«A tsunami of anti-Jewish hatred». The Anti-Defamation League – the largest international organization for Jewish anti-defamation founded in 1913 in New York – together with the University of Tel Aviv raises the alarm on the boom in cases of anti-Semitism in the world, including Italy, in the last year elapsed.
A considerable increase in incidents, the report denounces, particularly after October 7, when “the worst wave of incidents since the end of the Second World War” was recorded. On that date in early October, Hamas managed to penetrate southern Israel, causing more than 1,170 deaths, mainly civilians. A massacre that triggered a large-scale offensive in the Gaza Strip which has so far caused the death of 34,683 people, mostly civilians, according to Hamas.
According to the report, the countries with more “anti-Semitic incidents” compared to 2022 are “United States, France, Great Britain, Australia, Italy, Brazil and Mexico”. Here – the data were provided by the CDEC Anti-Semitism Observatory in Milan – there were 241 cases in 2022, almost double in the following year (454), of which only 216 between October and December 2023. of these 454 incidents, 259 occurred online and 195 in the real world. The latter also includes “a physical assault” on a Jewish pupil in a school shouting ‘Free Palestine’.
In 2023, 10 acts of vandalism and 67 with graffiti were also recorded, while in 2022 there were 6 and 28 respectively.
«This report – underlined the ADL and the University of Tel Aviv, who released it on the occasion of Shoah Day in Israel – is a messenger of bad news. Data collected by law enforcement, government agencies, Jewish organizations and media platforms tells a story of Jewish existence under growing threat” in the Western world.
The problem, the report claims, is not only the “blaze” unleashed by October 7 but also the months preceding the Hamas attack in which, without “exceptional events, most countries with a significant Jewish population recorded an increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents compared to the same period in 2022”.
But “the war in Gaza – it is added – contributed to spreading the flames of a fire that was already out of control”. The report also notes the current impossibility of reliably tracking incidents of anti-Semitism in Russia.
An extensive essay in the study examines the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Russian President Vladimir Putin and members of his entourage and reveals that “in early 2023, Moscow’s exiled chief rabbi, Pinchas Goldschmidt, issued a warning to Jews to leave Russia before becoming a scapegoat.”
