Antisemitic incidents are on the rise, but don't fall for overblown numbers

• A surge of antisemitic incidents have occured throughout the US, following the latest recent conflict between Israel and Hamas.
• But the ADL's statistics, widely cited in the media, are inflated by the conflation of anti-Jewish violence with some legitimate political protests against Israel. 
• There's no reason to stretch the truth about the scourge of antisemitism, because the truth is bad enough.  
• This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

You've probably heard that antisemitic incidents are on the rise over the past few weeks — including violent assaults, vandalism, and other forms of harassment. 

While hate crime data is notoriously unreliable, FBI statistics consistently show Jews as the most likely-targeted identity group, and there's ample evidence to suggest that following the most recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, there's been a spike of attacks against Jews in the US and elsewhere.

Targeting diaspora Jews for violence and harassment as a form of protest against Israel should be universally condemned, without equivocation. And it's important that the public be made aware of the scope of the threat.

At the same time, it's dangerous to hyper-inflate statistics to make it seem as if the surge in antisemitic incidents is much worse than it is. Disseminating inflammatory and misleading information not only fosters distrust in institutions, it inflames already existing tensions, and creates more opportunities for law enforcement overreach. 

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has been accused of doing that very thing.  

Legitimate political protest or hate speech? 

Journalists frequently rely on the ADL's stats when covering stories about extremist violence. And the group's stats have been cited as evidence of the recent uptick in antisemitic incidents in the US.

But what exactly meets the ADL's criteria for an "antisemitic incident" is murky, as is its source-gathering. News reports, police blotters, Twitter searches, and reports of antisemitism made directly to the ADL are all included in its overall number of "incidents." 

This results in news outlets promoting an overall number of "incidents" that would be significantly less if greater context was provided. 

Some critics have noted that the ADL also counts pro-Palestinian sentiments that attack the concept of Zionism and the state of Israel as "antisemitic." 

This is where it gets tricky, because the ADL says criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, but that anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism when coupled with statements where "Israel is denied the right to exist as a Jewish state and equal member of the global community."

Not everyone is going to agree with that statement, because Zionism is a political idea, and Israel is a political entity.

Writing for the the left-leaning site Jewish Currents, Mari Cohen asked of the ADL:

"Had the organization yet reviewed reports of the 193 'possible incidents' to determine their legitimacy? What kinds of incidents were they? Assault? Harassment? Vandalism? How did the organization decide when to add an incident to its 'tracker of antisemitic incidents?'"

An ADL spokesperson told me that the group's antisemitic incidents tracker is "not exhaustive" but is "rather a timely snapshot of incidents that have occurred in recent days" and that some cases "may be removed if they are determined not credible upon further investigation by ADL." 

Responding to Cohen's critique, the spokesperson said it's not true that the ADL counts "every anti-Israel or anti-Zionism protest as an antisemitic incident." 

But, they added: "Phrases such as 'Zionism is racism' or 'Zionism is Nazism,' are an implicit attack on the large percentage of American Jews who view a relationship with Israel to be an important part of their religious, cultural, or social identities. The phrase demonizes them in a manner which we know has led to intimidation of Jews and exclusion of many Jews from progressive spaces."

The line between strident, even offensive, political protest and a "hate crime" is often difficult to define.  

Extremism violence is bad enough, the threat doesn't need to be inflated 

A 2020 data investigation I produced along with several of my Insider colleagues found the ADL's top-line statistics — the ones most likely to be repeated by news outlets and politicians — are misleadingly inflated. 

For example, if two neo-Nazis engaged in a meth deal-turned bad and one killed the other, that's counted under the top-line statistic of "extremist violence." 

There are numerous examples of this kind of statistic-bloating. 

If a guy with sovereign citizen literature in his car kills his wife and kids, to the ADL that's "extremist violence."

If a would-be KKK member bails on their initiation and is killed by their would-be compatriots, that's "extremist violence," too. 

Our Insider investigation looked at 10 years of the ADL's data, and after investigating news reports, court records, and other sources, we re-assessed each incident as being either "extremist violence" or just violence committed by a possible extremist.  

We came to the conclusion that while the ADL is correct in its highly-publicized conclusion that right-wing extremists commit the vast majority of political and bigotry-motivated extremist violence, the ADL's top-line statistic for right-wing violence was inflated roughly by a factor of four.

