European Muslim Antisemitism: Why Young Urban Males say They Don’t Like Jews by Gunther Jikeli

Reviewed by Michael Whine
Government & International Affairs Director, Community Security Trust, London

Gunther Jikeli has been researching antisemitism for over ten years, but unlike many academics, his experience is also grounded in practice in his native Germany and elsewhere. Graduating from the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Berlin’s Technical University, he was involved from the start with the Kreuzberg Initiative against Antisemitism, known in Germany as KIgA. This group of teachers, social workers, and academics had become concerned by young Muslims’ antisemitism in the Berlin inner city neighborhoods of Kreuzberg and Neukolln, and volunteered to work in schools and youth centers to try to break down the growing prejudices they were encountering.

Among the training sessions they held to acquaint themselves with the issues was a four-day seminar in Kreuzberg, at which European experts were invited to guide them, this reviewer included. Sometime later, Jikeli jointly organized a conference in Paris, entitled “Perceptions of the Holocaust in Berlin, Paris, and London,” again attended by this reviewer. In recent years, he worked as the adviser on antisemitism at the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw, where his tasks included collecting and analyzing governmental and NGO data on antisemitic incidents and trends in order to formulate policy.

By the start of the millennium, it was becoming obvious to researchers of antisemitism in Europe that such antipathy emanated increasingly from Muslims and from the left. That is not to suggest that far-right antisemitism had declined; it hadn’t, but it was being augmented by the “new antisemitism” based on the left’s historical antipathy to Zionism; the spillover of the Middle East conflict onto Europe’s streets; Arab states’ adoption of traditional anti-Jewish tropes; and Islamic theology.

This change wasn’t obvious, however, or politically acceptable to those who managed the European agencies tasked with combating racism. Jikeli notes that his professors in Berlin were responsible for pointing this out in their research for the European Union Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). Their 2003 report only came to light after it was leaked to the media following a clumsy attempt by the EUMC to suppress their findings. A second attempt to examine the Muslim causes for European antisemitism was frustrated by European civil servants when their press briefings distorted the researchers’ findings. Subsequent research by the EUMC successor body, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), however, put the record straight, and Jikeli devotes a chapter in his book to examining this and other European polls and surveys. Of these, the most important was the 2013 large-scale survey by FRA, “Discrimination and hate crime against Jews in EU Member States: experiences and perceptions of antisemitism,” which found that among the 5,847 self-identified Jews interviewed in eight countries, one third had experienced antisemitic harassment in the five years prior to the survey; that seven per cent reported antisemitic violence or threats against them; and that the largest group of perpetrators was Muslim. Forty per cent of the victims of antisemitic violence or threats across the eight countries said that the perpetrators of the worst incidents in the previous five years had a Muslim background. Given the fact that there are only a few thousand Muslims in Hungary and Latvia, it can be assumed that the percentage is higher for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Respondents could give multiple answers, and about one third used this in combination with “teenagers,” the second-largest group of perpetrators of violent incidents and threats.

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