Powell Denounces Anti-Semitism

By James Gerstenzang

April 29, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

BERLIN — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered a high-level declaration against anti-Semitism on Wednesday, lending the Bush administration’s voice to the international struggle against the resurgence in recent years of attacks on Jews and on symbols of Judaism in Europe.

Drawing attention to ongoing incidents of violence and hatred six decades after the Holocaust, Powell said such intolerance was “not just a fact of history but a current event.”

The import of Powell’s visit was as much in the symbolism of his presence as in the words he spoke to a two-day meeting on the issue held by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which covers the breadth of the continent and is charged with, among other things, monitoring elections and adherence to human rights.

It signaled the administration’s interest in the subject -- the central theme of Powell’s two-day visit to Europe -- at a time when physical and verbal attacks on Jews in Europe are attracting new attention among politically active Jewish groups in the United States.

The secretary of State met with a small delegation representing Germany’s Jews and Muslims that included four members of the Green and Social Democratic parties. One of those at the meeting, Dietmar Nietan, a member of Parliament and a trustee of the Holocaust Compensation Fund, said Powell’s participation broadened German efforts to encourage Poland and other East European nations to fight anti-Semitism.

By lending his support, Nietan said, Powell was making it clear that Germany wasn’t simply exercising “a new kind of imperialism.”

Powell brings a special cachet to the topic. He wrote in his autobiography about his upbringing in a multiethnic neighborhood in New York and his comfort among various ethnic and racial groups. On occasion he spices his conversation with Yiddish phrases learned on the streets of the South Bronx.

Anti-Semitism is a topic that has grown in sensitivity in Europe in recent years, although reports of attacks on Jews have tapered slightly in the last year or two in France, Germany and Britain. The conference is the second major international gathering in two months to address fears of renewed bigotry toward Jews.

From a beating of a rabbi to a gasoline bomb assault on a synagogue, the attacks on Jews and symbols of Judaism that evoke a period of German life seven decades ago are occurring across Europe -- giving rise to a renewed political and social awareness of the breadth of anti-Semitism.

“We must send the clear message far and wide that anti-Semitism is always wrong and it is always dangerous. We must send the clear message far and wide that anti-Semitic hate crimes are exactly that: crimes, and that these crimes will be aggressively prosecuted,” Powell said.

“We must not permit anti-Semitic crimes to be shrugged off as inevitable side effects of inter- ethnic conflicts,” he added. “Political disagreements do not justify physical assaults against Jews in our streets, the destruction of Jewish schools, or the desecration of synagogues and cemeteries.”

At its heart in modern Europe, the debate about the extent of anti-Semitism swirls out of such political and diplomatic controversies as the U.S.-led war in Iraq and American support for Israel. It melds with historic elements of anti-Semitism rooted here, which Hitler made the seat of his Third Reich.

“It is not anti-Semitic to criticize the policies of the state of Israel,” Powell said. “But the line is crossed when Israel or its leaders are demonized or vilified, for example, by the use of Nazi symbols and racist caricatures.”

It was the second Powell speech in two days on an issue of particular importance to Jews. On Tuesday evening, he addressed a Washington celebration marking the 56th anniversary of the founding of Israel, and then boarded an Air Force jet for an overnight flight to Berlin.

Powell brought with him Elie Wiesel. As a teen, Wiesel survived the Holocaust; as an author who was awarded the Nobel Prize, he documented its evil. Wiesel addressed the conference in the morning, ahead of Powell.

Asked what such a conference could accomplish, Wiesel said to a reporter: “It makes people aware. It sensitizes them.”