Anti-semitic incidents dropped 46 per cent in 2010, report finds

Monitors and Critics

Jerusalem - The number of antisemitic incidents world-wide dropped 46 per cent in 2010 compared with the year before, a report by an Institute of Tel Aviv University said Sunday.

The total of incidents as physical injuries, vandal acts and direct threats attributed to anti-semitic motives in 2010 was 614, while 1,129 were recorded in 2009.

The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism published annual figures on worldwide anti-semitism on the eve of Israel's annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was to begin at sunset Sunday and end at sunset Monday.

The report explains the peak in 2009 as a direct consequence of Israel's war in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009, when 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed. The Israeli offensive 'provoked unprecedented anti-Jewish activity worldwide,' the report says.

Britain, France and Canada were in 2010 the three countries with highest rates of anti-semitic incidents, mostly physical street assaults on people identified as Jews. They constituted near 60 per cent of all incidents worldwide.

Between the hundreds of examples, the report quotes the attack in February last year against a 14-year-old student wearing a skullcap in Paris. He was brutally punched by seven teenagers inthe head and the stomach and called a 'dirty Jew'.

Harassment of Jews by young Muslims in several cities in the Netherlands led Rabbi Benzion Evers, son of Amsterdam's chief rabbi, to say that he would emigrate because of growing antisemitism.
Jews in Holland hid their skullcaps and avoided wearing traditional clothing because they feared harassment or violence on the part of young Muslims, the report notes.

Australia was however the country with the biggest increase last year showing a growth of one-third of that in 2009, despite a rise in the amount of insults directed against Jews on their way to or from synagogue.

The second half of last year, after Israel boarded the Freedom Flotilla and killed 9 activists of Turkish origin, the attacks against Jews and Israelis increased in Latin America also, specially in Chile, where the Palestinian diaspora is the fourth largest in the world.

In Venezuela, the report says, the flotilla incident triggered a further rise of antisemitic non-violent allegations. Those kind of attacks 'became an integral part of the anti-Israel propaganda of governmental and pro-Chavez circles', the report continues.

'Have we learned the lessons of the Holocaust in the world? To our great regret, the answer is no. A renewed anti-Semitism is spreading,' Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday in his cabinet meeting in the eve of the Holocaust Memorial day.