A rise in anti-semitism across Europe in the past three years is recorded in a controversial European Union report leaked this week.
The World Jewish Congress made the report public after alleging that the EU was suppressing it because the findings were embarrassing. Elan Steinberg, a WJC spokesperson, accused the union of refusing to deal with the issue of anti-semitism among European Muslims, whom the report blames for many of the attacks on Jews.
The EU said the report, dated February this year, was not published because it was insubstantial in its current state and lacking sufficient evidence. It would be published next year after it had been reworked.
The report, put together by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, links a rise in attacks in Britain with events in the Middle East, in particular the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000 and Israel’s attack on the West Bank town of Jenin in spring last year.
Between 1990 and 2001, an average of 282 anti-semitic incidents a year were recorded in Britain. In 2000, there were 405. This, according to the report, ”points to a connection between events in the Middle East, with criticism of Israel’s politics on one hand and anti-semitism on the other”.
The report says: ”Many British Jews are of the opinion that press reporting on Israeli policy is [so] spiced with a tone of animosity ‘as to smell of anti-semitism’, as the Economist put it. This is above all the case with the Guardian and the Independent.”
The report quotes Jeremy Newmark, official spokesperson for the chief rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, as saying that ”the anti-Israeli bias of much media coverage here has made British Jews more vulnerable”.
The director of the centre for research on anti-semitism at Berlin’s Technical University, Wolfgang Benz, welcomed the decision to publish the report. ”For months it was not released, for purely political reasons,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited Â