Jews are almost five times less likely to begin construction in east Jerusalem than in the capital's west, a report commissioned by Israel Hayom ahead of Jerusalem Day and conducted by the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research reveals.

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According to data, construction on 1,310 residential buildings began by Jews in east Jerusalem within the last three years, compared to 5,016 in west Jerusalem.

In 2018, 797 Jewish building starts were recorded in eastern Jerusalem, compared to 1,430 in the west. In 2019, 335 building starts were recorded in the city's east compared to 2,031 in its west. Last year saw 178 projects break ground compared to 1,555, respectively.

The report offers two possible explanations for the striking contrast. First, despite the government denying it, political pressure exerted by Europe and the United States limits Jewish construction in east Jerusalem. Second, there is a relatively small amount of land available for construction in that part of the capital to begin with, which is also partially the result of the political restrictions. 

The annual demand for residential units for Jews in all of Jerusalem is 5,000, of which only 2,100 are supplied, leaving many Jerusalemites no option but to move elsewhere. 

Yair Assaf-Shapira, head of Data Analysis and Services at the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, is of the opinion that Jerusalemites moving to the suburbs of the capital is not necessarily a bad thing. 

"Jerusalemites who move to Gush Etzion, Mevasseret [Zion], Maale Adumim and Beit Shemesh stay connected to the city. In many respects, Jerusalem is still the center of their lives," he said. 

The demographic issue can be set aside, not only because these cities are close to the capital, but also because of the high birth rate among Jewish women, 4.4 children, compared to 3.1 for Arab women, Shapiro explained.

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"This report marks one of the first times the UN has addressed the issue of anti-Semitism in any detail," said Anne Herzberg, Legal Adviser and UN Liaison at NGO Monitor. "The Special Rapporteur condemned the use of anti-Semitic tropes and denial of Israel's right to exist by BDS activists. Importantly, the Rapporteur also recommends the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition as a useful tool in combating anti-Semitism. Hopefully, UN bodies, particularly the Human Rights Council, will follow the Rapporteur's lead by adopting IHRA and ending their promotion of anti-Semitic tropes and attacks on Israel's legitimacy."

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The report, "Combatting Antisemitism to Eliminate Discrimination and Intolerance Based on Religion or Belief," that was released by the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Ahmed Shaheed, defines anti-Semitism as a global phenomenon – not one largely confined to the United States and Europe – as has been the case in many previous UN reports. The Special Rapporteur recognizes that the sources of anti-Semitism are varied, coming from the far-right, from members of radical Islamist groups and from the political Left.

The report identifies violence, discrimination, and expressions of hostility motivated by Jew-hatred as a serious obstacle to the enjoyment of the right to freedom of religion or belief. It expresses "serious concern that the frequency of anti-Semitic incidents appears to be increasing in magnitude and that the prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes and the risk of violence against Jewish individuals and sites appears to be significant, including in countries with little or no Jewish population."

Additionally, the report "notes claims that the objectives, activities, and effects of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement are fundamentally anti-Semitic."

The report recommends that all UN member states adopt the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism. So far, 18 of them have done so.

"The Special Rapporteur recognizes that the IHRA Working Definition of anti-Semitism can offer valuable guidance for identifying anti-Semitism in its various forms, and therefore encourages states to adopt it for use in education, awareness-raising, and for monitoring and responding to manifestations of anti-Semitism," states the report.

Israel's Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, commented that "we welcome the release of this unprecedented report on the subject of anti-Semitism. The report reflects the organizational change toward Israel. The assertion that the BDS movement encourages anti-Semitism is an important UN statement. As I have said many times, anti-Semitism has no place in our society, and must be denounced everywhere and from every platform."

"Thanks to Ahmed Shaheed's methodical and determined leadership, the UN finally is recognizing the severity of this ages-old hatred against Jews, and offering constructive guidance to member states on how to combat anti-Semitism effectively in their own countries and globally," said Felice Gaer, director of the American Jewish Committee's Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights.

The World Jewish Congress also applauded the report's release.

"We hope that this report serves as an eye-opener to the United Nations and its member states and that they finally take concrete action to stem the surge of anti-Semitism across the globe," said World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder. "We are grateful to have been able to take part in the facilitation of this research to ensure that the very real concerns facing our communities on a daily basis were not only taken into consideration but also addressed as areas deserving of serious and direct attention."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The report's title doesn't quite reflect its content, but the more accurate title of "Anti-Semitism and Islam" was no doubt considered politically unacceptable. In many [although not all] of the quotes below, "Islamist" should be replaced by "Muslim."

