can anyone be allowed to paint a swastika on the statue of Marianne, the goddess of French liberty, in the very center of the Place de la République
That was what the chairman of one of France’s most celebrated luxury brands was thinking last July, when a tall man in a black shirt and a kaffiyeh leapt to the ledge of Marianne’s pedestal and scrawled a black swastika. All around him, thousands of angry demonstrators were swarming the square with fake rockets, Palestinian and Hamas flags, even the black-and-white banners of ISIS. Here, barely a mile and a half from the Galeries Lafayette, the heart of bourgeois Paris, the chants: “MORT AUX JUIFS! MORT AUX JUIFS!” Death to the Jews. It was Saturday, July 26, 2014, and a pro-Palestinian demonstration turned into a day of terror in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods of the city
o something! Do you see what is happening here?” the chairman said to a line of police officers watching the demonstration build to a frenzy. “What do you expect us to do?” one officer said, then looked away. For years, the chairman, a longtime anti-racism activist, has turned up at rallies like this one to see which politicians and which radical groups were present. (For reasons of personal safety, the chairman asked not to be identified for this story.) France’s endless demonstrations are a mainstay of the republic, a sacred right rooted in the legacy of Voltaire. But hate speech is a criminal offense—people may express their opinions, but not to the extent of insulting others based on their race, religion, or sex. The protest—against Israel’s Gaza policies—had been banned by the government, fearful of violence, following flare-ups in the preceding weeks. But if the police were to move in too quickly, the riots might continue all summer long—suburbs in flames, mobs in central Paris.
Photographs and videos of the swastika and its perpetrator, of protesters chanting “Kill the Jews,” and of the Palestinian, Hamas, and ISIS flags were sent in a rush to various groups in the Jewish community who assess threats. By early afternoon, some of these reached Sammy Ghozlan, a 72-year-old retired police commissioner who has spent his career working the banlieues, the belt of working-class, racially mixed suburbs that surround Paris. Ghozlan is a folk hero of the banlieues and has a nickname that is impossible to forget: le poulet cacher—“the kosher chicken.” (Poulet is slang for cop.) For 15 years, he has overseen France’s National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism—known by its French abbreviation, B.N.V.C.A.—a community hotline he founded that is funded by his police pension and whatever small donations he can come by. Its purpose is nothing less than to protect the Jews of France.
Sammy Ghozlan, photographed by Uriel Sinai, at his new home, in Netanya, Israel. By Uriel Sinai.
This past year, Ghozlan’s frequent bulletins—detailing attacks in parks, schools attacked, synagogues torched, assaults on the Métro—have clogged the in-boxes of reporters at Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Le Parisien, and of thousands of Jews throughout thebanlieues. Ghozlan’s bulletins sometimes come twice a day, with claims that have also been backed up by hard numbers: according to a watchdog group, the Jewish Community Protection Service, or S.P.C.J., which reports statistics collected by the country’s Interior Ministry, there were 851 recorded anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2014, more than doubling the total from 2013. Ghozlan and his 19 volunteers are on the front lines in the most troubled areas, documenting, trying to confirm, hoping to get a reporter or a police prefect or a court to take action. There has been such an uptick, and such a flurry of alerts from Ghozlan over the past year, that there’s always a risk that his efforts will be hrugged off as yet another nuisance.
Just two weeks before the July 26 riot, Ghozlan’s texts and messages did not stop. It was Bastille Day weekend, and, on Sunday, July 13, he tracked the hundreds of protesters who rushed into the Marais, Paris’s historic Jewish quarter, stopping briefly at an empty synagogue on the Rue des Tournelles, near the Place des Vosges, and then racing, reportedly with iron bars, axes, and flags, toward the Rue de la Roquette, a boutique-and-café-lined street a few blocks from the apartment of Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Their destination was the Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue. Inside, the 200 worshippers—including the chief rabbi of Paris—heard the howls from the crowd, estimated to number about 300: “Hitler was right!” “Jews, get out of France!” Audrey Zenouda, a policewoman who happened to be inside the synagogue, called her father, a retired policeman who works with Ghozlan at the B.N.V.C.A. “Do something. We are terrified here.”
“I knew that if anyone could get the police to take action it would be Sammy and the B.N.V.C.A.,” Zenouda later told me. Only six police officers were assigned to be on demonstration duty that day. “We are waiting for the assault police to arrive,” one told a reporter at the scene. After an hour, a counterterrorism force rescued the chief rabbi, but everyone else was left inside, behind doors barricaded from the inside with chairs and tables. Outside, members of a special security patrol and a dozen members of the self-trained Ligue de Défense Juive began chasing off the demonstrators with chairs and tables from nearby cafés, working with a small unit from the security force. Together, it took them three hours to disperse the crowd and safely evacuate the synagogue.
Almost immediately afterward, the reports of the July 13 demonstration would be challenged and debated. The numbers would be skeptically parsed—were there really so many?—and questions would be asked about actions that might have provoked the violence, as if carrying iron bars and axes around central Paris might be normal. In some circles, there were even accusations that the Jews “brought on the behavior,” as they always do.
In the crowd—and many others that would turn the summer of 2014 into a summer of hate in Paris—were representatives of France’s political parties, both left and right. France’s Muslim population is estimated to be around 5 million, a potential voting bloc in a country of 66 million. (The Jewish population of France is in the neighborhood of 500,000.) Shimon Samuels, the director for international relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris—which combats anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and extremism, and, through a foundation, helps to fund Ghozlan’s hotline—witnessed some of the events of July 13. Among those he recognized in the crowd were a local concierge and bank teller, along with members of the current Socialist government.
