Rep. Chris Smith, a leading human rights lawmaker in the U.S. Congress, is offering a keynote address this week at an international conference attended by parliamentarians from over 50 countries working together to strengthen global efforts to combat anti-Semitism.

    (To read the full text of Congressman Smith’s address to the Coalition Combating Anti-Semitism, click here.)

    At the three-day Ottawa Conference of the Interparliamentary Coalition Combating Anti-Semitism (ICCA), Smith has been asked to speak specifically on anti-Semitism in North America and legislative efforts to combat it.  And as a member of the ICCA’s Steering Committee, Smith will also lead a working group addressing issues of policing and prosecuting anti-Semitic hate crimes.

    “All of us here recognize that anti-Semitism is a unique evil,” said Smith (NJ-04), a senior member of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and co-chair of the Bi-Partisan Anti-Semitism Task Force. “We know anti-Semitism is a distinct form of intolerance, the oldest form of religious bigotry, and a disease of the heart that has very often led to murder – and, in the last century, to a Holocaust of death and destruction to which the world responded: never again. We must ensure that these are not just words but by the actions of our governments we mean it and refuse to allow anti-Semitism to rear its ugly head – ever again.”

    The ICCA completed the Ottawa Protocol, which was signed at the end of the conference and contains an endorsement of Smith's House bill, the Combating Anti-Semitism Actof 2010, H.R. 6277). 

    To see a 10-minute video panel of Congressman Smith and other ICCA members on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) at the Ottawa conference click here. (To skip to the the segment regarding the Ottawa conference, go to approximately minute 22:00 of the broadcast.)

    In his remarks at the conference, Smith also identifies anti-Semitic hate on the Internet as a “serious and growing problem in the United States, where many of the world’s most vicious anti-Semitic Web sites are hosted,” and warns delegates about the spread of anti-Semitic attacks on Israel on U.S. campuses, and points to the 1,211 incidents of vandalism, harassment, and physical assaults reported in the ADL’s 2009 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents. According to the ADL’s 2009 Audit, New Jersey had the 3^rd highest number of anti-Semitic incidents.

    Rep. Smith is the author of the provisions of the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004 that created the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism within the U.S. State Department. He recently introduced new legislation, the Combating Anti-Semitism Act, that would strengthen the office and require it to report more frequently and in greater detail on anti-Semitism around the world.

    In 2009 Smith delivered the keynote address at the ICCA’s London conference. As a result of his landmark 2002 hearing, “Escalating Anti-Semitic Violence in Europe,” he led a congressional drive to place the issue of combating anti-Semitism at the top of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) agenda, as a result of which in 2004 the OSCE adopted new norms for its 56 member states on fighting anti-Semitism, and from 2004 to the present has held a series of high-level conferences on combating anti-Semitism. Rep. Smith is the author of numerous laws, resolutions, and member letters on combating anti-Semitism. In the 1990s Smith chaired Congress’s first hearings on anti-Semitism and in the early 1980s his first trips abroad as a member of Congress were to the former Soviet Union, where he fought for the release of Jewish “refuseniks.”