Ruobing Su/Business Insider

The ADL freely admits it includes incidents with no inherent political or bigoted motivations in its H.E.A.T. map (an acronym for Hate, Extremism, Antisemitism, Terrorism). But the ADL says those incidents need to be included among hate crimes and political violence to demonstrate the threat posed by extremists' proclivity for violence.  

Arthur Jipson, an associate professor at the University of Dayton who specializes in extremism, told me in 2020 that he believes the ADL is acting in good faith when presenting its statistics, but he added:  

"What I would do is say, 'Here's the raw data, here's the raw total.' Now let's break it up into categories where we've had really clear evidence. I don't think [the ADL] is wrong for [using] the raw data, but I would also then say, 'Let's compare that against data where we have this absolutely clear empirical manifestation of that criminal intent.'"

Anti-semitism knows no borders, is not distinct to the political right or left, and long pre-dates Israel. 

And while virulent anti-Zionist speech isn't inherently antisemitic, there is no question that a disturbing amount of anti-Israel protest has crossed that line, especially in recent weeks. 

But to inflate the threat by using an overbroad definition of antisemitism, and questionable information-gathering techniques, is to sow terror and mistrust.

As I wrote in 2020: "Violent extremists are inspired by each other, and the scope of their violence is often used as a recruiting tool. Inflating the overall statistics could embolden extremists who want the public to be terrorized by the seeming scope and force of their violence."

We need institutions like the ADL to be as transparent as possible in their methodologies, and we need such advocacy groups to responsibly report the scale of the threat, without inflating the numbers.

Journalists also should be less instantly credulous of statistics that confirm the conventional wisdom that everything is unspeakably terrible. Reporters have a responsibility to look under the hood and not reflexively cite top-line statistics as evidence of a crisis.

If antisemitism is on the rise in the US (and I believe it is), there's no reason to stretch the truth to prove it, because the truth is bad enough.  

https://www.businessinsider.com/antisemitic-jewish-incidents-rise-adl-overblown-numbers-israel-gaza-extremism-2021-5

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‘Breaking the News’: ‘Fabulous’ Book Exposing ‘How China Has Completely Infiltrated American Media’

Laura Ingraham lauded Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow’s Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption Thursday as a “fabulous” book exposing, among other things, the Chinese government’s influence over American news media outlets.

In an interview with Marlow on her eponymous podcast, Ingraham noted how conflicts of interest revealed in Breaking the News help explain news media mendacity related to the coronavirus.

“Alex, you have been all over this — the conflicts of interest,” Ingraham remarked,” [and] about how China has completely infiltrated American media with dollars, research money, advertising dollars, threats of travel restrictions and so forth … and you uncover this as it relates to the billionaires in this country and their connection.”

She observed Hollywood’s refusal to produce documentaries or other films depicting China’s communist history:

One of the reasons it happens is because we have a media that is not independent — forget objective — not even independent of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. We find out that the CCP — China — has spent billions of dollars over the years in advertising in the United States … in publications that desperately need ad dollars. I’m talking Time magazine, some newspapers, magazines like the Atlantic. So they buy their way into the United States, and these journalists become little pieces of putty.

Just like Hollywood’s not going to offend China by doing a powerful documentary about what’s happened to the religious minorities in China [or] what’s happened to traditional religious expression. Forget it. They’re not going to do that.

They’ll never do that movie, just like they’re never going to do a movie about Mao, a real one.

Can you imagine that film about Mao? Sixty million people dead. How many movies have we had about World War II? How about the Great Leap Forward? How about extermination of millions and millions and millions of Chinese? They’re not going to do it.

Their silence is bought.

Marlow’s book details China’s procurement of influence across American news media outlets, which Ingraham linked to much of the news media’s deception and suppression of information regarding the coronavirus’s origins and the one-party state’s conduct in response to the outbreak.

Marlow highlighted actor and former professional wrestler John Cena’s recent apology for describing Taiwan as a country as illustrative of the Chinese Communist Party’s financial leverage over America’s news and entertainment industries. He explained how conglomerate ownership of the two industries with business interests in China is at the heart of the industries’ betrayal of truth.

Marlow said of Breaking the News:

I connect that with what’s going on with John Cena. I’m sure you played a clip of John Cena’s obsequiousness to China because he dared call Taiwan a country, which it is. Universal, which owns the Fast and Furious [franchise], is part of NBC-Comcast-Universal. So you’ve got this Fast and Furious movie opening up. You’ve got a new Universal theme park opening up in Beijing last week. The established media doesn’t make that connection.