Monitoring the footage later, Ghozlan was sickened to see the faces of political allies he had worked with for decades, mostly in what is known as Le Neuf Trois (“9–3”), the area of northern Paris suburbs that he once presided over as a commissioner of police. Le Neuf Trois is the rap name for this district, which has the honor of being, by reputation anyway, the most violent in France. (The name derives from the area’s postal codes, which all begin with “93.”) It is also where Ghozlan lived for 30 years in a spacious house surrounded by hedges on the Avenue Henri Barbusse in the relatively calm community of Le Blanc-Mesnil.
For Ghozlan, July 2014 was the tipping point, after years of escalating anti-Semitic violence: “There was no debate in our family. We all knew—it is time to go. Leaving is better than running away,” Ghozlan later told me. He would ultimately come to think of the summer riots as the predictors of the catastrophes that would play out six months later in the terror attacks at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, three quarters of a mile from the Place de la République, on January 7, 2015, and then, two days later, at Hyper Cacher, a kosher grocery store in the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood of eastern Paris.
By then Ghozlan’s classified ad—one nobody who knows him could ever have thought possible—had already been posted: “Renting a house, 4 rooms, 2 bathrooms, a veranda, a garden with 50 m. square.” Two days before the Charlie Hebdo attack, Sammy announced what, to many, including me, was unthinkable: Sammy Ghozlan, proud Frenchman and the dean of Paris’s anti-Semitic crime-fighters, had joined the thousands of French Jews moving to Israel.
THE SEPHARDIC COLUMBO
THE SEPHARDIC COLUMBO
More than a decade ago, I spent weeks with Ghozlan at the height of the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation that began in September of 2000 and lasted more than four years. Ghozlan had recently started the B.N.V.C.A. hotline and was working from a crammed back room in a synagogue in Le Pré-Saint-Gervais. When I first met him, in the fall of 2002, Ghozlan carried a white plastic binder bulging with one-page reports written up from the calls he’d received from tipsters. All day and all night his phone would ring. It never left his hand. More than 300 reports were in that binder: Molotov cocktails thrown at Jewish schools, students called sale Juif (“dirty Jew”), arsons, desecrations, a Jewish woman beaten in a taxi. The attacks on the Jews of France had yet to catch the attention of the international press, and Ghozlan could get almost no one in Paris to take him seriously.
Now, 12 years later, Ghozlan’s binder is one of 50 that fill the shelves of his office in central Paris. I went to see him again last spring, when he was back in the city, having undergone surgery to repair a tendon in his leg. The B.N.V.C.A. was still operating, with Ghozlan monitoring from Netanya, a seaside town near Tel Aviv, where as many as 2,000 French Jews immigrated to in 2014, and where Ghozlan moved last December, coming back to Paris every six weeks or so.
The base of the Statue de la République is defaced with a swastika as a protest in support of Palestinians turns anti-Semitic, Paris, July 26, 2014. By Etienne Laurent/EPA/Corbis.Ghozlan resembles a beat-up version of Yves Montand, and the decade since we had seen each other only heightened the effect. Otherwise, not much had changed. He still wears the neat blazer and open shirt that suggest his native North Africa. (He was born in Algeria.) And he was still constantly on the phone, issuing directives to investigate allegations of anti-Semitism. He dispatched volunteer lawyers to the courts to try to stop marauding anti-Israel protesters who stripped kosher and Israeli products from supermarket shelves. And he was entrenched in a longtime legal battle against the anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, who was recently convicted in Paris of condoning terrorism. “This case obsesses me,” Ghozlan told me. “I have been filing against him for 10 years.” On his iPhone, he shows me dozens of pictures of Dieudonné’s fans in front of the Hyper Cacher, after the bloody hostage crisis of January 9, making the sign of the “quenelle,” a Nazi-style salute that Dieudonné created and popularized.
It had been two months since that attack, and Ghozlan was fixated on trying to make sense of what had happened inside the Hyper Cacher, where a 32-year-old terrorist named Amedy Coulibaly, who had grown up in a Paris suburb with his Malian parents, massacred four people in a quiet area of bobos and professionals in Porte de Vincennes. He wore a GoPro video camera strapped to his torso to record the slaughter. He reportedly announced to his hostages: “I am Amedy Coulibaly, Malian and Muslim. I belong to the Islamic State.” By the time the siege was over, four French Jews were dead, including one young man who grabbed a gun that Coulibaly had left on a counter because it had jammed. The day before, Coulibaly had killed a policewoman who was investigating a traffic accident in the suburb of Montrouge.
When news flashed of the Montrouge shooting, Ghozlan was following the situation from Netanya. He had an instinct and contacted a close friend in another Jewish organization who lived nearby. “This morning attack in Montrouge,” he wrote. “Can you check to see if this was near the [Jewish] school?” The answer came: “You are right. The school is close. There are rumors, but you are wrong. We are there and the school is not the target.” Later reports indicated that a Jewish school in Montrouge may actually have been Coulibaly’s original target. In Netanya, Ghozlan had yet to unpack his furniture, but he was already making plans to get back to Paris.
