The blind led by the wilfully blind

LGF and Roger Simon points to a Financial Times story that illustrates the saying "none are more blind than those who choose not to see".

The Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) decided in February not to publish the 112-page study, a copy of which was obtained by the Financial Times, after clashing with its authors over their conclusions.
[UPDATE Dec. 5, 2003: it is now available online here and here.]

The news comes amid growing fears that there is an upsurge of anti-semitism in European Union countries. Among many recent incidents, a Jewish school near Paris was firebombed last Saturday, the same day two Istanbul synagogues were devastated by suicide truck bombs that killed 25 and wounded 300. ...

Following a spate of incidents in early 2002, the EUMC commissioned a report from the Centre for Research on Anti-semitism at Berlin's Technical University.

When the researchers submitted their work in October last year, however, the centre's senior staff and management board objected to their definition of anti-semitism, which included some anti-Israel acts. The focus on Muslim and pro-Palestinian perpetrators, meanwhile, was judged inflammatory.

"There is a trend towards Muslim anti-semitism, while on the left there is mobilisation against Israel that is not always free of prejudice," said one person familiar with the report. "Merely saying the perpetrators are French, Belgian or Dutch does no justice to the full picture."

Some EUMC board members had also attacked part of the analysis ascribing anti-semitic motives to leftwing and anti-globalisation groups, this person said. "The decision not to publish was a political decision."

The board includes 18 members - one for each member state, the European Commission, Parliament, and the council of Europe - as well as 18 deputies. [...] The EUMC, which was set in 1998, has published three reports on anti-Islamic attitudes in Europe since the September 11 attacks in the US.

Reality is inconvenient and not politically correct? Send it down the 1984 "memory hole"! (Or throw Salman Rushdie off the troika to the wolves.) Orwell's fictional dystopia was locked in a three-cornered struggle between EngSoc, neo-Bolshevism, and "Death Worship". On the doorstep of 2004, we are seeing a three-cornered struggle as well: between liberal democracy, transnational oligarchic collectivism (of the EU variety)... and Death Worship.