Holocaust Survivor Given Police Escort in Italy After Receiving about 200 Messages of Online Hate Per Day

Reuters

Crispian Balmer

ROME — Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre has been placed under police protection after she received threats from far-right fanatics, security sources said on Thursday, highlighting concern about rising extremism in Italy.

Segre, 89, called last month for the creation of a parliamentary commission to investigate hate, racism and anti-Semitism after she was the subject of a barrage of online abuse, receiving almost 200 hate messages every day, the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center told CNN.

Italy’s right-wing parties did not back her proposal and the resulting controversy has only added to the abuse, with a neo-Nazi group this week hanging up a banner to denounce anti-fascism close to where she was making a public appearance.

Segre declined to comment on being assigned a police escort. A security source said the police were only accompanying her to public events and were not providing round-the-clock protection.

Wow! Is that like an invitation to wait until she gets home before you try and murder her?

“It must be said that Liliana receives vastly more messages of support and solidarity than she does hate messages,” said Paola Gargiulo, Segre’s chief of staff.

Segre was deported from Italy to Auschwitz in 1944 when she was 13 – one of 776 Italian children under the age of 14 who were sent to the Nazi concentration camp. Only 25 survived.

She has dedicated much of her time in recent years to visiting schools to recount the horrors of the Holocaust and was named a life Senator in 2018.

Israel’s ambassador to Italy, Dror Eydar, expressed dismay at the news Segre needed a police escort. “An 89-year-old Holocaust survivor under guard symbolizes the danger that Jewish communities still face in Europe today,” he wrote on Twitter.

It's amazing that the attitudes that allowed the original Holocaust have come around again in the lifetime of a Holocaust survivor. What an evil world we have become.

Government ministers also expressed solidarity. “Forgive us Liliana. The politics of hate will not stop your commitment, nor ours,” said Agriculture Minister Teresa Bellanova on Twitter.

There was no immediate comment from the leaders of the main rightist parties, the League and Brothers of Italy, who had opposed Segre’s call for a parliamentary commission, warning that it could lead to censorship.

The Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDEC), said anti-Semitism appeared to be increasing in Italy, but was still much less pronounced than in France and Britain.

CDEC researcher Stefano Gatti said that until the beginning of November 190 cases of anti-Semitism had been reported in Italy against 197 in all of 2018 and 130 in 2017.

That should work out to about 228 cases for 2019.

Most were social media attacks and verbal insults, with just two acts of minor violence registered this year.

“The anti-Semitism we are seeing is getting more aggressive, but the number of anti-Semites in Italy is largely stable,” said Gatti, pointing to surveys that suggested around 11 percent of Italians were hostile to, or prejudiced against Jews.

France Rocked by 69% Rise in Anti-Semitism as Acts Become ‘Relentless’, PM Warns

I expected that the drop in anti-Semitic violence

of the past couple years was an aberration.

France is back to normal now!

As the percentage of the French population that is Muslim increases, antisemitism increases,

even while the population of Jews in France decreases. It is the nature of Islam!

© Reuters/ Jean-Paul Pelissier

After a two-year drop, France has been hit by a staggering 69-percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the past nine months, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said on Friday.

The French prime minister used the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of November 9, 1938, when Jews were “systematically” targeted by the Nazis, to warn about the “relentless” acts of anti-Semitism taking place in his country.

“We are very far from being finished with anti-Semitism,” Philippe said on his Facebook page, branding the number of acts perpetrated against Jews “relentless.”

Despite seeing a drop in offences in the past two years, France has in the past nine months been hit by a 69-percent increase, he said. Although the PM failed to specify how many anti-Semitic acts were recorded in the period, French newspaper Le Monde previously said that 311 incidents were reported last year.

“Every aggression perpetrated against one of our citizens because they are Jewish echoes like the breaking of new crystal,” Philippe said, before outlining government plans to crack down on the rise in anti-Jewish sentiment.

He said the government will be testing a group of magistrates and investigators to help tackle the issue. A national team will also be mobilized in schools from mid-November to aid teachers in fending off growing anti-Semitism, while there will also be a legislative process aimed at the withdrawal of hateful content online.

According to French news outlet France24, Jews in France make up less than one percent of the population, and yet they were victims of 40 percent of crime registered as racially or religiously motivated in 2017.

In March, France was shocked when the body of an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor was found incinerated in her apartment in Paris and with 11 stab wounds. A man was arrested over what is suspected to have been an anti-Semitic attack.

Less than a year before that, 65-year-old teacher Sarah Halimi was beaten to death by a Franco-Malian man before he threw her from a third-story window. The case was prosecuted as an anti-Semitic crime.