France Is Failing Its Jews

Last year, France was shocked by a crime of unspeakable cruelty. In June 2024, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was gang raped by three young Muslim boys. The boys—two of them 13 at the time of the attack, the other 12—ambushed the girl while she was playing in a park with a friend near her parents’ home in Courbevoie, northwest Paris. They dragged her into an abandoned building, where she was raped. The boys threatened to kill her, called her a “dirty Jew,” and told her to convert to Islam. The girl’s parents told Le Parisien: “Before letting her leave, they made her swear on Allah not to say anything and that she should not tell anyone, neither her parents nor the police.” 

Thankfully, the girl did tell her parents, and her attackers were swiftly arrested. This summer, the boys were tried and sentenced. The two 13-year-olds were handed seven- and nine-year prison sentences, respectively, for their participation in the gang rape of a minor under the age of 15 on the basis of religion. The 12-year-old boy could not be given a prison sentence because he fell below the age of criminal responsibility. Instead, he was ordered to spend five years in an educational facility and was placed in closed foster care. Of course, his victim’s youth did not protect her from his crimes. 

Last week, though, it was reported that the boy serving the longer sentence would have his jail time reduced from nine years to seven. In a retrial held behind closed doors, the judge decided that a shorter sentence would help him “reintegrate.” According to the boy’s lawyer, “The court took into account the entire case as provided for by law: the facts, their seriousness but also the personality of the minor and the need to prepare for future reintegration.” 

The facts of the case would suggest there was very little integration happening here to begin with. It would not be unreasonable to assume that these boys have had their minds poisoned by radical Islam. How else would it occur to children so young to pick out a Jewish girl as a target, threaten her to convert, and invoke Allah? This mirrors the language of a wider Islamist culture, in which Jews are treated as subhuman and legitimate prey. The judge at the time of sentencing declared that “there is no doubt that [the victim] would not have been assaulted or raped if she had not been Jewish,” making the antisemitic motive undeniable. 

It also raises the question of how much “reintegration” is even possible. We have been here before, in a different context. In Britain, the 1993 murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys sparked a decades-long argument over whether such offenders can ever truly be rehabilitated and safely released back into society. Those boys were much younger than the Courbevoie attackers, and their crime had no ideological dimension. If we still struggle to believe in the full “rehabilitation” of children who commit a motiveless killing, how much more complicated is the task when the crime is not only sadistic but also bound up with a worldview that singles out certain victims as fair game?

For many French Jews, this is not an abstract debate. The boys who committed such an atrocity will one day be free to walk the same streets as their daughters. In the aftermath of the attack, hundreds gathered in Courbevoie and beyond to protest. The gang rape in a Paris suburb felt like the culmination of a rising tide of anti-Jewish hatred in France. 

That feeling did not come from nowhere. France has recorded well over 1,500 antisemitic acts a year since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, with 1,676 incidents in 2023 and 1,570 in 2024. Within weeks of the October 7th attack, the French interior minister was already talking about an “explosion” in antisemitic acts. There were more than 1,000 incidents and nearly 500 arrests in less than a month, ranging from physical assaults and threats to the harassment of Jewish schoolchildren.

For French Jews, the Courbevoie rape tops a long, grim list since the October 7th pogrom. Synagogues have been set on fire or targeted with petrol bombs in Rouen and in La Grande-Motte. The chief rabbi of Orléans has been assaulted in the street by a man shouting antisemitic abuse. And in Paris, the Shoah Memorial, several synagogues and a Jewish restaurant have been splashed with paint and hostile graffiti. These are only the most visible examples among the roughly 1,600 antisemitic acts recorded in 2024. Jews and Jewish institutions now account for well over half of all religious hate-crime victims in France. 

It is hardly surprising, then, that increasing numbers of Jews are voting with their feet and leaving France, home to the second-largest Jewish community outside of Israel. More than 10% of France’s Jewish population is estimated to have emigrated to Israel between 2000 and 2017, and aliyah from France surged again after the latest spike in antisemitism. In the first 10 months of 2024 alone, more than 2,000 French Jews moved to Israel—a 95% increase on the previous year. Those Jews leaving the country cite antisemitism as a key factor. 

When a judge trims the sentence of a boy convicted in an antisemitic gang rape in the name of “future reintegration,” French Jews hear a simple message: however grave the attack and however clear the antisemitic motive, they cannot assume that the system’s first instinct will be to protect them. As far as the French state is concerned, it is more important to protect a young, violent criminal’s future than it is to protect the safety of Jews. 

Jews are often said to be the proverbial canaries in the coal mine—when a society begins to break down, this is the group that tends to suffer first. And a state that cannot bring itself to protect a comparatively small minority from Islamist violence and antisemitic assaults will soon fail to protect anyone. If France will not defend its Jews, it will not defend its civilisation.