Posted on 05/20/21
| News Source: The Hill
The U.S. and other countries around the world are seeing a rise in antisemitic attacks at protests and online as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages in the Middle East.
Human rights groups say some criticism of Israel's actions during the conflict is crossing the line into antisemitism.
States around the country are reporting vandalism at synagogues, such as graffiti of swastikas and pro-Palestinian messages. Marking an uptick online, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Thursday reported finding 17,000 tweets between May 7 and May 14, a period of escalation in Gaza, with a variation of the words “Hitler was right.”
“Some people seem to have trouble distinguishing the State of Israel, which is a sovereign state just like the United States or France or any other state, from Jews because Israel is the Jewish state, about 80 percent of its citizens are Jewish,” Jill Jacobs, a rabbi and executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, told The Hill.
Join BJL on WhatsApp Status: Click here to Join BJL status for engagements, births, deals, levayos, events & more
Join BJL on WhatsApp Groups: Click here to Join an official BJL WhatsApp group for breaking news as it happens
“We saw, for example, a really horrible incident near a Jewish Community Center in London, where people were driving down the street yelling terrible things about Jews, including rape their daughters. We saw just on Tuesday night, a physical attack of Jews having sushi at a sidewalk cafe in Los Angeles. We've unfortunately seen an uptick in those incidents where people are vandalizing synagogues,” Jacobs said.
Pro-Palestinian protests are setting up outside of synagogues and Jewish communities in multiple states despite their having no direct involvement with the Israeli government.
“We have seen a little bit of this in the United States where there's an anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian demonstration that is organized in front of Jewish institutions. That often crosses a line, because it's not protesting an Israeli consulate or a State Department but protesting Jews for being Jewish,” Oren Segal, vice president for the Center of Extremism at the ADL, told The Hill.
Among the attacks are a pro-Palestine sign left with a smashed window at the Persian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago and a synagogue in Utah that was vandalized with a swastika drawn on the front door. Read more at The Hill