Austria’s Turkish and Arabic speakers ‘more antisemitic’

AUSTRIANS WITH Turkish or Arab backgrounds have “far stronger antisemitic attitudes” than the rest of the population, according to a new report.

The study into antisemitism in Austria — the third of its kind since 2018 — was commissioned by the Austrian parliament.

A majority of Turkish and Arabic speakers, 53 per cent, agreed with the statement that “Jews control the global economy” compared to 36 per cent of Austrians in general and 26 per cent of young Austrians.

And 53 per cent said that “Jews are exerting their influence over global media and politics to an ever-greater extent” and that “Jewish elites working for international companies are often behind current price rises”.

While surveying Austrians as a whole, the study focused on two control groups: Austrians aged 25 and under — the generation who came of age after Austria’s coming to terms with its Nazi past — and Turkish and Arabic speakers in Austria.

This group was in turn divided into two sections: 53 per cent were born and raised in Austria and educated in the Austrian school system, while 47 per cent were migrants from Turkey and the wider Middle East.

As concerns the Middle East, 57 per cent of Turkish and Arabic-speaking respondents said that “Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is fundamentally no different to the way Germans treated Jews during the Second World War” compared to 30 per cent of Austrians in general.

“Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is one of the attendant examples to the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.

In addition, 53 per cent of people from Turkish or Arab backgrounds agreed that “because of Israeli policy I can understand why some people have something against Jews”, while 56 per cent said that Jews used their victimhood status vis-à-vis the Holocaust “to their advantage”. The report found that Israel-related antisemitism tended to be more pronounced among Turkish and Arabic speakers who had arrived in Austria over the past ten years. However, that subset had weaker antisemitic attitudes overall compared to Turkish and Arabic-speaking Austrians in general.

For the survey, 2,000 people were interviewed in 2022.

Its findings were presented to a summit of Europe’s antisemitism tsars held in Vienna on Tuesday.

The study into antisemitism was the third of its kind since 2018