The
number of antisemitic incidents worldwide has decreased by 12 percent in 2016
despite a spike in cases in the United Kingdom and the United States, Tel Aviv
University’s watchdog on anti-Jewish racism said.
The data were published Sunday, Israel’s national day of
remembrance of the Holocaust, in the annual “Antisemitism Worldwide” report by
the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv
University.
The report is a global overview combining surveys from recognized
watchdogs from dozens of countries, including nearly all European Union member
states. The decrease in the overall number of incidents mirrored a decline in
the number of violent assaults, from 410 in 2015 to 361 the previous year, the
report said.
Bucking the overall decrease in
incidents from 2015 was the recording in 2016 of 1,309 incidents in the United
Kingdom alone, constituting a 36 percent increase over the 2015 tally.
The Community Security Trust,
the British-Jewish charity that compiles the report in Britain, said in
February it could not attribute the increase to any single trigger, citing
instead a “combination of events and factors,” including an unprecedented public
debate about antisemitism within the Labour Party, terrorist
attacks in Western countries and the June referendum in which a majority of
voters supported a British exit from the European Union.
In the United States, “there was an alarming rise of 45 percent in
antisemitic incidents on university campuses, where Jewish students are facing
increasing hate and intolerance,” Moshe Kantor, president of the European
Jewish Congress, said in a statement about the report.
It was a reference to a study conducted by the antisemitism watchdog
group AMCHA Initiative, which reviewed acts of antisemitism at 113 public and
private colleges and universities with the largest Jewish undergraduate
populations. Last year, 433 antisemitic incidents were reported, compared to
309 in 2015. However, the report’s findings and methodology were challenged by the American-Israeli Cooperative
Enterprise, among other critics.
In Austria, where approximately
8,000 Jews live, the number of antisemitic incidents rose slightly in 2016 to 477 from 465 the
previous year — when the figure had jumped by roughly 200, the country’s Forum
Against Antisemitism said.
In France, authorities recorded a 58 percent drop last year in antisemitic
incidents in a report that identified only far-right perpetrators and
questioned the existence of a new antisemitism by Muslims over Israel’s
actions. The report attributed the decrease to the deployment of troops around
Jewish institutions. In 2001, the SPCJ security group of the Jewish community
documented a 71 percent decrease to 219 cases. In 2004, SPCJ recorded 974
incidents.
In addition to the French government’s explanation for the
decrease, there is “the fact that more Jews avoid appearing in public spaces
with identifying attributes such as Yarmulke and a Star of David,” the Kantor
Center said in a statement about its report.
