News of another shooting at a mosque in the West, in Bayonne, France, spread around the world yesterday, although this time it was not as bloody, with only two people injured. This may be due to the identity of the attacker — according to available information, he was an 80-year-old war veteran suffering from cancer, who apparently decided to take the hated foreigners with him to the other side.
Against this backdrop, another news story has been overshadowed — the still-serving Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at the World Jewish Leaders Forum, announced that he would allocate additional funds to strengthen the security of Jewish communities outside of Israel. This directive was given to the Minister of Diaspora Affairs and passed on to the Jewish Agency.
So it turns out that attacks on mosques in the West are increasing, while Jewish communities are increasing their security. By the way, as the recent incident at the synagogue in Halle, Germany, has shown, the security of Jewish communal institutions is already at a sufficiently high level. Nevertheless, Israel is allocating funds to strengthen it further, proving that it is a country for Jews all over the world, not only in words but in reality.
One can only envy this and learn from it. Such a serious approach to the security of their institutions, which Muslim communities themselves should be concerned about, especially in countries where they may be at risk. And the support of overseas communities by a state that has such capabilities.
And unlike tiny Israel, there are many more of them, at least among those Muslim states that are major oil exporters or have populations in the tens or even hundreds of millions. What could it be? Of course, we are not talking about arming local Muslims en masse, creating self-defense forces, and so on — private security companies can perform the function of protecting their facilities much more effectively and without causing such rejection by the local population.
It would be nice if the leaders of Muslim countries, who like to speak from high world platforms on the subject of growing Islamophobia, would come to a similar conclusion next time.