Orla Guerin condemned as anti-Semitic. Also report claims an increase in anti-Semitism in Europe. Now if the Zionists are going to call reports on Israel's war crimes anti-Semitism then the increase could be down to a widening of the definition. Having been told that Muslims are responsible for an increase in anti-Semitic attacks only a couple of months ago, we are now told that young white males are responsible. The Independent's take on this story is very strange. They say that

The largest rise in anti-Semitic violence was in France, where incidents rose six-fold in 2002 compared with 2001. Of the 313 racist, xenophobic or anti-Semitic incidents reported in 2002, 193 were directed at the Jewish community.

In the UK, statistics showed 350 reported anti-Semitic incidents in 2002, a 13 per cent rise from the previous year. Figures for the first quarter of 2003 showed a 75 per cent increase in incidents compared with the same quarter of 2002.

Now check the Metropolitan police's statistics. The latest information I could find was for the year 2000 when there were over 23,000 racial incidents in the Greater London area alone. I haven't seen a breakdown of these figures, nor have I seen a police definition of "incident". Even so, the total figure for race attacks in Belgium put at 313 seems extremely low. And the fact that 193 of these were on Jews is very strange given that most Jews are well assimilated in western Europe. The problem here is that we can expect an increase in reports on anti-Semitism whenever Israel behaves badly. Couple that with the fact that a straight forward report on war crimes committed by the last of the colonial settler states is recorded as being anti-Semitic and we find it almost impossible to establish whether anti-Semitism is an issue or not. And if it is, should it be treated differently from other forms of racism?