BREAKING NEWS

Anti-Semitic incidents drop in the Netherlands

AMSTERDAM — A watchdog on anti-Semitism in the Netherlands recorded 126 incidents it considers anti-Semitic in 2015 — a 26-percent decrease from the previous year.
Of the incidents recorded by the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, or CIDI, in 2015, 36 were in the victims’ direct environment, meaning incidents involving neighbors or acquaintances the victims knew as opposed to anonymous threats and abuse online, read the CIDI report, which was published Monday.
Five incidents involved physical violence against people and six were cases of vandalism. The most common category of incident was insults shouted or spoken on the street, accounting for 19 percent of the total, or 24 incidents. Online anti-Semitic harassment in the form of emails and electronic messages totalled at 12 cases.
One of the cases featuring violence was reported this year in Amsterdam by a non-Jewish woman of Moroccan descent who is married to a Moroccan Jew. Parents of her daughter’s classmates pressured her and confronted during school activities over her relationship with the Jewish man, she said. In one case, in March, a father of her daughter’s classmate grabbed the woman by her throat after calling her a “Jew’s whore” and threatening to shoot her at a swimming pool, the report said.