Whenever the Palestinian issue heats up, the temperature rises in the gritty neighbourhoods the French call the banlieues (suburbs). These areas, best known for the low-cost housing projects that postwar city planners planted out there, are a vibrant and edgy mix of local working class, recent immigrants and minorities now in France for several generations.

(Photo: Police survey housing project in Paris suburb, 1 June 2006/Victor Tonelli)

Among those groups are Muslims and Jews, many of whose families came from the same parts of North Africa. About 7-8 years ago, at the start of the second Palestinian intifada, some of the far more numerous Muslims took out their anger at Israel on their Jewish neighbours. The official reaction against that wave of anti-Semitism was slow in coming back then, but leaders in France today — especially leaders of the main religious groups — seem determined to do their best to head that off this time around.

They have their work cut out for them. According to a French Jewish Students’ Union (UEJF) list (here in French), there have been 46 anti-Semitic acts in France since Dec. 27, when Israel began its bombardment of Gaza.  That includes several firebombs and several Jews beaten by thugs. Muslim and Jewish leaders have already issued several calls for calm. In some cities such as Strasbourg and Lyon, they have joined the mayor and their Catholic colleagues. After meeting President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday evening, the national heads of the Muslim, Jewish and Catholic communities said they would produce a joint appeal soon. See my story on this here.

The impromptu news conference in the courtyard of the Elysee Palace showed how delicate this project can be. Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, the Catholic archbishop of Paris, could simply say a few words about peace and not have to explain too much more.

(Photo: From left, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, CFCM head Mohamed Moussaoui and Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim, 12 Jan 2009/Charles Platiau)

But Mohamed Moussaoui, head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), and Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim were grilled about what they and their communities should do to avoid more violence. One reporter badgered them to say they would march together at the head of a parade for peace that, until now at least, has neither been suggested nor organised by anyone. Both thoughtful and soft-spoken men, Moussaoui and Bernheim made sure they showed enough support for “their” sides in the Gaza conflict without burning the shaky bridges between their communities here.

Moussaoui has already come under fire in the Muslim community for allegedly getting too close to the leadership of the CRIF umbrella group of Jewish organisations. He and CRIF President Richard Prasquier met last November and suggested creating a liaison committee to work together to defend human rights. They agreed to “create a common front against anti-Semitiism, racism and Islamophobia.” But when the Gaza operation started, the influential Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF) cast doubt on any further cooperation and the CRIF criticised the UOIF’s call for Muslims to protest and imams to preach “to make the faithful sensitive to the just Palestinian cause.”

The UOIF even issued a fatwa saying that Muslims who miss their afternoon and dusk prayers because they are demonstrating could say them at midday and evening to compensate.

(Photo: Protester in Strasbourg, 10 Jan 2009/Vincent Kessler)

“Peaceful demonstrations to support just causes such as that of Palestine are an act of adoration and connection with God,” it said. A more militant group called the Party of Muslims of France, based in Strasbourg, has been holding daily demos in the centre of the Alsatian city which have ended with occasional unrest.

It’s hard to say what if any connection this rhetoric has with the actual anti-Semitic acts that have been reported so far. Police have not issued any official overall figures for attacks. French mayors interviewed by Le Monde say the mood is strained but they think their local dialogues with youths and with religious leaders have kept the situation from deteriorating further.

Cardinal Vingt-Trois said the joint appeal by national religious leaders was due “in the coming days” but if any delay comes, it would probably not be from the community that has the least at stake in this story.

P.S. The last paragraph does not mean that only Muslims are responsible for the mentioned anti-Semitic attacks or that none were committed by people with a Christian background. There may well be non-Muslim anti-Semites who take advantage of the current climate to vent their hate. Since there are no official statistics on the perpertrators, it is hard to say with certainty who is committing these acts. But the general assumption among police, politicians, religious leaders and media is that all or almost all of these cases are in the “Muslim-vs-Jew” category. Vingt-Trois plays less of a role here — despite the impression the photo of the three religious leaders above might give — because the majority is mostly sidelined in this story.

