A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [146]
Nineteen eighty was even worse. A synagogue in the Marne was attacked in April. In May an organization for deportees and Resistance fighters was hit. In September a Jewish business was set on fire. A few days later, automatic weapons were fired on the central synagogue, a Jewish day care center, the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr, and a school.
On Friday, October 3, at 7:30, when the evening Sabbath service should have been ending, a bomb exploded in front of the Rue Copernic synagogue. Because the service had run a little late, there were fewer fatalities than planned. Still, more than twenty people were injured, including some inside the synagogue. Four people who had happened down the short street at the time were killed. One of them, by coincidence, was an Israeli tourist. The others were non-Jews. French Prime Minister Raymond Barre was quick to denounce “this odious attack which was intended for Jews on their way to the synagogue and which struck innocent Frenchmen crossing the street.”
Was not this statement a symptom of one of the problems? A government which distinguished between Jews and innocent Frenchmen? The Jewish community had had enough. A huge demonstration was quickly organized with the labor unions and opposition political parties. Some 300,000 people marched against racism and anti-Semitism. Some estimates of the crowd were as high as 500,000. The wide, long boulevard that extends from Re-publique to Bastille was filled.
An hour after the explosion, a telephone call claimed authorship ol the attack for a small neo-Nazi group called Federation d'Action Nationalists Europeenne, commonly known as FANE. The organization was officially banned one month later, which in practical terms only meant that it had to change its name. In Belgium and West Germany there were similar laws, and neo-Nazis had become skilled at running a variety of organizations and quickly turning one that was banned into another. The Flemish Military Organization, after being banned in 1983, became the Flemish Bloc. In Germany the Aktionsfront Nationaler Sozialisten was banned and became the Nationale Sammlung, which was banned and became the Deutsche Alternative. Year after year, the same people showed up at Diksmuide with different names for their organizations. The year after the French government banned FANE, the FANE activists were at Diksmuide under the name FNE. A mere inconvenience for the neo-Nazis, the name changes created total confusion for law enforcement.
The police investigation could not show who had planted the bomb at the Rue Copernic synagogue. Accusations landed all over the political spectrum. Extreme right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen accused the KGB. Arabs and Basques came under suspicion. Increasingly, so did the French police, recalling that Pierre Goldman's unsolved murder was claimed by a group called “Honor of the Police.” A police union official, Jose Deltorn, asserted that he knew of thirty police officers who were active in extreme right-wing organizations, including FANE. But when the government challenged him, he was discredited because he could prove that only nineteen of these policemen were neo-Nazis.
Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front was becoming better organized. There was also something called the New Right, which