"Filthy Jew!" schoolchildren howl at a classmate. "Jews only want money and power," they tell their teachers. "Death to the Jews" graffiti appear on school walls outside Paris and other French cities. These are not scenes from the wartime Nazi occupation or a fictional France where the far-right has taken control. Outright anti-Semitism like this is a fact of life these days in the poor suburbs where much of France's Muslim minority lives.After a slow response when this "new anti-Semitism" flared four years ago, France has made fighting prejudice against Jews into a national priority. Holocaust education in state schools now starts with pupils as young as nine years old. But even the best plans for teaching about the Nazi massacre of Jews can fall short when confronted with an Islamic identity spreading among a minority of France's five million Muslims. "It works with those who are ready to listen," said Iannis Roder, a history teacher in the tough northern suburbs of Paris. "But it doesn't work with those who won't listen. They have their minds made up."
Roder is one of several history teachers who sounded an alarm in 2002 about a wave of anti-Semitism among Muslim pupils, much of it a reaction to the uprising by Palestinians against Israeli control of their lands. Their outspoken book "The Lost Territories of the Republic" opened France's eyes to classrooms where some Muslim pupils openly denounced Jews, praised Hitler and refused to listen to any non-Muslim teacher talking about the history of Islam. Such tension has prompted Jewish pupils in these areas to switch to private Jewish or even Catholic schools. "Muslim pupils react less now to what happens in the Middle East," Roder said. "But the situation hasn't really changed. As soon as you talk about Jews in some historical event, there are (anti-Semitic) comments."
Only A Minority Presents Problems
Both Roder and Claude Singer, head of Holocaust education projects at the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Centre (CDJC), underlined that most schools had no problem teaching about the Holocaust and most pupils learned the lesson being put across. "A national survey of history and geography teachers showed that only 15 percent of them had problems teaching about the Shoah," Singer said, using the Hebrew word widely used in French for the Nazi massacre of six million Jews. "The problem concerns not only the Shoah but anything to do with religion," he said. "Some Muslim pupils don't accept being taught about Christian religious life, which is very important to understand the Middle Ages. The Algerian War is difficult, too, as is slavery." The French slave trade is taught in French overseas territories but not in mainland France, which prompts some black pupils here to ask why they study the Holocaust but not slavery. "In general, I think that Shoah education is going well. It's certainly much better than before," Roder said.
France's centralised state education system began teaching about the Holocaust in junior and senior high schools in 1983. Three years ago, faced with the wave of "new anti-Semitism", it added special classes for pupils as young as 9 or 10 years old. Last September, all 5,500 lycees (high schools) around the country received DVDs with excerpts of the classic Holocaust film "Shoah" and related texts to give pupils a hard-hitting lesson in where hateful prejudice can lead. Centres like the CDJC also offer subsidised day trips to Auschwitz with a French survivor of the death camps. Auschwitz is located near Krakow in southern Poland, just over two hours' flight from Paris, and the trip costs only 50 euros ($65.20). "We'll bring several thousand pupils there in 2005," said Singer, who also guides visits to the Shoah Memorial at the CDJC's headquarters near the old Jewish quarter of Paris.
Foreign Jews Praise France
After being heavily criticised for its initial slow reaction to rising anti-Semitism, France has cracked down on anti-Semitic violence and multiplied efforts to teach tolerance in schools. The American Jewish Congress (AJC) lauded France in September for its toughened stand on anti-Semitic crimes and its plan to ban the virulently anti-Jewish satellite television Al-Manar, run by Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrillas. After meeting Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Justice Minister Dominique Perben, AJC Executive Director David Harris said they were "people who understood the magnitude of the problem and were determined to do something about it."
Harris said he understood the difficulty teachers had with Muslim pupils: "Focusing simply on Holocaust education does not necessarily resonate with children from immigrant communities who say they have no historical or cultural connection with it." A month earlier, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said in Paris that France was doing all it could to fight anti-Jewish prejudice -- a calming statement coming only weeks after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had urged French Jews to move to Israel to flee what he called "the wildest anti-Semitism."
Link To Cambodian And Rwandan Genocides
While some progress has been made, both Roder and Singer said teachers had to work hard to counter anti-Semitic views that pupils pick up in their disadvantaged neighbourhoods. "I wouldn't say any Islamic groups are behind this," Roder said. "I hear things like, 'Don't buy Coca Cola, it's Jewish'. They hear that sort of thing at the mosque or in their neighbourhoods and they repeat it now and then."
"I'm convinced it's not just a problem of Jews and Arabs," Singer said. "There is a wider problem, one of identity. The (Muslim) pupils feel under attack for their identity so they reject out of hand anything that could put them down." One way to get around this could be to introduce pupils to survivors of other mass killings, for example in Cambodia or Rwanda, Singer said. He has already arranged one such meeting for teachers to help them understand the problem of genocide. "The Shoah cannot be allowed to hide all the other horrors concerning other groups," he said. "That's not our goal here." This has to be done carefully, Singer said, because inviting witnesses to other genocides to speak with Jewish survivors runs the risk of diluting the unique nature of the Holocaust. "We must not make comparisons," he said firmly.