Germany: Muslim and right-wing anti-Semitism on the German Internet

Via Arutz Sheva (Manfred Gerstenfeld):

Authorities have tried to keep statistical data and other information about anti-Semitic attitudes among Muslim immigrants and their descendants out of the limelight.

The Office for the Security of the German Federal State of Hessen has published a report on anti-Semitism on the German internet, authored by Ann-Christin Wegener. The study focuses on the manifestations and ideological background of anti-Semitic agitation on social networks in Germany.

Wegener wrote that the German authorities usually claim that 90% of anti-Semitic incidents are caused by the extreme right. She suggests that this results from the way the police report anti-Semitic incidents. As long as nothing is known about the motivation or the perpetrators, these incidents are labelled as right wing politically motivated.

Hate crimes committed in the Arabic or Turkish languages lead to less complaints than those in German. One has to also take into account the fact that many anti-Semitic incidents are not reported or do not result in complaints. It is estimated that less than a quarter of Jewish victims of anti-Semitism bring complaints to the police or to the Jewish community.

The author remarks that very little attention has been given to anti-Semitic crimes and attitudes of Muslims in Germany. She refers to some incidents which received much public attention. One of the most extreme was the severe beating of a rabbi in Berlin in 2012. Two years later anti-Israeli demonstrators shouted “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” in several German towns. Another incident which received much publicity took place in the Spring of 2017 when a Jewish boy quit his Berlin school after being severely harassed by Muslim pupils. Wegener writes: “All this says little about the quantitative comparison between anti-Semitism among Muslims and among the right.”

Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe has been greatly under-researched. Many authorities have tried to keep statistical data and other information about anti-Semitic attitudes among Muslim immigrants and their descendants out of the limelight. This has occurred despite the fact that all resolved murders of Jews in Western Europe in the past decade have been committed by Muslims. The same is largely true for other extreme anti-Semitic incidents. Among these are serious attacks on synagogues in France.

One classic example among many of hiding such information occurred in 2003. The Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin (CRA) completed its study on European anti-Semitism. It had been charged to prepare this report by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). (This organization was replaced by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, FRA in 2007.) The CRA identified young Muslims of Arab descent as the main perpetrators of physical attacks against Jews and the desecration and destruction of synagogues. The EUMC did not publish the study. The CRA stated that the reason for not publishing the document was thar it exposed the many Muslim perpetrators of anti-Semitic incidents. They also mentioned that the EUMC had repeatedly asked them to change their findings. At the end of 2003, the World Jewish Congress published the CRA draft report on the Internet, thereby exposing the EUMC’s manipulation.

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