The murder, torture and rape of more than 1,000 Jews on Oct. 7 was only an appetizer for Hamas supporters on college campuses and in major cities. We are forced to ask: Is public support for savage war criminals also a verbal incentive for concrete acts of Jew-hatred in the United States?
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a euphemism calling for a vastly greater slaughter than we saw in southern Israel on Oct. 7. It may also serve as a green light for some Hamas sympathizers in America to turn this sentiment into reality at home.
Last week, the FBI released hate crime statistics for the year 2022. As in recent years, Jews were the most likely victims per capita, far more than black Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Muslims. In the last two years, anti-Jewish hate crimes have increased dramatically, even before the massacres of Oct. 7.
Compared to 2020, when Jews were the target of 1.09 hate crimes per 10,000 population, the 2022 figure is 1.80. For black Americans in 2020, the number of hate crimes per 10,000 was 0.541, while in 2022 it was 0.77. For Muslim Americans in 2020, it was 0.48 compared to 0.54 in 2022. For Asian Americans in 2020, it was 0.112 compared to 0.22 in 2022. For Latinos, it was 0.09 in 2020 compared to 0.12 in 2022. These numbers are derived by dividing the number of FBI-reported hate crimes against each ethnic group by population numbers from the U.S. Census and Pew population surveys.
To put the trend in perspective, Jews in 2022 were 2.3 times more likely to be the target of a hate crime than blacks, 3.3 times more likely than Muslims, 8.2 times more likely than Asian Americans and 15 times more likely than Latinos.
The most recent upsurge in anti-Jewish hate crimes began after the Oct. 7 massacres, masquerading as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist. This ugly trend has been reported widely in many cities in the United States and Europe, although numbers are not yet available. According to Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, “ADL has tracked a massive increase in antisemitic incidents in the past two weeks—on top of the historic levels of anti-Jewish hate we’ve already been seeing.”
This directly contradicts White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s statement that “we have not seen any credible threats” to Jews before she pivoted to Muslims having supposedly “endured a disproportionate number of attacks.” The latter statement is shown by the above statistics to be untrue.
The whitewashing of the most egregious crimes against humanity by university professors, government officials, social media, and major television and newspaper outlets leaves us in a quandary: How did so many in our society lose their basic moral compass? And how do we restore a common sense of decency regardless of political viewpoints?
The FBI reports numbers according to the race and ethnicity of perpetrators, but the statistics are not linked to the specific victim categories. This raises another question: Why does the FBI not report who is attacking whom? This information could be very helpful in focusing efforts to reduce these crimes. Could it be that the Jew-haters are disproportionately from specific racial or ethnic groups and our government and the FBI do not want us to know who they are?
Because the FBI reports hate-crime statistics for ethnic and racial groups as simple numbers without relation to the population size of each group, it’s easy for journalists and the average American to miss the fact that a Jew is far more likely to be a target of a hate crime than anyone else, especially if the person’s location or dress indicates their Jewish identity.
We must compel government agencies to announce this fact clearly as an essential first step towards preventing attacks on Jews.