According to a 17 January 2011 report on The Baltic Course, the foreign ministers of the Czech Republic and of Lithuania agreed to ‘continue cooperating with an aim to properly evaluate at the EU level the crimes of totalitarian regimes’ (Obfuspeak for the red-brown movement in the European Parliament) as well as ‘the agenda of Lithuania’s chairmanship [of the OSCE] and plans for the conference on antisemitism, which is co-organized by Lithuania and the Czech Republic in Prague’.

It is widely feared in West European and Jewish circles that the antisemitism conference will be a decoy that avoids talking about the contemporary antisemitism in the OSCE chair’s own country, much of it emanating from state and state-related circles. See the definition at ‘antisemitism studies’ in this journal’s Dictionary of terminology and Obfuspeak in the minefield of Baltic-Jewish issues. As of today, nobody in the Lithuanian government has condemned the ongoing kangaroo ‘investigations’ and defamation of Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi partisans; of the Lithuanian Human Rights Association’s recent defamation of these last survivors who resisted Nazism, or of the Vilnius municipality’s current decision to allow the 11 March neo-Nazi march on the main boulevard of an EU capital city.

Moreover, the antisemitism conference is scheduled for 23 and 24 March under the auspices of the Lithuanian chairmanship of the OSCE, less than a week before the next red-brown event at the European Parliament, scheduled for 29 March. The juxtaposition leads to further fear that the former is scheduled to draw attention away from the latter.

Finally, many are disturbed that a right-wing Jewish parliamentarian in Lithuania who is the main organizer of the proposed antisemitism conference was also, shockingly for the Jewish community, himself a signatory of the 2008 Prague Declaration, criticized by experts as itself being riddled with antisemitism.  Many naive westerners are not aware that the parliamentarian, for all his many achievements for his country, can scarcely be held to represent the country’s Jewish community, from which he resigned publicly, never to return, nearly a decade and a half ago. Moreover, Lithuania’s OSCE delegations have recently included ‘Judaic Studies’ and ‘Yiddish’ operatives to help cloud the issues of Double Genocide and growing local antisemitism. Recent international conclaves organized by Lithuanian government bodies have failed to include even one slot for a person designated by the country’s small and embattled Jewish community.