08 September 2006
A group of British lawmakers has demanded that the government act against a rising tide of anti-Semitic attacks which look set to swell in the wake of Israel's war in Lebanon. The chairman of the cross-party parliamentary committee which wrote the report, Labour Party member Denis MacShane, said that many British Jews were the target of some people's anger about Israeli and American policies. "British citizens who happen to be born Jews have to accept responsibility for the anger there is against Israel or America," MacShane, a former minister for European affairs, told a press conference in London. The panel concluded its investigations before the conflict which erupted in July between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrilla movement. But MacShane linked the earlier upsurge of violence to the rise of Islamist ideology and organized Islamist political groups, including the extremist Hizb ut-Tahrir, in Britain. The Community Safety Trust, a Jewish group which monitors racism, recorded 455 anti-Semitic incidents in Britain in 2005, the second highest total since records began in 1984. The organization told the news agency AFP that it had recorded 92 incidents of abuse and intimidation in July, the third highest monthly figure since 1984.
"It takes classic forms: bricks through synagogues, school children being spat at, insulted as they go to school, Jewish graves being desecrated, stones thrown on their way to worship on the Jewish Sabbath," MacShane said. He also reported an increase in the dissemination of material, particularly over the Internet, which "frankly, we thought had been outlawed since 1945". But he backtracked from a previous comment in which he claimed that anti-Jewish sentiment was "entering the mainstream, appearing in the everyday conversations of people who consider themselves neither racist nor prejudiced". Instead, he told the press conference, he felt there had been a "coarsening" of public discussion among some groups, including academics.
Highlighting a particular problem on campuses, the report says that Jewish students feel "disproportionately threatened" and calls on university heads to take "robust action" against anti-Semitism. The report demands action from the government, police, prosecutors, universities and the Jewish community. It also calls on the Crown Prosecution Service to investigate why less than one in 10 anti-Semitic attacks leads to an investigation. All police forces, rather than the current minority, should start registering anti-Semitic crimes, the report says, also demanding that the Foreign and Interior ministries publish annual reports on the extent of anti-Semitism in the country and possible actions taken to tackle it.
