French Teacher 'Sends' Jewish Student to Furnace
Charming:
The Le Parisien newspaper revealed Tuesday that a schoolteacher seeking to punish a Jewish student proposed that the boy "go to a furnace," Israel's leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported Wednesday... a 10th grade student was busy chatting with his classmate. The teacher, named Pierre, asked the Jewish youth to leave the classroom... just before the student left the classroom the teacher told him that "if you don’t like it in the fridge [outside where it's cold], there is always room for you in the furnace."
We've often commented that the real danger of anti-Semitism emerges not when anti-Semitic beliefs are accepted by a small number of people - rather, it emerges when anti-Semitic behavior seeps into everyday life without large numbers of people actually being anti-Semitic. The threat from that Iranian lunatic is not that people will believe him, but that his Holocaust denial will become just another thing that people talk about, another part of the social landscape. The threat is that anti-Semitic behavior will become mundane - and therefore 'accepted' in the most immediate sense of being quotidian.
So this teacher will undoubtedly say he was just being careless and that he didn't intend his comment to be anti-Semitic - and he might very well be right. That's the scariest possibility - that average, generally good-natured French citizens have been so immersed in anti-Semitism that, like fish in water, it's everyday manifestations don't seem unordinary. This teacher was probably horrified at the vicious, anti-Semitic torture and murder of Ilan Hamili - that's not supposed to be part of French life. But sending a Jewish kid to the furnace? That's just the way people talk in France.
The Le Parisien newspaper revealed Tuesday that a schoolteacher seeking to punish a Jewish student proposed that the boy "go to a furnace," Israel's leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported Wednesday... a 10th grade student was busy chatting with his classmate. The teacher, named Pierre, asked the Jewish youth to leave the classroom... just before the student left the classroom the teacher told him that "if you don’t like it in the fridge [outside where it's cold], there is always room for you in the furnace."
We've often commented that the real danger of anti-Semitism emerges not when anti-Semitic beliefs are accepted by a small number of people - rather, it emerges when anti-Semitic behavior seeps into everyday life without large numbers of people actually being anti-Semitic. The threat from that Iranian lunatic is not that people will believe him, but that his Holocaust denial will become just another thing that people talk about, another part of the social landscape. The threat is that anti-Semitic behavior will become mundane - and therefore 'accepted' in the most immediate sense of being quotidian.
So this teacher will undoubtedly say he was just being careless and that he didn't intend his comment to be anti-Semitic - and he might very well be right. That's the scariest possibility - that average, generally good-natured French citizens have been so immersed in anti-Semitism that, like fish in water, it's everyday manifestations don't seem unordinary. This teacher was probably horrified at the vicious, anti-Semitic torture and murder of Ilan Hamili - that's not supposed to be part of French life. But sending a Jewish kid to the furnace? That's just the way people talk in France.
