World Jewish News

Jewish groups call on EU to fight anti-Semitism

Jewish groups met with senior EU officials yesterday, urging them to take the lead in fighting anti-Semitism and agree on a common definition of anti-Semitism.
The meeting came after the union's racism monitoring agency released the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia report calling the EU governments' 2004 record of fighting racism and xenophobia mixed, at best.
The Vienna-based agency's director, Beate Winkler, said yesterday there was a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2004, and linked recent unrest in the suburbs of French cities to a lack of job opportunities for immigrant families.
Calling for more efforts to end discrimination in employment, housing, education and other sectors, the report said some countries do well in countering discrimination, while others are either slow to enact anti-racism laws, lack data to measure how their policies affect ethnic minorities, or pass measures that actually restrict minorities' rights.
The report found that Europe's 8 million Gypsies, or Roma, were the most vulnerable, followed by Muslim groups and migrant workers from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.
The report covers 2004 - a year in which there was a terrorist attack on commuter trains in Madrid that killed some 200 people and the slaying of Islam-critical Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street. "After Van Gogh, we have seen a big increase in islamophobia in Holland and other European countries," Winkler said.
The report said British police received almost 53,000 reports of racist incidents in 2004. Germany was second with 6,474 reports.

Источник: jewish.ru