ABSTRACT
In February 2006 a young French Jew, Ilan Halimi, was kidnapped and tortured to death by ‘les barbares’ (the Barbarians), a gang of West-African Muslim racketeers operating in Paris. They believed that because he was Jewish he had to be rich and that, by abducting and tormenting him, they would get paid off. In August that year, a twelve-year-old girl on a bus in London was kicked unconscious and robbed after her attackers asked if she was Jewish or English. In December, the so-called ‘International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust’ was convened in Teheran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted that ‘the Zionist regime will be wiped out soon’. In May 2007 arsonists heavily damaged Hekhal Haness, Geneva's largest synagogue. These incidents illustrate what the statistics make plain: the troubling rise of global antisemitism in the new millennium. 1
