After the 11-year-old said he was Jewish, the perpetrators beat and choked him along with the verbal abuse.
By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News
An 11-year-old Jewish boy was harassed and beaten on the street in the Essonne district south of Paris because of his religion, French daily Le Parisien reported.
According to a court account of the attack obtained by Le Parisien, the boy was walking home from school with classmates in September when he was approached by two 14-year-old boys.
The older boys asked if he was Jewish. When he answered in the affirmative, the perpetrators beat the victim while choking and verbally abusing him.
One of the boys said “Dirty Jew, we are going to suffocate you with gas as they did before to the Jews,” and placed his hand over the boy’s mouth.
The attackers asked the boy to “surrender,” and the frightened victim agreed. The older boys slammed him to the ground, then performed Nazi salutes.
However, the harassment didn’t stop after that incident. Le Parisien reported that the perpetrators continued abusing the victim each day until he told his parents about the situation around a week after the first attack.
The parents filed a report with the police and the older boys will reportedly be charged with crimes related to antisemitic violence in juvenile court.
During questioning, one of the boys claimed he did not know what a Nazi salute was and that he performed the gesture without understanding the implications or history behind the act.
The other boy admitted that he knew what the Nazi salute represented.
The boys had no prior criminal record, and one of their lawyers floated the excuse that the pair had been influenced by violent “war” video games as a reason for their behavior.
In a separate incident last Thursday, French police arrested a teenager brandishing a large meat cleaver outside of a Jewish school in Lyon. He reportedly hurled projectiles at students in the school while screaming that they were “dirty Jews.”