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VIENNA, Dec 4: The European Union’s anti-racism agency on Thursday bowed to pressure to publish a report which blames anti-Semitism on Muslim immigrants, but stood by its criticism that the document was flawed.
The decision by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) to withdraw the report had been criticized by European Union parliamentarians and by major Jewish groups, who accused the EU of being afraid to face up to anti-Semitism.
The EUMC said it had withheld the study because it was based on too little data from too short a time period, that it jumped to conclusions and that it made unacceptable generalisations.
“The opinion of the EUMC remains that this draft study in its present form is not fit for publication,” EUMC said in a statement attached to the study on its Web site.
The agency objected to what it said was the suggestion that anti-Semitism was endemic among Arabic or North African Muslims.
“Such generalizations have always been challenged by the fight against racism and anti-Semitism,” it said.
The EUMC put the report on its Web site at http://eumc.eu.int. The World Jewish Congress and at least one news Web site had already published the text.
The authors of the study, from the respected Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism at Berlin’s Technical University, had submitted the report to the Vienna-based EUMC early this year. They have defended their work and denied it was flawed.
In the study, they said a rise in anti-Semitic violence in the first half of 2002 was mainly due to right-wing extremists, radical Islamists and young Muslims, mainly of Arab descent.
“Physical attacks on Jews and the desecration and destruction of synagogues were acts often committed by young Muslim perpetrators in the monitoring period,” the report said.
News of the EUMC report came after the EU executive published a poll in early November showing 59 percent of those Europeans polled saw Israel as the main threat to world peace — a finding Israel took as proof of anti-Semitism in Europe. —Reuters
