She made it up. That’s what police now say about the 23-year-old woman who told them a
gang of young men who “appeared to be of Muslim North African origin,” attacked her on a
suburban train near Paris because they thought she was a Jew. She said they drew swastikas on
her, cut her hair and overturned a stroller with her 13-month-old child in it, while onlookers
watched and did nothing, according to an AP report that we quoted and
editorialized about on Sunday.
It’s no comfort that many others
besides me fell for the hoax and condemned the reported attack as one more loathsome
instance of increasing anti-Semitic violence. In France, where hate crimes have
soared in recent years, everyone from President Jacques Chirac to
human rights activists expressed moral outrage:
One French daily, Le Figaro, compared the purported onlookers who did nothing to defend the
woman on “The Train of Shame” with witnesses who watched the 1964 murder of Kitty
Genovese on a street in Queens, N.Y., but failed to do anything either, including calling the
police.
I don’t know what kind of apology I should make for drawing the correct conclusion from an
incorrect news story. The best I can do is quote regular Straight Up reader Shane Hockin, who
writes with a wink that the hoax “sort of gives anti-Semites a bad name.” My staff of thousands
wishes I’d been clever enough to think of that.
