Larger issues in Europe

"Never again" isn't necessarily that long a time frame. It's one thing to condemn people who murder satirists. It's quite another to deal with a larger problem in Europe -- anti-Semitism is back in a big way:

Experts say European Jews have not felt this threatened since World War II, when some 6 million Jews were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust. Researchers at Tel Aviv University monitoring anti-Semitism have reported a chilling increase in attacks in Europe over the past decade, including deadly shootings in Toulouse, France, in 2012 and Brussels last year. In recent years, France has had the highest number of incidents of any single country.

For many of Europe's 2 million Jews, the mood following the Paris attacks was one of tense vigilance amid increased security and additional personal precautions. Some were defiant and determined to remain. Others wondered whether their way of life can continue.

Heightened security measures, visible and non-visible, were swiftly enacted at Jewish places of worship, study and business across Europe over the weekend. Security officials and Jewish leaders in Italy, Britain, Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria confirmed increased surveillance of vulnerable sites without providing details.

It's hard to live that way.

One thing worth remembering, though -- it's complicated in Europe, particularly France, in ways that we don't necessarily understand. And some things that the French government does are just as problematic:

France adheres to a strict form of secularism, known as laïcité, which is designed to keep religion out of public life. This principle was entrenched by law in 1905, after fierce anti-clerical struggles with the Roman Catholic church. Today, the lines are in some ways blurred. The French maintain, for instance, certain Catholic public holidays, such as Ascension. But secular rules on the whole prevail. It would be unthinkable in France, for example, to hold a nativity play in a state primary school, or for a president to be sworn in on a Bible.

Over the past 30 years, in response to a growing assertiveness among the country’s 5m-6m Muslims, the focus of this effort to balance religious and secular needs has shifted to Islam. After a decade of legal uncertainty over the wearing of the headscarf in state schools, the French government in 2004 banned all “conspicuous” religious symbols, including the Muslim headscarf, from public institutions such as state schools or town halls. This was followed in 2010 by what the French call the “burqa ban”, outlawing the full face covering in public. Critics accuse France of illiberalism, of curbing freedom of religious expression, and of imposing a Western interpretation of female oppression. Amnesty International, for example, called the recent European court ruling “a profound retreat for the right to freedom of expression and religion”. For the French, however, it is part of an unapologetic effort to keep religious expression private, and to uphold the country’s republican secular identity. Interestingly, many moderate Muslim leaders also back the ban as a bulwark against hard-line Islam.

If you believe in religious freedom, and I do, this is hard to accept as well. The history of anti-Semitism in Europe is horrible -- the primary reason there are only 2 million Jews in Europe is because over 6 million perished during the Holocaust. Yet you have to wonder whether a strict secularism, imposed with force of law, is the answer to overcoming these ancient hatreds.