Jewish Group Disturbed By Results Of Survey On Anti-Semitic Attitudes In Europe

PARIS (EJP)--- Results of a poll conducted by a German think-tank on European attitudes towards Jews and Israel are "deeply disturbing," said the European Jewish Congress (EJC).

The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a think-tank associated with Germany’s Social Democratic Party, found extremely worrying attitudes amongst a host of Europeans.

The study – "Intolerance, Prejudice, Discrimination: A European Report" –questioned roughly 1,000 people in Great Britain, Holland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Poland and France.

When asked to respond to the statement that "Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians," 63% of the study’s participants in Poland agreed with the statement, while in Germany 47.7 percent expressed agreement.

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http://www.ejpress.org/article/49705

You have no right to be disturbed.

The part where polls show that people believe that "Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians"?

How does one then explain the fourfold increase in the Palestinian population since 1948?

Not very efficient or deadly exterminators, those Jews, oops, sorry, those Israelis.

I'm sick of the killing. Holding one group above another is pure bigotry, and I'm seeing plenty of it on both sides, so you can keep your holier-than-thou fertilizer to yourself.

"Holding one group above another is pure bigotry", so you say, yet you hold the Jews, oops, sorry, the Israelis, way lower than any other group except perhaps sea slugs, (and I'm not even sure about that).

You imply in your comment that you approve of the point of view that it is Israel's actions that make the Jews deserve to be discriminated against. I point out that "Israel's... war of extermination against the Palestinians" is non-existent because the Palestinian population has increased fourfold (or more, who's counting?) - not what anyone would close extermination in any sense of the word.

And you accuse me of "holier-than-thou fertilizing". LOL! Takes one to know what he/she is talking about.

This is shocking.

than the old refrain that the Arabs "only want to push the Jews into the sea" (which I might add used to make an almost daily appearance in this forum)?

I am rather tired of this selective faux-outrage that finds shock in the histrionic claims of one side but not the other.

And an immediate follow up response of agreement (i.e. "exactly") from another poster. I guess I shouldn't be shocked anymore based on what I've seen here in the past, but these things still gives me pause.

Generalizations like the one you cited about Arabs "pushing Jews into the sea" are not as shocking, since, unfortunately, generic anti-Arab prejudice is something one encounters on a daily basis here in the United States.

If you turn on the radio, you will hear comments like the one you cited and much much worse from some of the most popular "political" talk show hosts in a way that you would never hear blatant anti-Jewish comments.

In fact, people say things about Arabs in public forums that they would never say about virtually any other minority group in the United States. And they generally are not even chastised for it.

Anti-Jewish remarks, at least in the United States, are not the sort of thing one is likely to encounter on the radio, television, or on other non-internet outlets. Anti-Arab remarks, however, are omnipresent across all genres, much to my disgust.

Of course, it's unfortunate that either sort of comment would make an appearance on a site like this, but here we are.

to what was a quite curmudgeonly comment from myself.

Please. I'm finding this meme horrifically hypocritical. I see you support Israeli terrorism, and the mass killing of innocent people. Wow.

Unless one is accusing *all* countries that have waged/ are waging war of genocide. Which IMO devalues the term 'genocide'; but is at least consistent. In recent years, Britain and America have caused the deaths of a lot more people, and specifically of Arabs and Muslims, than Israel has. Should our countries be accused of genocide?

I oppose MANY of Israel's policies (notably the Occupation and OCL), but I still wouldn't use the word 'genocide', especially given the UK's recent war record.

That's the difference. It's the going after a people with the intent of eradicating all of them that is offensive. No one in America or Great Britain is saying an entire people should be eradicated.

I don't condone Israel's treatment of the Palestinians but they aren't seeking to *eradicate* them.

Eradication.

Leaders truly dedicated to genocide rarely worry too much about the world watching.

... genocide since the number of Palestinians is increasing... that seems to be the opposite of a genocide.

Jews would not be shown any sort of "kindness" from Arab conquerers either.

That the "shoe fits" with respect to those statements is what is shocking and offensive.

And your bizarre conclusions about anyone supporting "the mass killing of innocent people" are even more disturbing.

many people do not.

