France: 89 Percent of Jewish Students Experience Antisemitism

french lawmakers see A man wears an Israeli flag as he takes part in a rally against antis
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Victoria Friedman

A poll has revealed that 89 per cent of Jewish students in France have experienced some form of antisemitism, while nearly half (45 per cent) of non-Jewish students say they have witnessed an antisemitic act.

An Ifop study conducted at the request of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) found that 85 per cent of those surveyed had been subjected to some kind of remark with an antisemitic trope, 75 per cent said they had endured “jokes about the Holocaust or Jews,” 42 per cent had experienced an anti-Jewish insult, and one in five experienced some form of a physical “antisemitic assault.”

“In an effort to stick as close as possible to the reality on the ground, we compared these answers to those given by non-Jewish students, and 45 per cent of them say that they have witnessed at least one antisemitic act during their studies, which gives an idea of the scale of the phenomenon,” Frédéric Dabi, Deputy Director General of Ifop, told L’Express.

Of those Jewish students who were victims of antisemitism, only one per cent said that they went to the police, while eight per cent made a report to the university. Nearly one in five (19 per cent) did nothing for fear of reprisals while 58 per cent said they tried to resolve the situation themselves with the individuals concerned.

The survey also revealed that 68 per cent of all students felt that “Jews are unfairly attacked when things go wrong.”

Breitbart London reported in February that France had seen a 73 per cent rise in the number of antisemitic incidents in 2018, while in neighbouring Germany attacks against the Jewish community have increased by 60 per cent.

More and more Jews are feeling so unsafe in Europe that they are moving to Israel in large numbers, with statistics revealing there were more than 5,000 departures from France in 2016, 7,900 left in 2015, and 7,231 in 2014. In total, 40,000 French Jews have emigrated since 2006.

There have been high-profile killings of French Jews by Muslim migrants in recent years, notably that of Dr. Sarah Halimi who was beaten and thrown from the balcony of her Paris apartment in 2017 by her neighbour, a radical Islamic extremist named Kobili Traore.

According to investigators, the Malian immigrant allegedly shouted “Allah hu Akbar!” as he attacked the 65-year-old woman, whose daughter also claimed Traore had called her a “dirty Jewess.”

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