French school shooting: Five responses to the gunman's attack

French authorities are searching for the gunman responsible for killing three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse yesterday. The event followed closely behind the murder of three French soldiers in the region. Here is a snapshot of reactions to the events from French and Jewish media.

4. Same weapon, different minorities

Haaretz, “Toulouse shootings shows hatred has more than one source
Jean-Yves Camus
“[I]ntelligence officials here have made a link between this cold-blooded murder, carried in a military style by a lone killer, and the assassination of three servicemen a couple of days ago from a paratroopers' unit who served in Afghanistan. ... What has sparked suggestions of a common ideological cause for these killings is that all the victims are from minority groups, whether Jews in the case of the school, or Muslim north African or West Indian, in the case of the soldiers.

But so far the most important fact to emerge for the Jewish community in France is that they will have to learn how to live under threat from an enemy that is not necessarily a terrorist network with a leadership and cells, but one which follows the pattern of "leaderless resistance," a concept believed to be on the rise within a range of radical movements, both Islamist and extreme-right.            

The so-called "new" anti-Semitism of the post-Intifada era emanates mostly from radicalized (although not often observant) Muslim immigrants or long-standing citizens, and it is rooted both in religious prejudice and in anger emerging from support for the Palestinian cause. ...[But] as shown in the Breivik case, sectarian hatred and bigotry, a bigotry that kills, can equally emanate from the other end of the political spectrum, for neo-Nazis may not scale intellectual heights, but they do have enough brains to hate Jews and Muslims at the same time, and for much of the same reasons. They also have the brawn to turn their ideology into real events.”

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