The report defines Islamism as a form of political extremism that aims to end democracy. Anti-Semitism is one of its essential ideological elements.

Many Muslims are not anti-Semitic, but the anti-Semitism problem in Islam is far from limited to people with extreme political views, or even to religious Muslims. The report notes that individuals with no known prior connections to "organized Islamism" have caused many anti-Semitic incidents. Islamism, the report maintains, was probably not the direct cause of a substantial number of incidents.

Just a year-and-a-half ago, Muslim anti-Semitism was a taboo topic in Germany, in particular for the country's politicians. This despite it being generally known that Muslims had been responsible for major anti-Semitic incidents in the country.

The document starts by stating that for historical reasons, and in view of the country's experience with National Socialism, anti-Semitism was long viewed as being inevitably related to the extreme Right. It has only gradually become clear that right-wing extremists do not hold a monopoly on anti-Semitism in Germany today. The report states that a pattern of "daily" anti-Semitic incidents is widespread in the social and political mainstream of German society. In addition, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism exist among leftist extremists.

The authors state that anti-Semitic opinions in Islamism are even more far-reaching. Religious, territorial and political motives combine into an anti-Semitic worldview. All Islamist groups have as a central pillar the concept of Judaism as the enemy.

The report states that the arrival of over a million Muslims in Germany between 2014 and 2017 increased the influence of Islamist anti-Semitism in the country. It cites Anti-Defamation League statistics on anti-Semitism among the populations of Middle Eastern and North African states. Turkey - a country from which many Muslims now living in Germany originated - is one of the least anti-Semitic countries on the list, yet even it is "nearly 70%" anti-Semitic. The study mentions that many children in these countries are raised on a steady diet of anti-Semitic indoctrination.

Like other studies, the report notes a turning point in German awareness of Islamist anti-Semitism reached a turning point following a 2017 demonstration in Berlin. At that event, demonstrators carried placards demanding that Israel be destroyed and set an Israeli flag on fire. The burning of the Israeli flag shocked Germans because they associated it with the far more severe book burnings of 1933, which the then-Nazi government encouraged.

The video of the flag-burning went viral, prompting a number of brief comments by leading politicians. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Germany's responsibility for its history knows "no limits for those who were born later, and no exceptions for immigrants." He added that "this is not negotiable for all those who live in Germany and want to live here."

German Health Minister Jens Spahn remarked that mass immigration from Muslim countries was the reason for the demonstrations in Germany.

Stephan Harbarth, deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU faction in the Bundestag, said, "We have to strongly confront the anti-Semitism of migrants with an Arab background and those from African countries."

The study concludes that it is crucial to counteract the spread of extreme anti-Semitism among Muslims in Germany, a task that requires greater public awareness of the problem. This effort, says the report, should involve teachers, social workers, police and the government office for migration and refugees, as well as relevant officials in Germany's federal states.

The authors also note that the way Islamists interpret Islam is contrary to basic tenets of the German constitution, including popular sovereignty, separation of church and state, freedom of expression and the principle of equality. This, they point out, is why German intelligence services monitor the activities of Islamist organizations.

The report lists commonly espoused Islamist expressions of anti-Semitism, such as "Jews control finance and the economy," "Jews operate with the help of secret agents and organizations," and "there is an eternal battle between Muslims and Jews." The report also names various extremist Muslim organizations that are active in Germany, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, Hizb Ut-Tahrir, Islamic State and the Turkish Milli Görus.

The long-overdue study concludes that the more than 100 anti-Semitic incidents officially perpetrated by Muslims in 2017 are most likely just the tip of the iceberg.

Shortly after the report was released, Germany's Liberal Islamic Association published another 178-page report entitled "Empowerment Instead of Antisemitism," financed by the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, among others. According to the report, many Muslim teens justify their anti-Semitism with the argument that they have experienced degradation and intolerance due to increasing Islamophobia. It concludes that members of the Muslim minority seek a scapegoat in an even smaller minority, the Jews.