Moving back permanently was out of the question, but it hasn’t been easy for Ghozlan to disconnect. “I am deeply French,” he told me. “I did my military service in the air force. I love France’s values, its culture, its history, its cuisine, philosophers, and artists. I never imagined that I would someday leave. I led the fight for 15 years and all our warnings made no difference.” In 2014, about 7,000 Jews left France for Israel, and this year the anticipated exodus is between 10,000 and 15,000. The Jewish Agency for Israel recently reported that, in 2014, 50,000 French Jews made inquiries about moving to Israel, an astonishing number. In many of France’s public lycées, Jewish students are insulted, classrooms are vandalized, books are defaced, and fights break out in the classroom with any attempt to teach the Holocaust. After theCharlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, there were reports that classes were disrupted when some Muslim students refused to participate in any memorial for the victims. According to Shimon Samuels, about 40 percent of France’s Jewish students are now in Jewish schools and 35 percent in Catholic schools. “This is an unprecedented situation,” Ghozlan tells me. “We are in new territory here.”
Ghozlan’s phone rings. When he hangs up, he tells me of two unidentified Muslim men who have swept into a Jewish school in Paris’s well-heeled 16th Arrondissement. (Earlier that week, there had been an incident at another Jewish school, in the 11th Arrondissement, an area of professionals, politicians, and writers.) “How did these thugs get into the school?” Ghozlan asks. “They walked around as if they were staking it out.” The school in the 16th was evacuated and the bomb squad deployed. None of this will appear in the press, Ghozlan says. There is a fear in the schools that they will lose more students.
Ghozlan’s voice is the first thing that commands attention—his inflection is almost musical. A part of Ghozlan’s celebrity in thebanlieues is his reputation as a former bandleader who played three instruments and oversaw orchestras that worked the Jewish-wedding and Bar Mitzvah circuit in Paris, advertising “Groove, Funck, Hassidiques, Israélien … Oriental.” He learned his limited English by lip-synching to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”
Like 70 percent of France’s Jewish population, Ghozlan is Sephardic, part of the group from North Africa called pieds-noirs (“black feet”). He lived in the Algerian city of Constantine until 1962, when, at age 20, he fled the country with his family in the wake of the Algerian war, taking with him just “a sandwich and a suitcase,” a commonly used pied-noir expression. With his wife, Monique, a petite kindergarten teacher he met when they were both in a Jewish youth group in Algeria, he lived in the house in Le Blanc-Mesnil. There were bedrooms for his three daughters and one son, and his mother, who never missed an episode of NYPD Blue. When I first met Ghozlan, he struck me as a Sephardic Columbo. Early in his police career, he managed to negotiate order in a part of thebanlieues that was so violent it was nicknamed Chicago. His method was to offer judo classes to the immigrant populations—many of which spoke Arabic, as Ghozlan does. He was assigned to take care of juvenile offenders, who seemed to respond to his direct style and lack of hyperbole, which he had learned, he told me, from his father, a former chief of detectives in Constantine.
Ghozlan made his counterterrorism reputation when the synagogue on the Rue Copernic was bombed in 1980, an attack that killed 4 people and injured more than 40. Ghozlan learned that the perpetrators were Palestinian sympathizers, not the neo-Nazis the police first suspected. He was made special commissioner to investigate the next major anti-Semitic attack, on Chez Jo Goldenberg, a landmark Jewish restaurant in the Marais, where 6 people, including two Americans, were killed, and another 22 wounded, in 1982. Ghozlan’s police career—always running alongside his Bar Mitzvah shows—eventually brought him to head the department in Aulnay-sous-Bois, in Seine-Saint-Denis. He retired in 1998 and in 2000 started the B.N.V.C.A., finding himself almost alone in his fight to protect the Jews of thebanlieues.
Ghozlan has been awarded the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest tribute. But his urgency has always made him an outlier, an annoyance to the assimilation-conscious, largely secular Jewish establishment concentrated in Paris’s preferred arrondissements, who still view him as a publicity hound from the banlieues, a Jew who does not know when not to react. However noble Ghozlan’s motives, he makes a nuisance of himself with his incessant press releases, I was told a decade ago. That sentiment hasn’t changed in some quarters.
When I originally met Ghozlan, he railed that his jerry-rigged detective agency had to deal with a rigid French justice system. To register a hate crime in France—which comes with a higher level of punishment than an ordinary crime—he would have to appear in front of a magistrate, who was generally loath to call the beating of a rabbi in the Métro an act of anti-Semitism. For them, Ghozlan said, it was a “simple assault,” usually committed by an unemployed French Muslim acting out of frustration. This enraged Ghozlan. “I wanted to start a Jewish defense force,” Ghozlan told me. Judge after judge told him, “There is no anti-Semitism charge applicable unless someone dies.” The party line of the Establishment Jewish organizations in Paris was always “Sammy, stop rocking the boat.” Back then, even David de Rothschild, the banker, told The**Jerusalem Post that the wave of attacks was likely coming from “neo-Nazis, a hostile, aggressive, antisemitic, right-wing population … ” He soon changed his mind.
