According to a recent and still unpublished report on anti-Semitism in eleven European countries—based on two years of research overseen by the former New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly—France is the nation most dangerous for Jews. Judith Miller writes:

Attacks and threats against French Jews surged 74 percent from 2017 to 2018, . . . and preliminary data for the first half of 2019 indicate “further intensification,” with another 75-percent increase last year. Moreover, the official estimates of some 500 attacks and anti-Semitic acts per year are “notoriously underreported,” according to the study.

Kelly and [his collaborators] blame the French government for failing to respond to the almost constant violence against, and harassment of, French Jews. Government funds to the Jewish community total just $3.7 million a year—“about one-fifth of what British Jews receive from their government, though France’s Jewish population is roughly double that of Britain.” . . . What the report calls the police’s “catch-as-catch-can” mobile deployments to protect synagogues and other Jewish facilities “provide little or no police presence and deterrence.”

To justify such indifference and what the report calls the public and private sector’s “inadequate” response to the growing threat, Paris hides behind its “lip-service to France’s secularism.” Requests for additional government funding to address security shortfalls would likely be rejected, prominent French Jews complained, . . . since France’s political, judicial, and law-enforcement establishment interpret their country’s “secularism ideology” to mean that the state “cannot give ‘special’ attention to one ethnic or religious group over another, even in the face of disparate threat or dangers.”

[T]he report stresses that the “single greatest threat of violence” against French Jews emanates from radicalization among portions of a growing French Muslim population, [which is in part] due to France’s failure to assimilate Muslims and to “anti-Semitic social media and satellite TV from the Arab world.” . . . Overall [its tone is] pessimistic. “Radical Islam is universally seen in France as a physical threat,” Kelly and his team conclude. “And this [kind of] more violence-prone anti-Semitism is certain to worsen.”

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.