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. (Click here to read the full text of Congressman Smith’s address.) 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, 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.”

In his remarks, 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
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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 3rd 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 of 2010, H.R. 6277, 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.”