If you go by what’s reported in the media (including by us), you’d think cemetery desecrations in France like the big one last weekend happen occasionally and target mostly Jewish and Muslim graves. Those are the cases the police report and we write about. A report by two parliamentary deputies, however, has taken an overall look at the problem nationwide and come up with some unexpected conclusions.

First, there are far more cemetery desecrations than we knew about. They happen on an average of every two to three days!  There were 144 last year and 110 up until Sept. 1 this year. And most of them target Christian — which in France would mean overwhelmingly Catholic — graves. Most desecrations are vandalism by teenagers, with only a small minority prompted by the racism, anti-Semitism or satanic cult practices normally highlighted in the media, the report said. The news story on this by our parliamentary correspondent Emile Picy is here.

(Photo: Police inspect desecrated graves in France, 8 Dec 2008/Pascal Rossignol)

The report is not aimed at playing down the gravity of attacks on Muslim and Jewish graves, but rather to get an overall idea of the problem in order to suggest possible remedies. It lists some obvious ideas like better surveillance of cemeteries and better use of existing punishment. What I found the most interesting was their discussion of the waning respect for the dead. The title of the report highlights this — “Du respect des morts à la mort du respect?” (”From respect for the dead to the death of respect?”)

“The place that death occupies in our society is ambiguous and has evolved a lot in less than a generation,” it said. “Death is omnipresent in films, video games, film clips and music. It is often staged in a violent way, with many effects that seems realistic, all the while being more and more ‘virtual’ for many young people. At the same time, the end of life — 516,000 people died in France in 2007 — is often a reality that is hidden and kept at a distance … the increase in cremation also helps to keep death at more of a distance … the relationship that young people have with death and graves has necessarily changed. Distancing death from life can cause indifference and eventually a loss of sense and respect. What is not known or put aside can progressively lose its sacred dimension.”

The report suggests that schools teach more about the death rituals of different cultures to inculcate more respect for the dead in young people. Police — but apparently not pupils — might also learn more about “religion in its cultural dimension” to understand the phenomenon better. This being an official report in France, it could not find fault with the official policy of laïcité, which is more aggressively secularist than just a policy of separation of church and state. But it’s hard not to sense a touch of nostalgia in it for an earlier French society that had more respect for its dead and (but don’t say this in public!) for religion.

(Photo: Desecrated Jewish graves in France, 31 Oct 2004/Vincent Kessler)

The full report is only in French and not yet posted on a website. We’ll link to it once it appears.

Muslim and Jewish leaders across the United States and Canada plan to meet this weekend to discuss ways to fight anti-Semitism and Islamaphobia.

The meetings and panel discussions from Friday to Sunday — dubbed the Weekend of Twinning — are part of a broader movement of interfaith dialogue taking place against a global backdrop of tensions between religious groups.

Several of the rabbis and imams have broadcast a public service announcement on CNN appealing for interfaith understanding (see the video above) and published a full-page ad in the New York Times available here in PDF form.

Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and co-organizer of the weekend talks, told me in a brief telephone interview that “it was a realization among Muslims and Jews that as children of Abraham not only do we share a common faith but we share a common fate … It is necessary for us to champion the causes and the concerns of the other.”

Asked how he rated Jewish-Muslim relations in America at the present, he replied: “Virtually non-existent” — a response that underscores the task ahead.

Many American Jews are politically liberal and strong supporters of Israel; many American Muslims feel they are regarded with intense suspicion in the wake of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.

The talks, panels and seminars will be held in 50 mosques and synagogues across the United States and Canada. The Weekend of Twinning resulted from a resolution passed at the National Summit of Imams and Rabbis held last year in New York and hosted by The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.

The Weekend of Twinning is co-sponsored by the Foundation of Ethic Understanding, Islamic Society of North America, World Jewish Congress and Muslim Public Affairs Council. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Muslim group in North America, says the 50 mosques and 50 synagogues participating in the weekend represent over 100,000 Muslims and Jews.

How effective do you think campaigns like this are? Can Muslims and Jews in North America find the common ground so difficult to achieve in the Middle East?

