FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE – Our columnist was born in Rouen, where a man targeted by an OQTF set fire to the synagogue on Friday. Faced with the increase in anti-Semitic acts, French Jews are close to despair, he testifies.
Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and essayist. Every week, he deciphers the news for FigaroVox. He has just published War diary. It is the West that we are assassinating (Fayard).
I was born in Rouen and grew up between the Place du Vieux Marché where Joan of Arc was burned and Rue des Bons-Enfants, a few hundred meters away, where the Israelite temple began to be burned.
The villains of my childhood imagination were called Cauchon and Eichmann. The only synagogue of the disbelieving chronicler who signs is precisely this synagogue of the Good Children. I went there, using the Jewish street, for every Great Pardon and made my communion there. I know every nook and cranny of its baroque architecture.
On the entrance wall, in the small courtyard, we find the names of the victims of the Holocaust. It includes that of Régine Goldnadel, sister of my father Henri, who died in Auschwitz. We will therefore understand that on Friday morning when I learned that my synagogue burned down I saw it, once again, as a bad omen. As Jewish and as French.
I read in Le Figaro on Saturday that the “investigations aim to clarify motivations” of the neutralized arsonist, Algerian targeted by an OQTF, rushing with a knife towards a police officer. The judicial officer does not have to stretch his imagination excessively to describe this motivation in eleven words: hatred of the French in general and of the Jews in particular.
I would be lying to my reader if I told him that learning in the early morning that my synagogue had burned, and still not knowing the identity of the person responsible, I could imagine that he could be a far-right supremacist. or from a satanic sect. I already knew who it was. I knew that he had been immersed in the same broth of hateful culture as Kouachi and Coulibaly. Than Merah and Fofana. That the killers of Sarah and Ilan Halimi and Mireille Knoll. I know him well. I often see him at the Palais de Justice. I know he blessed the sky on October 7th. And I also know who he listens to. I know religious sermons and I know those without God.
In this ocean of weakness, a drop of firmness: that of the Minister of the Interior congratulating the police officer who incapacitated his attacker and promising him a decoration.
Gilles-William Goldnadel
He was taught that the Jew was omnipotent. That he had both the press and the money. That he had to be killed if he hid behind a rock. But he was also told that Israel was Nazi. Or rather that if the Shoah did not exist, there was on the other hand a real genocide to be avenged in Gaza.
He was also told that all French people of old extraction were as racist and colonialists as the sons of Zion. The proof: France, his debtor, criminal of humanity – like Israel – who cruelly colonized Algeria, his country, does not even want him. He was told that there’s no point in wanting to work, the xenophobic French don’t want to give him a chance. He was told that among all French people, the racist policeman was the worst. The proof: He had murdered his brother Traoré. This is the broth of brackish ignorance that bathed my arsonist.
A few kilometers from the still smoking synagogue is the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray. This is where Father Hamel’s throat was cut. Another martyrdom with the same knife. Guilty of being part of the old religion of the old French people who do not want to die under submersion. No one will stop me from writing that Father Hamel would have remained alive if the man who murdered him had remained in prison rather than wearing, against the advice of the prosecution, a paltry electronic bracelet.
Likewise, and contrary to what I have read and heard, the OQTF targeting the Rouen arsonist was enforceable. Still, Algeria, which is suspicious but does not seem bothered by the conduct of some of its nationals – including the latter – had to have agreed to recover it.
In this ocean of weakness, a drop of firmness: that of the Minister of the Interior congratulating the police officer who incapacitated his attacker and promising him a decoration. Until recently, this legitimate defense would have been received at best in awkward silence. The disbelieving Jew of Rouen will have at least long ago made this principle of the Talmud his own: “He who gives mercy to the wicked wrongs the righteous.”.
No one will stop me from writing either that it is not far from Rouen in Incarville where two French prison guards transporting Mohamed Amra were massacred. And if I dared, I would cross a few thousand kilometers as the crow flies to fly over Nouméa and there again the victims of anti-white racism that we are finally starting to write about without trembling.
I wrote in my war diary that I hold the extreme left subjected to Islamism to be morally responsible for the situation faced by French Jews. These are close to despair.
Gilles-William Goldnadel
Alas, the fires follow the rapes which follow the assassinations of Pierre or Thomas which follow the attacks and a nail against a professor chases a nail against a police officer in a French memory which becomes forgetful. But who must remain dignified and above all silent.
This Friday morning I learned of distressed statements from Insoumis deputies condemning burning anti-Semitism. I looked at them like the declarations of arson firefighters, the aftermath of incendiary speeches. I heard the cautious speech of the socialist mayor of Rouen. Agreed. Not a bad word. No criticism of its yesterday allies.
I wrote in my war diary that I hold the extreme left subjected to Islamism to be morally responsible for the situation faced by French Jews. These are close to despair. For them as for France. They know each other, I wrote, like the canary at the bottom of the well. But they also know that their France looks bad.
