First, i resent that this person lied which affects real
victims of hate-crimes.
Second,
Antisemitism Worldwide 2002/3
antisemitic activity
The level of antisemitic violence remained high in 2002 as well as in 2003. According to CRIF, there were 517 incidents registered in 2002 and 503 in 2003. Despite the slight decrease in 2003, the number of violent attacks rose from 185 to 233, including 100 assaults on individuals compared to 75 in 2002, Moreover, 50 percent of all incidents in 2003 were directed against Jewish youngsters under the age of 18.
According to the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH), the French government’s human rights watchdog, there was a dramatic rise in antisemitic and anti-Muslim acts in France in 2002: over 300 reported instances of violence and 992 cases of abuse or threats. Two-thirds of these incidents (193 violent and 731 threats, graffiti and insults) were antisemitic, six times as many as in 2001.
Prior to the presidential elections of 5 April 2002, French government officials were reluctant to take firm action against the mainly Muslim perpetrators of antisemitic acts, other than condemning the more serious ones, probably for fear of losing the supposed Muslim/Arab vote. For example, President Jacques Chirac condemned an arson attack which entirely gutted a Marseille synagogue on 31 March 2002. However, Chirac added, he did not believe France was an antisemitic country. With the election of the new government, the new interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy took a more activist approach, inter alia, increasing security of Jewish institutions. As a result, there was a decrease in the number of attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in the Paris area between April and December 2002. In February 2003, Minister of Education Luc Ferry announced new measures to deal with increasing antisemitism in schools and universities. In March the minister was asked by the government to prepare a plan to decrease the level of violent incidents directed against French schoolchildren in general due to their religious or cultural background. An inter-ministerial committee to counter antisemitism was set up by President Chirac on 17 November 2003.
Jewish schoolchildren were the target of a large number of attacks in 2002, a trend which continued into 2003. Several of the attacks in 2002 were directed against buses carrying Jewish schoolchildren, especially in the Paris area (see also ASW 2001/2). For example, on 10 April 2002 a group of Arab youths stoned a bus parked beside the Lubavitch Gan Menahem Jewish school in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, as pupils were beginning to board. One child was injured and some windows were broken. A month later, a 16-year-old Jewish youth was assaulted in Bordeaux by a group of eight Muslims who studied in the same school. The attack was accompanied by curses and threats. Although Jewish school buses were no longer targeted in 2003, a Jewish schoolgirl studying at the Longchamp School in Marseille was assaulted and verbally abused on 16 May by a group of ten Muslim girls from a nearby school. She was rescued by the principal and identified her attackers to the police. In March and April 2003 students at the Otsar HaTorah School in Toulouse were hounded as they traveled home from school on public transport by Arabs who called them “Dirty Jews.” In public schools, teachers who attempt to give lessons on the Holocaust, as well as Jewish pupils, are harassed in classes with a large proportion of Arabs/Muslims, who deny that Nazis killed Jews (see, for example, CRIF, “Anti-Semitism in France: An Assessment”).
Among the serious attacks on Jewish adults in 2002, a worshiper leaving a synagogue in the 19th arrondissement of Paris was hospitalized after he was attacked by a group of thugs with a sharp instrument in February, and a Jewish couple (identifiable because the man wore a kippa) required hospitalization after they were beaten in Villeurbanne, near Lyon, by six Muslims in March. In March 2003 two Jews were severely beaten, allegedly by Muslims who had taken part in a demonstration against the war on Iraq.
Arson, Molotov cocktail and other violent attacks on synagogues reached epidemic proportions in 2002 (see also ASW 2001/2). As noted above, a synagogue in Marseille was burned to the ground on 31 March. Additionally, synagogues in the Paris area, Strasbourg, Nice, Montpellier, Lyon and again in Marseille were targets of arson or Molotov cocktail attacks. The Maccabi Club house in Toulouse was also torched in April 2002, destroying everything in the building. The year was also marked by stone throwing and vandalism (including graffiti) of Jewish property (synagogues, cemeteries, schools, private property). In 2003 arson attacks damaged synagogues in Saint Mandé and Cachan. “Palestine will win,” was scrawled on a wall of the latter synagogue. Further, an arson attack gutted the Merkaz HaTorah Jewish secondary school in Gagny, a suburb of Paris, on 15 November 2003, a Sabbath, so no pupils were present.
http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2002-3/france.htm 
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