Israel blames British media for rise in anti-Semitic crimes
AFP
Date: 01-25-05
LONDON (AFP) - Britain recorded the steepest rise in anti-Semitic crimes of any country last year, and the increase was due to hostile and biased reporting in the British media, the Israeli government alleges.
The Guardian newspaper on Tuesday described an Israeli government report which found that violent attacks on Jews in Britain had risen by nearly half last year, to 77.
The global forum against anti-Semitism, the Israeli body responsible for the report, found that France still had the most anti-Semitic violence, with 96 incidents reported. But it said that the total number of British incidents rose to 304 from 163 a year earlier, when crimes like verbal assaults and desecration of graves were included.
Israeli minister Natan Sharansky was quoted blaming the British figures on "years of hostile reporting and commentary about Israel in the British press now spilling into the streets".
Sharansky accused the left-leaning Guardian and the BBC public broadcaster, in particular, of "likening Israel to a Nazi state", and also criticized The Independent newspaper.
One example highlighted by David Weinberg, a coordinator of the forum and advisor to Sharansky, was the coverage of the Israeli army incursion in the West Bank town of Jenin in 2002.
Weinberg said that the incursion, in which 58 Palestinians -- mostly armed men -- were killed, was wrongly described as a "massacre" by some British media.
"You can't brainwash people for four years that Israel is an illegitimate country and that Israelis are like the Nazis and that Israelis are monsters and expect that nothing will happen to Jews," another Sharansky advisor, Tehila Nahalon, was quoted by the Guardian as saying.
The Israeli forum report on anti-Semitism was released as the world prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, where more than one million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis.
A spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which is reportedly releasing its own statistics next month on anti-Semitism in Britain, agreed with the Israeli claim of bias in journalism here.
"The British media has portrayed Israel in a very unfair light," the spokesman, Jason Pearlman, said. "It's what's not said as much as what's said: the fact that most Palestinian attacks on Israel are not reported in the British press, and the fact that almost all the attacks on the Palestinians are reported."
British police have confirmed a steady increase in attacks against Jews in Britain over the last decade, The Times newspaper reported in August.
In 2003, there were 375 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in the country, according to police records.
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