BRUSSELS, 7 January 2004 — The European Union’s head office threatened yesterday to call off a seminar on anti-Semitism in Europe after Jewish leaders accused it of “intellectual dishonesty and moral treachery” in handling the issue.
European Commission President Romano Prodi said in a letter to the World Jewish Congress and its European branch that the seminar, called amid a backdrop of rising vandalism against Jewish targets in Europe and strains with Israel, could not be held next month as planned.
“The attitude you have shown in your letter ... forces me to suspend the preparations,” he said.
In a letter to the Financial Times published Monday, the heads of the two Jewish organizations accused the EU’s executive Commission of censoring a study on the rise of anti-Semitic attacks and the involvement of Muslim minorities.
They also complained about the release of a “flawed and dangerously inflammatory” EU poll in which Israel was named a threat to world peace more than any other country.
“Let us not mince words: Both of these actions were politically motivated, demonstrating a failure of will and decency,” Edgar Bronfman, the president of the World Jewish Congress, and Coby Benatoff, the head of the European Jewish Congress.
“Outside Israel, the majority of the world’s violent anti-Semitic attacks took place in western Europe. For the EU to hide these facts reeks of intellectual dishonesty and moral treachery,” their joint letter said.
Prodi wrote to both saying he “was both surprised and shocked. I could not believe you were signing such an article.”
He denied the Commission censored the study from the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia, based in Vienna, Austria. “You perfectly know that the Vienna Center is an independent institution and that the European Commission has no power at all to interfere,” he wrote.
He also dismissed suggestions that the recent Eurobarometer poll was “politically motivated,” adding that no such criticism was leveled when he met Jewish leaders after its release in November.
After the poll’s release, Prodi condemned lingering anti-Jewish bias he said was reflected in the survey.
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, whose country held the EU presidency at the time, called Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to express his “surprise and indignation” over the survey results, saying the question had been “misleading.” The Commission also announced the organization of a seminar “to reflect on the questions relating to Judaism, the state of Israel and different Mediterranean questions,” which has now been suspended.
Meanwhile, Belgian authorities yesterday investigated five more suspect letters sent to the European Parliament a day after two booby-trapped letters sent to MEPs exploded, officials said.
None of the letters, which were found on various floors of the European Union assembly, had been opened, the Belgian Interior Ministry said in a statement. A parliamentary source said the five letters were different in appearance to one sent to Hans-Gert Poettering, the German leader of the assembly’s center-right grouping, which burst into flames on Monday.
A few hours later a letter bomb exploded at the offices of Gary Titley, head of the British Labour group in the EU legislature, in the English city of Manchester. No one was injured in the two incidents, the latest in a campaign of attacks over the Christmas break on EU bodies apparently orchestrated from Italy.
European Parliament chief Pat Cox had said the EU assembly would further bolster security measures after the blasts, which he called a “criminal conspiracy against democracy”.
Senior officials from all EU institutions will meet at the end of the week to review security, Cristina Gallach, the spokeswoman for EU Foreign Affairs envoy Javier Solana said. “We shouldn’t be alarmist,” Gallach said. But she added that the spate of letter bombs represented “a challenge to our individual and personal security, as well as to our institutions. We should stay on guard.”
Apart from Prodi, ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet, as well as the heads of EU agencies Europol and Eurojust in The Hague, were also targeted by booby-trapped devices over the Christmas break. The four devices were identical and, according to the Italian press, contained a tract entitled “Operation Santa Claus” including anarchist symbols and signed by the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI).
