Brussels shooting, right-wing electoral surge spotlight threats for Europe’s Jews

By Alina Dain Sharon/JNS.org

During the same weekend, the fatal shooting at a Jewish museum in Brussels and the surge of right-wing parties in continent-wide parliament elections have brought the multidirectional threats faced by Europe’s Jews back to the forefront.

These problems are coming together from the “right-wing, certain elements of the Muslim community, and at the same time also from the radical left, which is viciously anti-Israel,” Daniel Schwammenthal, director of American Jewish Committee (AJC) Transatlantic Institute in Brussels, told JNS.org.

The shooter who killed four people in the May 24 attack at the Jewish Museum of Belgium remains unknown. Two of the victims were an Israeli couple in their 50s, Mira and Emmanuel Riva. On the same day as the shooting, two Jewish brothers were beaten by two still-unknown assailants outside of a synagogue in Creteil, a suburb of Paris.

European voters, meanwhile, went to the polls Sunday to elect MEPs—members of the 751-seat European Parliament, which is also based in Brussels. Eurosceptic (opposing the political integration of Europe), right-leaning, and in some cases far-right parties gained electoral ground in the elections, in results that were dubbed a “political earthquake” by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

In France, the right-wing National Front party won 25 percent of the vote for that country’s parliament seats, and in the United Kingdom the Eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP) won 27 percent of the vote. In Germany, the son a Nazi SA assault division member was the first candidate from the extreme-right National Democratic Party (NDP) of Germany to be elected to the European Parliament.

Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, AJC’s Paris Director, told JNS.org that the National Front party has managed to capture a French public—especially young people and working people—that is critical of how the mainstream conservative and socialist parties have handled the country’s economic crisis and growing Muslim immigration.

“In an opinion poll a few months ago, 90 percent of French respondents said they did not trust their current political leaders. Marine Le Pen (the National Front’s current leader) has managed to convince voters that she is a credible alternative to the current system,” Rodan-Benzaquen said.

“While parts of the electorate hold clear anti-Semitic views, and certain elements in the party and around it do too, I do not believe that the majority of the electorate of the National Front necessarily votes for the party because they despise Jews,” she said. “The link between a rise in anti-Semitism and a growing National Front is the unhealthy environment in which extremism and populism prosper.”

Konstanty Gebert, a prominent Polish-Jewish activist, journalist, and expert from the European Council on Foreign Relations, noted that Le Pen has tried to distance herself from the extremism of her father, National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen.

“She has taken great effort to show that she is not anti-Semitic, and that what she really cares about is what the every man in France cares about,” he said.

There is a “feeling by the European common man that he’s no longer in control of events,” a sentiment Le Pen has targeted, according to Gebert. The National Front’s strategy is all a “smoke and mirrors act,” Gebert said, but since Le Pen has attempted to distance herself from extremism, it has become more acceptable to vote for the party.

Meanwhile, the election of the NPD candidate from Germany, while “an outrage, and an affront to Germany,” was a fluke due to the recent cancelation of a three-percent threshold for European Parliament elections in the country, explained Gebert.

Of greater concern, he said, is the rise of Britain’s far-right-leaning UKIP, as well as the advances of the far-right Golden Dawn party in Greece and far-right Jobbik party in Hungary.

A controversial memorial statue for the Holocaust is set to be unveiled in Hunagry on May 31. The statue depicting the German imperial eagle devouring the Angel Gabriel, who represents Hungary, is being called out for “whitewashing” Hungary’s own role in the deportations of more than 400,000 Jews.

Both the Hungarian and Greek parties won just three seats in the European Parliament, but when an explicitly neo-Nazi party gets “10 percent of the Greek vote, and not in the deepest moments of the [economic] crisis but when something of a recovery is underway, the people voting for Golden Dawn are voting for exactly what the party is selling,” Gebert said.

But an interesting phenomenon, according to Gebert, is that many right-wing parties throughout Europe are actually reaching out to the local Jewish community for the purpose of the struggle against Muslim immigration.

There is “violence that is disproportionately targeting Jews, and in most cases the perpetrators are Muslim immigrants or descendants of Muslim immigrants who believe it’s legitimate to reek revenge on Jews for real or alleged wrongs of Israel,” said Gebert.

For example, in 2012, three children and a rabbi were killed in a shooting at a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse by Islamic extremist Mohammed Merah, a French national of Algerian origin. Due to such incidents, European Jews in some places have become more accepting of far-right parties that take a tough stance against radical Islam.

“They (some European Jews) legitimately fear for their physical safety, and the right-wing is willing to patrol the streets and pick up threatening-looking Muslims,” Gebert said, citing as an example the Flemish extreme-right party Vlaams Belang, which sees Jews as allies.

In Brussels, the Jewish museum shooting has been called a possible terrorist attack. Although the identity of the shooter remains unknown, there have been several European Muslims—including from Belgium—who have traveled to Syria to join the fighting in the ongoing civil war there, leading to some theories of a possible jihadist motive for the museum attack.

The Brussels Jewish community has been forced to significantly increase security following the shooting. AJC’s Schwammenthal, whose children attend a Jewish school in Brussels, said that “when the kids are being brought and picked up, now they have police protection throughout the entire day.”

“The manhunt is still ongoing, and so we continue to live in a sort of fear,” Schwammenthal said.

Another frequent problem for European Jews is being confronted with false accusations about Israel, especially from left-wing elements.

“The average Jew in the office around the water cooler is suddenly being confronted with ‘What are you doing in the West Bank again?’ and that sort of thing,” Schwammenthal said.

Dieter Graumann, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said in a statement provided to JNS.org that the “anti-Semitic attack in the Jewish museum in Brussels, with four innocent people being killed, just showed us how irrational hatred became brutal and murderous reality.”

“The very first message of the newly elected [European] Parliament therefore should be the strong condemnation of any kind of hatred against minorities,” Graumann said. “Anti-Semitism and racism have no place under our common European roof. This is something that we are more than ever requested to state loud and clear.”