France Sees 58% Increase in Anti-Semitic Incidents
France saw an increase of 58 percent in anti-Semitic incidents in 2012 compared to the previous year, according to a report by the French Jewish community.
The report released on Tuesday by the SPCJ, the security unit of France’s Jewish communities, showed that 614 anti-Semitic acts were documented in the republic last year compared to only 389 in 2011.
“2012 has been a year of unprecedented violence against Jews in France,” the report read, referencing the murder of a rabbi and three Jewish children on March 19 by an Islamist radical who gunned them down at a Jewish school in Toulouse.
Incidents in which the victims were accosted physically or verbally on the street saw an increase of 82 percent, from 177 cases in 2011 to 315 last year, SPCJ said, and 25 percent of the 96 physical anti-Semitic assaults involved a weapon.
The SPCJ report reflects a near doubling in physical anti-Semitic assaults, of which only 57 were documented in 2011.
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