The Toulouse massacre has hit Jews hard today, though perhaps none so hard as those who, like the kids and adults shot today, go to or work at or send their kids to Jewish day schools. If you live in the world of Jewish education, you’ve gotten used to conversations and briefings on security—what is being done to prevent violence, what will happen if God forbid there is violence, how to find your kids in the aftermath of violence.
Since 9/11, the possibility of staged attacks on Jewish institutions has been a consuming concern, and institutions with resources have spent enormous amounts of money on metal detectors and guards and “man-traps.” And with good reason; in 2006, Naveed Afzal Haq shot six people at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle while shouting “I am a Muslim-American.” One of the busted terrorist plots in recent years involved a planned assault on a JCC in Riverdale, one of the most Jewish neighborhoods in America, just north of Manhattan. One school I know, on an upper floor in a building, is literally locked off during the day; its elevators cannot stop on the floor and it is impossible to enter through the staircase.
What makes the Toulouse shooting so chilling, therefore, is that it circumvents many security efforts to some extent. It took place outside, not inside, and it was not a systematic attack but rather a spraying of bullets. It is, in other words, a crime that can be imitated. All it takes is a street, and kids, and parents, and maybe a yarmulke or two as a means of identifying targets.
Jews are being hunted.
Well, according to Catherine Ashton, chidren are dying in Toulouse and children are dying in Gaza so the victims are culpable. This serve as an additional reminder of the fecklessness required to trust 5+1 negotiations with Iran when those doing the negotiating can come up with nothing more than, "well, you are killing them."
Latest French police theory is that weapons are linked to murder of Caribbean ethnicity French soldiers. The French authorities currently are saying that they believe this is a neo-Nazi gang and the authorities are looking for French persons of interest who were cashiered from the French paratroopers. Not random killings but organized hate-crime terrorism.
The European media, the European intellectual and political classes, and the European cultural elite have done their best for decades to demonize, villify, and smear Jews and their real bete noir, the Jewish State of Israel. The anti Semitic and anti Israel atmosphere in Europe and especially France, remember Sarkozy and his Netanyahu is a liar remark, is simply poisonous. All this premeditated massacre in Toulouse has done is sharpened the point that Jews are not welcome anywhere in Europe.