Tuesday, November 25, 2003
The sociologist who led the EU's anti-Semitism study is speaking out, and he's not happy about the shelving of the report. This starts to lift the veil a bit on the question of whether the report was shelved for methodological or political reasons. Of course it wouldn't be surprising that the head of the commission would defend his work, but given appearances, this is an important data-point in figuring out why the EU bureaucrats would try to pretend it never happened.
Haaretz - Researchers blast EU for 'burying' anti-Semitism study
...The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) decided not to publish the research after clashing with its authors over
their definition of anti-Semitism, which included anti-Israel acts, the paper said.
Bergman's partner in conducting the study, Professor Wolfgang Benz, termed the EUMC's grounds for rejecting the study "absolutely ridiculous. From our standpoint it verges on slander."[...]
A deputy board member not named by the paper confirmed that the directors of the EUMC had regarded the study as biased, adding that they had judged the focus on Muslim and pro-Palestinian perpetrators to be inflammatory.
And, lo and behold, a member of the Euro-left agrees:
Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the French student left in the late 1960s, is currently on a visit to Israel. He said the decision to shelve the study was a "big, big, error" and that his party would question the move in the European Parliament at the first opportunity.
"There is a danger of anti-Semitism in Europe, there is a danger of racism in Europe - both - and we must confront this reality, and we can't now postpone the debate on this," Cohn-Bendit said.
Nothing like a bureaucracy to try to dictate the contents of a report:
In the course of the study, the researchers complained to those who commissioned the research that data from some of the 15 nations studies was incomplete or flawed. "But they instructed us to continue," Bergman said.
