UN Hosts First Ever Meeting Dedicated to Combating Anti-Semitism

The UN General Assembly gathered Thursday for its first ever meeting dedicated to global action against anti-Semitism. The informal meeting, attended by about half the 193 member states, was organized by mainly Western nations in order to address an “alarming outbreak of anti-Semitism worldwide.” Planning began last October in response to the murder of three people outside the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium, and the killing of a rabbi and three children in Toulouse, France. (TIME)

Scotland Yard Reveals Huge Rise in Anti-Semitic Crime in London – Rosa Doherty (Jewish Chronicle-UK)

The latest figures from Scotland Yard showed there were 299 hate crimes against Jewish people between the start of April and the end of December.

That represented a rise of 128% on the same period in 2013, when there were 131 hate crimes. The period included the months during the Gaza conflict last summer.

Police said last week that they were increasing patrols in areas with large Jewish communities following the terror attacks in Paris.

Even If the Palestinians Were Granted a State, Anti-Semitism Would Not Dissipate One Iota – Bernard-Henri Levy (Huffington Post)

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy told a special session of the UN General Assembly on Thursday:

• In Europe and elsewhere, faulting the Jews is once again becoming the rallying cry of a new order of assassins. The United Nations was founded to fight this plague. This assembly was given the sacred task of preventing those terrible spirits from reawakening. But they have returned – and that is why we are here.
• It is not accurate to say that the policy of a particular state – I am referring, obviously, to the State of Israel – generates anti-Semitism. I have seen European capitals in which the destruction of the Jews was nearly total, yet where anti-Semitism still thrives. I have seen others, farther away, where no Jews have ever lived – yet where the word “Jew” is a synonym for the devil.
• Even if Israel’s conduct were exemplary, even if Israel were a nation of angels, even if the Palestinians were granted the state that is their right, even then, alas, this old, enigmatic hatred would not dissipate one iota.
• Today’s anti-Semitism offers three shameful new propositions:
  1. The Jews are detestable because they are assumed to support an evil, illegitimate, murderous state. This is the anti-Zionist delirium of the merciless adversaries of the re-establishment of the Jews in their historical homeland.
  2. The Jews are all the more detestable because they are believed to base their beloved Israel on imaginary suffering, or suffering that at the very least has been outrageously exaggerated. This is the shabby and infamous denial of the Holocaust.
  3. In so doing, the Jews impose on us the memory of their dead, to completely stifle other peoples’ memories, and to overshadow other martyrs whose deaths have plunged parts of today’s world, most emblematically that of the Palestinians, into mourning. And here we come face to face with the modern-day scourge, the stupidity, that is competitive victimhood.
• Let us imagine a UN General Assembly in which Israel would have its place, its full place, one country among others, no more and no less flawed than others, bound by the same responsibilities but enjoying the same rights – and let us imagine, while we are at it, that you unanimously acknowledge it to be what it truly is: an authentic, solid, and rare democracy.
• A world in which the Jews once again became the scapegoats for all people’s fears and frustrations would be a world in which free people could not breathe easy and the enslaved would be even more enslaved.