A still image from the documentary film on antisemitism rejected by Arte. Photo: Screenshot.

The international affairs director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) has called on the European Parliament to host a special screening of the documentary film, “Chosen and Excluded — The Hate for Jews in Europe,” which was originally commissioned and then rejected by the French-German broadcaster Arte.

In a letter to the president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, Dr. Shimon Samuels of the SWC cited the “many commentators” who had deemed Arte‘s decision to reject the film “as ‘censorship’ based on fear of acknowledging that Islamist violence against Jews, BDS (boycotts) of the Jewish state and anti-Zionism are part and parcel of the scourge of antisemitism.”

Among the issues covered in the documentary are the prevalence of antisemitism in children’s programming in the Middle East, physical threats to Jews in French and German cities and the role of antisemitism in the media. But Arte bosses turned down the film, claiming that the final cut ignored other issues, such as antisemitic activity in Norway and Sweden, that the documentary’s producers had allegedly agreed to cover.

Samuels argued that as the European Parliament had recently adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “Working Definition of Antisemitism” — which encompasses expressions of extreme hatred towards Israel and the identification of Diaspora Jews with Israel — it was “now endowed with a measure to test the apparent tendentious argument of Arte.”

The German newspaper Bild hosted the film on its website for just twenty-four hours on Wednesday, billing it as “Jew-Hatred: Bild Shows the Documentary Which Arte Won’t.”