This second report came under heavy criticism. Alan Posener, political correspondent at Die Welt, wrote that anti-Semitism among Muslim youths is a pre-existing prejudice, not a response to Islamophobia. Political scientist Hamed Abdel-Samad also denied Muslim anti-Semitism was the result of Islamophobia. If this were the case, he argued, the Muslim world would be free of Islamism and anti-Semitism, since Islamophobia is nonexistent in those countries.

This article is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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U.S. President Donald Trump is intensifying a drive to contain Iran's power in the Middle East, which has raised fears that his administration wants to topple the Tehran government or lay the groundwork to justify military action.

The administration says it is trying to halt Iranian "malign behavior" in its support for Islamist militants in the region and denies seeking the overthrow of the Islamic republic's government.

The clash among U.S. officials emerged on Tuesday when the State Department posted on its website, and then removed, an unclassified version of an annual report to Congress assessing compliance with arms control agreements that the sources saw as skewed Iran.

The report's publication follows the administration's formal designation on Monday of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran's elite paramilitary and foreign espionage unit, as a foreign terrorist organization.

Washington also has piled on tough economic sanctions following Trump's withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers. The administration also is waging a propaganda campaign, including over social media, aimed at fueling popular anger against Iran's government.

Several sources said the report, which reappeared without explanation on Wednesday, made them wonder if the administration was painting Iran in the darkest light possible, much as the George W. Bush administration used bogus and exaggerated intelligence to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A State Department spokeswoman defended the judgment on Iran, saying in an email that it was "informed by careful assessment of all relevant information."

The report was published to meet a mandatory April 15 deadline by which it had to go to Congress, the department said. A more comprehensive unclassified version will be provided after the completion of a review of what information in the classified report can be made public, the spokeswoman said.

The department did not address the internal dispute over the report or concerns of politicization.

The unclassified "Adherence to and compliance with arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament agreements and commitments" report omitted assessments of Russian compliance with landmark accords such as the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the New START arms control treaty.

The State Department spokeswoman said that the U.S. position that Russia is in violation of the INF Treaty "is clear."

The report also failed to include detailed assessments published in previous years of whether Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Syria and other nations complied with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Instead, the report replaced those assessments with a five-paragraph section entitled "country concerns."

The section made no mention of judgments by U.S. intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran ended a nuclear weapons program in 2003 and has complied with the 2015 deal that imposed restrictions on its civilian nuclear program.

Instead, it said Iran's retention of a nuclear archive disclosed last year by Israel raised questions about whether Tehran might have plans to resume a nuclear weapons program.

It added that any such effort would violate the NPT, as would any Iranian retention of undeclared nuclear material, though it offered no evidence that Iran had done either.

"It's piling inference upon inference here to try to create a scary picture," said a congressional aide, who requested anonymity to discuss the issue, as did the other sources. The aide added that by stripping out much of the report's normal content, the documents largely had become about Iran.

"There is significant concern that the entire sort of purpose ... was to help build a case for military intervention in Iran in a way that seems very familiar," the source said, referring to the Bush administration's use of erroneous intelligence before the invasion of Iraq 16 years ago that ousted President Saddam Hussein.

The 12-page report, down from last year's 45-page document, reflected a disagreement between Assistant Secretary of State Yleem Poblete, whose office is charged with its drafting, and her boss, Undersecretary of State Andrea Thompson, three of the sources said.

Two sources said Poblete had sought to include information such as news stories and opinion pieces in the report, which traditionally is based on legal analyses of U.S. intelligence reports.

The State Department did not comment on Poblete's role.

"And it had other obvious errors," said a former U.S. official familiar with the matter. A draft of the unclassified version had included classified information, the official said. "It's been described to me as just a big food fight within the department over an initially inadequate draft."

A second former U.S. official said he believed that the report was being used to advance the Trump administration's views on Iran rather than to reflect information gathered by intelligence agencies and assessments of that information by State Department experts.

"This 'trends' section is adding a political tinge or politicizing the report," said the fourth source on condition of anonymity, saying the administration seemed to be using a once objective report "to back up subjective assertions."

While saying they did not know why the report had been so abbreviated, removed and then restored from the website, analysts asked if there was an effort underway to demonize Iran.

"The worst case, of course, would be that we are observing signs of a politicization of intelligence for the purpose of serving what the top of the administration would like to accomplish," said nuclear expert Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.

"We have seen ... that in the past with the (Iraq) war," he said. "This is a potential warning sign about that."

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