HOAX GIVES ANTI-SEMITES A BAD NAME

She made it up. That's what police now say about the 23-year-old woman who told them a gang of young men who "appeared to be of Muslim North African origin," attacked her on a suburban train near Paris because they thought she was a Jew. She said they drew swastikas on her, cut her hair and overturned a stroller with her 13-month-old child in it, while onlookers watched and did nothing, according to an AP report that we quoted and editorialized about on Sunday.

It's no comfort that many others besides me fell for the hoax and condemned the reported attack as one more loathsome instance of increasing anti-Semitic violence. In France, where hate crimes have soared in recent years, everyone from President Jacques Chirac to human rights activists expressed moral outrage: One French daily, Le Figaro, compared the purported onlookers who did nothing to defend the woman on "The Train of Shame" with witnesses who watched the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese on a street in Queens, N.Y., but failed to do anything either, including calling the police.

I don't know what kind of apology I should make for drawing the correct conclusion from an incorrect news story. The best I can do is quote regular Straight Up reader Shane Hockin, who writes with a wink that the hoax "sort of gives anti-Semites a bad name." My staff of thousands wishes I'd been clever enough to think of that.

The Return of Anti-Semitism Gabriel Schoenfeld Encounter Books 01 October, 2003 $16.35 at Amazon.com

The New Anti-Semitism : The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It Phyllis Chesler Jossey-Bass 11 July, 2003 $15.72 at Amazon.com

Esau's Tears : Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews Albert S. Lindemann Cambridge University Press 04 December, 2000 $24.99 at Amazon.com

Posted by Jan Herman on July 14, 2004 10:29 AM (0 comments & pings so far)
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