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Europe warned on Anti-Semitism
BBC News
19 June 2003
The United States has said Europe
must do more to tackle a resurgence of anti-Semitism
around the world.
The plea was made by former New
York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, representing the US at
a conference in the Austrian capital, Vienna.
"Words do not suffice to
turn the tide of anti-Semitism that is once again growing
in Europe and other parts of the world," he said.
About 400 officials from the Organisation
for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) have
gathered for the unprecedented two-day meeting following
a rash of anti-Jewish incidents in Europe in recent
years.
The European Union told the conference
it was taking action against anti-Jewish hatred but
denied there had been a distinctive rise in anti-Semitism.
Official limits
Mr Giuliani told delegates to
take concrete steps to stamp out violence against Jews,
including keeping statistics on hate crimes, identifying
problems early on and comparing performances between
countries.
In a message read to the conference,
US President George W Bush urged countries to "ensure
that anti-Semitism is excluded from school text books,
official statements, official television programming
and official publications".
Last month, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre
said attacks on Jews had reached the highest level since
World War II.
As well as physical attacks on
Jews, many countries have reported vandalism of synagogues
and Jewish cemeteries,
Hate messages
French representative Michel Voisin,
whose country has experienced a six-fold increase in
anti-Semitic incidents in the space of a year, said
France viewed anti-Semitism as a "particularly
odious form of racism".
The Polish delegate, former Polish
Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, warned that
anti-Semitism had "mutated" in Poland since
the Holocaust, which wiped out nearly all of Poland's
pre-war Jewish population.
Several delegates pointed to the
problem of the internet being used to spread hate messages,
while Dutch OSCE ambassador Daan Everts highlighted
"[racist] music [and] racist slogans in football
stadiums".
Israeli chief representative Avraham
Toledo called on conference delegates to make anti-Semitism
a criminal offence.
"It will not do to classify assaults on Jews, synagogues
or Jewish communal institutions as mere hooliganism
and vandalism," he said.
The conference opened a day after
the Romanian Government retracted an earlier claim that
"there was no Holocaust" on Romanian soil.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk
Published: 2003/06/19 © BBC MMIII
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