Over 100 anti-Semitic incidents a month as prejudice towards Jews hits record high

A RECORD number of anti-Semitic hate incidents were reported in the UK last year, figures show.

Jewish people, organisations or property were targeted at a rate of more than four times a day in 2018, data compiled by a monitoring body indicated.

In total 1,652 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded by the Community Security Trust (CST), an increase of 16% on 2017.

The latest annual tally is the highest logged in a single calendar year by the CST, which has been recording the data since 1984.

For the first time in a January to December period, the charity recorded more than 100 anti-Semitic incidents in every month of 2018.

Home Secretary Sajid Javid said all acts of anti-Semitism were “utterly despicable and have no place in society”.

He added: “The Jewish community should not have to tolerate these attacks and we are doing all we can to rid society of these poisonous views.”

CST chief executive David Delew added: “Three years of rising anti-Semitic incidents shows the scale of the problem facing the Jewish community.

“This is happening across society and across the country and it reflects deepening divides in our country and our politics.”

The CST defines an anti-Semitic incident as any malicious act aimed at Jewish people, organisations or property which shows evidence of anti-Semitic motivation.

It registered a record 1,300 incidents of abusive behaviour last year — a rise of more than a fifth (22%) on 2017.

Examples of cases in this category include verbal abuse, hate mail, anti-Semitic graffiti on non-Jewish property and anti-Semitic content on social media.

The most common single type of incident involved verbal abuse randomly directed at Jewish people in public.

It cited a number of cases across different categories, including a man walking to synagogue having food thrown at him from a car, a woman being spat on in the face on a bus, a Jewish bakery being vandalised with anti-Semitic graffiti, and a brick being thrown at a glass door at the front of a synagogue.

The report also revealed the number of violent incidents recorded fell 17% to 123 in 2018, while instances of damage and desecration to Jewish property also fell, by 16%.

The charity recorded 384 anti-Semitic incidents involving social media last year, nearly a quarter (23%) of the overall total.

A total of 148 incidents were recorded in 2018 that were examples of, or related to arguments over, alleged anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

The report noted that, whereas previous high incident totals in 2014 and 2009 were associated with reactions to conflicts involving Israel, there has been no single trigger event to cause the pattern seen in recent years.

Shadow communities secretary Andrew Gwynne said: “These statistics make for hard reading and show much more needs to be done to heal the deepening divides within society and to challenge the growing confidence of those who preach hate, holocaust denial and inversion and anti-Semitism.”