French Muslim youths rioting in Paris during a July 2014 anti-Israel demonstration. Photo: Twitter.

A newly-published report from a leading Norwegian university on antisemitic violence in Europe has concluded that in six of the seven countries it surveyed, “individuals with backgrounds from Muslim countries stand out among perpetrators of antisemitic violence in Western Europe.”

“Antisemitic Violence in Europe” — authored by Johannes Due Enstad of the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo — examines incidents of antisemitic violence in France, the UK, Germany, Russia, Norway, Sweden and Denmark between 2005-15. Only in Russia — where the lowest level of violence against Jews was recorded during that ten-year period — do far-right skinheads and Neo-Nazi extremists predominate overwhelmingly among the perpetrators of these acts.

“Attitude surveys corroborate this picture insofar as antisemitic attitudes are far more widespread among Muslims than among the general population in Western Europe,” Enstad wrote.

The report will make for particularly grim reading in France, where over 4,000 incidents — classified as “physical violence against individuals and serious attacks on buildings that potentially threatened human life,” and not including vandalism or verbal harassment — were recorded. France is currently in the throes of a media and political scandal around the brutal murder of Parisian Jewish pensioner Sarah Halimi by an Islamist intruder in April.

The report stressed that in France especially, Jews in general felt far less safe and were much less likely to visibly identify as Jewish. “France scores much higher than the other countries on questions on considering emigration, worrying about being physically attacked, and regarding antisemitism as a major problem in the country,” the report said.

Manfred Gerstenfeld — a leading global authority on antisemitism and the author of Europe’s Crumbling Myths: The Post-Holocaust Origins of Today’s Antisemitism — told The Algemeiner on Friday, “That France is the Western European country where the problems of antisemitism are greatest has been evident since the year 2000.”

“Most murders since then of Jews — all by Muslims — because of their being Jews have been in France,” Gerstenfeld continued. “Currently the French authorities try to ignore or downplay the antisemitic character of the murder of Sarah Halimi, again by a Muslim.”

The report also highlighted concerns with the UK — which came second to France with almost 3,900 incidents in the 2005-15 period — and the situation facing the tiny Jewish communities in the Scandinavian countries, above all Sweden. “Measured in number of reported incidents per 1,000 Jews — a measure indicating exposure, or Jews’ chances of being subjected to antisemitic violence — Sweden comes out on top with a score four times higher than France, with Germany and the UK in the middle,” the report stated.

The role of Muslim extremists in engaging in antisemitic violence was the key finding of the report, Gerstenfeld said.

“Antisemitism experts have stated these facts since the beginning of this century,” he noted. “The politically correct Western European establishment has been considering the mention of this evidence about Muslim antisemitic attitudes and criminality a taboo subject.”

In its examination of data provided by law enforcement and communal agencies for France, the UK, Germany and Sweden, the report found that “right-wing extremists, who are often associated with antisemitism, in fact constitute a clear minority of perpetrators. Respondents in all four countries most often perceived the perpetrator(s) to be ‘someone with a Muslim extremist view.'”

The report added: “It is also worth noting that in France, Sweden and the UK (but not in Germany), the perpetrator was perceived to be left-wing more often than right-wing.”