E/CN.4/1996/72 page 15 of 10 per cent. A similar trend can be discerned also in Russia. Great Britain remained the most violent country with respect to racist and anti-Semitic activities for the third consecutive year. These are a few of the conclusions introduced in the annual survey, Anti-Semitism Worldwide - 1994, prepared by the Project for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Tel Aviv University. The following report is a brief summary based on that survey. Some of the trends noted in 1993 continued and seem to have become an acceptable part of reality: techniques for disseminating anti-Semitic propaganda are improving in sophistication in reaction to Government policies of imposing bans and legal constraints; bonds and coordination among extremist groups are being strengthened; a distinction is still made between moderate messages aimed at the larger voting public and cruder messages designed for internal consumption in radical circles. The moderate messages touched on sensitive points, such as foreign workers and the danger they allegedly pose to a country’s society and culture, or the bearing they have on civil rights in that country. Worst of all is the gradual breaking of taboos, which has resulted not only in greater violence but also in vicious and crude instigation, mostly on the part of small but increasing numbers of hard-core extremists. This incitement has been filtering down to the general public discourse, reinforcing the image of the negative and dangerous Jew. The image of the Jew as a subversive element aiming at ’Jewish world domination’ is at the core of various extremist ideas. In Japan popular books warn against Jewish and Zionist plots to use their world economic power to destroy Japan in a matter of years. In the United States, Black Muslims accuse Jews of having been slave traders, and of deflecting attention from their crime by bringing to centre stage their fabrications about the Holocaust, thus overshadowing the suffering of the Blacks. In a world which is more oriented towards nationalism and group affiliation, racist ideas are loudly aired. The alleged Jewish domination of the world, first embodied in The Protocols of The Elders of Zion, recently has been reborn in many new forms, especially that of Holocaust denial: the Jews’ grip is so strong that they can sell the world any horror story, and the world will buy the story and pay up. Throughout the Western world a considerable increase was noted in the role of extremist Muslim groups and movements affiliated to fundamentalist organizations in North Africa and the Middle East, and in the percentage of violent assaults which turned out to be part of extremist Muslim activity. This increase is in part related to developments in the Middle East, and in part independent of events there. Ceremonies which took place in 1994 all over the world commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of Auschwitz, brought relations with the Jewish people to the fore. The impact of these ceremonies on public debate and extremist activity was especially marked in Eastern Europe and the former

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