French President Francois Hollande warns of threat of anti-Semitic and anti-Islam attacks
FRENCH President Francois Hollande today warned that the growing number of acts against Jewish people and Muslims threatens the country's very foundations as he visited a graveyard desecrated by vandals.
Mr Hollande surveyed overturned gravestones at the Jewish cemetery in the small Alsatian town of Sarre-Union in the east of France.
Speaking after walking around the vandalised graveyard, the President noted that anti-Semitism and acts against Muslims are both on the rise in France, particularly after terrorist attacks last month in Paris on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket that left 20 people dead, including the three gunmen.
He said that anti-Semitic acts doubled in 2014 compared with 2013, and acts against Muslims in just the month after the attacks totalled the same as the entire previous year.
Mr Hollande said: "Must we put soldiers in front of cemeteries?
"How do we understand the unnamable, the unjustifiable, the unbearable?
"This is the expression of the evils eating away at the Republic."
Some 250 Jewish graves at the cemetery were vandalised by thugs over the weekend.
This is the expression of the evils eating away at the Republic
The graves - some of which date back as far as 1770 - were kicked over or daubed with Nazi swastikas.
Five teenagers - none of whom have a previous record - have been detained in connection with the incident, but no charges were immediately filed.
The youths aged 15 to 17 were held after the youngest gave himself up following a national outrcy over the anti-Semitic attack.
Rene Gutman, chief rabbi of the city of Strasbourg, said: "This anti-Semitic crime, this crime against nature ... how can it be excused?"
Mr Hollande's comments follow a report on France released Tuesday by the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner Nils Muiznieks.
The upward trend was part of an overall rise in racism in France, which shows that acts of discrimination and hate speech are resisting government efforts to beat back persistent intolerance.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caused outcry on Sunday when he called for a mass immigration of European Jews to the Middle Eastern country.
Following the killing of a Jewish man outside a synagogue in Copenhagen, Mr Netanyahu said: "Israel is your home. We are preparing and calling for the absorption of mass immigration from Europe."
His comments were countered by David Cameron this morning, who insisted Britain is a safe place for Jewish people to live.
A Number 10 spokesman said: "As the Israeli Prime Minister has said today, Jewish people deserve security in every country.
"And Prime Minister David Cameron could not be clearer. We will fight anti-Semitism with everything we have got.
"Together we will make sure Britain remains a country that Jewish people are proud to call home – today, tomorrow and for every generation to come."