FOREIGNERS AGAIN
Twelve years later. It feels like an eye-of-the-storm moment in Paris, as the government of François Hollande tries to restore calm after last summer’s riots and the January terror attacks, amid a faltering economy and plunging euro. When I landed, in March, the rise of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Front, was in the headlines, as Paris was still struggling to recover from the terrorist attacks of January. Mounds of flowers and posters could be seen on the streets. There were swirls of tourists at the Louvre, as always, but there were more soldiers with automatic weapons at every Jewish school and institution, even in the dining room of a Rothschild-foundation nursing home. In the lobby of the synagogue on Rue Copernic—the one damaged by the bomb in 1980—schoolchildren walked in proximity to machine guns. The optics were unnerving.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls—taking the risk that he might antagonize his Socialist Party base, which leans pro-Palestinian—was issuing a series of muscular statements seeking to stop the flood of Jews leaving France. Among them: anti-Zionism is “an invitation to anti-Semitism.” An increase in prejudice is “growing in an insufferable manner in our country,” he said, and pledged 100 million euros toward combating “racism and anti-Semitism.” Ten thousand soldiers were deployed throughout the country. Parts of the banlieues have resembled war zones, including, at times, Créteil, east of Paris, where Valls made his pledge. Last December, Créteil endured the brutal case of a 19-year-old woman whose apartment, which she shared with her boyfriend, was broken into. One of her assailants allegedly said, “You must have cash here because you are Jews.” They then gang-raped her. In April, Valls announced that French police had foiled five terrorist attacks in recent months amid stepped-up security. One involved an Algerian who allegedly shot himself by accident and then called an ambulance. “The threat has never been so high,” Valls said. “We have never had to face this kind of terrorism in our history.” (In June, the Anti-Defamation League was preparing to release a survey suggesting that the French population has become increasingly aware of the problem of anti-Semitism.)
More than a million people rally to honor those killed in the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher terrorist attacks, Place de la République, Paris, January 11, 2015. By Nicolas Gouhier/Abaca Press/SIPA USA.
The former foreign minister, 92-year-old Roland Dumas, once convicted of accepting illegal gifts from a mistress who was a lobbyist for a French oil giant—the conviction was later reversed—criticized Valls, even though they are both in the Socialist Party. “He has personal alliances. That means he has prejudices. Everyone knows he is married to someone … who has influence on him,” Dumas said on a news show. Valls’s wife is the Jewish violinist Anne Gravoin. Immediately, the Wiesenthal center called on President Hollande to strip Dumas of his Légion d’Honneur, as the British designer John Galliano had been when he lashed out against the Jews. Its campaign was unsuccessful.
France has the largest population of Jews in Europe (and the third largest in the world, after Israel and the United States) and has always been seen as the laboratory to understand what is happening on the Continent. But Jews make up less than 1 percent of the French population. Even so, according to the S.P.C.J., they are the target of 51 percent of all racist acts in France. The country has become Israel’s biggest source of immigrants.
The former foreign minister, 92-year-old Roland Dumas, once convicted of accepting illegal gifts from a mistress who was a lobbyist for a French oil giant—the conviction was later reversed—criticized Valls, even though they are both in the Socialist Party. “He has personal alliances. That means he has prejudices. Everyone knows he is married to someone … who has influence on him,” Dumas said on a news show. Valls’s wife is the Jewish violinist Anne Gravoin. Immediately, the Wiesenthal center called on President Hollande to strip Dumas of his Légion d’Honneur, as the British designer John Galliano had been when he lashed out against the Jews. Its campaign was unsuccessful.
France has the largest population of Jews in Europe (and the third largest in the world, after Israel and the United States) and has always been seen as the laboratory to understand what is happening on the Continent. But Jews make up less than 1 percent of the French population. Even so, according to the S.P.C.J., they are the target of 51 percent of all racist acts in France. The country has become Israel’s biggest source of immigrants.
There are those who question the dire statistics. “Can you believe that a philanthropist from New York was here last week and told us he had come to offer us humanitarian aid?” said Sacha Reingewirtz, the president of the Union of French Jewish Students, which won a court case against Twitter in 2013, forcing Twitter to identify authors of anti-Semitic tweets in France. Reingewirtz, with degrees from Oxford and the Sorbonne, tries to minimize the fact that swastikas have appeared on university campuses. The Jews of the Paris establishment have long lived a form of double life; religion in France is traditionally a private matter. “There is still a sense of downplay among the upper middle class,” said the author Clémence Boulouque, a former literary critic for Le Figaro who now lives in New York. “There is a sense of pride. There is a reluctance to share our feelings and fears.”
It’s precisely this attitude that Ghozlan has been battling for decades, one that is fiercely resilient given the current mood in Paris. The country’s counterterrorism forces are now desperately trying to cope with what is commonly called the “third wave of anti-Semitism” in modern France. The first wave, coming from the far right, morphed into the neo-Nazi crusades of the 1990s, which targeted not only France’s Jews but also the growing Muslim population isolated in projects on the outskirts of the cities. The second wave came from the far left—rooted in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel attitudes—and erupted during the first and second intifadas, with flare-ups in the 1990s and early 2000s. The third wave has been propelled by the recent rise of ISIS, has metastasized via thousands of Web sites and social media, and, in France, has become homegrown and home-schooled among a vulnerable population of young Muslims. One Jewish-American expat, living with his young family in a quiet part of Le Neuf Trois, just over the Boulevard Périphérique from Montmartre, told me, “It can feel like there are two choices for a young man in the projects: sell drugs or turn to Islam.”
French Muslims who are as assimilated as French Jews speak privately of suddenly being trapped into the identity of Islam, whether they are religious or not. Sartre once wrote of the Jews, “It is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew.” The same can be said about Muslims, as the documentary-film maker and novelist Karim Miské—who was born in Ivory Coast and was not brought up Muslim—wrote in Le Monde: “It is the Islamophobe who makes the Muslim.” Recently, Miské, winner of an English PEN award for his novel Arab Jazz, set in the checkerboard world of the 19th Arrondissement, was in the Marais with his 12-year-old daughter when a well-dressed man looked at him menacingly and said, “Boom.” “The tragedy is that we are now trapped in an identification with religion,” he told me. “Frankly, it is racist.”
