A 15-year-old Jewish boy who was wearing a kippah was attacked in the northwestern suburbs of Paris, French media reported. The attackers are reported to be of North African origin.
The incident joins a long line of cases in which Jews have been attacked in the French capital. Earlier this month, a Jewish woman was attacked at the entrance to her residential building. The attackers carved swastikas on her body and tried to rape her.
According to reports, on Sunday around 7 p.m., the boy left the metro station in Levallois-Perret, a residential area in the Haute-de-Seine district of Paris. At this point, the two attackers approached him.
"They quickly removed his kippah. The two men turned to him and told him: 'You, Jew, wait for us, wait for us,' and then attacked him," the boy's mother told French media. "My son stopped, turned around to see who these people were calling him. After that, he continued to move forward, but one of them managed to catch him."
The mother continued the description of the attack: "They pushed him in a corner near another subway exit and told him: 'Jew, come here, give us your cell phone!' They ripped off the earpieces he had in his ears, and then they hit him in the face and mouth."
According to the mother, the boy ran away and left the metro station. But the attackers caught up with him in the street. "My son was able to defend himself, but they succeeded in throwing him to the ground and kicking him in the mouth. My son screamed and they eventually ran away," she said.
The mother told Le Parisien: "I think if he didn't have his kippah, they wouldn't have attacked him." According to the report in the Jewish Chronicle, the mother asked her son to stop wearing a kippah. The victim's parents filed a complaint at the police station for "intentional violence of an antisemitic nature."
About 20,000 Jews live in Levallois and this is one of the Jewish communities in the country where the number of antisemitic incidents has jumped in the last year.
French politician Isabelle Balkany published on her X account a sharp condemnation along with a horrifying picture of the mouth of the boy who was attacked (we have chosen not to publish the picture). She wrote: "A young man from Levallois, wearing a kippah, was violently attacked by two people of North African origin who called him a dirty Jew."
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