PARIS, July 22: French government authorities were noticeably absent at the annual commemoration on July 20 of the deportation of 12,884 Jews who in 1942 were rounded up in Paris, placed in the Vel’d’Hiv sports stadium and then deported to concentration camps in eastern Europe from which very few of them ever returned to live again in the French capital.

France happened to be represented this year by a lower-level official, Hamlaoui Mekachera, the French state secretary for war veterans who perhaps significantly is Muslim and of Algerian descent.

Contrary to past years, when this event — and others marking France’s remorse for the official acts of anti-Semitism associated with the Vichy government (1940-44) of Marshal Philippe Petain — was presided over by prime ministers of the likes of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and heads of state like Francois Mitterrand, this year’s event seemed at least symbolically to reflect an official disinterest in the subject of anti-Semitism in France.

But it also perhaps marked a tendency by French authorities to start giving as much weight to the growing phenomenon of Islamophobia, and anti-Arab behaviour that at least until recently has gone largely unrecognized not only in official ceremonies, but in the national and international press.

Only last March, the French government, and the national media, at last publicised the subject of anti-Islamic behaviour in the country when it was revealed that racist acts in France against the Muslim community had increased “considerably” last year, according to the just-issued annual report of the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights.

Interestingly, past editions of the report, which had also emphasized how anti-Arab racism was at least just as important in France as anti-Semitic behaviour, had been more or less shelved away as France continued to stress the presence of anti-Semitism in the country, without wanting officially to admit that French Muslims had also become the victims of racism.