Every few months in Austria, vandals topple tombstones in a Jewish cemetery and spray swastikas on the headstones.
But it’s not just happening here, officials warned, as Europe’s top human rights body joined forces with a global Holocaust education task force to fight what they denounced as a “scourge of antisemitism” across the Continent.
“Antisemitism is still not an issue of the past … the Holocaust is something that can happen again and again and again,” warned Ferdinand Trauttmansdorf, chairman of the Task Force for International Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research.
The international task force, led this year by Austria, teamed up with the Council of Europe in a bid to more closely coordinate education and public awareness efforts to combat acts of hatred against Jews.
Among the measures in the works: a joint media campaign dubbed, “All Different – All Equal,” to promote and celebrate diversity.
“There are no races. We are one human race,” Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“Seventy years after these pogroms, in 2008, we still face antisemitic hate crimes,” said Janez Lenarcic, head of the human rights arm of the Organization for Security and Coordination in Europe.
“Clearly, important historic lessons have still not been learned by all,” he said.
Cases in point: recurring attacks on Jewish cemeteries and synagogues across the 27-nation European Union.
Even today, 6 percent of Austrians surveyed by the polling firm GfK Austria said they believe there’s no historical proof that the Holocaust actually occurred. That’s down from 15 percent in 1979, but it’s still cause for concern, officials said. GfK Austria did not release details on the survey’s methodology or margin of error.
“We do not have to repeat these atrocities – we can learn from history,” said Morten Kjaerum, who heads the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights.
Tracking antisemitic incidents has proven difficult, the agency says, because of patchy reporting in different countries.
Overall, incidents appear to have peaked in 2004, though they are still occurring in every EU member state, according to the agency’s most recent survey published in December 2006.
Source: The Associated Press