And we’re supposed to be trusted to think that movie stars for Universal Pictures and NBC News are going to treat China — one of the most racist countries on Earth, that interns journalists, that interns Muslims — they’re supposed to be credible when it comes to dealing with this regime?

Of course, they’re not. It’s all intertwined. … That’s why we’re never going to get that China movie or documentary. We’re not even going to get a hard-hitting article on China. In the meantime, American media conglomerates just sell out one after the next after the next.

Breaking the News illuminates the financial roots of much of the news media’s corruption, Ingraham said.

“Alex, your book is fantastic,” Ingraham concluded. “Everyone, before you think that you understand an issue, and you kind of brush off the concerns that we’re talking about, read this book because you’ll see that when something pops up on your screen as fact, you have to look at who owns it, when they bought it, who’s invested in it, and what their political affiliations [are].”

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/05/29/laura-ingraham-breaking-news-fabulous-book-exposing-how-china-completely-infiltrated-american-media/
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Bernie Farber of Canadian Anti Hate Network

Head of Canada's progressive 'Anti-Hate' network warns of 'sick rumours of violence aimed at Jews' after recent antisemitic violence

In every major city of North America and Europe, last week's anti-Israel rallies turned ugly in a way we in Canada have not seen before, with rock-throwing, Israel flag burning and outright assaults reported.

Hamas can't win a military war against Israel, but every time they start one, the virus of antisemitism, for which there is no vaccine, and whose ever-more vicious strains spread farther and faster by the day.

In every major city of North America and Europe, last week's anti-Israel rallies turned ugly in a way we in Canada have not seen before, with rock-throwing, Israel flag burning and outright assaults reported. Combat Antisemitism Movement's weekly report states that antisemitic incidents in the UK have increased by 600 percent. A number of British Jews have been attacked in the streets, and a car caravan flying Palestinian flags drove through neighbourhods with a high density of Jewish residents, chanting, "F*ck Jews, rape their mothers, rape their daughters."

Analyzing 77 media reports of antisemitic incidents, CAM found that 43 of them (56 percent) were motivated by Islamism; 14 incidents (18 percent) came from the far left; 6 were from the far right (8), and 14 (18 percent) were unidentifiable. Numbers like these leave no room for equivocation on the sources of contemporary Jew hatred. European Jews have been exposed for decades to pathological hatred from what is known as the "red-green" alliance of Marxists and Islamists. In Canada, where hate incidents of any kind rarely involve physical assaults, we have been slow to understand that it was just a matter of time before this particularly virulent infection reached our shores.

Ordinary Canadian Jews immediately absorbed the shock and ominous implications of the exponential rise in expressive antisemitism. Every Jew I know is feeling anxiety and fear. But Bernie Farber, chair of the Canadian Anti-hate Network (Antihate.ca), mocked our concerns. Last Tuesday, Farber took to Facebook to scold those "[s]preading sick rumours of violence aimed at Jews" as "fearmongering" and "the worst kind of nonsense." He said advocacy groups for Jews, Palestinians and Muslims "should speak in one voice to condemn it." "It," to be clear, being Jewish fear-mongering.

 

It is difficult to overstate the offensiveness of such blatant denial from someone in Farber's position. Antihate.ca is in the business of combatting (unspecified) "hate groups." Although the organization has no official standing in the Jewish community, Farber's group is often consulted as though it were an official community entity by media and government people, assumed to be a reliable source for truth on the subject of antisemitism. Antihate.ca receives grants from the government, and has positioned itself as the go-to organization for school boards and other institutions willing to pay for presentations and materials on the hate situation in Canada.

The name is misleading. It is not "hate groups" in general that Antihate.ca concerns itself with. It is hate from one source only—the far right which, as the CAM numbers show, is virtually irrelevant to the escalating crisis of global antisemitism. Antihate.ca does not hide their bias. Farber has admitted to website commenters and on Twitter that "we research all aspects of white supremacy," period, because "[w]hite supremacists pose the biggest threat in [North America]."

Although erroneous, this is an article of faith amongst many aging leftists, for whom the Holocaust is the defining Jewish event of their lives. For them, Nazis—the historical brownshirt, goosestepping kind, flaunting swastikas and speaking German, along with their pathetic brotherhood of modern stooges—became the once, forever and only icon of genocidal antisemitism. They are frozen in time. They can't get their heads around the fact that neo-Nazis of that kind are low-hanging fruit for hate-bashing, because they have no credibility with any decent human being of any mainstream political persuasion. Nor do they hold any institutional power in any democracy.

