This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.

Seventy years after the Nazis unleashed the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany and Austria, the scourge of antisemitism still persists. In 1938 and 1939, the Jews of those countries were forced to leave, but not all of them could find refuge in the democratic countries. And many of those who were successful in entering France, Belgium, Netherlands and other European countries were later caught by the Nazi machine and murdered.

To honor the memory of those who paid the ultimate price for such hatred - and to combat antisemitism in its current forms - Council of Europe Secretary General Terry Davis signed, on November 10, a letter of intent to forge new ties between the Task Force for International Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF) and the 47-member Council of Europe, which is dedicated to advancing human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

“Anti-Semitism is still not an issue of the past … the Holocaust is something that can happen again and again and again,” warned Ferdinand Trauttmansdorf, chairman of the Task Force for International Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research.

The international task force, led this year by Austria, teamed up with the Council of Europe in a bid to more closely coordinate education and public awareness efforts to combat acts of hatred against Jews. It is planning a joint media campaign dubbed, “All Different - All Equal,” to promote and celebrate diversity.

Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, declared at the press conference: “There are no races. We are one human race.” One of the main problems, however, is that antisemitism is deeply rooted in European and Christian culture and that all those campaigns led until now had almost no influence on the level of antisemitism in European countries.

“Seventy years after these pogroms, in 2008, we still face anti-Semitic hate crimes,” said Janez Lenarcic, head of the human rights arm of the Organization for Security and Coordination in Europe. “Clearly, important historic lessons have still not been learned by all,” he said.

Cases in point: recurring attacks on Jewish cemeteries and synagogues across the 27 nation European Union. This past weekend, several windows of a synagogue in Debreczen in eastern Hungary were smashed with rocks, the Rabbinical Center of Europe said Monday. And last month, up to 200 Jewish graves were vandalized in Bucharest, Romania. Such desecrations have become almost routine in Austria. So far this year, there have been reports of Jewish graves defaced or destroyed in Linz, Graz and in Vienna, where at least two dozen graves were vandalized in January. Unfortunately, not all such incidents are reported.

“We do not have to repeat these atrocities - we can learn from history,” said Morten Kjaerum, who heads the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights. Tracking anti-Semitic incidents has proven difficult, the agency says, because of patchy reporting in different countries. And - despite the fact that the EUMC which became the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights has published a working definition of antisemitism -there is still no agreed official definition.

Professor Bauer asked:

- Can we legitimately use history to show that anti-Semitism has led to disaster, primarily of course to Jews, but as a result of that to millions of others?

- Can we use educational strategies to help integrate deprived parts of the population into the societies in which they live?

- Can we show that anti-Semitism is morally repugnant in any society, and link it, not ignoring its exceptional specificity and historical depth, with Islamophobia and other group hatreds?

- Can we show that hate propaganda against any state, nation, or group, including the Jews and their nation State, is ultimately disastrous to those who preach it, and is connected to genocidal dangers past and present?

I often heard the optimistic view of my friend Simon Wiesenthal, who used to pin his hope on the coming generation. Despite the fact that most Austrian pupils are taken at least to the former concentration camp Mauthausen and some of them even travel with their teachers to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, the hoped for result is not forthcoming. The extreme right is getting more and more votes in Austria, one of the richest countries of the world, especially from young people.

Since 1945, we often hear the words “Never Again.” Every November 9, when remembering the pogrom on that day in 1938 in Germany and Austria, speakers promise to combat antisemitism. Probably because it is so very hard to turn words into deed, the result of all those promises is poor. There is, therefore, a strong argument to multiply the efforts and to re-examine whether the methods used are the right ones, as well as to assess what those European agencies tasked with combating antisemitism have really achieved.