Anti-Semitism today

You may have heard about the world-wide survey of anti-Semitism conducted by the US Anti-Defamation League, that canvassed over 50,000 people in 101 countries plus the Palestinian territories.  This is the largest such survey ever carried out, with results that are both unsurprising yet alarming.  Fully 26% of those polled, equivalent to 1 billion people, hold anti-Semitic views.  How was this determined?  Interviewees were asked a batch of 11 questions regarding their attitudes towards Jews, such as "do the Jews have too much power and influence?", "do the Jews control the media?", "do the Jews control the banks?" etc., if they answered affirmatively to 6 of these questions then it was deemed that they held anti-Semitic views.   

Not surprisingly the greatest concentration of anti-Semitism was found in the Muslim world with fully 49% holding anti-Semtiic views and this increased to an incredible 79% in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).  The average of anti-Semitic stereotypes was 24% in western Europe and 34% in eastern Europe, but the country that stood out with the highest score in Europe was Greece with a score of 69%.  By contrast, Iran had the lowest anti-Semitism score of 56% among the MENA countries.  The scores in Asia (22%) and the Americas (19%) were correspondingly low.  Among all English-speaking countries the total score was 13%.  Most notably the Palestinians (West Bank and Gaza) had the highest anti-Semitic rating in the world (93%), western Jewish liberals please note!

Among questions that gave surprising results, fully 41% agreed that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the country they live in, 35% of respondents had never heard of the Holocaust and 48% (70 million people) think that Jews make up 1% of the world's population (actually it's 0.19%), but even more incredibly 18% believe that Jews make up 10% of the world's population and 9% (1.5 billion people)  think that Jews make up 20% of the world's population - amazing.  Although informative, my conclusion from this survey is that the world's populaton is first and foremost incredibly ignorant, and such ignorant people may be many in number, but are hardly worth listening to.  We Jews value quality rather than quantity.

To view the survey yourself go to: http://global100.adl.org/public/ADL-Global-100-Executive-Summary.pdf