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Friday June 15, 2007

Report: European governments lax on rising anti-Semitism

by dinah a. spritzer
jta

prague | A young French Jew is kidnapped, tortured and left to die by a band of Muslims. Arson badly damages Geneva’s largest synagogue. A 13-year-old girl on a London bus is robbed and kicked unconscious after her attackers ask if she is “Jewish or English.”

That is a sampling of a dizzying array of recent reports, the latest of which was released at a conference combating discrimination under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Representatives of dozens of European governments attended the June 7-9 meeting in Bucharest, Romania, a follow-up to a 2005 conference of the OSCE conference on anti-Semitism in Spain.

The 2007 Hate Crimes Survey by the U.S.-based organization Human Rights First goes beyond the data included in many of the studies to suggest that most European governments are woefully inept at measuring and prosecuting hate crimes.

Human Rights First says the survey is the first by a U.S. non-governmental organization to examine racist, xenophobic, homophobic and anti-religious crimes in Europe. It is also the only one of the recent reports to raise the specter of a Europe teetering on the verge of a Hitler-era epidemic of racist hatred.

“Today the parallels with the 1930s include the seeming indifference of many governments and broad sectors of public opinion to the rising violence and fear that once again threatens European Jews, and with them members of other minorities,” says a separate, companion report that focuses exclusively on anti-Semitism.

The analysis comes just weeks after a May 24 fire that badly damaged the largest synagogue in Geneva. The fire was labeled as arson several days later, sending shock waves through Swiss Jewry.

Many Jews are also protesting anti-Semitism they say is disguised as criticism of Israel throughout Western Europe.

Reports issued since Israel’s war in Lebanon last summer and widely covered in the international media showed a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents, rhetoric and attitudes in the 27-member European Union.

Some say that anti-Semitic incidents are only cyclical and increase based on world events and not on actual antipathy to Jews. Similar spikes occurred during the first and second Palestinian uprisings.

But others argue that anti-Israel and anti-Jewish behavior have become indistinguishable.

As tensions flare in the Gaza Strip, European Jews may be wondering whether this summer will repeat last year’s record number of attacks against them, their synagogues and their cemeteries.

For Ilan Moss, author of the report, this trend was illustrated best when someone anonymously laminated a Guardian newspaper photo of victims from the Israeli air strike in Qana that killed 28, including 16 children, and taped it to the front of a London synagogue.

“The message was clear: You Jews are responsible for this massacre,” Moss said.

Other reports recounting violent anti-Semitic incidents in 2006 by specific Jewish communities revealed an upsurge in attacks and the desecration of Jewish sites not seen in decades.

Among the developments:

n In Britain, the Community Security Trust reported the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents since it began monitoring in 1984, with a 60 percent increase in the second half of the year — after the Lebanon War. There were 594 anti-Semitic incidents in Britain in ‘06, up 31 percent from 2005, according to the Board of Jewish Deputies.

n In France, the country’s main secular Jewish umbrella organization, CRIF, recorded a 24 percent rise in anti-Jewish incidents in general, to 371 from 350, and a 45 percent increase in violent incidents, to 99 from 72.

n In Germany, the government recorded 1,024 anti-Semitic acts, a 21 percent increase from the previous year.

The German media has been full of reports about how Jews for the first time in decades will not wear yarmulkes in public for fear of their safety. In Berlin alone, violent neo-Nazi attacks doubled last year, although Jews were not the lone targets.

n In Denmark, the Jewish community announced that there were as many anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2006 as in all of 2005, with most aimed at Jews on their way to or from synagogue or a Jewish school.

Putting all of the country reports together in April, Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism reported that of the 590 cases of anti-Semitic violence reported worldwide in 2006, 324 were recorded in Western Europe.

The report attributed the high numbers to the war in Lebanon, calling it “probably the main trigger for the intensification of anti-Semitic manifestations in most countries of Western Europe.”

In its hates crimes report, Human Rights First offered a 10-point plan to combat crimes motivated by anti-Semitism, racism, Islamaphobia and homophobia.

The group urged government leaders to publicly acknowledge and condemn hate crimes, enact specific laws enhancing penalties for such crimes, strengthen prosecution of offenders, improve monitoring, ensure adequate resources to deal with trigger events and create specific anti-discrimination bodies.

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