Volume 4 No 2 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

370 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:367Anklam, Germany, July 17: Fifteen out of 30 gravestones in the Jewishcemetery were desecrated. Mayor Michael Galander condemned the act.Police were investigating.Burgas, Bulgaria, July 19: A senior American official confirmed Israel’sassertions that the suicide bomber who killed five Israelis in an attack hereon Wednesday was a member of a Hezbollah cell operating in Bulgaria.Manchester, UK, July 20: Following a three-week trial at ManchesterCrown Court, Mohammed Sadiq Khan and his wife, Shasta Khan, wereconvicted of planning to bomb Jewish targets in north Manchester on July12.Wayne County, PA, July 26: Five people face charges for allegedly terrorizinga Jewish summer camp in Pennsylvania. In three separate episodesearlier this month, three adults and two juveniles caused property damageas they sped through Camp Bonim in Wayne County in a pickup truck,shouting antisemitic epithets and firing paintball guns at campers and staff,district attorney Janine Edwards said in a press release. The three adultsface felony and misdemeanor charges, including ethnic intimidation, terroristicthreats, and assault.Berlin, July 31: European antisemitism scholars are strongly protesting theappointment of Achim Rohde, an Islamic studies scholar in the mold of thelate Columbia professor Edward Said, to the Berlin-based Center forResearch on Antisemitism (ZfA), which is now branching out into anapparently unrelated research project, “Islamophobia in European Societies.”Opponents of Dr. Rohde’s appointment claim that his work is aimedat belittling antisemitism by confounding it with Professor Said’s Orientalismphilosophy, which Dr. Rohde is now advocating as a replacement theologythat equates antisemitism with Orientalism and portrays Muslims asvictims of Nazism and the Holocaust.AUGUSTWashington, DC, August 1: The US State Department’s report on religiousfreedom for 2011 described a “global increase” in antisemitism, saying thatthe “rising tide of anti-Semitism” was among the key trends of last year. Inaddition to the spread of Jew-hatred, the report outlined the mushroomingpersecution of Christian and Baha’i religious groups in the Islamic Republicof Iran. The executive summary of the report also detailed the “impact ofpolitical and demographic transitions on religious minorities” and “theeffects of conflict on religious freedom.” According to the report, theincreased antisemitism was “manifested in Holocaust denial, glorification