These Nazi-trackers seem not to—or perhaps have chosen not to, as Farber's post suggests—to grasp the reality  that the head office for genocidal hatred of Jews, whose rhetoric makes Hitler look ambivalent, has shifted from Berlin to Gaza, with branch offices all over the world, staffed by fellow Islamic supremacists and abetted by privileged white progressive BDS allies in academia. These useful idiots believe they are supporting a social-justice movement that is battling "colonialism" and "apartheid" and "racism," but in fact, as has been amply documented and affirmed, including by those best placed to understand systemic antisemitism when they see it, BDS is a movement inspired by and suffused with Judeophobia.

Last week in this space I wrote up the case of a medical resident at Memorial University of Newfoundland who had been mobbed by a coalition of medical students, administrative personnel and third-party commentators. All of them argued that the resident was unfit to practice medicine, largely on the grounds of his alleged Islamophobia, allegations I reject as false and on the "evidence," ludicrously so. The theme of "cultural safety" arose many times in the accusations levelled at the resident.

One of the resident's detractors was Amira Elghawaby, who is a founder and active board member of Antihate.ca. She now works for the Canadian Labour Congress, but from 2012-17, her NCCM tenure ending just before Antihate.ca officially launched in July, 2018, she was the Communications Director of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, an organization considered "controversial" by credible moderate Muslims. (NCCM's present director, Mustafa Farooq, claims Malcolm X as a guiding inspiration.)

Earlier this month, Elghawaby published an article in the Toronto Star, expressing support for the MUN resident's ouster. In her article she stated, "We know that systemic racism is a big problem within medicine in Canada. It is our duty as physicians to make sure that our patients have the best care, the best representation, that any time a doctor walks in, that doctor is bringing the best of the medical tradition with them rather than racism, Islamophobia, white supremacy, these sorts of things."

That article has not aged well in the light of last week's events, particularly since Elghawaby excluded "antisemitism" from her list of hatreds that patients deserve to be free from, even though statistically, antisemitism far outstrips Islamophobia as a hate problem in Canada.

 

Rather awkwardly for Elghawaby, medical students in Canada are feeling an unprecedented absence of "cultural safety" in the present environment, an absence, one might say, of "the best of the medical tradition." On May 14, Dr. Frank Sommers, co-founder of the grass roots organization DARA (Doctors Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, serving 700 members of the medical, dental, and academic community, on whose honorary board I sit), wrote to his fellow board members:

"It has come to our attention that Jewish medical students and residents feel extremely isolated and scared in the context of the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.

"To address these feelings, [several] medical students/residents organized a Jewish support group. Approximately 15 of us met last night over zoom, ranging from medical students to residents to fellows. Not one person in the meeting currently feels safe on campus. Several students described examples of staff physicians and fellow colleagues in positions of power posting anti-Israel messages, claiming that the conflict is not complicated and calling it 'ethnic cleansing.' While many attendees endorsed feelings of guilt at not standing up against these comments, there was also an underlying fear of repercussions in the form of evaluations, future job opportunities, social isolation, and otherwise. There was also a sense that when these issues have been reported in the past, they have been met with little support and sympathy by the current administration."

On May 16, Dr. Sommers wrote to the board again:

"I hope you are safe and well. The environment in the faculty of medicine has become extremely toxic for Jewish students. Many students are unabashedly fostering anti-Semitism. However, what has been even more disheartening is the physician leaders who have been sharing anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda. There are too many people to count who have engaged in inexcusable behaviour, but two are particularly noteworthy."

I am not going to name the two people or reproduce their antisemitic tweets here. Suffice to say that one of them was a vociferous critic of the MUN medical resident, calling for his cancellation on the grounds of alleged Islamophobia.

What a sobering and disheartening situation our future Jewish physicians find themselves in. Imagine: "Not one person in the meeting currently feels [culturally] safe on campus." Does this not sound like an ideal case for a group that educates the public on, and combats hatred, regardless of the cultural identity of the victim or of the hater? I wonder where one might find such an organization in this proudly inclusive and diversity-loving nation of ours.

https://thepostmillennial.com/head-of-canadas-progressive-anti-hate-network-calls-recent-violence-against-jews-sick-rumours

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