I went to visit a Jewish family in the Sixth Arrondissement, where life is as assimilated and as privileged as it gets for Jews in Paris. The 18-year-old daughter, a high-school senior making plans to attend university in England, asked me, “Is it true that if I lived in America I could wear a tiny Star of David necklace or a sweatshirt from Technion university?”
“What would happen if you wore it in this neighborhood?” I asked. “Do you think you would be physically attacked?”
“I would be made to feel angoisse,” she said, meaning uncomfortable, filled with anxiety or angst. This teenager was certain there would be looks and harassment, perhaps even a physical altercation. I heard the word angoisse frequently in Paris. However established you have been as a Jew in France, I was told, you no longer have the luxury of feeling invisible. It is as if the Jews of France are being forced yet again into a ghetto of cultural identification. This, despite France’s profound traditions of liberty, equality, and fraternity, not to mention laïcité—the stubborn commitment to strict secularism. As a member of an established Jewish family recently told the Telegraph columnist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, “When did we become foreigners again?”
“NO ONE ELSE WILL DIE”
On the ninth of January, the day of the Hyper Cacher attack in Porte de Vincennes, the sirens of Paris did not stop. Ghozlan’s niece, a lawyer, was on her way to the Hyper Cacher when she ran into a friend just outside the store. It was one P.M. They stopped to talk. Suddenly, a muscular African rushed past her with his knapsack. He knocked her in the shoulder. A few moments later she heard gunshots. She called her uncle immediately. Ghozlan happened to know the store owner. He texted him and started calling everyone he knew in the Paris police.
Only 12 days before, on December 28, Ghozlan had had an ominous feeling and sent out another of his warnings: “The next attack is going to come at an unguarded Jewish business or store. The B.N.V.C.A. demands 24/7 security on Jewish stores.” An associate told him, “You are going too far, Sammy.”
In news reports of the Hyper Cacher attack, one man is called the Unidentified Hostage. I met him in Paris in March, several weeks before French judges placed a gag order on the hostages. His story has never been told publicly. In the five hours that Coulibaly held 19 people hostage, André, as he insists on being called, was the only one alone with the attacker for long stretches of time. When he was finally rescued with the other surviving hostages, he spent hours briefing the counterterrorism squad, was congratulated for his sangfroid, drafted a 10-page statement, and met Prime Minister Valls at a reception. Soon after, André took leave from work, afraid for his life.
André is 43, a computer tech with clients that include law firms and banks. He is Jewish, but non-observant, and does not keep kosher. He had heard of Sammy Ghozlan but never paid particular attention to the B.N.V.C.A. Like everyone in Paris, he was badly shaken by the terrorist attack at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and on Friday, January 9, he and his girlfriend made the decision to stay in for the weekend. The Hyper Cacher is known for its appetizers—tabbouleh, hummus, freshly prepared every day. Moments after they entered the shop to buy some snacks for the weekend, they heard gunshots and raced downstairs to the basement with others to hide. A few minutes later, a fellow customer rushed down and told them, “He will kill us all if you do not come up.” André and his girlfriend followed a group upstairs to a scene of bodies, blood pooling on the floor, and an angry Coulibaly: “Does anyone here know anything about computers?”
For André, the smooth-faced African was obviously “a boy of thebanlieues.” He was struck by what seemed to be a split in Coulibaly’s personality. He seemed equal parts insecure student and newly trained terrorist, as if he were taking cues from the ISIS playbook, which inspires working-class would-be jihadists to morph into monsters capable of beheading. “It is a form of empowerment,” André said. It became clear to André that, for all his training, Coulibaly did not possess the tech skills needed to perform what was evidently an essential task: the uploading of his GoPro footage of the carnage, in which four people were slaughtered in the first moments of the attack. “He needed it for instant replay on jihadi sites,” André said. Just as urgently, Coulibaly wanted to get online to monitor the news. “What was urgent is that his footage was expected to be uploaded while he was in the store to incite other attacks in Paris.”
Liberal imam Hassen Chalghoumi speaks at the Sarcelles synagogue during an interfaith service, Sarcelles, France, July 21, 2014. By Aurelien eunier/Getty Images.
Coulibaly had raced into the store with at least one Kalashnikov rifle, a Scorpion submachine gun, two Tokarev pistols, knives, ammunition, and a silver laptop, with instructions on how to upload his footage and what to say to the news media. What he did not bring, however, was any equipment to make it work without Wi-Fi. The Hyper Cacher had no Wi-Fi. In addition, Coulibaly forgot to bring his charger cord, and his laptop was running out of power. In the office of the small store, his frustration was mounting. “He was desperate to get online,” André said. André volunteered to help. For the next five hours, he was in and out of the office of the Hyper Cacher as Coulibaly ricocheted between rage and calm. At one point, Coulibaly questioned the hostages and learned that André had never been inside the Hyper Cacher before. “Wow, that is bad luck,” Coulibaly said.
