A/HRC/9/12 page 11 28. The ideological context of the rise of religious discrimination and incitement to racial or religious hatred was illustrated once again in March 2008 when the film Fitna produced by Geert Wilders, a Dutch parliamentarian and founder of the Freedom Party (Partij voor de Vrijheid - PVV), was broadcast on the Internet. The essentialist association of Islam with violence is the mainspring of the film, which intersperses verses from the Koran with images of terrorist attacks, with the murder of the Dutch producer Theo Van Gogh and with anti-Semitic declarations. When the film was first broadcast, the Special Rapporteur together with the Special Rapporteur on the freedom of religion or belief and the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression issued a press release criticizing the fallacious and provocative nature of the film. While recognizing the balanced reaction of the Dutch Government in rejecting the equation of Islam with violence, the Special Rapporteurs had called on national and international human rights mechanisms to initiate a debate on the best way to ensure the complementarity between the right to freedom of expression and non-incitement to racial or religious hatred. B. Anti-Semitism 29. The Special Rapporteur wishes to restate the essential points made in his previous reports, in particular the resilience of anti-Semitism in its historical heartlands in Europe as well as its development in regions with no corresponding tradition or historical heritage, such as Africa and South America; the profound historical roots of anti-Semitism and its ability to adapt to new social and political contexts; and the need to treat all forms of discrimination on an equal basis. 30. The most recurrent form of modern anti-Semitism involves negation of the Holocaust. The refusal to recognize the historical fact of the Nazi regime’s project for a “Final Solution”, namely the devising and implementation of the plan for “destruction of the European Jews”, highlights two characteristics of anti-Semitism: its deep historical and cultural roots, and the central role of memory in opposing it. The persistence of anti-Semitism in Europe reflects its deep and pervasive roots in cultures, mentalities, representations and psyches. The ritual reference to Judeo-Christian roots masks the historical fact that European identity was to some extent forged on the basis of anti-Semitism. The enlargement of the European Union has reinforced this deep-rooted anti-Semitism with the vitality of the anti-Semitism found in most of the countries of Eastern Europe. The Special Rapporteur wishes here to draw the Council’s attention to the disturbing tendency in Europe to conceal this silent and subterranean anti-Semitism, present not only in popular culture but above all in the intellectual and ideological heritage of elites; to relegate it in all events to the ideology of the extreme right; and to overestimate, thereby encouraging a measure of Islamophobia, the existence among immigrant circles of anti-Semitism linked to an ethnic reading of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is indeed among elites that revisionism remains strongly active, in terms of silence over the events of the past as well as the intellectual reinterpretation of history and negation of the Holocaust. It is in this context that the Special Rapporteur has moreover noted a certain exploitation of anti-Semitism in some traditional and religious circles whose opportunistic and much publicized opposition to anti-Semitism masks the persistence of a profound current of anti-Semitism. A recent illustration was provided by an American evangelical pastor who maintained that Hitler had served as the expression of divine will by creating the circumstances for the return of the Jews to Israel.