February 15, 2015 — New York, New York
AJC Executive Director David Harris called yesterday's attacks in Copenhagen, including against a synagogue, “deplorable and despicable acts of terror” that are another “wake-up call to European leaders of the urgent threats to democratic societies and the values they embody.”
Dan Uzan, a Jewish security guard at Copenhagen’s Krystalgade synagogue, was killed and two Danish police officers were wounded by a lone shooter. Earlier in the day, a man was killed when gun shots were fired at an event on free speech, where a featured speaker was the cartoonist who has faced repeated death threats since he drew caricatures of the prophet Muhammad in 2007.
Details about the shooter, who died in a confrontation with police, have not yet been released.
“One can only imagine the horror if the shooter had succeeded in actually entering the synagogue, where a Bat Mitzvah ceremony was in progress,” said Harris. Some 80 people were inside the synagogue at the time, a leader of Denmark’s Jewish community told a Danish radio station.
The Denmark synagogue attack comes barely a month after a radical Islamist terrorist killed four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris, which occurred two days after other jihadists carried out a murderous atttack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. In total, seventeen innocent people were killed in three Paris attacks.
“As AJC has been saying for 15 years to Europe's top political leaders, European core values such as freedom of speech, freedom of worship and pluralism are inextricably intertwined with the well-being and security of the continent’s Jewish communities,” said Harris. “European nations individually and collectively must confront antisemitism with utmost urgency. Jews should not once again have to live in fear in Europe.”
Harris and other AJC representatives, including the directors of AJC's offices in Berlin, Brussels, Paris and Rome, have been pressing European leaders to recognize the urgency of the danger, the specificity of antisemitism, and the need to take concrete steps to make clear that confronting antisemitism is a high and sustained priority.
AJC urges the EU and its member states to establish a high-level task force on antisemitism, enhance round-the-clock security at synagogues, schools and other Jewish institutions, and utilize all other tools available through education, law enforcement, justice, and transnational cooperation to confront the threat to Jewish communities and European democratic values.
“Sadly, no country can assume today that jihadist violence against Jews and other symbols of liberal democracy will not happen there,” Harris added.
