An international human rights organization has called on the European Union’s Foreign Minister to investigate the recent slew of anti-Semitic incidents in the Netherlands.
Dr. Shimon Samuels, director of international relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris, wrote a letter to Baroness Catherine Ashton that said, “due to the current political vacuum in the Netherlands following General Election, we are requesting your intervention to investigate the rampant epidemic in anti-Semitic incidents in that country.”
Approximately 40,000 Jews currently live in the Netherlands. According to Samuels’ letter, anti-Semitic incidents in the Netherlands grew by 64 percent in 2009. Moroccan youth have mostly been held responsible for these attacks following the October 2008 beating of Ber Van Halem. Van Halem was crossing the street when a group of Moroccan boys began taunting him with ethnic slurs; he confronted them, and was kicked to the ground and punched repeatedly in one of the more publicized manifestations of anti-Semitism in recent years.
The letter comes on the heels of a vandalism attack on the Synagogue of the Jewish Community of Amersfoort, which was smeared with red paint earlier in the week. Additionally, an annual Holocaust remembrance ceremony for the last transport of 3,000 Jewish children deported to concentration camps was “disrupted by passing bikers shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ during the mourners’ Kaddis prayer,” Samuels said.
Samuels also noted that the nine-million member Dutch social networking site, Hyves, was “rife with calls ‘to murder all Jews’ and for ‘Adolf Hitler to finish the job.’” The website has faced criticism from various Jewish community organizations—including from the Wiesenthal Center— for its unwillingness to monitor discriminatory content before.
The Center urged the EU to “condemn such incidents and the climate they portend, to take measures to investigate their origin and to impress upon the, as yet, unformed new Dutch government, its responsibilities to the entire European Union to contain a scourge that will not end with the Jews.”
Ashton has not responded publicly.
