All-Party Inquiry into Antisemitism

Download or read book All-Party Inquiry into Antisemitism written by Great Britain: Department for Communities and Local Government and published by The Stationery Office. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This update is based on the five themes in the original September 2006 inquiry report: antisemitic incidents, antisemitic discourse, sources of contemporary antisemitism, antisemitism on campus and addressing antisemitism. The All Party Inquiry acknowledges that antisemitism remains a factor in the life of the Anglo-Jewish community. The police and other bodies have become better at dealing with violence, poisonous threats and the desecration of synagogues and cemeteries. It has not been easy to make such good progress where antisemitism is less explicit and where there is lazy acceptance of Jewish stereotypes. The number of antisemitic incidents in the UK remains a cause for concern. The 2009 figure was abnornally high due to reactions to the action taken by Israel in Gaza. The Government is clear that it is unacceptable that feelings about the conflict in the Middle East should create a climate of opinion where British Jews are attacked and threatened both verbally and physically. While recognising that the events in the Middle East will impact on other communities, this can never justify hostility towards citizens of this country. A key success has been the agreement by the Department for Education to fund the counter-terrorism security needs of Jewish faith schools within the state sector. Also the agreement for all police forces to record antisemitic hate crimes and publication for the first time of the official statistics. There has also been progress in tackling antisemitism on the internet. However there are still two areas which remain of concern and a need of further work: hate material on the internet and antisemitism and political tensions on campus and to ensure continuing attention the Government commits the Cross-Government Working Group to Tackle Antisemitism to meeting quarterly to monitor progress.