The riots in France have become antisemitic - opinion

The riots in France are currently one of the biggest international news stories. One would naturally expect their coverage by major news outlets to strive for comprehensiveness in its reporting, and accuracy in its analysis. It is therefore instructive to observe the void at the center of this coverage.

If riots involve the deliberate defacement of a Holocaust memorial, and if said defacement takes the form of threatening Jews with a new Holocaust, as has happened in the Paris suburb of Nanterre last Thursday, where the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation was defaced with the slogan “On va faire une shoah“ (We are going to make a Shoah), it’s hard to see how one could argue that those riots – whatever the original cause of their ignition was – should not described as antisemitic.

So what happens if you search Google News for the term “antisemitic riots”, even several days after the fact? You will find several articles about the incident in Nanterre – all of which have one thing in common. From Israeli newspapers like this publication or the Times of Israel, to The Jewish Chronicle in the UK or the Algemeiner in the US, all the results are from Jewish outlets. Only on subsequent pages do results from ABC News or USA Today pop up as well – but those aren’t related to the recent events in France at all, but months-old articles about people involved in the January 6 riots in Washington DC.

Even if you let go of that particular phrase and simply search for news about the Nanterre memorial, only one non-Jewish outlet (i24News) pops up in addition.

If you rely on newspapers like the New York Times or the Guardian, or the websites of CNN or the BBC for the entirety of your information about the riots in France – even if you combine all four aforementioned sources to make sure you get a comprehensive picture – you will be completely oblivious about the incident, and anyone mentioning antisemitic riots will sound like a paranoiac to you.

When is an antisemitic riot not antisemitic?

IT SEEMS that the defacement of a Holocaust memorial with threats of a new Holocaust counts as a niche news item, its newsworthiness restricted to those who are directly affected by it through their Jewishness; not political news, but “Jewish interest” news. In a media landscape in which an awkward encounter at a dog park can generate headlines about racism for days, this is at the very least surprising.

Of course, riots are almost by definition chaotic, decentralized affairs, which can make it tricky to define any single incident as representative of the whole. But it’s hard to imagine that, for example, riots by Trump supporters or anti-vax protesters, in the course of which a Holocaust memorial was vandalized and a new Holocaust was threatened, would not be described as antisemitic by most major media outlets. 

And even if we abandon the notion of assigning it a defining role in the riots, and only look at it as an isolated incident, the silence surrounding it is still striking, and suggests a desire to avoid “tainting” the riots with it, in order to preserve a certain narrative.

If the explanation for this curious state of affairs is not an ideological one, with all the tacit endorsement of (some kinds of) antisemitism and willful abdication of journalistic duties that entails, one would certainly like to know what it is instead.

The author is a British-German writer living in Germany. He has written about antisemitism for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Jüdische Rundschau.