Is there a “Ferocious Surge” in Antisemitism in the U.S. Needing New Antisemitism Laws?
If there is one political topic in the U.S. today that is uniting both Republicans and Democrats, it is the topic of antisemitism and the belief that the U.S. needs tougher antisemitism laws. Democratic President Joe Biden joined together with Zionist Republicans this week and announced that there is a "ferocious surge of antisemitism in America" today. But is there really? If you listen to the pro-Israel Zionist lobby, led by such groups as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) with their nearly $2 million annual revenue, and AIPAC with their $300 million annual revenue, not to mention the Zionist Christian lobby led by Christians United for Israel with their $10 million annual revenue, you would think that we have a national crisis right now over anti-Jewish hate crimes that requires new legislation to "protect Jews." When groups like this publish statements about the "ferocious surge" in antisemitism, they never actually give any hard data to back up their claims. Based on statistics supplied by the FBI for 2022, the last full year that statistics are currently available, there were 809,381 violent crimes, of which only 11,613 were "hate crimes", or about 1.4% of all violent crimes. And of those 1.4% of hate crimes, surely the highest number of those hate crimes were committed against Jews, right? No, actually there were about 3x MORE hate crimes committed against Blacks, than against Jews. Well, since these are 2022 statistics supplied by the FBI, surely antisemitic hate crimes against Jews have vastly increased since the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, right? Actually, there are more reported hate crimes against Muslims since the recent war in Gaza, than there are against Jews, based on their own reporting: 2,171 increase in Islamophobic incidents (Council on American-Islamic Relations), and 2,031 increase in antisemitic incidents (Anti-Defamation League). So this is the actual data behind the push for a new antisemitism law that just passed the House of Representatives last week, that will seek to change the definition of "antisemitism" to broaden the kind of language that is considered "criminal speech."