Introduction by the Chairperson of the Sub-Committee of Inquiry into AntiSemitism Hon. M.

P Fiamma Nirenstein
Our final report makes clear the urgency of our work: it is for all the reasons that you will find here, that we requested the Italian Parliament in 2009 to follow the British and Canadian Parliaments in systematically investigating what the historian Robert Wistrich defines as the longest hatred. Anti-Semitism. We embarked on this mission with a lot of energy and held dozens of hearings, including four Ministers. Throughout our work we also held many open sessions, inviting Members of Parliament as well as citizens to discuss the issue of anti-Semitism in the halls of our most important democratic institution We worked intensively, yet still could not match the speed of this new tide invading the world unexpectedly sixty years after the Shoah. There has also been ample evidence of growing intolerance about our Sub-Committee of Inquiry, which is accused of being the long arm of the Jewish hold on Italy and its Parliament. I would like to thank the President of the Chamber of Deputies, the Chairpersons of the Committees on Constitutional Affairs and Foreign Affairs and all the members of our Sub-Committee for their contribution. In particular, I would like to thank all the Committee officials and other staff who have shown their dedicated commitment to completing this investigation with us. We worked with an unprecedented sense of urgency, prompted by the abrupt resurgence of this millenary danger. Moreover, as legislators we felt a specific obligation to avoid past underestimations of the danger and to overcome many obstacles so as to go beyond rhetorical statements and take concrete action. It is not only an Italian issue, it is a global emergency: a new globalized anti-Semitism is described in all the documents mentioned in the report. First the OSCE, then the Interparliamentary Coalition for Combating Anti-Semitism (ICCA), of whose Steering Committee I am a member, and the Inquiry Committees in London and in Ottawa showed that an anti-Semitism based on old stereotypes is using new, very pervasive and widespread tools. The international resolutions refer to a situation reminiscent of the 30s, unparalleled and unprecedented since World War II.

In some countries, anti-Semitic episodes have grown by fifty, sixty per cent; the percentage of people who do have an unfavourable opinion of the Jews - even if they have never met one is incredible. And against any possible expectation, the figure is more than 40% in Italy, even though we have fewer violent incidents compared to the rest of Europe. All this brings me back to many analyses of Italian anti-Semitism that show it is cautious, creeping but in the end extremely lethal. Can we speak of authentic anti-Semitism when we look at its new expressions on the web and social networks, the neo-Nazi anti-Semitism with its allegations about the Jewish grip even on the Italian Parliament, the new genocidal Holocaust denial, which sentences Israel to death? Is it dangerous? There are different views on this subject and even during our sessions we heard different opinions. In my view, there is a substantial and clear continuity, even if it is hard to bear for people like me who had firmly believed that after the Shoah, anti-Semitism would never be possible again. It is true, though, that in the last few decades, knowledge of the Shoah has become more widespread than ever before, but paradoxically this has created a backlash in terms of a widespread rebellion against the truth, an irritated, almost bored but still reactive guilty feeling. In the worst cases, this feeling has generated denial and sometimes a return to ignorance. This is how, in Spain, 35% of the individuals between 18 and 44 years of age are not able to place the Shoah chronologically, while two thirds of European respondents do not know how many Jews were killed. Therefore we must not only fight against ignorance, but we must also try to kindle a yearning for truth. Not least because, as we must be aware, we are listening to the last direct beloved witnesses of the Shoah. We are faced today with a denied, masked anti-Semitism that hints at its nature but is never openly admitted, and which can even be so extreme as to envisage the elimination of the Jewish people. The premise of the current determination to eliminate the Jews, and first Israel as the collective Jew, is the very denial of the Shoah. And it is a shame that the very institution that should have condemned this attitude has repeatedly accepted it on its podium: this is what happens when the UN become an instrument for denial and elimination theories, when the Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who promises to destroy Israel, defines it as a tree with rotten roots and argues that the 2001 September 11 attack on the Twin Towers was a Zionist plot. With these awful public statements and his unacceptable language, he destroys the credibility of the institutions, thus encouraging similar behaviour on a global scale. Unfortunately, we have plenty of evidence of this phenomenon. 2

