Anti-Semitism throughout the world has altered its character, but it still presents a constant threat, the World Jewish Congress reported today on the basis of a survey conducted by its Institute of Jewish Affairs. The survey also established that “the secret trials of Jewish leaders in the Soviet satellite countries are motivated by the desire to deter Jewish emigration to Israel.”
In analyzing the character of anti-Semitism on a world-wide scale, the survey points out that “political anti-Semitism now dominates all other types of Judophobism.” Anti-Semitic leaders in such countries as France, Western Germany, England and Sweden, have sought to participate in nationalistic movements and to propagate their ideas under the common banner of a People’s Party, National Union, or Imperial Party, it reports.
Anti-Semitic occurrences, the study further shows, “have lost much of their purely domestic character and have clearly transcended the boundaries of single countries.” Present-day anti-Semitism, the report declares, “tends to unite the various anti-Semitic movements into one anti-Semitic international under the guise of a fascist movement.”
In evaluating the strength of anti-Semitism abroad, the study comments: “Despite the ideological poverty of this variety of anti-Semitism, and despite the fact that it is still based on a repetition of the same old vicious absurdities, we can by no means consider anti-Semitism as a dying movement. There is no doubt that now, more than at any time since the end of the war, the ideas of Nazism are alive in certain circles.”
Regarding the secret trials of Jewish leaders which have been proceeding in Rumania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the study says: “They are an indication of a renewed determination on the part of the Communist regimes to combat national Jewish tendencies. They have been arranged to coincide with what Communist propaganda now calls the need to ‘reorganize’ Jewish life and Jewish communities–a move whose object is to weaken those communities still further.”
GERMANS ASSAILING ALLIED MILITARY TRIBUNALS
In a section devoted to the treatment of war criminals by the Allied powers, the survey emphasizes that despite the extraordinary amnesty measures toward Nazi war criminals–a policy of clemency which has opened the prison doors for the greater majority of the Nazis sentenced by Allied Military Tribunals–“the commonalty of Germans were not satisfied.”
An important segment of the German people, the study declares, “consider the amnestying of war criminals who committed crimes against humanity not as an act of clemency, but as one of ‘re-establishing justice, and this has afforded them an opportunity of assailing the Military Tribunals, including the International Military Tribunal.”
In sections devoted to the plight of Jews in the Arab League countries, the survey pictures the status of Jews as almost unrelievedly “dark.” “Ultra-nationalism and xenophobia” are the two principal factors which are principally responsible for the deterioration of the Jewish position in the Middle East today. The Jewries of Iraq, Syria and Libya, the report says, “have apparently no prospects for survival, even on a modest scale.” Conditions in Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia, while less tense than in the other Arab nations, are nevertheless “deteriorating.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
