DAILY BEAST
by Bernard-Henri Lévy
June 10, 2014
Europeans are reluctant to describe the Brussels museum shooting as an anti-Semitic hate crime. It’s time to end this dangerous state of denial.
The Belgian and French police did their job. As a result, we know that it was a French citizen from Roubaix, one Mehdi Nemmouche, who was probably the author of the killings on May 24 at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
Belgium’s Jews are afraid. The Jews of Marseille, where the suspect was detained, are afraid.
Not a Jew in Europe does not feel fear at the similarities between the itinerary of Mohamed Merah in 2012 and Mehdi Nemmouche two weeks ago. There is not a single believer in democracy to whom the terrifying idea has not occurred that just one Merah might have been an isolated case, an exception, a monstrous event about which one might say, by way of reassurance, that it was without pattern, precedent, or future, but that two Merahs—a Merah followed by a Nemmouche, a Merah renamed Nemmouche and mimicking his model down to the modus operandi, well, that is one too many—that is the beginning of a series and constitutes, with the help of buzz and viral propagation, the outline of a paradigm.
ArchitectGuy on Israel 