Group of Experts Says That Anti-semitism in Europe Requires Vigilance, Not Exaggerated Alarm

Increased anti-Semitism in Western Europe during the past few years calls for heightened vigilance and continued protest, not exaggerated alarm.

This was the conclusion of a report of experts from eight Western European countries, submitted by the American Jewish Committee’s Foreign Affairs Department to the AJC’s 75th anniversary meeting, which continues through Sunday at the Washington Hilton Hotel. The report, based on the experts’ conference on anti-Semitism held in Amsterdam at the end of March, was discussed at a meeting of the AJC’s Foreign Affairs Commission, chaired by Rita Hauser, the Commission’s chairperson.

William Frankel, former editor of the Jewish Chronicle of London, who was chairman of the Amsterdam meeting, discussed the findings both at the Commission meeting and at a news conference.

INDICATIONS OF RISE IN ANTI-SEMITISM

In its report, the AJC pointed to these recent events and trends as indicating the rise in anti-Semitism:

A receding memory of the past, with new generations neither interested in learning about the Holocaust or, if informed, looking upon the attempt to exterminate European Jewry as “just one of the many tragedies of world history and, if anything, pushed to surfeit.”

In France particularly, an increasing success for proponents of the New Right something quite distinct from the moral and religious “New Right” in the U.S. with “insidious anti-egalitarian anti-Judeo-Christian civilization ideas, cleverly masking affinities to Aryan supremacy and racist notions under guise of ‘culture’ and an a-political stance.”

Jewish worry because of the pro-Arab positions taken by most West European governments, along with such activities as permitting a commercial boycott of Israel, abnormal criticism of Israeli policies, a voting pattern in international forums, etc.

Xenophobia toward immigrant workers, which seems to include the Jewish component of the population. “Despite the fact that in most European countries, Jewish communities have been established for centuries, Jews still are perceived as outsiders, as foreigners concerned with different struggles such as Israel,” the report points out.

The amalgam of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, according to the experts at the Amsterdam meeting, has been a major influence in the growth of anti-Semitic sentiments and acts of the past few years. These experts pointed out that both the political right and the left were identifying Jews and Israelis.

SUGGESTED COUNTER-MEASURES

In setting forth a program of counter-measures, the AJC report suggested that the Amsterdam conference had indicated these:

Education, with efforts to uproot prejudice and intolerance, beginning in the schools, a program that should be urged upon the governments concerned. The history of the Nazi regime should become a part of the educational curriculum; it is hardly taught in European countries, the report pointed out, and when it is, conversely to need that is, in Denmark and Holland but not in France or Italy.

Countering old stereotypes of Jews with more positive images of Jewish contributions to history through the media.

A system of alliances with other minorities.

Exposing individuals or groups that are at the source of anti-Semitism, revisionism, and “super-race ideologies” with “irrefutable” facts about them their past and their credentials so that they are discredited.