Europeans alarmed at leap in anti-Semitism, urge continent-wide laws
By Associated Press  December 18, 2004
 
 
Europe's new justice commissioner said Wednesday he will lobby European Union countries for a continentwide law cracking down on anti-Semitism.

Franco Frattini told a conference on anti-Semitism hosted by his home country's Foreign Ministry that "Europe has the right, and perhaps the duty, to propose to members a common base ... to strike at and punish racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism."

"Europe can, with unity, approve a common European rule which will ... oblige all countries to adopt a law," Frattini said.

Europe is already trying an EU-wide approach to tackling such problems as international terrorism, for example, pushing for all states to accept European-wide arrest warrants for that crime.

The conference, called to explore the effects of anti-Jewish actions on democracy, also heard a prominent U.S. journalist assert that the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Europe is widely underestimated in the United States, even by U.S. Jews.

"Americans have a hard time understanding the grip that anti-Semitism has on the imagination, even American Jews have a hard time understanding the grip it has" on European opinion, said Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of the New Republic, a weekly political journal.

The daylong conference was sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and Il Foglio, an Italian think-piece newspaper.

Spain's former Foreign Minister Ana Palacio urged Europe to be more diligent in rooting out anti-Semitism that may try to mask itself as freedom of speech.

"As democracies we have to draw a clear line" between legitimate right to criticize the policies of Israel and anti-Semitism, Palacio said.

On Wednesday night, before conference delegates, Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini delivered a ringing denunciation of anti-Semitism.

Il Foglio editor Giuliano Ferrara said that since the Sept. 11 attacks "anti-Semitism is linked to a strong anti-American" ideology that has "conquered a large space not only in some European chancellories but also a large space in public opinion."

New York Times columnist David Brooks, who is Jewish, traced a surge in anti-Semitism in the United States in the last three years.

"I was not someone who paid a lot of attention to anti-Semitism, but then Sept. 11 happened," Brooks said. After the terrorist attacks in the United States, "you began to see the anti-Semitic e-mails. They started to show up on my voice mail."

Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham H. Foxman choked back tears when he was surprised at the conference with the one of Italy's highest honors. Chamber of Deputies President Pierferdinando Casini said among those recommending the medal as "commendatore of the Italian republic" for Foxman was Premier Silvio Berlusconi.

Foxman evoked a Jewish proverb in saying that what life has already given to him "would have been sufficient," including surviving the Holocaust as a Polish child and helping lead the League since 1987.

The editor of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, David Landau, described the anguish he feels when his paper reports Israeli abuses against Palestinians, knowing that such information could end up fueling anti-Semitism.

But the duty of a free press in a democracy to provide the facts and reality to its audience must prevail, Landau said.

Landau said he participated in the conference, even though, he contended, such forums are "journalistically flawed, because they don't invite the anti-Semites."
 

 

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