PARIS, France (AFP) — Nearly 100 graves were daubed with swastikas at a Jewish cemetery in eastern France, authorities said Tuesday, with President Emmanuel Macron vowing to crack down on hate crimes as the country grapples with a surge in anti-Semitic acts.
Macron went immediately to the cemetery in Quatzenheim in the Alsace region near Germany, a few hours ahead of nationwide rallies to denounce a surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes.
“We shall act, we shall pass laws, we shall punish,” Macron told Jewish leaders while inspecting the 96 tombstones spray-painted with blue and yellow swastikas.
“Those who did this are not worthy of the Republic,” he said, later placing a white rose on a tombstone commemorating Jews deported to Germany during World War II.
Another grave bore the words “Elsassisches Schwarzen Wolfe” (“Black Alsatian Wolves), a separatist group with links to neo-Nazis in the 1970s.
It was the second case of extensive cemetery desecration in the region since December, when nearly 40 graves as well as a monument to Holocaust victims were vandalised in Herrlisheim, about a half-hour drive from Quatzenheim.
Macron was to also visit the Paris Holocaust memorial Tuesday ahead of the anti-racism marches, called after a spate of anti-Jewish vandalism discovered in and around Paris following recent “yellow vest” protests.
– ‘Immigrate to Israel’ –
Many French Jews are on edge after the government announced a 74 percent jump in anti-Jewish offences in 2018 after two years of declines.
Germany has also seen a sharp rise in anti-Semitic crimes, with more than 1,600 cases recorded last year.
Israel’s Immigration Minister Yoav Gallant said the increase should prompt French Jews to move to Israel.
“I firmly condemn the anti-Semitism in France and call on the Jews: Come home, immigrate to Israel,” he said on Twitter.
Tensions mounted last weekend after a prominent French writer was the target of a violent tirade by a protester in Paris on Saturday.
A video of the scene showed the protester calling the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut a “dirty Zionist” and telling him “France belongs to us”.
In France, several officials have accused the grass-roots yellow vest movement of unleashing a wave of extremist violence that has fostered anti-Semitic outbursts among some participants.
“It would be false and absurd to call the yellow vest movement anti-Semitic,” Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told L’Express magazine in an interview published Tuesday.
However he added that “anti-Semitism has very deep roots in French society”.
Philippe, who has promised a tough new law targeting online hate speech by this summer, will join several of his ministers at a Paris rally due to start at 7:00 pm (1800 GMT) Tuesday.
– Long history –
Macron is to lay out his plans to combat anti-Semitism during a speech at the annual dinner of the CRIF umbrella association of French Jewish groups on Wednesday.
Anti-Semitism has a long history in France where society was deeply split at the end of the 19th century by the Alfred Dreyfus affair, a Jewish army captain wrongly convicted of treason.
During World War II, the French Vichy government collaborated with Germany notably in the deportation of Jews to death camps.
More recently French anti-Semitism, traditionally associated with the far right, has also spread among far-left pro-Palestinian extremists and radicals from amongst the growing Muslim community.
But Macron has resisted calls by some lawmakers to explicitly penalize so-called anti-Zionist statements calling into question Israel’s right to exist as a nation.
Macron himself has been targeted in some of the anti-Semitic graffiti found in the wake of recent protests, though many prominent yellow vest demonstrators have said they plan to participate in the anti-racism marches.
But a recent Ifop poll of “yellow vest” backers found that nearly half those questioned believed in a worldwide “Zionist plot” and other conspiracy theories.
“The yellow vests aren’t an anti-Semitic movement,” said Jean-Yves Camus of the Political Radicalisation Observatory in Paris.
“But it’s a leaderless, horizontal movement… and extremist elements have been able to drown out the voices of its high-profile figures in the media,” he said.
© Agence France-Presse