To mark the 70th anniversary of ”Kristallnacht”, when Nazis ransacked Jewish shops and homes and set synagogues ablaze, the German parliament this week passed a resolution on anti-Semitism.

It says anti-Semitism is still a problem that Germany needs to take seriously and calls for a team of experts to report regularly on anti-Semitic activity in Germany and to recommend steps to combat it.

A row with the Left party over the resolution sparked criticism from the Central Council of Jews and overshadowed a wider debate in Germany on the subject.

There has been much talk in the last couple of years about the revival of Jewish life in Germany and it is true that synagogues have sprung up and cultural organisations are now flourishing in some cities.

This is all to the good but it cannot hide a more sombre reality in the country responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were killed.

Last year, 1,541 crimes against Jews were reported in Germany, of which 59 were violent offences. German synagogues have round-the-clock police surveillance and Europe’s biggest Jewish cemetry, Weissensee, in Berlin, has been vandalised.

The number of registered Jews in Germany has risen to more than 100,000 from just 12,000 after World War Two, although many more non-practising Jews live here. The increase is mainly thanks to immigrants from the former Soviet Union. 

Only last weekend, two men in a Mercedes braked in front of van with a Rabbi and eight students inside in a smart part of western Berlin and hurled anti-Semitic abuse at them.

Chancellor Angela Merkel will no doubt condemn anti-Semitism this weekend at a ceremony to commemorate “Kristallnacht”. But have she, her government and the German establishment done enough to root out anti-Semitism?

Does Sony need a full-time religious affairs adviser? Someone who says “that’s OK” or “whoa, don’t go there!” It looks like they could use one, judging by its decision to recall and remaster its Playstation 3 video game LittleBigPlanet because it might offend Muslims. LittleBigPlanet was supposed to be one of the biggest releases of the season. And then Sony found out some background music had a few phrases from the Koran in it and they decided to replace the disks with different music. An in-house religion maven who does some “content debugging” would cost much less than this embarrassing exercise.

Sony isn’t the only company to trip over religious sensitivities. Microsoft had to withdraw its Xbox fighter game Kakuto Chojin; Back Alley Brutal in 2003 because of Koran verses chanted in the background. Back in 1998, Muslims accused Nike of sacrilege for selling sneakers bearing a logo showing the word “air” written in fiery letters that looked like the Arabic word “Allah.” Nike ended up withdrawing the shoes, giving sensitivity training to employees and building playgrounds at several mosques in Virginia.

Muslims haven’t been the only ones complaining. A French jeans poster showing women imitating Jesus Christ and his apostles in the Leonardo da Vinci painting, “The Last Supper”, was banned in France and Italy after Catholics there complained. A leading anti-Semitism watchdog howled last spring when a South Korean cosmetics company advertised a skin lotion with a picture of a young woman sporting what appears to be a Nazi officer’s hat.

Not all protests work. Sony refused to withdraw another PS3 game, Resistance: Fall of Man, despite legal threats from the Church of England against shoot-’em-up scenes in a virtual representation of Manchester Cathedral. The company argued the game was fantasy sci-fi and that historical buildings were often used in fiction. In the end, it issued an apology last year but did not withdraw or change the game. And the publicity seems to have boosted sales…

What’s interesting here is that these are products that marketing departments presumably signed off on. They’re not organisations printing potentially provocative material, such as the Prophet Mohammad cartoons or The Jewel of Medina, as a statement on freedom of speech. These companies want to sell their products and either don’t see the possible offence or think the provocation can help sales.

What would the job description for religious affairs adviser to a large international consumer products corporation look like? Here are a few points the adviser would probably have to address:

1. Should companies simply avoid any reference to Islam at all? That would seem like the safest way to go, but as the Sony and Nike cases show, it is not always clear that such a reference has even been made. And some Muslims are not offended by references that others decry as sacreligious. Which Islamic authority should you consult to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not?

2 . How far can you push Christians? Lampooning Christians is widespread and certainly sells books, as Richard Dawkins could tell you. Most Christians don’t bother to threaten legal action in response. When the Church of England did, Sony toughed that one out. But there is growing talk about “Christianophobia” and some churches seem more ready to fight back. Will this become more of a minefield in the future?