In fact, people say things about Arabs in public forums that they would never say about virtually any other minority group in the United States. And they generally are not even chastised for it.

Anti-Jewish remarks, at least in the United States, are not the sort of thing one is likely to encounter on the radio, television, or on other non-internet outlets. Anti-Arab remarks, however, are omnipresent across all genres, much to my disgust.

Perhaps my assumptions about your thinking have been way too harsh. Thank you.

Sadly, I wouldn't say I am 'shocked' by them any more; no doubt I once was, but they are sadly common - against Jews, against Muslims, against Arabs, against immigrants, etc.

these questions do not reveal how any respondent feels about jewish people in general but asks how they feel about certain Israeli policies.

And I'm a little more than tired of seeing people called anti-semitic because they don't like bigotry and killing... Israel has blood on their hands. I'm not saying the Palestinians are any better, I'm just pointing to hypocrisy.

most of the questions are *not* about Israel, but about whether Jews have too much power, talk too much about the Holocaust, have/haven't enriched the culture of the respondents' country, etc.

I wanted to look at the full article, but haven't, for that reason.

I did not see anything. See also.

http://siteadvisor.us/sites/ejpress.com/msgpage

Here's a link to the main survey itself; the responses to specific questions are at the end:

http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/do/07908-20110311.pdf

It deals with several different sorts of prejudice: antisemitism, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, sexism, anti-immigrant prejudice. They tend to go together, though not always. And there is too much of all of them everywhere, though there are considerable differences between countries.

The survey indicates that Britain is better than most Europaean countries with regard to antisemitism (where other surveys suggest that it's similar to or better than America) and most other forms of prejudice; the exception being anti-immigrant prejudice where we seem to lead all the rest! This does not surprise me; Britain is relatively live-and-let-live and has fewer social prejudices than many countries, but hostility to immigrants has always been our Achilles heel.

The Netherlands is also one of the less prejudiced countries in Europe, despite a few high-profile Islamophobic and antisemitic politicians.

By contrast, Poland and Hungary seem to be relatively FULL of antisemitism, as well as other sorts of prejudice. Quite a few people whom I know are Jews whose ancestors left one or other of these countries for good reason (Poland in the case of my own ancestors); and it's sad to see that they haven't improved as much in these respects as one would like to see.

and the one question which at least half of the respondents in all countries replied to positively was this one "Jews enrich our culture." it seems that one wasn't mentioned in the article






'

Poland had relatively little anti-semitism when its population was the most Jewish of any country in the world except for Morocco (1 in 7 Poles was Jewish at the end of the nineteenth century).

It now has relatively high levels of anti-Semitism even though there are next to no Jews there.

On the other hand, Polish Jews don't seem to be particularly keen on Polish Catholics either, as far as I can tell. Many seem to believe in false conspiracy theories that the Polish Underground conspired with the Nazis to track down Jews. Even the Hollywood film "Uprising" about the Warsaw ghetto dabbled in these theories. When Shimon Peres visited Poland he made a statement to the effect that Poland was not responsible for the holocaust. Which is well and good but I thought that would have gone without saying.

Israel has recently become quite popular amongst some of the countries in the former Soviet orbit, such as the Czech republic and Bulgaria, mainly because of the unpopularity of Turks and Turkey in those countries. There are only very few Turks in Poland; perhaps that is the difference.

especially after WW1. Of course, 'Poland' itself had shifting boundaries through history and was partitioned many times, so it's sometimes hard to differentiate events in Poland from neighbouring countries. At any rate, both Poland and Lithuania were very bad countries for Jews, including many of my relatives, during that time - long before the Nazi occupation.

At least judging from a Polish fellow-student of mine in the 80s, who though friendly with individual Jews was prepared to be rather open about his general prejudices, some postwar and current Polish antisemitism seems to involve a stereotype of Jews supporting and collaborating with Soviet domination -unlikely as the Soviets themselves were rarely exactly very friendly toward Jews. (This was the same Polish student whom I mentioned before, who initially thought that EVERYTHING opposed by Soviet propaganda must be a good thing, including Thatcher, Reagan and even McCarthyism.)

I mean to some extent this is part of a historical trend, they have always been like that.