France: You Built the Cattle Cars. Now You Cry About Human Rights?

On this day, 83 years ago, in July 1942, one of the darkest crimes on French soil took place: the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup — Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver. Under orders from the Vichy regime, which collaborated with Nazi Germany, the French police (not the Germans) brutally and systematically rounded up over 13,000 Jews — men, women, and children — and herded them into the Velodrome d’Hiver stadium in Paris. There, they were imprisoned under horrific conditions — almost no food, no sanitation — before most were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.

More than 4,000 children, all citizens of France, were torn from their homes. The trains departing from Drancy and Compiègne made no distinction based on age or citizenship. The silence of most of the intellectual elite, the legal system, and the public — save for some in Paris and a few Christian leaders — rang with a chilling clarity. A sound, it seems, that still echoes today.

This week, 83 years later, the French government announced its intention to recognize a Palestinian state, joining the European chorus of condemnation against Israel while systematically ignoring the atrocities committed by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and their partners. In Europe, as always, concern for human rights often seems to operate only in one direction.

Once, Jews were accused of being a “nuisance.” Today, we’re accused of committing “crimes against humanity.”

History does not repeat itself, but it does echo. France, which in the 1990s still asked forgiveness for its sins, is backsliding. Once again, Jews are under threat in Paris. Once again, communities are packing their bags. Once again, public discourse legitimizes the idea that Zionism is racism.

But this time, there is one critical difference: There is a Jewish state. There is a people who stand their ground. There is an army. There is Jerusalem. And there is no longer naivety.

That France — and today’s France — neither truly understands the Jewish soul. The power to return, to survive, to believe, and to rebuild Jerusalem from its ruins. Perhaps they need reminding: a people who refuse to take responsibility for the crimes of their past are doomed to drown in the moral failures of their present.

And when they once again ask how the riots began, why the Jews are leaving again, why whole neighborhoods of Paris are governed by Sharia law — let them look back to Vel’ d’Hiv, and forward to their own government, which has weaponized Holocaust memory into the opposite of what it was meant to teach.

France then — and France now. The names change. The tone is sometimes less harsh. But the message? Sadly familiar. The Jew is embraced when he is beaten and butchered — but condemned when he stands tall and defends himself.

As for the moral outrage over the war in Gaza — leave that to us. You have enough problems in France, and in your not-so-distant past. It is not your place to lecture us.