After twelve Parisians were murdered at the headquarters of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie – I Am Charlie – trended worldwide. The expression of solidarity with the murdered free speech advocates crossed the world.
Of course, few of those expressing solidarity – especially governmental actors – stood with Charlie Hebdo or any other publication that ran cartoons of Mohammed at any point in the past. And press publications have been routinely pixellating graphics from Charlie Hebdo or slicing away any reports that Islam could have been involved.
Before the bodies of the writers and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were cold, the West’s suicidal left began worrying deeply about the problem of Islamophobia. Thus, the hashtag #RespectForMuslims began trending. That hashtag, of course, followed hard on the hashtag #IllRideWithYou, which trended worldwide after a Muslim terrorist took hostages in Sydney, Australia; #IllRideWithYou expressed solidarity with Muslims based on a made-up tale by a fantastical professor who said she had seen a possibly fictional Muslim woman remove her possibly fictional hijab after seeing coverage of the attack, and then had fictionally stood with this fictional Muslim.
Actual Jews in France do remove their actual yarmulkes thanks to actual attacks on Jews over the years in Paris. As early as 2003, France’s chief rabbi, Joseph Sitruk, warned Jewish men not to wear skullcaps in public for fear of violence and retaliation. I wear my yarmulke publicly on national television in the United States and Canada; when my wife and I visited Paris some two years ago, I removed my yarmulke and she hid her Star of David necklace.
That’s because both my wife and I knew of the warnings; we also knew the story of Ilan Halimi, a French Moroccan Jew who was kidnapped by a Muslim terrorist group and tortured over the course of three weeks. They tortured him with acid (upon his death, over 80 percent of his body had been burned with acid), beaten repeatedly in the testicles, and wrapped his head completely in duct tape while feeding him with a straw.
We also knew the story of the shootings in Toulouse and Montauban in March 2012, in which Mohammed Merah murdered seven people, injured five others, and attacked the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school.
Today, the same terror cell responsible for the murder of the journalists at Charlie Hebdo took over a Jewish supermarket in Paris on the eve of Sabbath, taking five hostages, reportedly a woman and her four children. Four of the hostages, according to the latest reports, have been killed. France responded by shutting down all Jewish businesses in Central Paris.
Charlie Hebdo was attacked for the crime of printing cartoons of Mohammed. The kosher supermarket was attacked for the crime of containing Jews.
The Nazis and their European collaborators dreamt of a Jew-free Europe. With the help of radical Muslims, that’s now becoming a reality.
Nonetheless, there is another hashtag that has not trended. That hashtag is #JeSuisJuif – I Am Jewish.
And we all know why.
The same Europe that pretends that Hamas is not a terror group and opposes Israel in its fight against Islamic terrorism will never tweet #JeSuisJuif. That’s because for years, Europe has done nothing in the face of Islamic terror against Jews; Jewish blood is cheap for those who separate Jews off from Western civilization more generally.
Deputy Mayor Philippe Karsenty of Neuilly-sur-Seine told us this morning on KRLA 870 that the police officer shot in the line of duty by one of the Islamic terrorists was shot because she was defending a Jewish school. That little factoid has not appeared in the media.
Two weeks ago, a kosher burger shop in the heavily Muslim 19th district was shot at; earlier that week, a synagogue was shot at as well. Two weeks before that, assailants invaded a Jewish home and raped a 19-year-old woman, telling her it was “because you are Jewish.” Days before that, two Jewish brothers wearing yarmulkes were attacked on the streets near their synagogue with brass knuckles. At the time, President Francois Hollande said, “France wants all the Jews of France to feel perfectly safe and quiet.” Obviously, that worked.
In July 2014, the world cowered as Muslims rampaged through the streets of Paris, vandalizing Jewish businesses and burning cars, shouting “Gas the Jews” and “Kill the Jews.” A mob surrounded the Synagogue de la Roquette, threatening to murder everyone inside. The only people who stopped the attack were members of the Jewish Defense League – a group that has been undermined by French authorities.
Weeks before that, 20 Muslim immigrants beat bloody Jewish students at a local library in Paris. And just weeks before that, attackers attempted to shoot up a synagogue in the 20th district; weeks before that, two teenagers were attacked with an axe in Paris.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said, “An attack on a synagogue and on a kosher shop is simply anti-Semitism. Nothing in France can justify this violence.” Obviously, that worked.
During the first quarter of 2014, 169 separate anti-Semitic incidents were recorded. In May 2014, two Jewish teens were beaten on the way to synagogue. In Toulouse, anti-Semitic inscriptions reading “Hitler burned 6 million Jews and forgot half” and “Long live Palestine” suddenly appeared.
But France surrendered to radical Muslims long ago. France’s 6.5 million Muslims are heavily radicalized: a 2007 poll showed that 42 percent of Muslims aged 18-29 backed occasional suicide bombings. The French government has created 751 “Sensitive Urban Zones” – no-go zones in which the police are essentially unwelcome. Those ZUSs are heavily Muslim, of course. French Muslims have taken over streets in Paris for public worship; France banned that practice, but that ban is not always enforced. Rowan Scarborough at The Washington Times says, “city officials have increasingly ceded control of heavily Muslim neighborhoods to Islamists, block by block.”
The Jews were the canaries in the Islamist European coal mine – and the Islamist European coal mine killed the Jewish canary. In mid-July 2014, over one thousand Jews left France during one ten-day span. Over the course of 2014, according to Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky, some 5,000 Jews left France.
After September 11, we asked if Muslim terrorists had won. We said that our most cherished values were under fire. We then spent the next thirteen years undermining freedom of speech so as not to offend Muslims, scrubbing Islamic connections to terror and uttering platitudes about the religion, and pretending that the murder of Jews all over the world and in Israel could be separated from the Islamic war against Western civilization – because, after all, it was just the Jews. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion both went by the wayside, thanks to our own pathetic willingness to undermine those values.
Yes, the terrorists won. And they will continue to win so long as hashtags like #RespectForMuslims and #IllRideWithYou trend while hashtags like #JeSuisJuif do not, and so long as people tweet #JeSuisCharlie, then go back to fretting over Islamophobia while undermining the fight against Charlie Hebdo‘s attackers.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.