André is a slight man, with delicate hands and large expressive eyes. It was easy to understand how Coulibaly would not have found him threatening. His size, however, masked his physical strength and discipline. On the day we met, he wore purple suede running shoes and a gray silk scarf knotted around his neck. His first task was to get Coulibaly online. “Are you sure you know what you are doing?” Coulibaly said, and hovered over him with the guns. “I just focused,” André said. “I told him what I was doing as I was doing it. And at all times I called him ‘mister,’ and I used the formal vous, as a way of showing my respect. I wanted to keep him calm. I knew that already he had killed four people, and I made it my mission: No one else will die. ‘We don’t need Wi-Fi,’ I told him. ‘I can get you online.’ ” André grabbed a cable from the Hyper Cacher’s printer, used it to connect Coulibaly’s laptop to the store’s Internet hookup, and opened a Web browser on Coulibaly’s desktop. He could have used an application that would have left no footprint—like Tails, the choice of Edward Snowden—but a browser, André knew, is easily trackable.
Soon, the news was up on the three channels Coulibaly had requested, France 24, Canal+, and BFMTV, the country’s leading news network, which Coulibaly was determined to contact. André remained near him. “Connect me to the newsdesk,” Coulibaly snapped, but he kept his laptop angled so André could not see directly onto the screen. What he did manage to see was a complex set of instructions that Coulibaly had downloaded and was trying to follow. On the telephone finally with BFMTV, Coulibaly began to free-associate a rambling statement about his mission to avenge the Prophet and kill the Jews. When he hung up, he continued to speak to André, and, from time to time, others in the store. He allowed the hostages to have lunch. “I will serve you,” André said, which angered Coulibaly. “I have not given you that order,” Coulibaly said.
Some of what Coulibaly talked about that day was tracked by authorities when they were able to monitor a Samsung Galaxy phone Coulibaly had borrowed from one customer, but much was not. To André, he admitted that he had killed the policewoman in Montrouge and that he was working with Cherif and Said Kouachi, the brothers responsible for the Charlie Hebdo massacre. “He said, ‘There are many people like me who are now preparing in Arab countries.’ He told me, and others too, ‘I am not crazy. We understand the Koran. We understand the good and the right way.’ ” Coulibaly’s French sounded unsophisticated to André, without subjunctives. On the telephone, however, with French media, he spoke a more academic French, as if he had been tutored with a formal script.
What André never revealed to Coulibaly was that, in his early career, he had, in fact, been a teacher in a very tough suburb. “It was a different France then,” he told me. “In the 1990s we had no problems. I had students that reminded me of Coulibaly. They were operating out of the system. We were trained in how to work with them.” The first step, he said, was to always show them respect. “I knew to listen and not to argue. I knew, ‘Do not use the familiar tu—that only came at the end.’ I used the word vous until he began saying ‘tu’ to me.”
André did not tell Coulibaly another essential fact of his life. On the roster of his tech clients were some with high security clearances at foreign embassies. From a cold-storage room in the basement of the Hyper Cacher, he had texted his contacts. The French counterterrorism squad still has his phone, he said, but André re-created a version of what he sent: “It is very urgent. There is a terrorist attack at Hyper Cacher. He has already killed.” He noticed that he had only two bars on his own Samsung Galaxy and worried that it would not go through. He quickly sent another: “I am downstairs in the refrigerator room.” And one more: “I am in the Hyper Cacher of Porte de Vincennes. There is someone with a weapon and he has already killed.”
Several times that afternoon, Coulibaly, finally calm, asked André, “Do you understand why I am doing what I am doing? Do you understand what I am doing here? I am here because the Prophet has given me an order. I am here to stop the war in the Arab countries.”
“I said, ‘I can understand what you are saying.’ I went into a neutral state, like a teacher. I wanted him to see into my eyes and know that I was not angry. I said, ‘I am here and I will try to help you.’ ” He was, André believed, hoping for a glimmer of mutually understood truth or to hear perhaps the ultimate French compliment of agreement: exactement!
Reliving it, André starts to tremble slightly. He has been in therapy since January, as has his girlfriend, who still cannot get on the Métro. His fear is that he will be identified, and his life will be threatened. “Again and again he said, ‘This is not my fault. I have to do this. It is not against you personally.’ He wanted me to acknowledge in some way his point of view. And what had brought him to what he had to do. He needed to be understood.”
AU REVOIR, PARIS
The most troubling question in the French Jewish community is also the most obvious one: “Is it time to leave?”
I asked Roger Cukierman, the head of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France, or CRIF, the umbrella group for secular Jewish organizations in France. I expected him to equivocate, but, by way of an answer, he quickly reeled off some of the horrors that have plagued the Jews of Europe during the last decade: the case of Ilan Halimi, a cell-phone salesman kidnapped, brutally tortured, and killed in the Paris suburbs by a gang in 2006 for being Jewish; the 2012 murders of three small children and one adult at point-blank range at the Ozar Hatorah school, in Toulouse, by Mohamed Merah; the 2014 slaughter at the Brussels Jewish Museum; the deadly attack at the synagogue in Copenhagen in February of this year. This March, Merah’s stepbrother was pictured in the New York Post in his camouflage ISIS togs pronouncing a death sentence, as a pre-pubescent boy beside him pulled the trigger in the videotaped execution of the 19-year-old Israeli Arab Muhamed Musalam. Then there are the riots. As Cukierman told The Telegraph last summer, “They are not screaming ‘Death to the Israelis’ on the streets of Paris. They are screaming ‘Death to the Jews.’ ”
A French soldier stands guard at a synagogue in Lille, France, January 12, 2015. From PhotoPQR/Voix du Nord/Newscom.