3. What about Jews and Israel? What is anti-Semitic and what is not? Can you use a Jewish joke in an ad? Should your company or institution divest in Israel over its policies towards the Palestinians?

4. What about images from India? India is a treasure trove of exotic images, especially in its Hindu temples and religious festivals. But what do the symbols mean? Should any be avoided because they might offend others or be linked to the nasty fringe of Hindu nationalism?

5. At least Buddhism presents no problems, right? Well, you never know how the China vs. the Dalai Lama issue will work out. What if a company made DVDs or even some kind of interactive game about reaching spiritual enlightenment that included images of the Dalai Lama. How would Beijing react? Could it be commercially significant?

6. Can we ignore protests from religions X,Y or Z because they’re too small to upset our sales? Hmmm…

Send in any other questions you think a corporate religion specialist would face. My last one is — how much should a company pay someone who can get the answers right without cutting into sales?

UPDATE: MTV quotes the musician of the disputed song, Toumani Diabaté, as saying that quoting the Koran is  his “way to attract and inspire people toward Islam.” Diabaté is a Muslim from Mali. The MTV report includes comments from two Muslims explaining that “there is no explicit rule in Islam prohibiting a song like Diabate’s.”

Reasonable people can agree to disagree on lots of issues, but some are so polarising that even reasonable people will hunker down in opposing trenches whenever debate about them flares up. The long-standing Catholic-Jewish dispute over Pope Pius XII and his role during the Holocaust is one of those issues. The 50th anniversary of Eugenio Pacelli’s death on Oct. 9, 1958 has recently mobilised both his defenders and detractors. After several pro-Pius comments from the Vatican and its friends and a firm but polite rebuttal by an Israeli rabbi, the umbrella group of French Jewish organisations, CRIF, has issued a stinging denunciation of Pius and warning that beatifying him would strike a “severe blow” to Catholic-Jewish relations.

The statement (here in French) is clearly sharper than the latest call by the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) urging the Vatican to open its last wartime records to historians’ scrutiny before deciding to proceed with Pius’s beatification and eventual canonisation as a Roman Catholic saint. CRIF is the public spokesman for France’s 600,000-strong Jewish community, which is Europe’s largest. It regularly denounces anti-Semitism in France and upholds the memory of the Holocaust, but has not been as active as the ADL in engaging the Vatican in the debate over whether Pius did as much as he could have to save Jews during the Holocaust.

A quick look at the timetable of the latest dispute puts the CRIF statement in perspective. Shear-Yashuv Cohen, chief rabbi of Haifa in Israeli, became the first Jew to address a bishops’ synod in Rome on Oct. 6. Catholic-Jewish relations have improved markedly in recent decades and Cohen accepted the invitation in that spirit. But when in Rome he realised the meeting would also be commemorating Pius’s death, he told our Vatican correspondent Phil Pullella he might not have attended if he had known that. During his address, he told the bishops that Jews “cannot forgive and forget” that some major religious leaders during World War Two did not speak out against the Holocaust. He separately told reporters Pius “should not be seen as a model and he should not be beatified”.

Four days later, at the Oct. 9 commemorative Mass for Pius, Pope Benedict — who as a German must be particularly sensitive to the debate — staunchly defended his Italian predecessor. Pius “often acted in a secret and silent way precisely because, given the real situations of that complex moment in history, he realised that only in this manner could the worst be avoided and greatest number of Jews be saved,” Benedict said. He added that he hoped the beatification process could “proceed happily” (felicemente in the original Italian, successfully in the official English translation).

Even though he gave no date for any move on beatification, this was clearly a ringing papal endorsement for the plan. It’s no surprise, then, that CRIF upped the ante, saying that a beatification “would deal a severe blow to relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish world”. Apart from criticising Pius’s caution during the war, it said he never issued a full public denunciation of the Holocaust after the war and called this shocking. “Jewish survivors of the Shoah will suffer a profound hurt if the silence of the magisterium in the face of the genocide of the Jews is presented as model behaviour,” it concluded.

