The growing cancer of anti-Semitism in Europe

Anti-Semitism in all its vile, virulent forms is on the rise. In Europe the hatred of Jews, often presented as anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist sentiment, is terrorising a new generation.

Sarah Halimi and Mireille Knoll are victims of deadly anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism in all its vile, virulent forms is on the rise. In Europe the hatred of Jews, often presented as anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist sentiment, is terrorising a new generation.

France is among a number of countries that has seen a shocking rise in attacks against Jewish businesses and individuals in the past decade.

One such attack in recent days saw an elderly Holocaust survivor slaughtered in her own home.

Mireille Knoll escaped the Vel d’Hiv roundup of French Jews in 1942 that saw 13,000 of her countrymen, including thousands of children, sent to their deaths at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

But the wheelchair-bound 85-year-old could not escape an anti-Semitic neighbour that repeatedly stabbed her and then burnt her body in late March.

Authorities have charged two men, a neighbour and his friend, with murder with an anti-Semitic motive.

The suspects have not been named but both are reportedly in their twenties with lengthy criminal histories.

One has told investigators that the other screamed “Allahu Akbar” during the killing, according to reports in the New York Times and French publication Le Monde.

Knoll’s sadistic murder occurred on the same day that France suffered an Islamist attack at the hands of known extremist, Radouane Lakdim.

In that Islamic State-inspired attack, a 25-year-old Moroccan-born French citizen killed four people and injured another 16 before being shot by police in a supermarket in Trèbes.

One of those killed was Lt-Col Arnaud Beltrame, who heroically swapped places with a female hostage during the Islamist’s reign of terror.

French President Emmanuel Macron attended the funeral of both Knoll and Beltrame and drew a link between the two sets of crimes, which he labelled as examples of “barbaric obscurantism with the only goal of eliminating our liberties and our solidarities”.

The murder of Knoll occurred in the same area where another grisly anti-Semitic murder took place last April.

In that instance, it was clear that the torture and murder of 65-year-old Orthodox Jew Sarah Halimi was religiously motivated and yet French authorities steadfastly refused to acknowledge that fact for months.

The man accused of the retired doctor and schoolteacher’s murder screamed “Allahu Akbar” and recited Koranic verses before throwing her battered body off a balcony. 

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