Nearly half of all adults worldwide hold significant antisemitic views: ADL survey says
NEW YORK, Jan 15 (SABAH): Nearly half of all adults worldwide hold significant antisemitic views and younger people are more likely to discriminate against Jews, according to an Anti-Defamation League survey released the other day.
The global survey asked 58,000 respondents in 103 counties and territories if they agreed with 11 antisemitic tropes, such as “Jews’ loyalty is only to Israel” and “Jews have too much power in the business world.”
If respondents believed that more than half of the statements were true, they were categorized as having “significant antisemitic beliefs,” ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt said in a briefing, calling the findings a “global emergency.”
“Why do attitudes matter so much? Because attitudes lead to action. When antisemitic views are normalized, when anti-Jewish bigotry takes root, it creates an environment where Jews become more vulnerable,” he said, tying the antisemitic views to incidents such as the attacks on Israelis in Amsterdam in November.
In total, 46 percent of adults backed a majority of the antisemitic tropes, representing around 2.2 billion people.
The level of antisemitism varied widely by country and region. The Middle East and North Africa had the highest levels, with around three-quarters of respondents endorsing a majority of the antisemitic statements. Antisemitism was most prevalent in the West Bank and Gaza at 97%, followed by Kuwait and Bahrain. Fifty-nine percent of the region held a favorable view of the Hamas group.
Iran was the least antisemitic of the 18 countries in the region, with 49% of respondents holding significant antisemitic views.
Greenblatt ascribed the widespread Jew-hatred in the region to Al Jazeera, calling the news network a “nonstop fountain of antisemitism.” Al Jazeera’s Arabic coverage differs significantly from its English-language coverage, and Iran is the only country in the region, besides Israel, that does not mainly speak Arabic.
Western Europe was the least antisemitic region, at 17%, followed by the Americas at 24%; Oceania, 20%; sub-Saharan Africa, 45%; Eastern Europe, 49%; Asia, 51%, and the Middle East and North Africa, 76%.
The least antisemitic countries were Sweden, Norway, Canada and the Netherlands. Israel was not surveyed. In the US, nine percent of respondents held significant antisemitic views.
Russia was the most antisemitic country in Europe, at 62%. The global figure represented a 108% increase in significant antisemitic views over a similar survey conducted in 2014.
“I don’t have the words to adequately describe how dangerous this spike is,” Greenblatt said.
Matt Williams, the vice president of the ADL’s center on antisemitism research, said certain views were correlated with anti-Jewish activities on the ground. The belief that Jews were primarily loyal to Israel was tied to Jews being targeted in anti-Israel activities, and the view that Jews are only concerned with their own kind was predictive of hostility toward Jews, he said.
Many countries held widespread antisemitic views despite lacking any significant local Jewish population.
For respondents under the age of 35, half held antisemitic views — 13 percentage points higher than among those over the age of 50.
The survey also queried respondents on the validity of the Holocaust’s historical narrative. Only 39% of adults aged 18-34 endorsed the mainstream narrative of the genocide, with the remainder saying the number of deaths was exaggerated, that the Holocaust was a myth, or that they had never heard of it. For the general population, 48% endorsed the historical narrative, and 20% said they had “not heard about the Holocaust.”
Marina Rosenberg, ADL senior vice president of international affairs, called the views of young adults a “demographic time bomb.”