Pages

Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Antisemitic hate crimes remained very high in COVID 2020, and the media still downplayed them (UPDATE)

The FBI released its 2020 hate crime statistics report. 

As with every year, anti-Jewish crimes dwarfs every other anti-religious crime, with anti-Muslim crimes coming in a distant second..

There were 951 reported anti-Jewish crimes - compared with 134 anti-Muslim hate crimes.

Anti-Jewish hate crimes were 57.5% of all anti-religious crimes.

Digging deeper into the statistics, comparing antisemitic and anti-Muslim hate crimes, we see that the crimes against Jews were also violent. 60 cases of simple assault (vs. 35 for Muslims), 34 for aggravated assault (vs. 12 for Muslims, ) and 507 for destruction of property (vs. 26 for Muslims.) 

Google News coverage for 2020 shows slightly more results for  "anti-Muslim hate crime" than for "anti-Jewish hate crime." Only in 2021 did the media seem to finally notice anti-Jewish crimes as the high-profile assaults of Jews during the Gaza war - which is truly maddening, because in 2020 there were numerous violent antisemitic crimes against religious Jews especially in Brooklyn that the media roundly ignored. 

UPDATE: Adam Levick points out to me a recent study in INSS about how the media disregarded Black antisemitism in 2020:

The media discourse focused on antisemitism within the Black community at two main points during 2020: in January, following the violent attacks in New Jersey and New York, which were carried out by African Americans, and in May and June, following the murder of George Floyd, which resulted in demonstrations throughout the country (see Figure 7). The Israeli media in Hebrew and English and the Jewish media (see, for example, Oster, 2020b) reported extensively on vandalism of synagogues in some of these demonstrations; in contrast, the national media did not report on the antisemitic incidents related to the demonstrations at all.


COVID affected crime rates. Anti-Muslim hate crime plummeted by 44% compared to 2019. But the Jew-haters still find ways to attack Jews - antisemitic hate crime only decreased by 13%.