A look at the Vatican agenda shows this dispute may not go away soon. The Vatican plans to open a photo exhibition on Pius next week and two pontifical universities in Rome, the Gregorian and the Lateran, will hold a joint conference on the pope and his teachings in early November. So there will be more fodder for debate.

For an institution that famously “thinks in centuries”, the Vatican seems to be pressing the issue by moving towards beatification before Pius and his papacy have slipped out of living memory. It seems to be saying that the Church and the Church alone will determine who is a saint. By doing so, it has painted itself into the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” corner. As the U.S. religion writer David Gibson put it : “Giving Pius the green light to sainthood would compound the controversy; not doing so would be seen as a rank injustice by some Catholics.”

After reading an earlier FaithWorld post on Pius, a reader named Raffi Shahinian left a link to an interesting comment on his blog. Pius may well have done the best he felt he could do under the circumstances, he said. “But shouldn’t a saint be someone whose life and works are more indisputably Jesus-shaped? Shouldn’t a saint be someone who the whole Church, nay, the whole world, can look to and say, ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about!’ In other words, should the very debate disqualify Pius?

After all the books, conference, articles and disputes about Pius, is that it in a nutshell?

Germany’s “kosher anti-Semitism” case has ended with a partial victory for the defendant. A court in the western city of Cologne has upheld an injunction banning the prominent German-Jewish writer Henryk Broder from calling another German Jew an anti-Semite. But it said the ban only applied to his blistering personal attack on Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, daughter of the deceased former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Heinz Galinski. If it had been expressed in a more factual way, it said, the statement would have been protected as free speech.

The dispute, which the Jerusalem Post dubbed a case of “kosher anti-Semitism,” started back in May when Broder posted a letter on the website Die Achse des Guten (The Axis of Good) complaining to WDR radio in Cologne for interviewing Hecht-Galinski for a programme on Israel’s 60th anniversary. In her comments, Hecht-Galinski compared Israel’s policy towards Palestinians to Nazi policy towards Jews. Broder wrote: “Mrs EHG is an hysterical, egoistic housewife who is talking for nobody but herself and is uttering nothing but nonsense anyway. Her speciality are thoughtless anti-Semitic and anti-Zionistic statements, which are a fleeting fad once again.”

Hecht-Galinksi obtained a court injunction against him calling her an anti-Semite (which explains why the adjective “anti-Semitic” has since been xxx’ed out of Broder’s letter on the web). She argued that Broder, an active defender of Israel who has written a series of books dealing with the relationship between Germans and Jews, was trying to silence criticism of Israel. “Especially in the face of our common past, critical comments on committed injustices must be possible, also if they concern Israel,” she wrote in a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Broder challenged the injunction and declined to settle out of court, telling the Jerusalem Post that he opposed a deal “allowing anti-Semites to decide what anti-Semitism is. It is as if pedophiles can decide what real love toward children is.”

In the end, the court issued a split decision that German media rated as a partial victory for Broder. The comments in question constituted offensive criticism, it ruled, so the injunction should be upheld. “A comparable statement with the necessary factual context would … be allowed,” it added. Just where the dividing line between the personal attack and free speech would have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Seeing two Jews fight over who is an anti-Semite was uncomfortable for Germans, especially for the media who often ask German Jews to comment on the news from Israel. The conservative daily Die Welt drew an interesting conclusion from the dispute. “The whole thing is shameful for a large section of the non-Jewish German media who actually prefer to let Jews do the talking so they don’t have to take a controversial position in the minefield of German-Israeli-Jewish relations,” commentator Clemens Wergin wrote. “The lesson from this affair is that it’s time for non-Jews to have a more vigorous debate about Israel and stop using German or other Jews as their representatives. Whoever believes in the power of the better argument need not shy away from disputes, and needs no Jews as a fig leaf.”

If two German Jews can’t agree on what anti-Semitism is, can a court — and a German court at that — do any better?

