Europe experiences rise in Anti-Semitism at rates not seen in decades

Germany and France top the list.

WORLD SEPTEMBER 8. 2024 18:10

Immigrant Muslims are generally strongly anti-Semitic, that’s what an earlier scientific analysis prepared by the Anti-Semitism Research Centre (ZfA) of Berlin’s University of Technology found.

The ZfA assessed the existing studies of the last ten years. The result is clear: every second immigrant from Islam-dominated countries possesses an anti-Semitic worldview.

The Council of Experts on Integration and Migration sounded the alarm back in 2022. According to data collected at that time, 11.3 per cent of Germans agreed with anti-Jewish stereotypes. Among those with Turkish migrant backgrounds, however, this rate was 50.2 per cent.

A similar picture emerges in the case of anti-Israel sentiment, which shows marked differences between Germans and immigrants.

In other words, even though Jew-hatred had already been present in Germany, it has reached drastic proportions since the beginning of the migration waves and became a kind of imported commodity.

According to the authorities, an average of five anti-Jewish crimes are committed every day in Germany. In its response, the federal government lists several other crimes in addition to acts of violence:

such as inciting hatred, incitement to violence, defamation, property damage and the use of symbols – in particular the swastika – tied to constitutionally banned organisations.

The life of Jews in Germany has changed significantly since 2015, when hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Islamic cultural area arrived in Germany. Jewish activist Malca Goldstein-Wolf says,

„Muslim Jew-hatred is the biggest threat to Jewish life in Germany. There are relatively far fewer violent right-wing extremists, but there are masses of Muslims who are not afraid to physically attack Jews wearing kippahs and to unabashedly and completely live out their anti-Semitism.

The situation is worse in France

Among European countries, France has the largest Jewish community, numbering approximately 600,000 people. Despite this, Jews feel the least safe there, as was found in the survey, prepared by the London-based Jewish Policy Research institute on behalf of the European Jewish Association (EJA). The study was conducted focusing on four main aspects: the Jewish community’s sense of security, the population’s attitudes towards Jews and Israel, anti-Semitism and finally the government’s performance regarding the subject, including statistics on anti-Semitic incidents, budgetary expenditures on Holocaust memorials and Jewish people’s security, ensuring the freedom of worship and the practice of Jewish customs. In viewing the results, the lower a country ranks, the worse the situation is in terms of anti-Semitism.

Aggregating all aspects of the survey, France ranked tenth out of twelve countries, far behind Italy, which came in first place. The article also reveals that Hungary was second on the list, while Belgium was in last place.

When it comes to the safety of Jewish community members, France ranked last, meaning this is where Jews are most worried about their safety, Denmark took the first place in this category.

A Paris murder in 2018 comes to mind. The victim, 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mirelle Knoll, was brutally murdered by her attacker, Yacine Mihoub, a Muslim of African descent, who stabbed her 11 times and then set her body on fire. The case was tried in November 2021 and the perpetrator received a life sentence.

The case of another brutal anti-Semitic murder of a 65-year-old Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, also caused great outrage. In 2017, her neighbour Kobili Traore, a 27-year-old of migrant background, broke into her home, brutally beat her and while praising Allah threw her from the balcony.

The court later acquitted the perpetrator, saying he was under the influence of drugs at the time of the murder and was not of sound mind and therefore could not be held criminally liable.

The most shocking anti-Jewish crime took place in France in 2015, when on 9 January, the terrorist Amedy Coulibaly, armed to the teeth, murdered four people and took seventeen others hostage in a Parisian grocery store called Hyper Cacher.

In 2006, the murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi also caused international outrage. The young man was kidnapped and held captive for three weeks by a gang of mainly Muslims called the Barbarians.

They tied him to a radiator, beat him and tortured him repeatedly, all because of his origin. The perpetrators, thinking their captive was wealthy, demanded a ransom of €450,000 from the Jewish man’s family.

The money was never delivered, and the half-dead Ilan Halimi was found in the street in a suburb of Paris, with most of his body covered in burns. He died while being taken to hospital.

WORLD

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antisemitic attack, antisemitims, migrant