Posted on 08/27/2002 2:38:54 PM PDT by knighthawk
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - European governments are failing to accurately report or effectively combat an alarming rise in anti-Jewish violence in their countries, according to a report by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.
"European governments are inadequately reporting anti-Semitic violence, with some providing little public information on even the most serious hate crimes," said Michael Posner, executive director of the independent New York-based group.
"Yet timely, accurate, and public information on crimes of racist violence are essential for effective action to suppress such violence," he said on Tuesday.
The report, "Fire and Broken Glass: The Rise of Anti-Semitism in Europe," concluded that the climate created by this inaction had contributed to an "alarming rise" in acts of anti-Jewish speech and violence across Europe, which many governments tried to play down and explain as a reaction to events in the Middle East.
"Criticism of Israeli policies and practices is not inherently anti-Semitic. But when such criticisms and related actions take the form of broadside attacks against 'Jews' or the 'Jewish state', they become racist," the report said.
In recent months, it said, vandals have desecrated scores of Jewish cemeteries across Europe, daubing anti-Jewish slogans, threats, and Nazi symbols on walls and monuments, while toppling and shattering tombstones.
Anti-Jewish attacks have included physical assaults on individuals as well as fire-bombings, gunfire, window smashing, and vandalism of Jewish homes, schools, synagogues and other community institutions, in countries from Russia to Britain.
The report said Jews and people presumed to be Jewish have been assaulted in and around Jewish community centres, in their homes and in more random street violence. Attackers shouting racist slogans have thrown stones at children leaving Hebrew-language schools and people leaving religious services.
Such attacks have been particularly pronounced in France and Belgium but the governments of those countries seem reluctant to acknowledge the problem or even collect data to measure its extent, the Lawyers Committee said.
NO OFFICIAL STATISTICS
The group said the French government had said little about the rising tide of anti-Jewish violence and had yet to release official statistics on such incidents this year. On March 31 alone, it recorded the following events in France:
A pregnant Jewish woman and her husband were attacked in a Lyons suburb, requiring her hospitalisation; a Jewish school in a Paris suburb was badly damaged by vandals; shots were fired into a kosher butcher shop in Toulouse; a synagogue in Nice was attacked with a firebomb; and in Marseilles attackers set alight and burned to the ground the Or Aviv synagogue.
A week after the synagogue attack, a Jewish school in the city was set on fire, its windows broken with stones, and its walls daubed with anti-Jewish graffiti.
In a Washington Post article in June, France's U.S. ambassador Francois Bujon de l'Estang, said his country was being unfairly attacked in the United States and accused critics of singling out France because they disagreed with its policy toward Israel.
He said nearly all the attacks all were perpetrated by "poorly integrated youths of Muslim origin who would like to bring the Mideast conflict to France."
"Those who perpetrate the fiction that France is anti-Semitic only to pursue their own agenda of discrediting French policy in the Middle East are distorting the truth in a despicable way," the ambassador wrote.
The Lawyers Committee also criticised the governments of Belgium, Germany, Britain and Russia for releasing little detailed documentation of anti-Jewish violence and having "done little to abate the rising tide," of anti-Semitism.
In April 2002, the Jewish community in Britain reported 51 incidents nationwide. Anti-Jewish attacks are often left to the Jewish community alone to document and protest, the report said.
Slightly off topic, but still important. If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
In fact, this statement itself is anti-semitic. Surprised he omitted the word "lobby" or "cabal" for the JOOOOS! and their "agenda" - which, of course, has nothing to do with what is happening in France, but is a crafty JOOOOISH! trick about France's Middle East policy.
This guy speaks in more code than a Saudi politician.
"poorly integrated" or planted in rich soil?
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