An unusual alliance among Jewish groups tracking anti-Semitism worldwide has uncovered another kind of new collaboration — between Islamic terrorists and neo-Nazis.
The Anti-Defamation League, the World Jewish Congress, Tel Aviv University and the Anti-Semitism Monitoring Forum of the Israeli Government’s Secretariat teamed up to compile a new report on “Anti-Semitism Worldwide: 1994.”
It includes a country-by-country examination of anti-Semitic incidents and trends in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as in North Africa, South Africa, North America, Latin America, Australia and Japan.
The joint report was presented before its April 10 release to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Its sponsoring organizations plan to present it to the Knesset, the U.S. administration and Congress, the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the European Parliament.
“It is disturbing to see the incredible resilience of anti-Semitism as a worldwide phenomenon,” said a joint statement issued by Edgar Bronfman, president of of the World Jewish Congress, and David Strassler, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League.
“These attacks against Jews must be seen as a threat to all citizens and be addressed in a serious manner,” the statement said.
The study found that violent anti-Semitic activities have escalated around the world.
It attributed this increase at least in part to “the combination of Muslim fundamentalists and extreme right-wing elements.”
“While part of the anti-Semitism in Christian countries in recent decades has turned into anti-Zionism, in the Muslim world, anti-Zionism appears to be turning into anti-Jewish manifestations, thus broadening a political and territorial conflict into a matter of clashing ideological and religious world views,” the study says.
“The use of Christian and secular European anti-Semitic motifs in Muslim publications is on the rise, yet at the same time Muslim extremists are turning increasingly to their own religious sources, first and foremost the Quran, as a primary anti-Jewish source.”
The report noted the rise of Muslim extremist activity against Jews in Western Europe. In general, violent attacks in Western Europe doubled last year, rising from 15 to 31.
By the end of 1993, in Germany alone, there were 14 extremist Islamic groups with an overall membership of about 21,000, according to the study.
The report traces the influence and support of these groups to extremist Islamic forces in the Middle East and North Africa, notably Iran, Sudan, Lebanon and Algeria.
As a “a significant example” of this phenomenon, the report cites the Swedish radio station “Radio Islam,” which broadcasts a mix of “extreme anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli propaganda” and presents “the ideas of European Holocaust- deniers and neo-Nazis.”
The study found “a sharp rise” in the number of anti-Semitic attacks in the wake last February’s Hebron massacre, in which a Jewish settler killed 29 Arab worshipers in a Hebron mosque.
“Violent activities by Muslim extremists were particularly evident in France and England, where a number of attacks and attempted attacks were mounted against Jewish targets,” the report says.
“These included booby-trapped cars, Molotov cocktails, shootings and stabbings and vandalism.
In Great Britain, the number of seriously violent attacks rose to 6, from 0 in 1993. The figure include the two car bomb attacks in London last summer, one of which destroyed the Israeli Consulate.
“In Belgium, where a significant increase in violence was registered, Islamic extremists were behind most of the incidents,” the report noted.
In Germany, where anti-Semitic incidents of all kinds doubled from 1993 to 1994, “the media frequently reported Jewish institutions and individuals receiving threats from Arab fundamentalists.”
When speaking of the 100 percent increase in reported incidents in Germany, however, the study cautions that German citizens are increasingly inclined to report such incidents and police and security forces have become more sensitive to hate crimes. Incidents and trends noted in other areas of the world include: – In Japan, popular books warned against Jewish and Zionist plots to use Jew world economic power to destroy Japan in a matter of years. – In the United States, black Muslims accused Jews of having been slave traders and of deflecting attention from their crime by bringing to center stage their fabrications about the Holocaust, thus overshadowing the suffering of blacks. – In the former Soviet Union, Jews were accused of having initiated the Bolshevik Revolution, and then of destroying Communism. According to these accusations, the Jews subsequently found shelter in Israel, where they were rewarded for their crimes. – Even in Brazil, where racial mixture has been, and still is for many a social ideal, Jews are depicted as symbolizing cosmopolitanism and of profiteering from it. A Jewish gubernatorial candidate in the state of Parana, Jaime Lerner, was slandered during the campaign by an Evangelist minister who accused him of being God’s enemy. A political opponent called him a “Jewish- Nazi candidate,” according to the study.
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.
