The latest FBI Hate Crimes statistics report, for 2015, shows that the number of antisemitic hate crimes increased by 9% last year, from 609 to 664.
Hate crimes against Jews outnumber hate crimes against every other religious group.
But anti-Muslim hate crimes increased sharply, by 67%, so most of the news headlines concentrate on how awful that is. But still, it is only 257 attacks, far less than the number of antisemitic attacks.
I’m not saying that it is great, and it is a worrying trend, but Jews remain far more likely to be targets of hate crimes in America than Muslims are. Yet most of the news stories barely mention that.
AP waited until the last sentence of the article to mention that most religious based hate crimes are against Jews. So did CNN. Fox buried it in paragraph 9. The Guardian made it sound like there were far more Muslim hate crimes than any other, with a quote from an “expert”: “Levin said that Muslims were now the most disdained social group in the US, and have subsequently been subject to widespread prejudice.” The Christian Science Monitor mentioned Jewish attacks in the second paragraph but the headline was about Muslims.
One of the only news outlets that tried to be accurate was MassLive. Even though its headline also only mentioned Muslim victims, the first paragraph says:
The number of hate crimes reported against Muslims nationally jumped by 67 percent in 2015 — but a majority of religiously motivated hate crimes were still committed against Jews, according to statistics released Monday by the FBI.
Now, was that so hard?
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