It doesn’t take a lot of understanding to understand the National Front and groups like that, it is fear, pure and simple. When faced with fear, people lash out, and they find convenient scapegoats for their fear. The National Front is preying on fears of those ‘not french’, which would mean immigrants, especially from those from North Africa and other ex French colonies, and yes, Jews, who in France are often seen as ‘controlling the media’ and are rich and only out for themselves, only care about Israel, etc. Among other things, they are scared about terrorism, and blame terrorism on the Palestinian/Israeli situation, that if Israel didn’t exist there would be no cause for the terrorists. It doesn’t help that the French Catholic church has never really reconciled with the anti semitism they promoted pretty much until the post war II period (among other things, like the church as a whole, it has mostly ducked the issue of the Church and its role in collaborating with the Germans and the Vichy regime, and its lack of response to what was happening to the French Jews), and that is still out there (While France like most of Europe has become a lot more secular, people there still see it as being a “Catholic Country”, and the church still has power, depending on the issue).
That doesn’t make the French unique. While anti semitism , at least overt anti semitism, is not common here in the US, it is still there, below the surface, when you hear about media controlling the government,that has overtones of anti semitism because the assumption there is “Jews control the media”. The fundamentalist Christians who have rallied around supporting Israel are not the kind of friends I would want to have, because they have embraced Israel, not because they necessarily like the jews, but their theology (wherever that came from) embraces the idea that for the second coming to happen Israel has to exist, at its old borders, but meanwhile their theology also insists that for the second coming, Jews have to convert…not to mention there are plenty of people who claim to be friendly towards Jews, who will on the other hand say things that tell a very different story, when in private.