Iran’s state anti-Semitism is neglected and even played down by the world. Europe in particular should deal with this issue and not only with Tehran’s nuclear program, said Ambassador Gideon Behar, Director of the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Department for Combating anti-Semitism.
"Anti-Semitism as an official policy of Iran is very unique in the world since World War II," he told a conference organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Transatlantic Institute, two Brussels-based think tanks.
An this despite the fact that around 25,000 Jews live in Iran, the largest Jewish community in any Muslim country.
Behar, a former ambassador to Senegal, recalled the organization in Tehran in 2006 of a conference attended by several Holocaust deniers and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahamadinejad’s denials of Israel’s right to exist and repeated calls for its destruction.
"This anti-Semitism is exported in the world by Iran which uses a huge machine of propaganda to this purpose," Behar said, mentioning the Frankfurt book fair where it brought last year around 200 books with anti-Semitic content and Internet websites inciting hatred against the Jews and the "Zionists." But Iran’s anti-Semitism also takes a more violent form like the bombing of the building of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) in Buenos Aires in 1994 that killed 85 people and injured hundreds and the cooperation with movements like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Iran also propagates the same ideology as in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” by claiming that the attacks in Norway last year were an ‘Israeli conspiracy” and that 9/11 was a “Zionist plot.”
"Another characterization of Iran’s anti-Semitism is international cooperation, for example in Europe and Latin America, with extreme-left and extreme-right groups, such as Jobbik in Hungary," Ambassador Behar said.