Regular readers will be noticing a streak of incidents here. On April 29th-30th, the Jewish cemetery at Herrlisheim was defaced: 127 headstones were marked with nazi grafitti. On Saturday, the attack in Valenciennes occurred. (Meanwhile, on May 2nd, the Interior ministry reported a rise in anti-Semitic violence for the first three months of this year.) The same day that the Interior ministry made its figures public, a Roman Catholic cemetery in Niederhaslach was found defaced with nazi slogans and swastikas in what police presume was an act copying the Herrlisheim desecrations.
In to-day's issue of Le Monde, former Middle East correspondent Georges Marion (a pro-American and highly talented reporter*) published an essay entitled "European anti-Semitism: the alarming signs." He notes that the Herrlisheim desecrations occurred within hours of the end of the Berlin conference on anti-Semitism held by the the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
One could think that this act, apparently in memory of Adolf Hitler's birthday, is also not unrelated to the Berlin conference, as if the perpetrators had sought to respond dramatically to what they must view as an unacceptable provocation. But for the Jewish associations that for three years have been denouncing the persistent public expression of anti-Jewish sentiment and the rise of its corollary in the form of physical assaults on people and property, the desecration of Herrlisheim-Hattstatt constitutes only a bitter illustration of the fact that their warnings were not superfluous.Marion notes that the first OSCE conference on anti-Semitism was much the same and that this one promised to result in equally little concrete action. However, he notes one change:
The Berlin meeting will at least have allowed us to establish, if not the exact extent of the phenomenon, at least the area over which it has spread. Nearly all of those who appeared reported the return of anti-Semitism to their countries with varying degrees of virulence. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel offered painful contemplations on this new beginning, sixty years after the Holocaust, the horror of which, he thought, would have protected the Jews henceforward. Alas! he could only become disenchanted. "The Jew that I am belongs to a traumatized generation," he told his audience. "We have antennae. Better still, we are antennae. And when we say that the signals we're receiving today are alarming, the world would do well to listen." The message is clear: as European history shows, anti-Semitism concerns not only Jews but the liberties of all.
Significantly, the principle decision taken at the Berlin conference concerns the collection and central tabulation of trustworthy data by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), an organization founded in Warsaw and funded by the OSCE.------------
Each country will now have to define its criteria for observation and make its data compatible with those of its neighbors in order to enable comparison, which is no mean feat.
Yet, the "signals" perceived by Elie Wiesel are no less real. A report written last year [shelved under suspicious circumstances — D], by two scholars in Berlin at the request of an EU office, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), professed to be able to discern the presence of a "new anti-Semitism" riding the wave of the Arab-Israeli conflict (Le Monde, December 1, 2003). The report was not published in the ground that its data were incomplete.
The one followed, published (PDF, 1.1mb ; 346 pp./press release here: 2 pp ; 24k) in April, corroborates the conclusions of the previous report while refining its analysis. "Between 2002 and 2003, we've observed a rise in anti-Semitism in Belgium, in France, Holland, Germany and the UK," says Beate Winkler, director of the EUMC. "In Austria, in Greece, in Spain and Italy, the speech is disturbing." According to the EUMC, the "old anti-Semitism" is being expressed once again, serving as a vehicle for the oldest stereotypes of European anti-Semitism: a taste for money, suspect communal allegiances, global conspiracy, the financial exploitation of the Holocaust, etc. But, which is a more recent phenomenon, these ideas are taken up by social, national or political groups that had until now been alien to them.
Gathered in Berlin prior to the conference were several non-governmental organizations that also provided many examples of the old European anti-Semitism, which is now widely exploited in the Arab press and television to feed criticism of Israeli policy. Identical instances are cited in Europe, in political sectors that are theoretically inoculated against anti-Semitism, but that nevertheless remain susceptible to exploiting it.
That is what the German president Johannes Rau recalled upon opening the conference: "Every one knows that behind the criticism repeatedly directed at Israeli policy during the last decade a violent anti-Semitism is hiding."
(*) Marion was one of the only French reporters to cover the famous remarks of Imad Faluji, former Palestinian Communications Minister who gave speech at Lebanese refugee camp on March 2, 2001, asserting that "the Intifada had been planned since the failure of negotiations at Camp David."
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