Race crimes rise in France/Anti Semitism too

I was lead to this story by a tweet from New Statesman politics editor Mehdi Hasan

France, 2009-2010: 6% rise in violent crime. 119% rise in racist crimes. What do French police do? Arrest veiled women.

It is a nice piece of staggersish demotic. Sounds pretty appalling and highlights how ghastly the French are over the Burka ban.

Rise in racist attacks

Another grim statistic published Monday was the amount of racist crime in France. A government agency counted 1026 acts of racist violence or threats of racist violence in 2009, most of which were directed against North Africans. This was up from 467 in 2008.

But take a look at the numbers, following this quote comes this,

Six mosques were attacked, which was two more than in 2008.

According to statistics, anti-Semitic violence had also risen from 459 reported acts or threats of violence to 815. Thirty attacks were also made against French synagogues in 2009.

So there is an almost equally staggering increase in attacks against Jews,  What we do not hear is a break down of those who have committed these crimes. But I don't think that anybody would be surprised if there were a link between those burka clad lovelies and the anti-semetic attacks. We do not know from this report the increase in the attacks on synagogues, but I would guess that the attacks against the Jews are more dare I say targetted, more 'racist' in intention on average than most of those against North Africans.

I may be wrong as the French state is very selective about the data it produces on such matters, but call it an educated guess.