UNESCO surveyed over 2,000 teachers in the EU about
how much antisemitism they witness in the classroom.
The main headlines are bad enough:
- 78% of teachers said they had encountered at least one antisemitic incident among students
- More than a quarter reported seeing nine or more such incidents.
- 61% said they had come across Holocaust denial or distortion in the classroom, with one in ten saying this occurred frequently.
- One in ten teachers reported witnessing physical attacks on Jewish pupils at least once,
- 44% said they had seen students making Nazi gestures or wearing or drawing Nazi symbols.
But I think the most noteworthy and frightening results came from a different question.
The teachers were asked to judge whether a series of statements were antisemitic or not. All of them are.
36.7% are not sure that defacing a Holocaust memorial with "Free Palestine" is antisemitic.
36% think "Jews control the media" might not be antisemitic.
25.7% think the classic blood libel of Jews murdering and drinking the blood of Christian children is either not antisemitic or "depends on context."
Holocaust denial, using derogatory terms for Jews, attacking Jewish properties - a significant number of these teachers don't consider those necessarily antisemitic.
The survey didn't ask the question, but one can assume that a majority of those who answered that these things were definitely not antisemitic actually believe them to be true.
Which means that at least 10% of European teachers are antisemites. Moreover, since so many had no idea what antisemitism actually means, the statistics of how many witnessed antisemitism in their classrooms are certainly undercounted.
I don't know what the numbers would be in America, but the EU has been a harbinger of US antisemitism for quite a while now. This is what US and Canadian classrooms will look like in a few years, unless someone starts to take the fight against antisemitism seriously. Unfortunately I cannot imagine US teachers unions supporting the training and vetting that would be necessary to stop this from happening in America.