According to France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiments spreading in the French society have all the necessary elements to be considered as anti-Semitism.
‘’In the 1970s, a new type of Jew-hatred emerged among elites, one that expressed itself primarily as hostility to Zionism and Israel. This new bigotry, has all the components of anti-Semitism, the old ones,” including a “plot”-based view of imagined Jewish conspiracies,’’ he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
“Step by step,” the elites’ anti-Semitism “followed a migration and impacted young people in the poor neighborhoods,” he added.
“There will always be a couple of idiots who desecrate Jewish cemeteries—the petit Nazis,” he said. “But unfortunately I think that the anti-Semitism that struck French society is much deeper than that. In 2013 or 2014, you have people in the streets of Paris chanting ‘Death to the Jews!’ And in all the attacks in Paris or the attacks in Copenhagen, targeting the Jews is really at the heart of their motivation.”
Valls has been among Europe’s most vocal advocates for the Jewish community and was recently the target of an anti-Semitic smear himself when a former Socialist Foreign Minister claimed that the Prime Minister’s policies were influenced by his wife’s Jewishness.
Valls is married to renowned violinist Anne Gravoin, who is Jewish.
Valls said that Dumas’ comments did not affect him “at a personal level.”
“Except that I felt that I was dirtied all over,” he explained. “But I immediately understood that when a former minister, a president of the Constitutional Council, says something, his words have a lot of influence for young people. It gives justification for how they think.”