US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) urged European leaders to go the extra mile to protect their Jewish communities. Photo: Wiki Commons.

JNS.org – In the wake of recent attacks on Jewish sites in Denmark and France, US Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Thursday urged European leaders “to go to extra lengths” to protect their countries’ Jewish communities.

“European leaders should tell those who would try to perpetrate antisemitic acts that they will be fully prosecuted,” Schumer said in a statement. “The bottom line is that, like all ethnic groups and religious minorities, Jewish people, no matter where they call home, should not have to live in fear.”

Last Sunday, 22-year-old Omar El-Hussein—a terrorist of Palestinian origin—fatally shot 37-year-old Jewish volunteer security guard Dan Uzan outside of a synagogue in Copenhagen. In January, an Islamist terrorist attack on the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris killed four Jewish shoppers. More recently in France, hundreds of gravestones were vandalized at a Jewish cemetery in Sarre-Union, near the German border.

“There is an evil stew right now in Europe,” Schumer said Thursday. “It is a combination of Islamic fundamentalist, the far Left, and the far Right—and they are not just being anti-Israel, they are being outright antisemitic. Just as racism has been the poison of America for centuries, antisemitism has been, just as strongly and just as equally, the poison of Europe for a millennium. For centuries, Jewish people have been perniciously targeted because of their faith, and in recent years it seems that this primitive, hateful feeling towards Jews has tragically regenerated and grown.”

European governments, said Schumer, “must do more to protect their fellow Jewish citizens, while also providing leadership to call out, confront and beat back a rising current of antisemitism.”