A new report by the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI) finds that antisemitic violence has increased in the two years since a landmark UN report on global antisemitism warned governments of its dangers. The JBI report tracks attacks against Jews and Jewish sites and trends in antisemitic rhetoric in 50 countries around the world since October 2020, including the sharp increase in antisemitic violence that occurred in May 2021.
The report, A Call to Action Against Antisemitism: Confronting Rising Global Antisemitism in the Context of COVID, Conspiracies, and Conflict is the third in a series produced by JBI since the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Dr. Ahmed Shaheed, published a historic report to the UN General Assembly on global antisemitism as a human rights concern in September 2019.
The new JBI report confirms that the frequency of antisemitic incidents increased or remained disturbingly high in 2020, with record-high numbers reported in several countries despite restrictions on gatherings and movement to address the COVID-19 pandemic. It also finds that in late 2020 and 2021, conspiracy theories suggesting that Jews or Israel are responsible for causing or profiting from the COVID-19 pandemic, expression distorting and trivializing the Holocaust and the treatment of Jews by the Nazis, and rhetoric blaming Jews for societal problems are persistent or increasing in many countries.
JBI’s report also documents incidents in more than 30 countries in which Jewish people and sites with no direct connection to Israel were attacked following the dramatic surge in reports of antisemitic violence in and after the 11-day period of violent hostilities between Israel and Hamas that occurred in May 2021. These violent assaults and threats against identifiably Jewish people occurred alongside a troubling increase in antisemitic rhetoric criticizing and threatening Jews as proxies for the State of Israel as well as rhetoric disparaging Zionism, the self-determination movement of the Jewish people, as a racist ideology, and in some cases explicitly characterizing it as a form of white supremacy. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism identifies “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” as an example of antisemitic rhetoric which goes beyond sharp criticism of Israel’s practices and policies, which the IHRA Working Definition permits.
The JBI report calls for urgent action by governments and public figures, including leaders at the United Nations, to comprehensively condemn antisemitism and for social media companies to curb the proliferation of antisemitic rhetoric on their platforms, including by adopting and effectively enforcing robust community standards. These and other recommendations align with those in Dr. Shaheed’s 2019 report, which sets out guidance for combatting antisemitism while respecting the right to freedom of expression.
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