Since Hamas carried out the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, I have been appalled as to how kidnappers, rapists, murders, and génocidaires could possibly get the sympathy of the world. I had to question how the Far Left became so anti-Semitic (read here, here, and here). I also wrote about how the entity known as Palestine needs to put the victim card back in the deck but probably will not (see here, here, and here). It is not only the Palestinians playing the victim card. It is Muslims throughout the Western world. I find the victimhood audacious enough where I started writing about how "Islamophobia" is nowhere near the bigotry that anti-Semitism is. You can read Part I here.
The first inconvenient truth I pointed out is that anti-Semitism has existed for three thousand years, whereas the concept of "Islamophobia" has only existed since 1997. This lead to my second inconvenient truth, which is that "Islamophobia" is so new because Muslims spent much of their history oppressing, persecuting, and colonizing. Now I continue more inconvenient truths, including continued oppression, a lack of attempts to systematically wipe out all Muslims on the planet, and that Jews are significantly more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than Muslims.
Muslim-majority nations continue to oppress. The non-profit Freedom House provides detailed analysis on political freedoms and civil liberties by country. The vast majority of Muslim-majority countries are ranked as "Not Free," whereas none of them are considered "Free." In the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom's 2024 annual report, you will see multiple Muslim-majority countries detailed as being problematic for religious freedom, including Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkey. If Islam were really a religion of peace, you would think at least one Muslim-majority country would be tolerant of non-Muslims, yet such a nation-state does not exist. On the other hand, there is only one Jewish-majority state, Israel. Guess what? Israel allows Muslims, Christians, and Druze to live peacefully and practice their respective religion within Israel's borders.
People have not tried to systematically wipe out Muslims. The closest that there has been to systematic extermination is the Chinese government's persecution of the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority of about 11 million living in Western China. While a reprehensible violation of human rights, this repression of the Uyghurs has not been determined to be an act of genocide. As I pointed out when refuting the pro-Hamas' accusation of Israel being genocidal, genocide has a specific legal definition. To quote Spiked Online:
Muslims are not facing the intimidation that Jews now face daily on the streets. There are no demonstrations calling for the destruction on any Islamic nation or protests demonizing Palestinians as 'child murderers' or 'genociders.' Nor are there influential initiatives calling for a boycott of Arab institutions or individuals.
There has not been a nut job like Hitler that wants to systematically exterminate all 1.9 billion Muslims with a "Final Solution" for all believers of Islam or has succeeded. Unfortunately, Jews have not been spared that fate. Hitler managed to wipe out a third of the world's Jewish population with his Final Solution. If only that genocide were a thing of the past for the Jews. It is 2024 and it is difficult to talk about a two-state solution when the government representing the Palestinian people is pushing for a Final Solution against its Jewish neighbors in Israel.
Furthermore, you do not see thousands of protestors across the globe calling for the extermination of Muslim people. It is thousands of people in the so-called "civilized world" denying the atrocities of October 7, cheering on raping, murdering, genocidal terrorists, all the while chanting for the extinction of Jewish people in the name of anti-Zionism and "freeing Palestine." Too bad these bigots cannot call for freeing Palestine from Hamas or denounce the atrocities of October 7.
Jews are more likely to endure a hate crime than a Muslim. Harassing, threatening, or committing violence against Muslims is unacceptable because no one should undergo that sort of treatment. At the same time, there is a disparity between the dangers a Muslim faces versus what a Jew faces.
In the United States, we can see those rates with the FBI's Hate Crime Statistics. According to the FBI Crime Data Explorer, there have been 821 anti-Muslim hate crimes while there have been 5,424 anti-Jewish hate crimes between 2019 and 2023. There are 4.45 million Muslims in the United States in contrast to 7.5 million Jews. When adjusting for population, a Jew in the United States is 3.9 times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim.
Outside of Israel and the United States, the countries with the largest Jewish populations are France, Canada, and the United Kingdom. I will start these non-U.S. countries with the United Kingdom.
In London, anti-Semitic hate crimes have overtaken the number of anti-Muslim crimes since October 7, 2023. This does not even factor in that there are 1.32 million Muslims versus 145,466 Jews in London, or there are about 9 Muslims in London for every Jew. Merely by eyeballing the graph below (Telegraph), you can see that multiplying the blue bars by 9 to get a sense of the rates show that a Jew in London is much more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim, especially since October 7, 2023. In 2022-23, the likelihood is about five times as likely. In 2023-24, that is about 12 times more likely.
Canada does not fare better. B'nai Brith Canada has shown a doubling of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada from 2022 to 2023 in its annual report. Looking at hate crime figures from Statistics Canada, there were 1,496 police-reported hate crimes against Jews versus 576 against Muslims between 2018 and 2021. There are about 1.8 million Muslims in Canada versus the 393 thousand Jews, or about 4.6 Muslims for every Jew. When adjusting for population to understand rates, a Jew in Canada is 12 times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim. To think that these figures were before October 7, 2023!
And finally, there is France. First, I will show the number of anti-Muslim crimes recorded by the Central Territorial Intelligence Service [Service Central du Renseignement Territorial; SCRT] (per here and here).
Then there are the anti-Semitic crimes reported (see here and here). You can read the most recent report here from the French government's SCRT (in French). What we see with historical data is that there are more anti-Semitic hate crimes than anti-Muslim crimes. That is before October 7 when anti-Semitism nearly quadrupled in France. That is also not factoring in the fact there are 550,000 Jews versus 5.7 million Muslims in France, or more than 10 Muslims for every Jew in France. In 2022, that would mean that a Jew in France was 22 times more likely than a Muslim in France to be a victim of a hate crime.
Moral of the story: what we see with government data from the countries with the largest Jewish populations (excluding Israel) is that Jews are significantly more likely to be harassed, terrorized, and victimized than Muslims are. The fact that there are more hate crimes against Jews than Muslims in these countries signals that anti-Semitism is a bigger scourge than "Islamophobia."
Postscript. I hope to address one additional aspect of this debate in a future blog entry, mainly that "Islamophobia" is a cudgel to silence legitimate dissent against Islam or Islamists. In the meantime, I will say this. Treating "Islamophobia" and anti-Semitism as equals and lumping together is insulting to Jews because it diminishes what the Jewish people have endured not only since October 7, 2023, but over the centuries. It also ignores the fact that Muslims have oppressed and persecuted others for centuries and that those who run Muslim-majority countries still oppress to this day.
Denunciations of anti-Semitism are diluted when lumped together with other forms of bigotry. When George Floyd was murdered, people did not denounce "racism, homophobia, transphobia" or scream "All Lives Matter;" the chant was "Black Lives Matter." Equating "Islamophobia" with anti-Semitism is giving Jews the "All Lives Matter" treatment, which apparently is an unacceptable mantra for the Woke Left except for when it used against Jews. "Islamophobia" is nowhere near the problem that anti-Semitism is. Anyone who does not treat anti-Semitism as a separate, legitimate form of bigotry is part of the problem. After all, anti-Semitism has been the canary in the coal mine far too many times in history. Let us hope that the Western world can learn that important lesson before it slips into decadence.
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