So what is anti-Semitism today? Is it different from what is has been in past centuries? Has it left behind the plan of exterminating the Jewish people? In my opinion the answer is no: the core of the phenomenon has remained unchanged, it is just more amplified and widespread because of globalization. There are some specific current issues that are also connected to it, such as emigration or the economic problems that create general mistrust in politics. We are witnessing a revival of right-wing racist sentiments, linked to ethnic and cultural intolerance, which are sometimes directed also at the Jewish Italian Community, which has been living here for over 2000 years. Moreover, anti-Semitism has been inflamed by the most conspicuous collective Jewish community ever seen, the State of Israel. We have noticed that typically anti-Semitic stereotypes (blood libel, conspiracy theories) are used against it, in addition to the legitimate political criticisms, as we have repeatedly pointed out. The President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, whom you will find quoted in our Report, supports our opinion, as do the views expressed by all the experts and Ministers interviewed. Our times are characterized by an exponential growth in the number of messages that appear on social networks: these capitalize on ignorance and on spreading the basest stereotypes. According to the most dangerous of these, the Jews are believed to have invented or amplified the story of the Shoah in order to obtain an illegitimate and colonial State of Israel that now persecutes the Palestinians. But how? Well, just in the same way the Nazis persecuted the Jews. A painful intellectual confusion often results in a denial of history, which is then suddenly brought back into the picture just to accuse the Jews of cruelty. Moreover, this approach completely ignores the fact that the history of Zionism has nothing to do with the Shoah, which it predates by a long time. Todays anti-Semitism is fed by a political legend that results in a theoretical and even mysticalreligious bias. In fact, radical Islamists describe Jews as pigs and monkeys and, on the TV and in the textbooks of many Arab countries, they are generally depicted as cruel killers and greedy exploiters. This incitement is so vast and multi-faceted that it is certainly the major political issue we have to deal with across borders. When it comes to Europe, it is easy to underline how often political attacks against Israel turn into physical attacks on Jews, as happened to the Ghetto of Rome and several Jewish facilities, cemeteries and homes of community leaders. We cannot avoid recalling the tragic memory of the

attack by a terrorist group on the Synagogue in Rome in 1982, which resulted in the death of the two year old Roman Jewish baby Stefano Gay Tach. While we must affirm the right even to the harshest criticism, we also feel the duty to require people to refrain from the language of incitement, which becomes completely anti-Semitic when someone claims that the Jews are creating concentration camps or a State of apartheid. This is the typical language of moral boycott. The new anti-Semitism is not pure and simple racial or religious hatred. On the contrary, the champions of anti-Semitism even those who have a genocidal attitude wave the banner of the three monotheist religions and cite their common father Abraham. But when we read the context, we can always identify the reality and the stereotypes of anti-Semitism. The three Ds by Nathan Sharansky can help us when we try to identify the shift from the right to criticism to anti-Semitism: Demonization, when the judgment is disproportionate and senseless, i.e. when Gaza is likened to Auschwitz; Double standards, when Israel is judged by completely different criteria from other countries, for example on human rights, when China, Iran and Cuba, for example, are completely ignored by the international organizations; Delegitimation, when Israel's right to exist is denied. Since, unfortunately, we have noticed in our Inquiry that anti-Semitism is inversely proportional to access to education among young people, it is an evident and present duty of the institutions to find the way to intervene. We know that the attacks on Jews always precede attacks on democracy. Kofi Annan, in his capacity as Secretary General of the UN once stated: Our Organization came into being when the world had just learnt the full horror of the concentration and extermination camps. It is therefore rightly said that the United Nations emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust. And a human rights agenda that fails to address anti-Semitism denies its own history. [] It is hard to believe that, 60 years after the tragedy of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is once again rearing its head. But it is clear that we are witnessing an alarming resurgence of this phenomenon in new forms and manifestations. This time, the world must not, cannot be silent. He recalled that the U.N. was born in the wake of the Second World War to prevent any recurrence of its horrors, especially antiSemitism. Along the same lines, we may say that all our democratic institutions born after World War II have grown out of the ashes of the Jews, having anti-Semitism in mind as the most severe risk and as decisive battle ground for the future.

The birth of the ICCA, the many conferences held and the documents signed by many interparliamentary groups are manifestations of the will to fight actively against this phenomenon. Recently, this International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians from all over the world, that I have the honour to chair, has made plans to visit the countries where anti-Semitism is regaining a powerful momentum, such as Scandinavia and Venezuela, to ask their governments to halt this phenomenon with great determination. But no action will be successful unless the Institutions are able to raise awareness of this new situation, in all its ramifications. A case in point is Ilan Halimi, a young Jew who was kidnapped in Paris in 2006, tortured for twenty-four days and then killed by an extremist Islamic group only because he was Jewish. The Police refused to believe in the anti-Semitic root of this murder and ascribed it to many different circumstances. Well, this fact should be seen as a very serious reminder. It is to create a widespread awareness of what anti-Semitism means today that we have worked, and it is to actively fight against it that we will keep on doing so. Hon. M.P. Fiamma Nirenstein