The latest anti-Semitic hate crime in France is pretty heinous, partly because commuters who witnessed it haven't yet come forward to assist in identifying the warped miscreants responsible.

The Scotsman reports:

Police stepped up a search today for six men who scrawled swastikas on the stomach of a young mother as she travelled on a suburban Paris train, and officials appealed for some 20 witnesses who may have seen the attack to step forward.

...The mother, who was travelling with her baby...suggested that a young man seated near her in the train could be of help.

...France was stunned by news of the attack. The brutality of the aggression, its anti-Semitic character and the fact that no one came to the mother’s rescue.

...The woman, with her 13-month-old baby in a stroller, was attacked in a suburban train north of Paris around 9:30 a.m. on Friday, by six young men who, according to press reports, appeared to be of African and North African origin. Some wielded knives.

According to police, the gang, described by the victim as between 15 and 20, grabbed the woman’s backpack, taking her money and credit cards. When they saw that her identification card said she lived in the 16th district of Paris, they told the woman: “There are only Jews in the 16th.”

Police said the suspects then cut off locks of the woman’s hair, opened her shirt with their knives and used markers to draw three swastikas on her stomach.

Guedj said that, according to the young woman, about 20 people in the train were “capable of seeing” what was happening.

Another stain on the soul of a nation in grave moral and spiritual decline.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at July 12, 2004 10:34 AM

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