E/CN.4/1996/72 page 38 Annex II REPORT ON ANTI-SEMITISM Submitted by the Coordinating Board of Jewish Organizations, a non-governmental organization in consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council 1. Anti-Semitism is an irrational hatred of the Jewish people. It starts with hostility, grows to prejudice, and from there to agitation, discrimination, and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions. Historically, it has resulted from an effort to demonize the Jewish people because Jews adhere to a religion or culture different in every land except Israel from that of the majority population. Simply put, the anti-Semite starts with the thesis that the Jews are different, and concludes that they are bad and even dangerous. 2. Anti-Semitism is usually motivated by politics, although at times economics has also played a role. Historically, anti-Semitism has been used to instal or help keep a regime in power or, alternatively, to help bring down a regime when a direct attack would be too dangerous. Anti-Semitism has also been inspired by religious leaders who were angered when Jews refused to accept their religious teachings. Under the Catholic Church from Roman to medieval times, Jews were forbidden to own land or join trade guilds because they did not accept the Christian religion. Thus, in Europe for some 1,500 years they were not able to enter vocations by which persons normally earned a livelihood and Christians were taught for centuries that Jews should suffer for having refused conversion to Christianity. The Crusaders on their way to and from the land of Israel were responsible for murdering thousands of Jews, and the Catholic Inquisition was responsible for torturing thousands of Jews to death. (In both cases the victims were frequently robbed, and it was not unknown in the Middle Ages for Christians to murder Jews or to instigate pogroms against them in order to avoid repaying debts.) Mohammed and Luther also inspired anti-Semitism when Jews refused to accept their teachings. 3. After the Enlightenment, anti-Semitic propagandists developed a secular version of anti-Semitism based upon the myth propagated by the Tsarist secret police forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The principal themes of this hate primer are that Jewish people aspire to dominate the world, and that they will achieve world domination through a conspiracy, which entails control of the world’s banks and media, as well as infiltration of the Freemasons. 4. For a century The Protocols have remained the most enduring anti-Semitic propaganda, adopted both by Hitler and Stalin. Versions of this myth are currently distributed in such distant places as Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Japan, although Jews in most of these areas constitute much less than 1 per cent of the population and in Japan these myths first infiltrated the country from Japan’s enemy Russian during the Russo-Japanese War. They have reportedly been financed more recently from the Middle East. 5. The Jews were a vulnerable target for thousands of years because they had been exiled from their homeland and dispersed over much of the world, with no