This piece has been republished in The Times of Israel.
According to a recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), across 100 nations, 1.09 billion people (of the 4.2 billion surveyed) hold anti-Semitic attitudes, and half have never heard of the Holocaust. Across the board, those holding the highest level of anti-Semitic attitudes were where? You guessed it. The Middle East. Compare the 93% of Palestinians to the 9% of those in the USA, or 14% in Canada holding anti-Semitic attitudes, and it isn’t difficult to understand where the flaw lays in the peace discussion.
“For the first time we have a real sense of how pervasive and persistent anti-Semitism is today around the world,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL national director. “The data from the Global 100 Index enables us to look beyond anti-Semitic incidents and rhetoric and quantify the prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes across the globe. We can now identify [anti-Semitic] hot spots, as well as countries and regions of the world where hatred of Jews is essentially nonexistent.”
In juxtaposition with the US and Canada, the south Asian country of Laos holds last place on the list; only 0.2% of its adult population holds anti-Semitic beliefs.
Using an 11-question survey, tested and retested over the past five decades, the ADL found 26% of sample data suggests that 1.09 billion people are deeply infected with anti-Semitic attitudes (based on the criteria that they answered ‘probably true’ to 6+/11 questions).
Continue Reading here: Times of Israel
Contributed by CAMERA intern Seth Greenwald, a Sophomore at Clark University.