At UN workshop, envoys warn of ‘tsunami of antisemitism’ since Oct. 7
EU coordinator for Jewish life says current situation ‘reminds us of the darkest days of Europe’ as officials cite worldwide surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes
Surging antisemitism since the Hamas terror group’s October 7 attack sparked the war in Gaza recalls the run-up to World War II, with fear spreading through Jewish communities worldwide, top European and US envoys warned this week.
“We have seen a tsunami of antisemitism really rolling across Europe and the globe,” said Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission’s coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life.
“We are seeing a situation that we had hoped we would never see again,” she told AFP in Geneva after a closed-door workshop at the United Nations on Wednesday on how to address the threat.
She pointed to the firebombing of synagogues, Stars of David spray-painted onto houses where Jews live and Jewish students attacked on university campuses.
“I think we are now in a situation that really reminds us of the darkest days of Europe.”
During Wednesday’s event, hosted by the United States, speakers highlighted a dramatic surge in antisemitic attacks since October 7 last year.
In France, statistics show the number of antisemitic incidents exploded four-fold last year to 1,676.
And in Denmark, 121 antisemitic incidents were registered in 2023 — up 1,244 percent from the nine incidents recorded a year earlier.
“We see these spikes everywhere,” von Schnurbein said.
On October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
Israel responded with an offensive in Gaza to destroy Hamas, return the hostages, and prevent any security threat from the enclave going forward.
Amid the devastating war, protests have roiled a long line of university campuses in the US and elsewhere, with demonstrators in many cases expressing open support for Hamas and other terror groups.
Last week, Columbia University in New York published a report warning of a “surge in violent antisemitic and xenophobic rhetoric” and urging better training and reporting to prevent the victimization of Jewish students.
The US envoy against antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, who also took part in Wednesday’s workshop, stressed that “criticism of Israeli policies [or] the Israeli government… is not antisemitism.
“If it were antisemitism, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who’ve been in the streets would be antisemites. Of course that’s ridiculous and not true,” she told AFP.
But she said that the conflation was happening on both sides.
She highlighted the case of an Anne Frank statue in Amsterdam being defaced with “Free Gaza” slogans, and protesters who had chased Jewish students but claimed they were only being criticized because of their views on Israel.
“You can’t conflate it on one side and then be judicious about conflation on the other side.”
Lipstadt said she was deeply concerned to see “the normalization of antisemitism,” sparking “a degree of fear that has permeated the Jewish community.”
Jewish students, she said, are now picking universities “depending on the degree of hostility they may encounter,” while men who wear kippas are covering them with baseball caps.
Michele Taylor, the US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, voiced particular alarm at “the vitriol that we’re seeing online,” especially threats of rape targeting Jewish women.
The case in France in June, where “a 12-year-old girl was brutally gang-raped simply because she was Jewish” was particularly horrifying, she said.
Wednesday’s workshop promoted a set of global guidelines for countering antisemitism, including calling on governments and political leaders to swiftly and unequivocally denounce antisemitism whenever it occurs, and demanding the issue not be politicized.
“Antisemitism is a scourge on our collective humanity,” UN rights chief Volker Turk told Wednesday’s event in a video message.
“We all have a duty to eliminate it.”
