By Elinor Blair - 1st September 2004
Anti-Semitism should be consigned to the chamber of horrors in a waxwork museum, said Hungarian MEP Magda Kosane Kovacs on Wednesday.
Kovacs told colleagues on the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee that she thought that the last anti-Semite would have been on display in wax works museum Madame Tussauds by now.
“I thought that these negative trends would diminish,” she said. “Not so, anti-semitism is still with us and is on the increase.”
The committee was holding talks with the director of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) - recent publishers of a controversial report on anti-Semitism in the EU.
Reporting to the committee on the annual activities of the centre, director Beate Winkler said that whilst having “one of the most fascinating jobs Europe,” it is also, “one of the most difficult”.
The EUMC, set up in 1997, collects data across Europe on the “highly emotive” issues of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.
Winkler reported that most racism occurs in economically deprived areas of the Union and that it is important “to explain to citizens how to deal with ethnic diversity”.
If citizens do not see foreigners as a positive contribution to their societies their attitude, “descends into xenophobia”, she claimed.
French MEP Patrick Gaubert proposed that legislation relating to racism needed to be harmonised across the EU and that tolerance should be taught in schools and also in teacher training courses.
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