Earlier this month, Spanish fans hurled racial taunts at Formula One’s first black driver, Lewis Hamilton, prompting the International Automobile Association to create a “Racing against Racism” campaign for the Spanish Grand Prix in April. Some worry the attacks aren’t isolated, and they aren’t just aimed at blacks.

Sports authorities, athletes and media have either condemned the taunting as endemic of Spanish sports or dismissed it as an isolated event. Spanish soccer has had a number of racist incidents in recent years. Despite fines and legislation aimed at curbing such behavior, some say it is not enough, particularly in light of the most recent abuse. Others, however, disagree, saying that racist incidents in Spain are lower than the UK, France or Germany.

Some say the incident highlights a growing prejudice among some Hispanics. In 2006, after Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez denounced Israel’s advance into Gaza, anti-Semitic graffiti appeared on the main Sephardic synagogue in Caracas. The Anti-Defamation League has tracked other incidents throughout the world.

Hispanic anti-Semitism began in Spain, according to Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The sentiment later spread to Latin America. In 1994, a terrorist attack killed 85 and injured hundreds at the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association in Buenos Aires. More than a decade later, Stavans says that Jewish sites in Latin America are “tensely vigilant.”

Some have pointed to the Iranian government as the culprit for the attack. In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, Abraham Foxman, national director the Anti-Defamation League, says Chávez is building relationships with countries and movements that are unabashedly anti-Semitic, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Foxman warns that the increasing acceptance of anti-Semitism should not be taken lightly. “Throughout the ages, Jews have been the canary in the coal mine, with any downturn in their treatment or status as equal citizens signaling the decline of democracy within a society.”

Working to curb rising anti-Semitism in France, President Nicolas Sarkozy ruffled feathers last Wednesday when according to The New York Times, he told a Jewish audience that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”

His plan requires every fifth grader to learn the story of a French-Jewish child who died in the Holocaust. Critics have heatedly denounced the measure, and French Jews have lent only lukewarm support. Psychiatrists and teachers predict that this requirement will traumatize students. “It is unimaginable, unbearable, tragic and above all unjust,” Simone Veil, president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust, told L’Express.

Also rousing vehemence is the way Sarkozy blamed France’s rejection of God for Jewish hatred. As the Times explains, Sarkozy “wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an ‘absence of God’ and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races ‘radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.’”

A Catholic whose personal faith is mostly remarkable for its unorthodoxies (e.g., he is a double divorcé) and has been compared to Rudy Giuliani’s, Sarkozy has ramped up the religious rhetoric in ways that rankle secularist French, who accuse him of abandoning the quintessential French ideal of “a single, nonreligious identity for all.” The New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner argues that Sarkozy’s comments about how God “liberates” man or how teachers “will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor” in teaching right and wrong, for example, rub French the wrong way.

Ironically, religion is what’s behind the sharp rise in anti-Semitism. It’s the metastasizing transplant of the Arab-Jewish conflict to France. Disaffected Muslims—especially youth, like the rioters who burned cars and threw Molotov cocktails in 2005 to protest joblessness and squalid conditions in the banlieues—clash with the Jewish community, now estimated Europe’s largest at 600,000.

Holocaust education is already mandatory in French schools, but the problem is what kids learn at home and bring to school. In a 2004 report, Jean-Pierre Obin, France’s inspector general of education, wrote that anti-Semitism was “ubiquitous” in French schools, representing “a stupefying and cruel reality: in France, Jewish children—and they are alone in this case—can no longer be educated in just any school.”

Some say the media remain reluctant to present this context for the Sarkozy’s comments, preferring to criticize his aberrant invocations of God or his personal life. Sarkozy is the only president to either marry or divorce while in office (he’s done both), and French polls show widespread disapproval for his personal life.