The Washington Post has recently discovered that people in France hate the filthy Jews.

They are not amused.

“I am not an anti-Semite,” French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala says with a devilish grin near the start of his hit show at this city’s Théâtre de la Main d’Or.

Then come the Jew jokes.

In front of a packed house, he apes Alain Jakubowicz, a French Jewish leader who calls the humor of Dieudonné, as he is known, tantamount to hate speech. While the comedian skewers Jakubowicz, Stars of David glow on screen and, as the audience guffaws, a soundtrack plays evoking the trains to Nazi death camps. In various other skits, he belittles the Holocaust, then mocks it as a gross exaggeration.

In a country where Jewish leaders are decrying the worst climate of anti-Semitism in decades, Dieudonné, a longtime comedian and erstwhile politician whose attacks on Jews have grown progressively worse, is a sign of the times. French authorities issued an effective ban on his latest show in January for inciting hate. So he reworked the material to get back on stage, cutting, for instance, one joke lamenting the lack of modern-day gas chambers.

But the Afro-French comedian, whose stage name is simply Dieudonné, managed to salvage other bits, including his signature “quenelle” salute. Across Europe, the downward arm gesture that looks like an inverted Nazi salute has now gone so viral that it has popVote Dieudonné for King of All Black People. Because he is the best black guy. Ever.ped up on army bases, in parliaments, at weddings and professional soccer matches. Neo-Nazis have used it in front of synagogues and Holocaust memorials. Earlier this year, bands of Dieudonné supporters flashed it during a street protest in Paris while shouting, “Jews, out of France!”

“Dieudonné is getting millions of views on his videos on the Internet and is spreading his quenelle,” said Roger Cukierman , president of the Council for Jewish Institutions in France. “Something very worrying is happening in France. This is not a good time for Jews.”

Dieudonné, Jewish leaders say, is a symptom of a larger problem. Here and across the region, they are talking of the rise of a “new anti-Semitism” based on the convergence of four main factors. They cite classic scapegoating amid hard economic times, the growing strength of far-right nationalists, a deteriorating relationship between black Europeans and Jews, and, importantly, increasing tensions with Europe’s surging Muslim population.

In Western Europe, no nation has seen the climate for Jews deteriorate more than France.

Anti-Semitism has ebbed and flowed both here and throughout the region since the end of World War II, with outbreaks of violence and international terrorism — particularly in the 1980s and early 2000s — often linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But Jewish leaders here are now warning of a recent and fundamental shift tied to a spurt of homegrown anti-Semitism.

Angry protestors who filled the streets of Paris on Sunday to protest against French President Francois Hollande’s persecution of Comedian Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala began shouting Antisemitic slogans and giving the Antisemitic Quenelle salute.

The protest fell on the eve of the 9th annual “Holocaust Remembrance Day,” and was reportedly attended by close to 20,000 people.

“Jews, France is not yours,” “Faurisson is right, the gas chambers are bullshit,” and “Jews, out of France” are among the chants heard in this recently surfaced video of the anti-Government (turned Antisemitic) demonstration.

It seems as if the Jews’ time may be running short in France.

From the Jewish online magazine Tablet:

Sadly, such an event is far from an isolated incident. As we’ve reported previously, the European Union’s own Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 40 percent of French Jews are afraid to publicly identify as Jewish, while 56 percent have heard someone say “the Jews have too much power” in the last 12 months. And of course, the country is the home of the increasingly prevalent reverse-Nazi salute, the Quenelle, which was popularized by the anti-Semitic French comedian Dieudonné, and became a global media sensation after it was performed by French soccer player Nicolas Anelka. (Yesterday’s demonstrators were also photographed by the press making the gesture.)

Which is why it should come as no surprise that this past week, the Washington Post reported on the growing French expatriate population in Israel. “As immigration to Israel has dipped over the past 10 years, France is the only country seeing a growing number of its Jewish citizens move there,” the Post notes, adding “there were 3,270 French arrivals last year, an increase of 63 percent from 2012.” As anti-Jewish prejudice in France grows, its Jewish population continues to shrink.