Serious words....

On Sunday I listened to President Macron's moving and challenging speech at the Commemoration of the round-up of Jews at the Vel d'Hiv, Paris in 1942

It is available in full (and in French) at http://www.elysee.fr/declarations/article/discours-du-president-de-la-republique/

His words speak to us....

My friends, barbarism does not advance with open face. She does not wear a uniform. 

And when the Nazi boots strike the pavement of Paris, it is already too late. Barbarism is first forged in people's minds. It is the ideas and the words that gradually break the dykes of our consciences, push back civilization, which accustom us to listen, to accept words that we should not even hear.

HITLER, 
First the Third Reich? It is not 1933! 
HITLER is first and already Mein Kampf! 
None of this was born with Vichy and it was the weakness of France to allow this cancer to thrive. 

But none of this either died with Vichy. I know well that all of us, we are strong to fight against anything that could lead to the same situations. But we must open our eyes, look at reality in the face. 

In France today*, this corruption of minds, the moral and intellectual weakness of racism and anti-Semitism are still present and present. They take new forms, change faces, choose more sneaky words.

It is enough to stop there for a moment to break through the new appearances,  - old racism, the most concealed anti-Semitism. Ordinary racism...  It closes the labor market to young people who are stigmatized because of a surname or a first name. 

Conflicts of the world are being invoked in certain territories of our Republic, creating divisions that chase Jewish children from certain schools or lock up immigrant families in their communities. 

And then one day, because we You, because we did not want to see, the passage to the act intervenes. 

So what was words, which was only some hatred formulated differently and in others a form of cowardice or a complaisance not to want to see, then it becomes mowed lives and gestures that kill. 

Every synagogue, every mosque, every church, every temple, every desecrated or vandalized cemetery must alert us. The theory of the planetary plot, fantasies about world finance, insidious iconography, identity anxiety mobilizing the most toxic clichés At high speed it reaches gullible or permeable minds. 

Racism and anti-Semitism have the means to carry out their work of undermining - there are now unprecedented means of propaganda. 

Social networks are the biggest providers and we have not yet seen the extent of their influence in this regard.

* we can substitute the UK