Two prominent Jewish leaders said today that there was on obvious connection between French Middle East policy and the recent wove of anti-Semitic acts in France, including the Oct. 3 bombing of the Rue Copernic Temple in Paris.
That viewpoint was expressed by Howard Squadron, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), at a meeting of the Presidents Conference here. Squadron spoke of the meeting he had earlier this week with the French Ambassador to the U.S., Francois de la Boulez and Schindler reported on his visit to Paris last week to speak of the bombed out synagogue.
Squadron said that the French Ambassador did not accept the contention that there is a link between his government’s Middle East policy, including its advocacy of full status as a Middle East negotiating party to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the outbreak of anti-Semitism in France.
“I have not seen any sign that the French government will reconsider its Middle East policy which is to appease and give respectability to the PLO,” Squadron said, “to join prominently in every public criticism of Israel no matter how extravagant and unjustified; to risk global catastrophe by providing nuclear know-how to the radical regime in Baghdad in exchange for Iraqi oil and generally to sabotage the Camp David peace process.”
He said he told the French envoy that the attitude of the Jewish community in America and Americans generally toward France “is going to be fainted” as a result of the French government’s pro-Arab policy.
Squadron said the French Ambassador expressed the “profound dismay” of the French government and people at the anti-Semitic outbreaks and repeated his government’s pledge to bring the perpetrators to justice. Squadron and Yehuda Hellman, executive director of the Presidents Conference, are going to Paris to attend a meeting of the Representative Council of Jewish Organizations in France (CRIF) next Thursday.
Schindler, a past chairman of the Presidents Conference, said the major lesson learned from the synagogue bombing is that “the unjustified blackening of Israel by governments of Western Europe diminishes the status of the Jews” and that “the extortionist price does not have its limits” because terrorism which is first aimed at Jews is later used against other minorities and religious groups.
He said that in his short visit to France, he found that “French Jews are deeply concerned that the new Nazis who seek to destroy Jewish lives have been encouraged by official laxity and inattention to the violent nature of the anti-Semitic movement in France.”
Concluding the meeting, Squadron said the Jewish communities’ response all over the world to the latest anti-Semitic outbreak is going to be firm and united to show the world that today’s world “is not the same” as in the past and Jews “are not going to be victimized that easily. “
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