Social inequality: Extreme intolerance is spreading across the globe - by Carol Hunt

Last month's Fundamental Rights (Agency FRA) Conference chose "Combating Hate Crime in the EU" as its topic of 2013. It had good cause. A new FRA survey on European anti-Semitism showed that "anti-Semitism is ... shockingly widespread and that Europe has failed to take action to prevent another alarming escalation in levels of hate crimes against the Jews". It also found that "over the past five years, around one in four lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or intersex people have been attacked or threatened with violence".
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Last January, at an informal EU Council in Dublin, the discussion was all about the need to combat intolerance, racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and homophobia.

And last month, in Brussels, Alan Shatter made a passionate speech ("Towards a New Rule of Law Mechanism") beginning: "Contemporary Europe needs to reflect carefully on where we are in the second decade of the 21st Century and about the real problems we face. We need to have a real debate with ourselves about the re-emergence of extreme forms of intolerance."

Shatter himself has been a victim of such intolerance at home in Ireland. Last month posters in Limerick read: "Shatter has learned from his homeland how to crucify the little people," and "Jewish influence in our dictatorship has brought Palestinian devastation to Ireland". Back in June the building that was to be the Anglo Irish headquarters in Dublin was defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti which included the slogans "Zionist engineered global financial holocaust" and "Jewish supremacist destruction of indigenous Europeans".

Read more: Extreme intolerance is spreading across the globe - Independent.ie