UN convenes for anti-Semitism session

The first-ever UN meeting on anti-Semitism was requested in October by thirty-seven countries, including Israel, the United States, all 28 member states of the European Union, Canada and Australia.

"The fight against anti-Semitism is inseparable from our wider quest for peaceful coexistence and human rights for all," Ban Ki-moon told the General Assembly members via video message on Thursday. "Where anti-Semitism flourishes, other forms of discrimination are sure to be there, too."

While the UN meeting was planned before the Islamists' attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and the assault on a kosher market in Paris earlier this month, the issue of hatred against Jews has returned to the forefront since the Paris attacks. Seventeen people, four of them Jewish, were killed in the twin Paris attacks.

'No justification' for anti-Semitism

Expressing his alarm over the attacks on Jews and anti-Semitic demonstrations worldwide, the German Foreign Ministry's minister of state for Europe, Michael Roth, said his country would do its best to protect Jewish communities.

"Let me be clear: Anti-Semitism poses a threat not only to Jewish people, but to society as a whole," Roth said, adding that because of the historical responsibility for the Holocaust, Germany "will always fight anti-Semitism in whatever form it is expressed."

"There is no justification for anti-Semitism, either in Germany, France, or any other place in the world," the minister said at the UN session.

Ron Prosor, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, called on the UN member states to join his country's battle against the oppression of Jews.

"Let the message echo from the halls of this institution to the streets of Europe and to the capital of all nations – stand for human rights and human dignity by taking a stand against anti-Semitism," Prosor said.

'They have returned'

Addressing the 193-nation assembly, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy said that the world had the responsibility to counter Holocaust deniers and those who deny Israel's legitimacy as a state.

"In other capitals in Europe and elsewhere, faulting the Jews is once again becoming the rallying cry of a new order of assassins, unless it is the same but cloaked in new habits," Levy said.

The French intellectual said the United Nations was created in the wake of World War II and the genocide of six million Jews during the Holocaust.

"This assembly was given the sacred task of preventing those terrible spirits from re-awakening, but they have returned and that is why we are here," said Levy.

shs/msh (AFP, dpa, AP)