El Observador Uruguay quoted B’nai B’rith Director of Latin American Affairs Eduardo Kohn in an article on heightened anti-Semitism in France and the danger felt by both the French Jewish community, as well as Israeli athletes competing at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

Read in El Observador in Spanish.

His face is covered with a black and white checkered keffiyeh. She looks at the camera and, in the name of God, threatens French President Emmanuel Macron: “You invited the Zionists to the Olympic Games, you will pay for what you have done.” Shouting “Allah is great”, she shows the face of a doll dripping with blood. The one-minute video circulates like viruses on social networks.

A few days before, an army of trolls launched the media campaign (and in Arabic) Olympic Games with a taste of blood. They redesigned the logo of the interlocking rings that symbolize the unity of continents and cultures—which, as if scripted, had been presented as a sketch a century ago at a congress in Paris, the same city that now hosts the sports competition—to paint them in blood red. They drew the Israeli athletes marching at the inauguration, with weapons hanging and blood on their hands. And they threatened Israeli goalkeeper Itay Shani.

The governments of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates also received threats.

Paris counts down the hours until the Olympic torch lights the cauldron. And the local Jewish community – the largest in Europe, estimated at just under half a million members – sees the risk of an attack against it approaching. And they have arguments to think so.

Because these Olympic Games take place not only in the midst of the war in Ukraine and Gaza, but also in the midst of growing anti-Semitism (rather Judeophobia) in a country that has not treated Jews very well since before the famous Dreyfus case. .

Macron’s government estimated a 300% growth in anti-Semitic acts in France since the fateful October 7, when Hamas terrorists entered Israeli territory and massacred thousands.

The crudest event was the rape of a Jewish teenager for the sole reason of being Jewish.

They had previously attacked the Rouen synagogue. And before that they had stabbed a literature teacher. And two months before the start of the war in the Middle East, a survey had already revealed that 91% of French Jewish students had suffered anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia

Two hooded men enter the editorial office of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. Twelve people are murdered and four are injured. It is likely that many remember the attack and also the massive solidarity with the inscription Je suis Charlie. But it is also likely that very few remember that a few hours later, a terrorist linked to the newspaper attackers killed an employee and three customers at a kosher (food appropriate for religious Jews to eat) supermarket in Paris.

“It is not about generalizing and putting 68 million French people in the same place. It would be insulting and out of place, as well as false, since France is a democracy. But yes, you have to have memory, historical and recent, and understand from that memory and in a current situation with anti-Semitic violence and hostility, why the French Jewish community of almost half a million people, once again, not only feels that it is in danger, but actually lives in fear and danger,” says Uruguayan Eduardo Kohn, B’nai B’rith director for Latin American Affairs.

It was in France where the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus had been unjustly accused. It was one of the most documented systemic anti-Semitic acts and was exposed by the writer Émile Zola in his open letter “I accuse.”

France was also the place where locals crammed thousands of Jews into the velodrome so that the Nazis would deport them to the extermination camps. The documents speak of some 65,000 French Jews sent to their deaths from the Drancy camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau or Sobibor.

And France was the cradle of the far-right movement of Jean Marie Le Pen, a holocaust denier and “convicted six times for his criminal anti-Semitic verbiage.”

To this anti-Semitism guided by the right, was added one led by the left: the link between the Jew and colonialism. In fact, Melenchonistas call Hamas terrorists “freedom fighters.”

In the midst of this breeding ground of hatred, the Jewish community of France “is afraid.” This was explained by María Laura Avignolo, Clarín’s correspondent in the European country. And she cited an Ifop survey: 76% of French people believe that anti-Semitism is a “widespread phenomenon,” a figure that rises to 92% among French Jews.

Some members of the Islamic communities are also afraid. Because as Nicolás Lerner, from the Latin American Jewish Congress, explained, hand in hand with the growth of Judeophobia there was an increase in Islamophobia. In the midst of tensions over the arrival of immigrants from Arab countries, and bidding over the ban on the use of the veil in educational centers, many Muslims feel how part of French society is attacking them.

The great event of world sport, the Olympic Games, only draws attention to this hostile climate. And there are many who fear that the Black September of 1972 (when the Israeli athletes competing in Munich were attacked) could be repeated in a Black July-August.