The Financial Times reported the sensational news today that "the European Union's racism watchdog has shelved a report on anti-semitism because the study concluded Muslims and pro-Palestinian groups were behind many of the incidents it examined. … The focus on Muslim and pro-Palestinian perpetrators," the Financial Times explains, "was judged inflammatory." Indeed, one person familiar with the report found that "The decision not to publish was a political decision."
For anyone curious to learn more about this subject but frustrated by the EU's censorial actions, may I recommend conclusions I reached in mid-1992? The final paragraphs of a paper presented at a conference in Brussels read as follows:
For world Jewry, Muslim anti-Semitism is an increasing problem, and in large part this has to do with the ever-growing population of Muslims in the West. There are nearly four million Muslims in France; some two million in Germany; one and a half million in the United Kingdom and in the United States; almost a million in Italy; and something on the order of half a million in Belgium.
The Muslims who emigrate or convert and live in the West are not that different from the Muslims in the rest of the Muslim world and the home countries. They have their share of secularists and fundamentalists but fundamentalists, the most anti-Semitic of Muslims, are disproportionately powerful in the West. That's due in part to they're being organized, in part to the secular Muslims going on to do other things and not sticking within the community of Muslims, and in part to support from the Middle East going almost invariably to fundamentalists. The Iranians, the Libyans, the Saudis have now for years been supporting the most aggressive, radical fundamentalist groups and, by definition, these are also anti-Semitic groups.
These fundamentalists are forwarding anti-Semitism in a variety of ways. A man by the name of Ahmed Arami broadcast excerpts from Hitler's Mein Kampf on something called Radio Islam in Sweden, and as a result he spent six months in a Swedish jail. In the United States, Louis Farrakhan has referred to Judaism as a gutter religion. These are extreme cases to be sure, but these are the people who are speaking in terms of overt anti-Semitism not found elsewhere in the West. These are people who pose a potentially serious threat to Jewish welfare. Their numbers are growing, and fundamentalists continue to dominate the discourse.
My message then is that ultimately anti-Semitism is more serious in the West than in the Middle East. The Christian world has a resonance to anti-Semitism not found in the Muslim world; fundamentalist Muslims today are the most vibrant and explicit anti-Semites; they are contributing to and who are increasing anti-Semitism in the West.
If I might say so myself – too bad more heed was not paid to this warning of over a decade ago. (November 21, 2003)
