Three Frenchmen jailed for anti-semitic attack...

You have to hide being Jewish these days in France.

Three young men in France have been condemned to nine months in jail by a criminal court in the city of Annecy for an attack against a young Jewish boy in August. Hakim Bouaoune, 21, Yassin Gsimi, 25, and Nabil Achenani, 20, all from Bellegarde, a small city in southeastern France, had been denied entrance to a nightclub in the nearby city of Annecy, on the grounds that they were drunk. When the three heard a teenager call her boyfriend "Abraham", they started beating the 16-year-old boy and shouting anti-Semitic insults at him. The nightclub’s bouncers intervened with dogs and held the assailants until the police arrived. Abraham was taken to hospital and was unable to work for six days. The prosecutor had requested a one-year prison term, claiming that the “racist insults were clear” and that the boy’s first name, Abraham, led to an outburst of violence. The local Jewish community welcomed the sentence which is the harshest ever imposed in France for an anti-Semitic attack. The victim’s lawyer, Marc Dufour, criticized “the abominable words of the three aggressors", calling them "disgusting". However, the defendants' lawyer, Philippe Metral, denied any anti-Semitic motives, saying the three had not intended to go on “a commando-like Jew-beating rampage”. “They were not in a normal state because they drunk a cocktail of whiskey and beer,” he said.

I had lunch this week with a young Jewish man from France who is studying here in Ottawa. He said much the same thing - you cannot tell people you are Jewish in France, unless you are on very friendly terms.