Europe Shows Its Darker Side

Crowds protest the kidnapping, torture and death of French Jew Ilan Halimi last year in Paris. Areas of Western Europe are being seen as hotbeds of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish fervor.

Prague
A young French Jew is kidnapped, tortured and left to die by a band of Muslims. An 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."

Anti-Semitism in Western Europe is apparently out of control.

That is the consensus of a dizzying array of recent reports, the latest of which was released last week 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 thus prosecuting, hate crimes.

Human Rights First says the survey is the first by a U.S. nongovernmental organization to examine racist, xenophobic, homophobic and anti-religious crimes in Europe. While the report includes analysis of Russia, Ukraine and even North America, the focus lies on Western 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.

Hundreds of mourners attend the funeral of murdered French Jew Ilan Halimi, who was reburied in Jerusalem on Feb. 9.

"As it did in the 1930s, the reactivation of ancient prejudices and the transformation of new hatreds into deadly violence have been largely overlooked outside the Jewish community," concludes the report.

In most European countries, "anti-Semitic violence and other hate crimes still are largely unacknowledged in public policy and action," according to the survey by Human Rights First, formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

The survey says that the data that has been collected "reveals both a general trend toward a rise in anti-Semitic incidents and a trend toward violent crimes against Jewish people in a growing proportion of such incidents."

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

Many Jews are also protesting anti-Semitism that they say is disguised as criticism of Israel throughout Western Europe. The latest examples come from Britain: the proposed boycott of Israeli academics, which the largest British teachers union voted last month to disseminate to its membership for a final decision, and the country's largest trade union, with more than a million members, deciding to consider a boycott motion on Israel at its upcoming conference.

At the reburial: Ruth Halimi, mother of Ilan

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 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.

In an Anti-Defamation League survey on European attitudes toward Jews released in early May, some 51 percent of respondents in five countries said that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home country, and 52 percent said Israel's actions have lowered their views of Jews.

A European Jewish Congress report issued last November revealed a dramatic rise in anti-Israel discourse during the recent Lebanon war, both among leftist politicians and media in Europe, as well as on the extreme right. The discourse, the report said, often morphed into anti-Jewish sentiment.

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 airstrike 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," he 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:

· 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 last summer's war with Hezbollah.

Explaining at least one cause of the jump, CST spokesman Mark Gardner complained of the media's ongoing portrayal of Israel in a negative light. "If people think Israel is a mad, bloodthirsty, apartheid state, they will think those who support Israel should be socially isolated, boycotted and perhaps even deserve a good kicking now and then," he said.

· 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.

Perhaps no attack was more representative of the trend toward anti-Semitic violence in Europe than the January 2006 torture and murder of Ilan Halimi, a Jewish student in Paris, by a gang dominated by African Muslims. The leader was quoted in the French press as having singled out Halimi because he thought Jews have money.

· 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.

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."

According to the Roth report, "the proportion of Muslims among the attackers" in anti-Semitic assaults documented in 2006 "is far higher than their share in the population at large."

Some 20 million Muslims live in Europe, and their numbers are growing much faster than the non-Muslim population.

In Britain, for instance, while the majority of anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom last year were committed by non-Muslims, Muslims were disproportionately represented as perpetrators, said the CST's Gardner.

"When we look at the demography of Muslim communities in some European countries, we see there are potential problems," he said. "That's not to say all Muslims are anti-Semitic -- far from it."

Gardner stressed that Muslim anger is often whipped up by "Islamic groups with the international agenda like the Muslim Brotherhood, who say that Muslims are all facing an existentialist threat led by America and Israel."

But the war was not the only catalyst, he added.

"It's also 9/11 and Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. There is a larger anti-Semitic mythology at play here," said Gardner. "When you preach hatred about Zionists and Israel, that hatred has an impact on those who are visually Jewish, or cemeteries or synagogues."