“The opening of our yeshiva (in 2005) and the ordination of the new rabbis is the best answer we can give to Hitler and the Nazis, it shows they did not win,” said Rabbi Shalom Stambler. The ordination of nine new rabbis on Sunday evening in Warsaw, the first in Poland since the Nazis murdered most of what was one of the world’s largest Jewish communities, was a proud moment for the Warsaw-based head representative of Chabad Lubavitch of Poland. “Poland was always a centre of Jewish study in the world,” he said. “People used to come from all over the world to study the Torah here. This was stopped by the Nazis … We hope the yeshiva will grow and grow.”

Read our feature “Pride, hope as Poland ordains first postwar rabbis” here. Apart from his comments in the feature, Rabbi Stambler told me a recent controversy in Poland over a book accusing Poles of persecuting Jews in the years after the Holocaust had told him something about today’s Poles. “I saw how many people entered into the dialogue, students, intellectuals, people who wanted to know how their grandparents had acted,” he said.

Jan Gross’s book Fear argues that anti-Semitism remained prevalent in Poland under the communist regime after 1945. In a sign of the continued sensitivity of the subject in Poland, state prosecutors investigated whether the book had slandered the Polish nation but finally decided not to press charges.

Stambler said he did not believe there was anti-Semitism in the higher echelons of Polish society, but noted the continued attraction of the ultra-Catholic, often anti-Semitic Radio Maryja among some sections of the population.

Commenting on anti-Semitism, Stambler’s brother Meir, a businessman, said: “Some old people, or young drunks, sometimes shout abuse. There is not plenty (of anti-Semitism) but it exists… But once an old man was screaming at us on a tram and some young people walked up and told him to stop, they were ashamed, they told him to join the 21st century,” he said.

Think the uproar over John Hagee’s comments about Hitler, the Holocaust, the Bible and John McCain’s rejection of his endorsement is over? Hardly.

U.S. news networks have been abuzz with the latest twist to the saga — a Hagee endorsement (of sorts) from renegade Democrat-turned-independent Senator Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman, who is Jewish, said in a statement posted on his website on Wednesday that “I believe that Pastor Hagee has made comments that are deeply unacceptable and hurtful. I also believe that a person should be judged on the entire span of his or her life’s works.”

The maverick Connecticut senator went on to note Hagee’s work with “Christians United for Israel.”

“Pastor Hagee has devoted much of his life to fighting anti-Semitism and building bridges between Christians and Jews. The organization that he has helped build, Christians United for Israel, is a vital force in supporting the war against terrorism and defending our ally, Israel. I will go to the CUFI Summit in July and speak,” he said.

Presumptive Republican nominee McCain dumped Hagee like a burning ember last week after it emerged that the Texas pastor had given a sermon in the 1990s in which he quoted from the Bible to make the argument that Hitler was doing God’s work by helping to drive the Jews back to Israel.

In apocalyptic Christian circles in the United States, the creation of the state of Israel in the aftermath of the Second World War is widely taken as a key sign that the End Times are drawing near.

Millions of evangelical Americans to varying degrees subscribe to such views.

Observers of this scene say Hagee’s views are hardly news.

“He’s been saying this kind of thing for decades … he’s a providentialist — he believes that everything that happens on earth is part of God’s plan for the redemption of the world,” said historian Nicholas Guyatt, who has written extensively on apocalyptic Christian culture.

Watch this space: Hagee will remain in the news for some time to come.

Jews are returning to Russia. For as long as anyone alive can remember, the flow was mostly in the other direction. But Amie Ferris-Rotman and Conor Sweeney in our Moscow bureau have found a return wave, despite a persistent anti-Semitism there:

Around one million Jews fled during the Soviet era and the post-communist chaos. Those returning now from Israel, the United States and Europe hope to use their new skills and old knowledge to do business.

“Now there are services here, like in New York and Paris, but the lifestyle is more interesting than in either of them — it’s easy to understand why thousands are coming back,” said Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress.

Hard statistics on Jews returning to Russia do not exist, said Satanovsky, but anecdotal evidence is there. He estimates 80,000-120,000 Russian Jews have returned, plus many more who originated in other Soviet republics.

Read the whole feature here.