Sunday, September 19, 2010
Elder of ZiyonAccording to Dutch police statistics, the 48% increase represented 209 reported anti-Semitic incidents in 2009.The actual police report is even more interesting.
The mushrooming number of anti-Semitic incidents in in the Netherlands in 2009 – a 48 percent increase over 2008 – may be “just the tip of the iceberg,” Ronny Naftaniel, the head of The Hague-based Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, said on Thursday.
That accounted for 9.4% of discrimination- based incidents in the Netherlands, although Jews constitute only 0.3% of the country’s 16.6 million people.
Many anti-Semitic incidents are not reported, Naftaniel said in a statement.
Dutch observers say that the Netherlands’ 1 million Muslims (about 5% of the population), largely from Morocco, coupled with anti-Israel leftists have contributed to a hostile climate for Jews in the Netherlands.
At the same time that the number of anti-semitic incidents ballooned by 48%, the number of anti-Muslim incidents in 2009 went down by 17%, from 116 to 96.
This means that the average Jew in Holland is more than 450 times likely to be the victim of a hate crime than the average Muslim there.
UPDATE: A number of Dutch-speaking readers who read the report point out that the number of anti-semitic attacks did not really go up significantly, just crimes that had been classified in a more general category are now being properly listed as anti-semitism.
