YOU DON’T SAY: Germany Struggles With an Unfamiliar Form of Anti-Semitism.
The police registered 1,453 anti-Semitic incidents in Germany last year, more than in five of the previous seven years, and organizations including the American Jewish Congress say fewer than a third of such incidents get reported. Their stubborn persistence in the country where the Holocaust was plotted and executed is raising concern that decades of work to eradicate anti-Semitism are slowly being undone as prejudice against Jews spreads beyond its traditional home in the far right.
“I fear that a new generation of anti-Semites is coming of age in Germany,” Josef Schuster, head of the country’s chief Jewish organization, told journalists on Wednesday.
German police attribute more than 90% of cases nationwide to far-right offenders. But Jewish activists and victim representatives say the data is misleading because police automatically label any incident where the perpetrators aren’t known as coming from the far right.
The problem goes beyond Germany. The murder of an elderly Holocaust survivor in Paris earlier this month in what prosecutors said was an anti-Semitic attack has fueled a perception that anti-Jewish acts—from casual insults to brutal violence—are on the rise across Europe and that governments appear unable to do much about it.
You have to get to the seventh paragraph before the word “Muslim” is used, which might reflect part of why European governments are “unable to do much” about the problem.