January 15, 2015--Fanatics All

Do you know what happened to Angela Merkel?

I mean, I thought she was in Paris last Sunday to participate in the Je Suis Charlie march, joining governmental leaders from 40 or so other countries. (As a sidebar--not including the United States which sent the ambassador.)

I may have been hallucinating, but I thought I saw a picture of the front row of marchers with Francois Hollande, president of France in the center, locking arms with Palestinian president Mahmond Abbas on his right and Chancellor Merkel on his left.

But then when I picked up my copy of HaMevasar, the Israeli newspaper of the ultra-Orthodox, there was that same picture but no Angela Merkel.

So either I'm confused or losing it.

Before I could see if the New York Times had anything to say about this, I spoke with a friend who knows a lot about neurology to see if he thinks I'm losing it (yes and no, he said) and about the possibility that the image might have been doctored.

"Send me a link to the HaMevasar picture," he said, and within 15 minutes of my doing so he called to report, "It's obviously Photoshopped. I mean, the editor of the paper had Merkel crudely deleted from the photo. And also a few other female world leaders who were in the first two rows, making it look as if the march was an all-male affair. Just like a . . ."

"Just like an ultra-Orthodox Jewish wedding," I interjected, "where the men and the women attend and participate separately, including dancing with each other."

"Exactly," he said, "And here are a few ironic thoughts. First, they cut out the picture of the chancellor of the country that spawned the Nazis and perpetrated the Holocaust, but the country that now stamps out any manifestations of renewed anti-Jewish behavior and still pays reparations to Israel. Then the paper, HaMevasar, ranted about how the whole Hebdo massacre was about Islamic anti-Semitism, ignoring the fact that the initial victims were mainly French Christians. Finally, they completely ignored the fact that the march in Paris was about defending France's essential freedoms, very much including the right to free expression. And though HaMevasar does mention that the attack was on freedom of the press, it is in a journalistic context that is self-contradictory since by cropping the photo as they did it gives the lie to the very freedom this massacre was planned to stifle."

"Then there was Benjamin Netanyahu's reaction," I said. "On the day after the massacre he sent the French an impassioned letter of condolence that claimed, to quote him, that 'Israel is being attacked by the very same forces that attacked Europe.' As if the arrack on Charlie Hebdo was about Israel rather than about France."

"And he followed it up the next day when he linked the Paris suspects to Israel's enemies, likening the killings to the rockets fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip."

"Talk about chutzpah."

"And can you explain to me how the four Jewish victims of the kosher supermarket shootings all wound up in Israel for a ceremony and burial?"

"As I understand the situation," I said, "only one of the four had any direct connection to Israel. I think he had two chidden living there."

"The other three are either from North Africa or born in France and had no family in Israel. I don't want to be overly cynical," he said, "But it feels as if the Orthodox forces there have co-opted the situation and are representing the attacks in France as being about Israel and anti-Semitism. That is not to say that there isn't a reemergence of anti-Semitism in Western Europe, including France, though mainly from nationalistic forces, and so what Netanyahu and HaMevasar are up to is shameful."