According to no-pasaran, a small group of French Jews recently gathered in Paris to peacefully protest French apathy toward the growing number of attacks by Muslims on their community. About half way through the event, however, the demonstrators broke into a panic when one of their number tried to raise the flag of Israel.

The would-be flag bearer was promptly "dressed down" by his brethren and Zion's colors never saw the light of day. End of story, unless you're wondering why the kind of ethnic enthusiasm commonplace in New York City produced pure dread in Paris.

As we'll try to show, this widely ignored blog posting offers insight into the continuing genocide of Jews who remain exiled in Europe.

If avoiding a Muslim pogrom wasn't the real motivation for muzzeling the flag waver, the repressed nature of French Jewish history may well have rendered it the most conscious one. The current persecutors of French Jewry constitute a large and growing percentage of the French populace. Fully eight million out of sixty one million Frenchmen are Muslims while only 600,000 or so are Jews.

French Muslim enmity toward Jews goes back to Islam's origins and Muhammad's first experiments with forcible conversion, a technique his followers would eventually use to conquer much of the known world. Having resided comfortably in Madina for hundreds of years prior to the new prophet's arrival and possessing a rich culture of their own, the Jews declined to follow Muhammad. Islam's founder responded by destroying Jewish cities across the Hijaz, and within a generation Islam's next leader, Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, would institutionalize the inferior status of Jews and Christians (as dhimmis) in his codification of Islamic Law.

Today, a thousand years after the destruction of the Madina Jews, Muslim enmity toward the oldest indigenous community in the Middle East still derives from Judean resistance to Islam. Muslims continue to believe that the entire Middle East "belongs" to them, that "their dhimmis" do not have the right to political expression let alone a state of their own, and that despite the UN decision to re-establish Israel, the existence of a "dhimmi state" in the Middle East is an affront to the Muslim god.

Embarassed by the failure of multiple Arab-Islamic efforts to annihilate the flegling Jewish democracy, French Muslims finally turned to terrorizing their Jewish neighbors. As the outrages mount (a synagogue torched here, a child beaten there, and so on) French gentiles have looked-on passively, just as they did when French Nazis ruled their country.

Since the French were complicit in the murder of a million Jewish children in the 1940's, the demonstrators had good reasons to avoid anything that might provoke a Muslim attack and unleash a second holocaust.

Along with assaults on Jews, there is the related issue of Muslim political intimidation. To their credit, almost all of the French political parties were present at the Jewish-led rally. Due to the rapid growth of Muslim influence, however, these parties are at best only minimally supportive of the Jewish state. Thus the behavior of the demonstrators may have also reflected a strategic decision to try to separate the issue of Islamic hegemony in the Middle East (about which the French are unwilling to engage) from the issue of religious freedom in France, a pillar of post-revolutionary French "humanism."

Notwithstanding the forgoing, the real motivation for keeping the Jewish flag hidden was only tangentially related to Jewish-Islamic relations - troubled as they are. Rather, its roots lay in Franco-Jewish relations, and more specifically the year 1806. That was the year when the infant "Republic of France" launched a policy toward its Jews no less genocidal than the set of American policies that destroyed the Native Americans.

To understand what really occurred when Zion's "Star of David" was raised and shudders of undiluted dread ran through the Jewish demonstrators, one must examine the conditions of their citizenship as set forth by Napoleon and officially acceded to by the Jews two centuries ago. For it was Napoleon who depended their legal status as Frenchmen on their willingness to repudiate a central tenet of their religion - the belief that they would eventually return home to the Middle East - to Zion.

Napoleon "established" a Sanhedrin (Jewish governing body) to resolve the question of Jewish status in modern France and offered it an agonizing choice. They could either renounce one of the pillars of Judaism and gain admission to the French Republic, or they could remain faithful to their religion and continue to be terrorized.

Napoleon's demand for an act of supreme self-abnegation was nothing new, of course. The Jews had endured a thousand years of similar threats from the Church. Christian theologians as far back at the fifth century were staking the Church's legimacy on the tortured - and patently genocidal - logic of "replacement theory." It declared that Christ's coming had nullified the Jewish covenant with God and with that the heretofore definitive relationship between the Jews and their return to Zion.

