Far-right parties sweeping EU vote should serve as warning sign - World Israel News

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  • Far-right parties sweeping EU vote should serve as warning sign -

    The shared fear of Muslims has not yet led major Jewish organizations to lift their boycotts against dubious politicians in far-right parties.

    By Asaf Ronel | May 27, 2014

    Haaretz
    http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/.premium-1.595445

    Despite Sunday’s election gains for far-right parties, according to the latest report on the issue by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, published last month, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Europe actually declined last year.

    The center, at Tel Aviv University, is headed by Prof. Dina Porat. And while the Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100 Index found that 24 percent of Western Europeans held anti-Semitic attitudes, it is hard to find a direct link to the election results.

    The index scores in France and the United Kingdom, where far-right parties swept the EU polls, were 37 percent and 8 percent, respectively. And Greece and Sweden, both of which voted to send parties with a neo-Nazi past to Strasbourg for the first time, were on either end of the Global 11 Index, at 69 percent and 4 percent, respectively.

    Another measurement of the threat felt by European Jews is immigration to Israel. While in most countries on the continent the number of Jews coming to Israel declined between 2012 and 2013, in France the number rose by nearly 50 percent, to 3,200, and so far this year the pace is only increasing. France had the most anti-Semitic incidents in the world, according to the Kantor Center report, but perhaps it can shed light on the situation throughout the continent.

    Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front and the daughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, has made tremendous efforts to shed the party’s anti-Semitic image. And while her father suggested last week that the deadly Ebola virus could solve Europe’s immigration problems, his daughter has successfully rebranded the party as protecting “ordinary citizens” from both the bureaucrats in Brussels and mass immigration from Africa.

    In France as in other EU member states, the makeovers of the far-right parties included removing most of their anti-Semitic features to focus on fear of the “Muslim threat” to the continent.

    Many French Jews are still repelled by the National Front, and German Jews are certainly shocked by the neo-Nazis’ gains in their country (even if they had more to do with the lowering of the electoral threshold than a significant rise in support for the NPD).

    But a significant proportion of the anti-Semitic incidents in France and elsewhere in Europe are a product of anti-Jewish sentiment among Muslims, linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and not “old-school” Christian anti-Semitism.

    Until Saturday’s attack in Brussels, the worst anti-Semitic attack in Europe in recent years was the 2012 killing of four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse by a Muslim extremist.

    The shared fear of Muslims has not yet led major Jewish organizations to lift their boycotts against dubious politicians in far-right parties.

    But the common interest is clear, and the wall is more porous than it once was, as seen in the increasingly close ties between the extreme right in Europe and in Israel.