Anti-Semitism suges amongst the youth of France...

A frightening report about the youth in France from the New York Times.

"The minister of education has done nothing," said Jean-Pierre Obin, an inspector general of education in France, who wrote a report in 2004 that called anti-Semitism "ubiquitous" in the 61 schools surveyed. "He prefers not to talk about it."

Mr. Obin wrote in the report of "a stupefying and cruel reality: in France, Jewish children — and they are alone in this case — can no longer be educated in just any school."

Ianis Roder, 34, a history teacher in a middle school northeast of Paris, said he was stunned by what he witnessed after Sept. 11, 2001. The next day, someone spray-painted in a stairwell of the school the image of an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center beside the words "Death to the U.S., Death to Jews."

When he told his class months later that Hitler had killed millions of million Jews, one boy blurted out, "He would have made a good Muslim!" Mr. Roder told of a Muslim teacher who dismissed her class after a shouting match over Nazi propaganda. The students said the offensive images accurately depicted Jews.

Even today, he said, there is widespread belief that the Sept. 11 attacks were a Jewish plot and that Jews were notified beforehand.

Barbara Lefèbvre, a history teacher who has taught in several of the working-class suburbs, said many people minimize the anti-Semitism among France's youth.

"They say, 'That's the way the kids talk — they don't mean it in the same way that you or I would,' " she said. Ms. Lefèbvre, who is Jewish, said she had to argue with the principal of her school several years ago to get an investigation when a student wrote "dirty Jew" on a notebook used by her class. The student, a French-Arab boy, was ultimately given just two hours of detention.