European Union coordinator for combating anti-Semitism, Katharina von Schnurbein, briefed Israel’s parliament and expressed her goal of guaranteeing that all Jews in Europe will be able to live without fear.

The European Union’s (EU) coordinator for combating anti-Semitism, Katharina von Schnurbein, briefed the Knesset’s Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs this week about the EU’s efforts to combat anti-Semitism.

“The goal of all this activity is that Jews will be able to live in Europe without fear,” she said. She said that the situation whereby “Jews send their children to schools behind barbed wire fences or send them to public schools without knowing whether they will be exposed to incitement” is “unacceptable.”

The fact that there are security guards posted outside synagogues “is also unacceptable,” she said. “We are convinced that it is the responsibility of society as a whole to combat anti-Semitism.”

Von Schnurbein said the general increase in anti-Semitic incidents throughout Europe and the “atmosphere of hatred,” particularly online, are very worrying.

She said that since her appointment in December, the EU’s activity against anti-Semitism has included dialogue with the major Internet companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft — which brought about the formation of the Code of Conduct. Under the code, the online giants pledged to fund organizations that would help them monitor the situation and train people who will report any inciting content online.

Committee Chairman Member of Knesset (MK) Avraham Neguise thanked von Schnurbein for legislation, which he said would allow social media companies to “remove hate speech inciting to violence within 24 hours,” which is “a correct and important step, the fruits of which I hope we will see immediately.”

Neguise told the meeting, which was also attended by EU Ambassador to Israel Lars Faaborg-Andersen, of a survey conducted ahead of the meeting among rabbis and Jewish community leaders in Europe. The survey, commissioned by the European Jewish Association and the Rabbinical Center of Europe, indicates that anti-Semitism is intensifying in Western European countries, but pointed out that the involvement of Muslim refugees in anti-Semitic incidents is marginal. The same survey showed that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Eastern Europe is decreasing.

“We are currently monitoring the process to see if there really is a change. We want to see a real change on the ground,” von Schnurbein said. “Today, only 13 of the 28 member states properly apply the [Code of Conduct] law . . . We are pressuring them to implement it.”

NGO Monitor President Gerald M. Steinberg spoke of the “new anti-Semitism” and said the rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents and terror attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions “is directly linked to the incitement we hear about every day in Europe and the world. It is obvious that phrases such as ‘war crimes,’ ‘genocide,’ ‘violation of international law,’ ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘apartheid’ — which are said repeatedly in reference to Israel — feed this anti-Semitism.”

Ido Daniel, Program Director at Israeli Students Combating Anti-Semitism, pointed out that in 2014 the organization filed some 14,000 complaints with new media companies regarding anti-Semitic content online, and in 2015 the number of complaints rose to about 29,000. The trend is continuing in 2016, and the organization expects to file over 30,000 complaints by the end of the year, he told the committee.

“The social networks allow many people to disseminate inciting messages which are then translated into physical acts against Jews,” said Daniel, who noted that Jewish students from Brussels told him that they conceal their real last names on Facebook to avoid receiving hateful and insulting messages.

By: JNI.Media and World Israel News Staff

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Europe has a problem with properly grasping the fact that Israel exists as a sovereign Jewish state, ‎whose integrity under international law it must respect in the same way that it respects the ‎integrity of other states.

By: The Algemeiner

If anyone is still unsure that Europeans have difficulty coming to terms with the fact that Israel, as a sovereign nation, will not let the European Union meddle in its internal affairs, the debacle ‎over the NGO bill should remove all doubts.‎

Army Radio reported on Sunday that the EU furiously protested the ‎proposed legislation. According to the report, based on what Army Radio said was a leaked ‎internal EU document, EU Ambassador Lars Faaborg-Andersen met with Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked several weeks ‎ago. He called upon Israel to refrain from taking actions that will “make more complicated” the ‎space in which Israeli nongovernmental organizations operate, claiming that this would impinge on freedom of expression ‎and association. According to the report, the ambassador said that while the request for ‎transparency was legitimate, the draft law is aimed at organizations critical of the government. ‎‎

“This will have a negative impact on Israel’s image and on Europe’s relating to it as an open and ‎democratic society,” he was quoted as saying. Faaborg-Andersen also reportedly said that placing ‎restraints on civil society is something “we see mostly in tyrannical regimes. We call on Israel to ‎remain in the family of democratic states and not to join this worrying trend.”

Naturally, the EU is very unhappy with having its meddling in the internal affairs of Israel limited ‎in any way, especially since it has been able to do so with impunity up until now. However, to ‎claim that Israel would be breaching any human rights, such as freedom of expression or ‎association, by implementing the NGO bill is taking the hyperbole beyond all red lines.

Let’s be ‎perfectly clear: The bill breaches no one’s rights, least of all anyone’s rights to freedom of speech ‎and association. As Israel Hayom reported, the bill requires NGOs that receive ‎more than 50% of their funding from foreign entities to detail the funding sources in all ‎their official publications and communications with elected officials. Activists from the NGOs also ‎will be required to wear identifying name tags when working in Israel’s Knesset, as lobbyists do.” ‎This is a reasonable and fair requirement, which in no way interferes with anyone’s right to ‎freedom of speech or association.‎

Critics of the bill in Israel are also panicking, claiming that the legislation is discriminatory, since ‎mainly left-wing groups receive money from foreign governments. The ‎warped logic of this is just mind-boggling: If anything is discriminatory and a threat to democracy, it ‎is precisely the overwhelming financial support by foreign European governments and the ‎European Union of leftist NGOs, which gives the NGOs an almost unbeatable edge over any other ‎NGOs in Israeli civil society. This is not only true for NGOs but also for the cultural field, where ‎large parts of, for example, the Israeli film industry, are supported by European organizations, as long as ‎they portray Israelis as nasty “occupiers” and Arabs as helpless victims. ‎

It is precisely the meddling of European governments in the internal affairs of Israel through the ‎funding of leftist NGOs, whose agendas are often subversive to the State of Israel, which is in ‎direct contravention of the very principles of international law, democracy and diplomacy that the ‎European Union claims to hold in such high esteem. Foreign governments have no rights under ‎international law to further their own agendas toward another sovereign nation by funding ‎subversive NGOs in that country.

On the contrary, it might actually be in breach of international ‎law. Furthermore, it subverts and distorts the most basic principles of international diplomacy, ‎which are supposed to be the means through which states interact under international law. Finally, ‎the affront to democracy comes not from demanding that NGOs detail their funding sources in all their official ‎publications and communications with elected officials, but from the very idea that these funding ‎sources should not be disclosed in those publications.‎

In conclusion, let us recall that the EU has explicitly stated its difficulties in accepting the existence ‎of a Jewish sovereign state in the first place. In February 2014, asked what the EU thinks about the Palestinians being pressured to ‎recognize the Jewish state, the EU ambassador to Israel told an ‎Israeli journalist: “I don’t think we have any clear position on that because we’re not ‎‎100% sure what is meant by this concept of a Jewish state.”‎

Europe has a problem with properly grasping the fact that Israel exists as a sovereign Jewish state, ‎whose integrity under international law it must respect in the same way that it respects the ‎integrity of other states. It is furious that it can no longer meddle secretly in Israel’s internal ‎affairs by financing local NGOs that further its agendas to destabilize Israel and ruin its image ‎abroad. ‎

Ironically, this attitude of the Europeans reeks of the colonialist, imperialist spirit that the ‎Europeans perfected and clearly still cannot rid themselves of.

Judith Bergman is a writer and political analyst living in Israel. This article was originally published by Israel Hayom.

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