorine against Kurdish Peshmerga units, and the group’s tactics were evolving.

CAR and Sahan Research also investigated the munitions that landed in northern Syria — at Tel Brak and Hasakah. Bevan said ISIS forces had “fired a whole range of projectiles at a Kurdish YPG unit outpost” on June 28th. They had caused “loss of focus; loss of consciousness in some cases; pain from the waist down, resulting in temporary, localized paralysis” and other problems.

Nine days later, when researchers examined fragments of munitions at Tel Brak, they were covered in a chemical residue which still had an acrid odor and caused powerful throat and eye irritation. At a hospital in Qamishli, several of the affected fighters tested positive for PH3, a phosphine-based chemical used as an insecticide or fumigating compound.

On the same day as the Tel Brak attack, a home in Hasakah was struck by a rocket that contained a chemical liquid whose residue was dark olive green. The projectile had been fired from a village about four kilometers away which was then under the control of ISIS, Bevan said. Again, investigating teams found residues that “emitted an acrid odor and induced powerful throat and eye irritation.”

‘A test run’

Malik Ellahi, spokesman for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, told CNN that the OPCW had not seen the evidence collected by CAR but “any use of toxic chemicals as weapons constitutes use of chemical weapons which is clearly prohibited by the Chemical Weapons convention.”

CAR has had teams operating in both Syria and Iraq for a year, documenting tens of thousands of weapons and ammunition types used by ISIS.
Bevan says ISIS experiments with different designs. “We consider this very much a test run, using improvised munitions and filling them with chemicals that are available to them.”

An agricultural chemical like phosphine would be available in farming regions of northern Syria.

ISIS often boasts through its official media outlets of its ingenuity in building and adapting weapons. Last month it released photographs of its fighters manufacturing frames for Katyusha rockets and of an IED workshop in Fallujah, near Baghdad, described by analysts Flashpoint Partners as the “epicenter of the group’s explosive-making efforts, home to its manufacturing facilities for proprietary rockets” and other weapons.

Even though the attacks at Mosul Dam and Tel Brak were more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) apart, their similarities suggest that different ISIS commands are sharing technology and skills.

Past allegations

There have been a number of allegations in the past year that ISIS has used chlorine in attacks by suicide bombers and in IEDs in Iraq. CNN’s Ben Wedeman reported that several members of the Iraqi security forces had been incapacitated last September by what appeared to have been chlorine gas released by an explosion near the town of Balad. ISIS had recently taken over a local water purification plant, where chlorine would likely have been present.

In March, the Kurdish Regional Government said residues tested by a laboratory in Europe had shown the use of chlorine during a suicide attack by ISIS at Eski Mosul on January 23. At the time, ISIS was trying to recapture an important road junction in the area and had sent a series of suicide bombs against Kurdish positions. A senior Kurdish security official said the vehicle had been laden with chlorine canisters. Several Peshmerga fighters were sickened in the attack.

There were also reports that ISIS used chlorine in roadside bombs set around Tikrit in March. ISIS was then trying to hold onto the town (unsuccessfully) in the face of a major Iraqi offensive. One video showed a large cloud of orange gas billowing into the air as an IED was set off in a controlled explosion.

Crude chlorine-based devices were also used by Iraqi insurgents against U.S. forces in 2006-07, often in combination with high explosives. In one attack in 2007, a suicide bomber detonated a truck of explosives and chlorine cylinders in Ramadi. Some 20 people were killed — apparently by the explosion — while scores more needed hospital treatment for the effects of chlorine.

In the current conflict in Syria, the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been repeatedly accused of using chlorine in bombs. The Syrian American Medical Society, which runs medical facilities in the country, documented 31 attacks using chlorine dropped from helicopters and over a three-month period this year. The Syrian government denies it has used chlorine bombs.

Bevan says the latest evidence of ISIS using chemicals is disturbing because it shows the group has access to chemical agents which can be weaponized and that it continues to experiment with munitions and delivery systems.

“If they deem this to be militarily effective, then we have suspicion that they will use them again,” Bevan told CNN.