The notion that unassimilated Jews constituted a threat to the new French Republic is revealing. According to the Jewish holy book or Bible, there is no greater symbol of the eternal covenant between God and his children than the land that He gave to His children - Zion. Jews have always known this, and through Christianity - so have non-Jews. Like Christianity, French secular modernism's claim to being the new, universal redemptive mode would also depend on its success in overthrowing their awesome predecessor - redemption through God's covenant with the Jews. Coercing Jews into repudiating the Bible (and its exhaustive documentation of their national and universal claims) may have been an ungainly technique for winning this clash of civilizations, but it was effective. Today, Western culture revolves around the French belief that God and Zionism are interelated myths. Among its most ardent (and celebrated) adherants - so-called "secular Jews."

(To understand how the Jews went from being the Church's primary target to becoming the Enlightenment's, see Adam Sutcliffe's book, citation below.)

The World Zionist Organization describes the humiliating denouement:

Now bear in mind that according to The New York Times, BBC and NPR, for example, none of the above took place. For in the view of our leading secular propagandists, Zionism hadn't as yet been invented. That's right. Western mainstream news organizations promote the widely accepted innanity that Zionism was created out of whole cloth in the late nineteenth century by secular European Jews. The truth, of course, is that Zionism is integral to the Jewish religion. Its source is God's revelation to the Jews at Mount Sinai.

Why should it matter to us that a fundamental principal of Judaism dating back to the birth of Judaism constituted a deal breaker for Napoleon?

Because the widespread lie that Zionism was invented by European Jews (long after Napoleon's demise) in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair is used today to support a couple of monumentally convenient and critical misrepresentations.

The first is that Judaism, like Christianity, was never a nationality but "only a religion." The second is that the Jews would not have developed a national identity were it not for the advent of the national model in Europe and the herculean efforts of Hertzl and other European Jews to graft this non-indigenous, European plant onto Judaism. Today, these twin desecrations of historic truth are relied upon and propagandized by a set of highly interested parties including, as it turns out, many Israelis. (Anyone with the slightest doubt that Zionism is basic to Judaism can put their concern to rest by simply perusing a traditional Jewish prayerbook or Bible.)

Islamists rely on this misrepresenation to bolster their wild claim that they are the indigenous people of "Palestine" (Rome's name for Judea) and to promote the line that the national aspirations of the Jewish people amount to nothing more than the death throws of European colonialism.

Israeli confusion about the roots of Zionism can be traced to the tragic irony that Israel's founders were in fact the children of the Jews who renounced their religion in exchange for Napoleon's "freedoms." Their consequent ambivalence about the historicity of the Sinaic revelation (when over a million people saw and heard God), and their guilt-ridden anger toward religious Jews (who neither renounced Zion or feel ambivalent about their purpose or origin) all devolve from their post-enlightenment European "education." (Yoram Hazony is the expert on this complex and important subject.)

The mainstream media collude in the fairy tale that the Jews hail from Europe largely out of ignorance (in fact, most Israelis are the descendants of the million or so Jews who fled dhimmitude in Arab countries), but also as an expression of the repressed Christianist origins of their world view.

The average journalist knows very little about Israel, and even less about Judaism. Trained in the great secular academies of the US and Europe, she finds all of the religious pretensions of the West to be dubious. Her "rationalism" (like that of Voltaire and Spinoza) assures her that the Zion of the Bible is pure myth, that the religious beliefs of Jews (and yes, most certainly the Evangelicals as well) hinge on them, and that these fables should have no bearing on resolving tensions with Islam, a "great" third world religion. That her late-European pretext for denying the biblical record fits hand in glove with Christian supersessionism (the Church's long standing belief that the Jewish covenant with God was abrogated when the Jews refused the overtures of Jesus) is, of course, no accident. As Bloomsian predecessor's go, Judaism trumps all and easily fit the bill for both Voltaire and Paul.

