In the past ten years, police have recorded at least nine desecrations of Jewish cemeteries in France. None of those episodes provoked the torrent of outrage unleashed by the grisly find two weeks ago in a graveyard in Carpentras in southern France. Investigators speculate that four vandals set upon the Jewish burial ground in the hours before dawn, shattering tombstones with sledgehammers and iron bars. The desecraters, who are still unidentified, dragged one woman's body halfway out of her grave. They also exhumed the corpse of an 81-year-old man buried only two weeks earlier and impaled it on an umbrella.
The...