A combination of immigration from the Arab world and a biased view of Israel's conflict policies is whipping up anti-Semitism across Europe, the head of a Jewish lobby group said today.
"It is our responsibility today to face this issue before it becomes...something that we cannot stop," said Mr Jacob Benatoff, president of the Paris-based European Jewish Congress.
"A new Europe cannot be born if there is still this old sickness," he said after a meeting with Mr Romano Prodi, president of the European Union's executive Commission.
The Commission and the congress, which represents some 2.5 million Jews in Europe, agreed to hold a conference in early February to find ways of tackling the problem which, Mr Benatoff said, "we all thought...was something of the past".
He pointed to a report released last week by the EU's anti-racism agency which said a rise in anti-Semitic violence in the first half of 2002 was mainly due to right-wing extremists, radical Islamists and young Muslims, mainly of Arab descent.
The agency had originally withheld the study, arguing that it was based on too little data from too short a time period, jumped to conclusions and made unacceptable generalisations.
But it bowed to pressure to publish the paper after criticism from European lawmakers and major Jewish groups, who accused the EU of being afraid to face up to anti-Semitism.
"The facts that were depicted in this research were quite well known to us because we live them every day in our everyday lives," said Mr Benatoff. "In the last three years violent acts against Jews have increased in the streets of Europe."
Synagogues and Jewish schools in France have been attacked repeatedly in recent years, violence authorities link to poor Muslim youths enraged by Israel's tough policies against Palestinian unrest.
Mr Benatoff put what he called "the transport of the Middle East conflict into the streets of Europe" down to a flood of immigrants from Islamic countries who are themselves suffering from discrimination and a "demonisation" of Israel's policies.