On November 17, demonstrations broke out throughout France in reaction to an increase in fuel taxes; the participants’ distinctive yellow vests gave their name to a movement that has not yet abated. As the protests have continued, a number of demonstrators have displayed and chanted anti-Semitic slogans; last weekend, a group of them verbally attacked the Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. And this is one anti-Semitic incident among several in just the past week, not to mention the 74-percent increase in attacks on Jews last year. Jeremy Sharon writes:

Although the [yellow-vest] movement started out as a protest against fuel-tax hikes, it has morphed into a protest movement against the socioeconomic condition of the French working and middle class with a highly populist strain of anti-elite rhetoric and beliefs. At the same time, the anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist sentiment, alive in significant portions of France’s large Muslim population, has been an engine for anti-Semitic attacks in the country for the last two decades.

It appears that the combination of these two phenomena, and a snowball effect in which one anti-Semite is emboldened by the anti-Semitic attack of another, is behind the recent outbreak of attacks.

Yonathan Arfi, vice president of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities, says that significant elements within the yellow-vest movement have identified French Jews as part of the “elite establishment” that is keeping them down and oppressing ordinary, working French citizens.

Even though French Jews are largely in the same economic circumstances as many in the middle and lower-middle class, they are associated with the establishment and blamed for the perceived wrongs done to other French citizens. Anti-capitalist sentiment has become a notable feature of the yellow-vest protests, which quickly morphs into anti-Jewish stereotypes and prejudices. . . . “Everything comes back to the Jews, ‘They have money; they have power; they are Zionists,’ and even though they have nothing to do with the issues in France, when there are problems, Jews get blamed,” said [the French-born Israeli activist] Ariel Kandel.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.