Race report team ‘told to change findings on Muslims’

Researchers who found that young Muslims were to blame for many attacks on Jews were told several times by the European Union to change their conclusions, they said yesterday.

The charge helped fuel a furious row between the two sides as they traded accusations of bias, incompetence, and lying.

The Anti-Semitism Research Institute of Berlin’s Technical University was asked last year by the EU’s anti-racism body to examine the increase in attacks against Jews across Europe.

But the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has now refused to publish it, claiming that it was too badly written and based on poor information.

The report’s authors responded yesterday by saying their findings had been shelved because criticism of Muslims did not fit in with the centre’s agenda.

They had found that young Muslims, particularly immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, were responsible for much of the rise in anti-Semitism. The far-Right and some Left-wing anti-globalisation activists were also partly to blame, they said.

As well as physical assaults, they had considered verbal abuse, newsletters, survey findings, newspaper articles and other information, mostly from the centre’s databases.

Prof Werner Bergmann said the centre repeatedly asked for the draft report to be changed to soften its conclusions about young Muslims. Alterations were also sought when it linked anti-Semitism to both anti-Zionism and criticism of Israeli politics.

His co-researcher, Dr Juliane Wetzel, said: “The EUMC didn’t want to publish the report because it’s not politically correct. The results give the EUMC problems because it wants to protect exactly these groups.”

But Bob Purkiss, the centre’s chairman, insisted that the work was of poor quality - so much so that the centre might try to recover the £4,900 paid for it.

“We are studying the contractual arrangements that we had with the Berlin institute to see whether they have fulfilled their contractual obligations and, if not, will be taking the appropriate action with regard to the contract,” he said.

Mr Purkiss added that the work was never intended for publication, but was supposed to be the basis for a larger study that the centre will conduct next year, with a view to publishing a report then.

“The EUMC remains 100 per cent committed to its ongoing research on anti-Semitism and all forms of racism and intolerance.”

His comments provoked fury in Berlin. Prof Bergmann said: “We were asked to write a report.

“It was totally clear that it was for publication. We would not write it for someone else to rewrite and include in something else.”

He and his staff had had to gather data themselves because of gaps in the centre’s information, but both sides had agreed there was enough on which to base the report.

A letter from the centre to the research institute in January, headed “Chair’s comments on the Anti-Semitism Report”, reads: “The EUMC must be seen as bringing groups of people together, not as acting divisively.”

Under the heading, “Divisive statements” it remarks: “The authors assert a direct connection between anti-Semitism and ‘Arab/North African Muslims’, ‘the Muslim population’, ‘the Arab-Muslim population’, ‘young Muslims’ in Europe.

“The authors assert a direct connections [sic] between anti-Semitism and ‘immigrants’.”

It then says: “All these generalising statements are made despite acknowledgement on the last page that ‘the fight against racism, xenophobia and discrimination remains a common struggle’.

“That Muslims are also targets of racism and religious discrimination is acknowledged only as an aside.

“Mention of Muslim people should only be made if it were directly relevant to specific manifestations of anti-Semitism. Any generalisation should be strictly avoided.”

Prof Bergmann said: “I am also in favour of crimes being dealt with independently of a person’s religion, but this was important to our analysis.

“Of course these incidents involved for example French citizens, but the fact that they were also immigrants and Muslim was relevant to our study.”

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