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Fear of Intifadah Pursues Jews in The Netherlands
With additional reporting by Khalid Shawkat
THE HAGUE, The Netherlands, Dec. 20 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - In a statement published Thursday in the Dutch daily newspaper,
Metro, the Center for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI), based in The Hague, announced that "Jews have been leading a difficult life in the Netherlands since the outbreak of the Palestinian Intifadah, whose repercussions have had their toll on those minority Jews more than have the U.S. attacks.
"Enmity towards Jews - known as anti-Semitism - is characteristic of the Dutch society," said the statement. "However, it grows deeper every now and then, based on national and international conditions."
"The year 2001 has been tough for the Jewish minority in the Netherlands," said the CIDI statement, "where many hate crimes against Jews call for an immediate interference of the government and security services."
The number of reported anti-Semitic incidents was considerably more than last year, noting that many incidents occurred at work, which had never happened before to such an extent.
However, contrary to widespread misconceptions, the extreme right-wing neo-Nazis, and not Arabs, are the threat to Dutch Jews, according to the statement. Those known as skinheads, in particular, are most dangerous.
These groups state, "Jews are the cause of the grave problems in Western societies. They have destructive plans for Christian peoples - plans based on financial and economic monopoly and the spreading of promiscuity and division with the aim of hegemony."
Jews, as seen by these groups, "have perfected the game of playing the victims by using the hatred against them as a means of playing on the European feelings of guilt, hence achieving their own interests."
Jewish lobbies in the Netherlands and other European countries have persistently harped on issues like anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, whose six million victim figure has caused various problems - ranging from fines to prison terms - for academic researchers and historians who have raised doubts about its credibility.
According to the CIDI website, the web plays an important role in spreading anti-Semitism. "There was only a limited amount of reports on Holocaust denial [in 2001], This has probably something to do with strict prosecution policy. The distribution via the Internet of these distasteful ideas no doubt also plays a role…There were more sentences passed than in other years."
The Dutch judiciary last year convicted a book salesman in Dordrecht for selling an old copy of Nazi leader Adolph Hitler's autobiography,
My Struggle. A Muslim man is also being pursued by the Dutch authorities for putting abstracts from the same book on a website.
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