Anti-Semitism: New Trends in Old Hatred

Sept. 26, 2007 — -- Civil rights activists and Jewish-American organizations said tenuous connections but important parallels could be drawn between the anti-Semitic remarks made recently by the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a spate of anti-Jewish graffiti recently discovered by police.

On Friday, the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, police in Washington Township, N.J., discovered a massive swastika cut into a cornfield. And Monday night in New York, hours after Ahmadinejad addressed a crowd at Columbia University in which he questioned the historical accuracy of the Holocaust, swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti were found outside two Brooklyn, N.Y., synagogues.

Jewish groups are quick to point out that anti-Semitism, like other forms of prejudice and intimidation, including a number of recent events in southern states where nooses were found at schools and in black communities, has never disappeared; but they warn of a new trend in an old and hate-filled tradition.

Anti-Semitism monitors warn that traditional grass-roots anti-Semitism anchored in Old World ideologies, neo-Nazism and white-supremacism is mixing with newer forms of hate propelled by Islamic fundamentalism. The Internet, they add, is providing a new avenue for the cross-pollination of new versions of the old bigotry.

"Incidents continue to happen and often tend to be vandalism," said Deborah Lauter, the national civil rights director at the Anti-Defamation League.

"There hasn't been a sharp increase in incidents, but there has been a noticeable shift in attitudes. … Fourteen percent of Americans hold anti-Semitic feelings," she said.

The FBI's most recent statistics on "anti-Jewish" hate crimes date from 2005. Of the 1,405 victims of religion-based hate crimes in that year, 69.5 percent were directed at Jews, compared with 10.7 percent of attacks directed at Muslims, 4.3 percent directed at Catholics, and 4.1 percent targeting Protestants.

Most of the recent anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, like those in New York and New Jersey last week, have not been violent, according to monitors at Human Rights First and the Anti-Defamation League.