To get a better idea of why Ghozlan decided to leave, I went to visit his friend and colleague Yossi Malka, a retired businessman who works for the B.N.V.C.A. Malka met me at the commuter rail station at Stains, a suburb in Le Neuf Trois. If you didn’t know better, you could be in parts of Queens or the Bronx. Here are the same gray projects, laundry flung over the balconies.
Malka wore a worn brown leather jacket, a natty tie, and a fedora—what I think of as the uniform of the banlieues—and drove me to Sarcelles, 20 minutes away and part of what is called the Red Belt, a string of suburban towns, many with Communist or Socialist mayors historically but, now, an expanding National Front. “This is not the Paris of Woody Allen,” Malka told me as we approached a small synagogue ringed by low apartment buildings topped with satellite dishes. “That Paris no longer exists.”
Sarcelles, which borders Le Neuf Trois, is an extended area of small apartment houses, shopping centers, projects, and markets, the first stop for middle-class Moroccans, Algerians, and Tunisians, who, like Ghozlan’s family, immigrated to France in the 1960s. For decades these neighborhoods were peaceful, a vibrant mix of French citizens and immigrants, all trying to make their way in a country with little regard for their special identities.
“Welcome to the most endangered synagogue in France,” Malka said as we entered a small driveway in Garges-lès-Gonesse, a suburb next to Sarcelles. “Look at that,” he said, pointing out through the windshield. “All day, they throw things—melons, garbage, rocks, and bottles.” Parked in front was a large silver van from France’s counterterrorism force, Vigipirate.
In Garges last July, a week after the violence on the Rue de la Roquette, a highly visible billboard advertising lollipops was modified with a large scrawl: PALESTINE WILL LIVE, PALESTINE WILL OVERCOME. COME WITH: MORTAR, FIRE EXTINGUISHER, BATON. DEMONSTRATION AT THE GARGES-SARCELLES TRAIN STATION. COME OUT IN NUMBERS! FOLLOW TO THE JEWISH QUARTER.
French authorities took action, and the pro-Palestinian demonstrations planned for the weekend, which clearly promised another wave of anti-Semitic violence, were forbidden. Yet nothing was done to stop them. On Saturday, July 19, thousands appeared in and around Paris, burning cars, attacking buses. By two P.M. the next day, a mob of hundreds crowded the narrow street by the Garges synagogue, and the first rocks had shattered the Star of David window. Hammers were taken to the lock at the gate; the marks were still visible when I visited in March. The police refused to move in. Ghozlan was alerted immediately but could hardly hear over what had become the standard rallying cry: “MORT AUX JUIFS!” Their next destination: the shopping center in Sarcelles and its large synagogue, two blocks away, another stop on Malka’s grim tour.
Ghozlan sent out a blast via text message: “Big emergency in Sarcelles. Stores are being attacked. Synagogue is being held by demonstrators. Police are not going in Sarcelles.” Within the hour, a pharmacy was in flames. Then hundreds raced through the central plaza toward a Jewish market and that too went up in flames. Then on to the synagogue. Ghozlan was furiously texting for every member of the Ligue de Défense Juive in the area to get to the synagogue and protect it, while advising the general public to “stay out of Sarcelles.”
News footage showed French police standing inert for almost two hours until reinforcements arrived with tear gas. (The previous day, the police had used tear gas and made 38 arrests.) With the help of the Ligue, they were able to push back the mob. Later, they would say they were waiting for authorization: France’s police are under strict instructions not to intervene without actual threats of violence. When the young people of the synagogue came outside, they began to sing “La Marseillaise” to thank the police for their rescue. Standing in the crowd, Malka saw several French police officers crying. “This should not be happening ever again in France,” one of them told Malka. Earlier that afternoon, Prime Minister Valls had laid a wreath during a commemoration of the 72nd anniversary of the roundup that sent more than 13,000 Jews from Paris to the Nazi death camps.
When I asked Ghozlan about this day, his eyes moistened. “I relived my childhood. In Algeria, the French said they would protect us. Then the mobs came and torched Jewish businesses and we had to flee.”
The first things Ghozlan packed last November were his musical instruments, two violins and a piano. Then he sorted through hundreds of family photographs and letters. He shipped a Louis XVI commode and a writing desk but left most of the furniture for the tenants, an immigrant family who were the first to answer the ad for the house on the Avenue Henri Barbusse in Le Blanc-Mesnil that Ghozlan had built in the 1970s. Today, few of the Ghozlans’ Jewish neighbors remain; two-thirds of the members of his synagogue down the street have departed. His three daughters have already moved to Israel.
Gunman Amedy Coulibaly, in a still from a video he recorded before the Hyper Cacher attack. From Polaris.
What surprised many was Ghozlan’s determination to leave. He resisted encouragement from a friend and neighbor, Hassen Chalghoumi, the imam of Drancy, who moved to that suburban town, the next one over from Le Blanc-Mesnil, from Tunisia in 1996. He has been an ally of Ghozlan’s for most of the past decade, attending his rollicking Shabbat dinners and hosting Ghozlan for lunches at his mosque. “I told him again and again, ‘You cannot leave,’ ” Chalghoumi told me. “Sammy would not engage in the conversation.”
Chalghoumi is tall and commanding, with an exuberant personality. “The world changed on 9/11,” he said. “At the airport I am often pulled out of the lines.” But the imam reacted strongly when I referred to “Islamophobia.” “I will not use that word,” he said. “That plays into a sense of victimization.”
