The Netherlands on Tuesday became the latest European country to report sickening levels of anti-Semitism with a 19 percent increase in recorded anti-Jewish incidents in 2018 to a record 230 cases, Ben Cohen reported in The Algemeiner.
The Center for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) — a Dutch Jewish watchdog group – recorded in its annual report 135 anti-Semitic incidents during 2018, with a further 95 cases of anti-Semitism online.
“CIDI is concerned about the increase in antisemitism and wants a clear action plan from the government to combat this problem,” a statement from the group that accompanied the report said. “It is high time that the police and the judicial authorities paid specific attention to antisemitism and properly identified the problem.”
In one incident in June, a security guard at a nightclub in the Dutch city of Vlaardingen violently removed a Jewish teenager from the property after seeing his identity card which carried a distinctly Jewish name. In a separate incident in February, a man waiting for the metro was approached by another man who told him, “God will kill you.”
The CIDI noted that many Dutch Jews are subjected to anti-Semitic abuse at work, on campus, or in school and in their neighborhoods. “The most drastic increase was registered in incidents occurring in people’s direct vicinity,” the report said. “This encompasses incidents at schools, at work or between neighbors. The increase in this category is 67 percent compared to the previous year (from 24 in 2017 up to 40 in 2018).”
The report emphasized: “This is the highest number of antisemitic incidents in people’s direct vicinity in 10 years.”
The watchdog also observed that many anti-Semitic attacks go unreported. “Only 25 percent of respondents in the Netherlands report incidents of antisemitism to the police, other government agencies, or an NGO such as CIDI,” the group said. Moreover, the report observed, “41 percent of all cases of discrimination [in the Netherlands] concern antisemitism.”
CIDI concluded that when “antisemitism occurs — on the street, at school, on the internet — it is important that people speak out clearly.”
“We should not consider antisemitism to be normal,” the watchdog urged.
In February, studies in both the United Kingdom and France reported sharp increases in anti-Semitic incidents during 2018.
Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of history at Emory University and author of numerous books on the Holocaust, assessed the results of a poll of more than 7,000 Europeans in seven nations conducted on behalf of CNN in November of last year.
According to the poll, 25% of those surveyed across Europe felt that Jews had too much influence in business. Lipstadt said that the results were “frightening.”
[Photo: Ben Bender / WikiCommons ]