Moreover, the failure of Christianity to delegitimize Judaism only fueled the determination of the secularists to finish the job. That anti-Zionism, the undiluted expression of anti-Judaism, is as natural to a London-born member of the Anglican Church as it is for a Cincinatti-born member of the liberal American academic church should remind us of the Christianist roots of the West and direct a spotlight at the elephant in the room of modern history - that a rationalism founded upon the genocide of an ancient and supremely worthwhile people is hardly rational at all.

Needless to say, the French exiles of ancient Judea are acutely aware of the terms to which their ancestors agreed for they remain the humiliating basis upon which the Jews are tolerated in France today.

Given the complexity of the present argument, the reader may be forgiven for asking whether it could really be the case that the French Jews fear expulsion two centuries after the demise of Napoleon. Have they not been citizens of France longer than most Jewish-Americans have been Americans?

The answer resides in France's sordid history of terrorizing and expelling its Jews dating back to the Middle Ages, and the relatively recent betrayal of her remaining Jews by the Vichy government. During World War II, it should be remembered, the French sent 75,000 of her Jews north to be exterminated by the Germans.

There is also another explanation for the existential anxiety of the French Jews and it resides in the veritable certainty that whatever it was that they promised Napoleon, they never truly renounced their religious beliefs. If the French do not know this, they must surely suspect it which leaves us today with both parties having lived a lie for over two hundred years. In such a situation, it would be surprising if the remnants of French Jewry (like the Spanish conversos before them) did not live each grey Parisian day with the underlying fear that their secret faith in Zion will be exposed. Thus regardless of the superficial rationale they used for dressing down their itinerant flag bearer, the deeper reality of those who found themselves unexpectedly confronted with their true colors was something akin to Anne Frank's reality in the moment that she stood revealed.

Let us ask another question then. Even if, God forbid, another expulsion from France were to come about, what do French Jews have to fear? Didn't the League of Nations and the UN re-establish the State of Israel for just this purpose? Aren't their brethren in Israel waiting for them with open arms?

The perceptive observer will have no difficulty discerning why the Jews of France would devote more psychic energy to hiding their true colors than acting upon them. For them, just as for most of us, reality takes a back seat to shame, and it is the shame of being an exiled Judean still living under a false pretext that occupies their psyches, not the long repressed (or in many cases ossified) passion to return to Zion. For anyone who imagines that it will be an easy thing to get these wounded Judeans home, let them think again and recognize that in 21rst century Europe the enemy of Jewish freedom is shame.

That the European remnants of Zion, the Ur-Nation Under God upon whose journeys, conquests and metaphysical discoveries so many of the West's blessings stand; whose storied and heaven-kissed youth is recounted by billions of faithful in churches and synagogues around the world; whose reputation as the divinely established Kingdom of Freedom resonated throughout the world long after its physical demise thereby inspiring other peoples as the quintessential national model; who thereby constituted an inspirational beacon for pre-enlightenment England and Holland, both of whom dubbed themselves a Second Israel (see Judaism and Enlightenment, Adam Sutcliffe, Cambridge University Press, 2003); about whom the great Dutch theologian Petrus Cunaeus once wrote: "the Republic of the Hebrews - the holiest and the best there ever was" (ibid.); the holy republic that finally left the French authors of the enlightenment feeling un peu tard aux theatre; that the splendorous remnants of First Israel traveled to Paris to protest anti-Semitism only to disavow themselves again brings new meaning to the word tragic. Yet no one should judge the courageous survivors of the imperial obscenity that calls itself European civilization.

With all respect to the diminutive dictator that imposed these self-abnegating terms upon the terrorized Jews of France, and through various proxies eventually upon multitudes of exiled western Jews who similarly acceded to their own spiritual disembowelment, the truth is as follows. In order to excise the longing of the Jewish people to return to Zion from normative Judaism one would have to discredit the Bible or turn Judaism on its head. Try as they did, and the crusaders of the Enlightenment certainly gave it their all, both objectives are well beyond the reach of French impertinence.

"And you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation"
Exodus 22

[Related: The Modern 'Hep! Hep! Hep!' . The French Are Not A Nation]