One hundred anti-Semitic incidents occurred in the 10 days following last month’s presidential election, representing about 12 percent of hate incidents in the United States recorded by a civil rights watchdog.
A report released Nov. 29 by the Southern Poverty Law Center looked at 867 hate incidents that occurred in the 10 days following the election of Donald Trump. The incidents targeted various minority groups, including Jews, immigrants, blacks, Muslims and the LGBT community. Incidents counted had been submitted through the watchdog’s website or reported in the media.
Of the 100 incidents classified as anti-Semitic, 80 were “vandalism and graffiti incidents of swastikas, without specific references to Jews,” while others targeted Jews more overtly, such as the harassment of individuals or vandalism of a synagogue, the report said. Many of the vandalism incidents included references to Trump, the nonprofit said.
The report referred to an attack prior to the election on a historically black church in Mississippi as “a harbinger of what has become a national outbreak of hate, as white supremacists celebrate Donald Trump’s victory.”
Some of the anti-Semitic incidents and acts of vandalism reported included: a swastika and spray-painting of “Make America White Again” on a softball dugout in Wellsville, New York, on Nov. 9; swastikas and racist messages daubed on a large rock outside a Boston-area public school; the words “Sieg Heil 2016” and “Trump” with a swastika replacing the letter “T” written on a storefront in South Philadelphia; a damaged porch and the note “Gas Jew Die” stuffed inside the mezuzah on the front door of an Oberlin College professor; and an anti-Semitic leaflet, stating in part, “False religious orders must perish … that goes for Judaism,” sent to the home of a gay New York state senator days after swastikas were carved into his apartment building.
The Southern Poverty Law Center report said that the 867 incidents “almost certainly represent a small fraction of the actual number of election-related hate incidents,” citing a Bureau of Justice Statistics estimate that two-thirds of hate crimes are not reported to the police.
The document also noted that 23 of the incidents reported were anti-Trump, including harassment of supporters of the president-elect.
In the weeks after the election, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, said anti-Jewish public and political discourse in the United States is worse than at any point since the 1930s.
The election season saw the rise of the “alt-right,” a loose far-right movement whose followers traffic variously in white nationalism, anti-immigration sentiment, anti-Semitism and a disdain for “political correctness.”
Many alt-right members, including prominent white nationalists, have been vocal in their support for Trump. The president-elect said last week that he did not want to “energize” white supremacists, and he denounced a Nov. 19 alt-right conference in Washington, D.C., where speakers railed against Jews and several audience members did Hitler salutes.
In other alt-right news, Jewish groups and leaders urged Texas A&M University not to allow the founder of a white supremacist think tank, who made waves at the Washington, D.C., conference last month, to speak at a private event on campus on Dec. 6.
Richard Spencer, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a suit-and-tie version of the white supremacists of old,” will be allowed to speak, the university confirmed this week, noting that it did not invite him and that private individuals are allowed to use the space of the public university, according to the Battalion, the student newspaper. Almost 10,000 people signed a petition urging Texas A&M to cancel the event and denounce Spencer’s rhetoric, one newspaper reported, and protests against his appearance are expected to continue. — jta