Chalghoumi gave a speech at the Shoah Memorial in Drancy in 2006. Not long after, his house was vandalized, the contents damaged or destroyed. At a prayer service in 2009, Chalghoumi talked about the need to respect the Jews and their centuries of culture. The next day, around 200 protesters collected outside his mosque, confronting anyone who tried to enter. Many of the protesters waved signs: PUPPET OF THE JEWS. With members of a Jewish organization, he toured Israel with 20 imams in 2012. When he returned, there was a mass of demonstrators at the airport. In 2013, he was in Tunisia with his family when he was assaulted near a mosque. His daughters were with him and have yet to get over it. He spent days in the hospital.
I met Chalghoumi in a private room at a Hilton, given to him, he said, by “Jewish friends”—the hotel owners. With him were three bodyguards. His next appointment was with the grand rabbi of Brussels, and soon, Chalghoumi said, he would be on his way back to Israel. His phone rings as frequently as Ghozlan’s. One of the calls that day was from someone informing the imam that the French government would start shutting down a few Islamist Web sites that were advocating terrorism. “Bravo,” he said. “It’s a start
He pulled out his iPhone and showed me dozens of racist sites, many naming him as a target. Suddenly, I heard shouts from the speaker. The images on the screen were of demonstrators massed against him in Drancy. The problem in France, Chalghoumi believes, “is the foreign funding of mosques where imams are often imported from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Why won’t the government put a stop to it? No one is monitoring what is going on. All of the imams here should be trained in France
When Ghozlan was in the hospital, Chalghoumi made sure to visit—the only one of his friends, Ghozlan later told me, who made the effort. The imam thinks he might still have a shot at getting his friend to move back to Paris. “I am not giving up,” he told me. “I am going to make him change his mind
Throughout the second half of 2014, Ghozlan and the B.N.V.C.A. were in overdrive amid a flurry of new reports: signs in Le Neuf Trois that said, HITLER WAS RIGHT; a 16-year-old Jewish student hospitalized when four Africans jumped him; groups making Nazi salutes at the Shoah Memorial; the robbery and rape in Créteil. A new white plastic binder had to be started
On Christmas Day, Ghozlan received word that an air rifle had been fired at a kosher fast-food restaurant in the 19th Arrondissement, just a few days after a synagogue had been similarly attacked. Then, the following day, a nearby synagogue and a printer’s shop. Ghozlan insisted on cranking out a press release. Then he sent out the alert predicting further attacks on Jewish stores, 12 days before Coulibaly entered the Hyper Cacher
On that January day, the chairman of the luxury-goods company who witnessed the defacing of Marianne with a swastika last July got a hysterical phone call from his daughter. She had learned on Facebook that one of her father’s cousins was trapped inside the store. Her father was already in a garage off the Champs-Élysées, getting on his motorcycle to try to get through the police lines in Porte de Vincennes
Inside the office of the Hyper Cacher, Coulibaly was desperate to connect to the police. He demanded that André dial the number. Coulibaly heard the recording: “ ‘If you need this office, press 1. If you need that office, press 2,’ ” André told me. “Coulibaly said, ‘What bullshit. Nothing in this country works.’ ” He had managed to get through to French TV but was still having other problems. He needed to upload his GoPro footage, but, André said, “his program was a very old Adobe Flash Player. Maybe if the Flash Player would have been working, I would never have been in that office all that time. At one point, he asked all of us our names and religion. And what we did for a living. I said, ‘I am a handyman. That is how I know computers.’ At that moment, he took his weapon and started to load it. I thought, This is the end
In the Hyper Cacher office later that afternoon, André saw that Coulibaly’s upload of his seven minutes of carnage had stalled at 87 percent. Then he heard noises coming from outside. He and his girlfriend hid under the checkout counter. Coulibaly had gone to a corner of the store to pray. When the counterterrorism squad sprayed bullets into the store, Coulibaly was killed instantly. As André and the other hostages, including the luxury-company chairman’s cousin, rushed out, they were told, “Do not look to your side.” In the pandemonium, André did not notice Coulibaly’s dead body next to the checkout counter
The Hyper Cacher in eastern Paris, January 16, 2015. Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images.
Nicolas Comte, the head of the Unité SGP police union, had been among the crowd earlier in the day outside the Hyper Cacher. Tall and broadly built, he resembles a TV anchor and is the face of the French police. When we spoke, he mentioned that the concerns of the Jewish community were crucial to him. “Why?” I asked. He hesitated. “I don’t tell many people, but my wife is Jewish and so are my children.” Comte is Catholic. The one time he had met Sammy Ghozlan was when Comte went to his in-laws’ synagogue in Le Blanc-Mesnil. “I knew him only from his reputation. He’s a hero of mine,” Comte said
Like many in his situation, Comte now lives “a bit of a double life,” he said, in France. “I have told all my children, ‘Do not let anyone know you are Jewish. It is a private affair.’ But my youngest son, recently a Bar Mitzvah, insists on wearing a small Star of David. I let him know my concern. I said, ‘You must be careful.’ Now, when I go to synagogue, I have a gun that I carry in my coat pocket so no one can see it. It has come to that
Not long after the attack on the Hyper Cacher, representatives of the Ministry of the Interior appeared on the Avenue Henri Barbusse in Le Blanc-Mesnil. They had come to alert Ghozlan that he would now have a security detail posted at his house at all times. Ghozlan’s tenants informed them, “Mr. Ghozlan has moved from France,” and gave them his new address in Israel
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/07/anti-semitism-france-hostage-hyper-cacher-kosher-market
http://www.canarymission.org/
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