Ha'aretz - 02.18.2004

Ha'aretz Daily

Jewish groups to urge EU to step up fight on anti-Semitism

BRUSSELS (AP) - Jewish groups will appeal to the European Union Thursday to take a lead role in combating anti-Semitism through stricter law enforcement and educating young Europeans about the legacy of centuries of persecution on their continent.

"Jewish citizens of Europe are worried they cannot lead a normal life," Cobi Benatoff, head of the European Jewish Congress, said Wednesday, on the eve of a one-day seminar on anti-Semitism hosted by the European Commission.

Anti-Semitism is rising in the face of "indifference" from European governments, Benatoff told a news conference.

He said Jewish organizations want the EU to commit to systematic monitoring of anti-Jewish acts and tougher penalties for the perpetrators.

They also look to European governments to support a draft United Nations resolution condemning anti-Semitism.

Speakers at Thursday's seminar include German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, European Commission President Romano Prodi, Elie Wiesel, the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Nathan Sharansky, Israel's minister for Diaspora affairs who spent 8 years in a Soviet prison.

In recent months, Prodi has clashed with Edgar Bronfman, president of the New York-based World Jewish Congress and Benatoff, the head of its European branch, who accused him of "intellectual dishonesty and moral treachery" in handling anti-Semitism.

Bronfman and Benatoff took the EU head office to task for censoring a study highlighting the involvement of Europe's Arab minorities in anti-Semitic attacks in Europe. They also cited a "flawed and dangerously inflammatory" EU opinion poll that put Israel at the top of a list of nations seen to threaten world peace.

The accusations left a mark on Prodi whose first foreign visit after taking office in 1999 was to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in Poland to show his credentials as an opponent of anti-Semitism.

"The new Europe has to be the Europe of rights recognized and practiced; the Europe of free people living in solidarity; the Europe that enforces right and justice," he said there.

On Wednesday Benatoff said, "Anti-Semitism can be eradicated from Europe, but you have to have the will and, secondly, a strategy," he told reporters.

Youths from the large Arab immigrant communities in France, Belgium and other European countries have been blamed for attacks on Jewish property and individuals which have increased as violence has surged in the Middle East.

Isi Leibner, a senior vice president of the World Jewish Congress, said anti-Semitism in Europe was linked to the EU's pro-Arab bias in the Middle East conflict.

Speaking separately to reporters, Prodi denied that. "Our policy in the Middle East is and has always been to assure security and peace to both Israelis and the Palestinian people. This is not unbalanced," he said.

He added the EU, along with the United States, Russia and the United Nations, is a sponsor of the "road map" to Mideast peace. "We want this road map to be implemented."

Last year, the EU's European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna, Austria, found the increase of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe was "committed above all either by right-wing extremists or radical Islamists or young Muslims mostly of Arab descent."

The EJC has published that finding on its web sites after the EU monitoring center refused to release it. It said the EU had suppressed the report for making a link between anti-Jewish violence in Europe and Arab immigrants.

However, the monitoring center said it had withheld the report, compiled by Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at Berlin's Technical University, because it was of "poor quality and lacking in empirical evidence."