After the terrorist group Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, causing the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the United States began to record historic levels of antisemitism.
The Hamas invasion lit the spark of a war in the Middle East that, little by little, has been escalating. Israel, of course, responded with all the pertinent forcefulness to the violence of the Islamic terrorist group, and today, more than three months later, there is nothing to suggest that the conflict will end soon.
The war generated discussions and reactions beyond the Middle East, and one of the immediate consequences has been a significant increase in antisemitic attacks and episodes throughout the world. However, one last figure is genuinely terrifying.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish organization based in New York, which is supposed to combat antisemitism and defend the rights of Jewish communities in the United States, revealed in its latest report that between October 7, 2023, and January 7 of this year alone, there have been 3,283 antisemitic incidents in the United States.
"In the three months since the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, U.S. antisemitic incidents have skyrocketed (...) This represents a 360-percent increase compared to the same period one year prior, which saw 712 incidents," reads the ADL report.
Paradoxically, the ADL, which is not exactly a right-wing organization, has been strongly questioned for failing to register anti-Zionism as antisemitism in the past. Now, some members of the community on the left are complaining to the ADL for considering that the attacks on Israel, the call for the destruction of the Jewish State and the annihilation of the Jewish population that inhabits the Middle East should also be considered antisemitism.
NEW: For the first time, the @ADL is counting pro-Palestinian rallies that do not feature overt hostility toward Jews in its count of antisemitic incidentshttps://t.co/W9HMrt1Da4
— Arno Rosenfeld (@ArnoRosenfeld) January 10, 2024
According to the ADL Center on Extremism, which is responsible for tracking antisemitism, the 3,283 incidents are categorized as follows:
- 60 incidents of physical violence.
- 553 incidents of vandalism.
- 1,353 incidents of verbal or written harassment.
- 1,317 rallies involving antisemitic rhetoric, expressions in favor of terrorism against the State of Israel, or anti-Zionism
What is striking is that a high percentage, 505 incidents, occurred on university campuses, while another 246 were in schools.
Universities, breeding grounds for antisemitism
The controversy surrounding the presidents of Ivy Leagues, such as Harvard or the University of Pennsylvania, was just a symptom of a deep problem in the elite universities of the United States. As the ADL itself records, more than 10% of antisemitic incidents are in universities.
That before the Senate hearing the heads of Harvard, Pennsylvania or MIT could not condemn antisemitism on campuses, said that it depends on the context and refused to consider that they violated the codes of conduct, exhibits the tacit complicity between a certain elite with the attacks.
In a column in the Wall Street Journal, author Charlie Covit writes that "Harvard President Claudine Gay was forced to resign after being credibly accused of plagiarism, but the crisis facing Harvard's Jewish community hasn't gone away. A zealous hatred of Israel has swept our campus, thinly veiling an epidemic of antisemitism."
"Antisemitism was an issue long before Ms. Gay's tenure, and it will continue long after it too. According to Laurence Sigal-Klagsbald, a former director of the Paris Jewish Museum, Jews were viewed in Europe' as ethnographic subjects, exotic figures, negative mirrors of Europe.' Simon J. Rabinovitch, a Northeastern University historian, wrote in Haaretz that German antisemites would 'argue against Jewish civil equality on the grounds that Jews had always been, and would remain, Oriental foreign strangers in Europe,'" Covit writes.
He then concludes his column: "At Harvard, Zionists are branded settler colonialists, white supremacists, European outsiders in Israel. The story hasn't changed."
