The Mayor’s Trip To Paris

We salute Mayor Bill de Blasio’s trip last week to Paris to demonstrate unity with France and with the French Jewish community following the Islamist terrorist attacks earlier in the month against the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher Jewish supermarket. He spent the first leg of his daylong visit to the French capital at Hyper Cacher.

It will be recalled that the attack against Hyper Cacher was but a footnote to the Charlie Hebdo attack at the Paris rally against terror that drew millions of French citizens and a number of world leaders. It will also be recalled that French President Hollande was widely reported to have tried to block Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from attending but Mr. Netanyahu came anyway. His insistence on attending apparently prompted Mr. Hollande to invite Mahmoud Abbas as well.

We can understand that President Hollande was more interested in framing the event in terms of an attack on France than on making it a more parochial, or Jewish, concern. Yet Hyper Cacher was targeted because it was identified as Jewish, not because it was located in the French capital. So Mayor de Blasio’s trip and his emphasis on the attack on the Jewish supermarket was most welcome.