The number of antisemitic attacks in Germany surged in 2019, reaching the highest level since 2001, German authorities announced Wednesday.
According to the official data, which Interior Minister Horst Seehofer unveiled, last year saw a total of more than 41,000 instances of politically-motivated crimes and offenses, ranging from verbal abuse to arson and murder, a 13-percent increase over 2018.
Out of those, 2,032 attacks were antisemitic in nature, the data revealed, representing a 13-percent year-on-year increase over 2018. On a more worrying note, the number is also the highest since 2001, the year when the authorities started keeping such a tally.
According to Seehofer, most of the antisemitic attacks come from the German far-right circles, which account for 93.4 percent of the incidents.
The German authorities have described one-in-three cases of far-right antisemitic attacks as hateful “propaganda,” about 14 percent include verbal abuse, and in approximately five percent of instances, things have turned violent.
The uptick in politically-motivated crime and attacks, including not just antsemitic incidents, but also Islamophobic attacks, also largely attributed to the far-right, contrasts a decline in the total number of criminal offenses in the country, which has been going down for three consecutive years.
Source: i24news
