EU justice commissioner to push law against anti-Semitism

ROME - Europe's new justice commissioner said Wednesday he will lobby European Union countries for a continentwide law cracking down on anti-Semitism.

Franco Frattini told a conference on anti-Semitism hosted by his home country's Foreign Ministry that "Europe has the right, and perhaps the duty, to propose to members a common base ... to strike at and punish racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism."

"Europe can, with unity, approve a common European rule which will ... oblige all countries to adopt a law," Frattini said.

Europe is already trying an EU-wide approach to tackling such problems as international terrorism, for example, pushing for all states to accept European-wide arrest warrants for that crime.

The conference, called to explore the effects of anti-Jewish actions on democracy, also heard a prominent U.S. journalist assert that the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Europe is widely underestimated in the United States, even by U.S. Jews.

"Americans have a hard time understanding the grip that anti-Semitism has on the imagination, even American Jews have a hard time understanding the grip it has" on European opinion, said Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of the New Republic, a weekly political journal.

Peretz was part of a panel of journalists opening discussions at a daylong conference sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and Il Foglio, an Italian think-piece newspaper.

Spain's former Foreign Minister Ana Palacio urged Europe to be more diligent in rooting out anti-Semitism that may try to mask itself as freedom of speech.

"As democracies we have to draw a clear line" between legitimate right to criticize the policies of Israel and anti-Semitism, Palacio said.

The Italian Foreign Ministry hosted the conference, which began Wednesday night with a ringing denunciation of anti-Semitism by Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini.

Fini joined forces with Anti-Defamation League officials in calling for vigorous campaigns against anti-Jewish acts in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere.

Il Foglio editor Giuliano Ferrara said that since the Sept. 11 attacks "anti-Semitism is linked to a strong anti-American" ideology that has "conquered a large space not only in some European chancellories but also a large space in public opinion."

New York Times columnist David Brooks, who is Jewish, traced a surge in anti-Semitism in the United States in the last three years.

"I was not someone who paid a lot of attention to anti-Semitism, but then Sept. 11 happened," Brooks said. After the terrorist attacks in the United States, "you began to see the anti-Semitic e-mails. They started to show up on my voice mail."

Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham H. Foxman choked back tears when he was surprised at the conference with the one of Italy's highest honors. Chamber of Deputies President Pierferdinando Casini said among those recommending the medal as "commendatore of the Italian republic" for Foxman was Premier Silvio Berlusconi.

Foxman evoked a Jewish proverb in saying that what life has already given to him "would have been sufficient," including surviving the Holocaust as a Polish child and helping lead the League since 1987.

Casini said that in view of the "germs of racism and anti-Semitism" being sown in Europe, "the principal error to avoid" is to write off the problem as isolated from public opinion at large.

Haaretz editor David Landau described the anguish he feels when his paper reports Israeli abuses against Palestinians, knowing that such information could end up fueling anti-Semitism.

But the duty of a free press in a democracy to provide the facts and reality to its audience must prevail, Landau said.

Landau said he participated in the conference, even though, he contended, such forums are "journalistically flawed, because they don't invite the anti-Semites."

Participants at the two-day conference also included the chief rabbi of Rome, the mayor of Rome, the interior minister, the president of the senate and the speaker of the parliament.

Participants attended a number of workshops, among them one on governments and the international response to anti-Semitism, and on the task of the media and culture in the struggle against anti-Semitism.

Israeli Ambassador to Italy Ehud Gol also spoke. Among the Israeli representatives at the conference were Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein.

	From left, Barbara Balser, president of the U.S. Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Italy's Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini, and ADL director Abraham H. Foxman, speaking at the opening of a two-day conference on anti-Semitism in Rome on Wednesday. (AP)