Day 104.

This week in antisemitism that’s being ignored by the President:

1. A man in South Carolina planned an attack on a local synagogue, saying he was inspired to act “in the spirit of Dylann Roof.” He has a felony conviction and has suspected ties to white supremacists. He was arrested and is currently being held on weapons charges.
2. Today marks the fourth day this year that someone coordinated telephoned bomb threats to JCCs in North America. This time it was 11 calls to campuses in 10 cities. The centers were all evacuated and searched.
3. More than 100 gravestones were knocked over in a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, MO.

It seems like hate attacks against Jews are becoming ubiquitous. Just how common are they?

This article puts the current situation into context. There are two charts in this article and they’re both remarkable, and terrifying. The first (which I can’t ignore) shows hate crimes committed on people of Muslim faith over time. There’s a huge spike in 2001. Levels remained elevated every year after that – at least 5 times what they’d been before 2001. The article notes that “[o]verall, anti-Muslim crimes now make up about 13 percent of religiously-motivated hate crimes, and 2 percent of all hate crimes in general.”

The second shows how often people are targeted for their faith (or atheism). Jews are targeted most often (over 600 attacks in 2013). The numbers have risen since then (over 900 attacks in 2015). Even with the five-fold increase in crimes against Muslims? Hate crimes against Jews are five times that. If you correct for relative percentages of the population, Jews are still more than twice as likely to be victims of hate crimes as Muslims.

Jews and Muslims share this undeserved unrest. We deserve peace. But instead, we’re seeing a wave. It’s rising, not yet cresting. And the president continues to be silent.