World Jewish News

Natan Sharansky (photo by Jewishagency.org).

'Anti-Semitism highest since WWII'

Anti-Semitism has reached a global peak since the end of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip last winter, and levels of Jew-hatred have not been so high since the Second World War, according to the Jewish Agency's annual report on anti-Semitism issued on Sunday.

The report was presented by Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein and Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky.

The tightening ties between extreme left-wing activists and Islamists were noted in the report, as well as more tolerance shown to Muslim hate crimes against Jews.

Iran and Venezuela stand at the top of the list as the world's most anti-Semitic countries.

The list also includes countries which are not actively anti-Semitic, but are indifferent to occurrences of anti-Semitism.

In the Netherlands, some one hundred incidents were noted immediately following the Gaza incursion - the same number as what the country had witnessed during the entire previous year.

In France, 631 incidents occurred in the first half of 2009, compared with 431 during all of 2008. In Britain, some 600 anti-Semitic incidents took place during 2009.

In Ukraine and Hungary, public displays of anti-Semitism sometimes surfaced as tools used by competing political parties in election campaigns.

Ukraine, Mexico, the United States and the Czech Republic were noted as the countries which most ardently battle anti-Semitism.

The report highlights a relatively new phenomenon - the "modern blood libel" - the dissemination of unverified or deliberately false reports tying Israel, Israelis or world Jewry to occurrences such as organ theft or kidnapping non-Jewish infants in order to give them to adoptive Jewish parents.

The report in Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet last August implied a connection between a ring of organ traffickers exposed in New York City, where some of those accused were rabbis from the local community, and claims made by West Bank Palestinians that the IDF had shot their relatives, then stolen their organs during the autopsies.

The story was widely repeated in Arab media and picked up hook, line and sinker by anti-Israeli Internet bloggers who presented it as a factual account.

The article's author, Daniel Bostrom, himself admitted that he could not verify the narrative which had been passed on to him by the Arab families.

A TV series recently aired in Turkey presented Israeli Mossad agents as baby snatchers, while one of the most successful movies currently showing in Egypt tells the tale of a woman who flees her husband with her children in tow when she realizes he is an undercover Mossad agent.

A clip uploaded by an American man to video-sharing site Youtube warned Haitians against attempts to steal their organs by IDF soldiers who were part of the rescue team stationed there.

Sharansky presented a plan to boost the number of emissaries engaged in public diplomacy in large universities overseas. Currently numbering 19, he wants the number of emissaries to exceed 100.

JPost.com