Don’t trust these misleading figures
The CAA questionnaire showing Jews are thinking of leaving the UK in the face of rising hate has been criticised as unreliable and incendiary. Here are two views on its validity
ASSESSING UK antisemitism is not a suitable subject for propaganda games. Last week a new Jewish pressure group called Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) rushed out a deeply flawed report following the outrages in Paris. This presumably was to take advantage of the prevailing panic to gain publicity for unfounded statements about a “tsunami” of Jewhatred in Britain. If headline-grabbing was the aim, it certainly succeeded.
The community’s leading research body, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) has justifiably condemned CAA’s publication as “incendiary” and “irresponsible”. The JC has published considerably less alarming findings from its own, more reliable research.
In order to reach a judgement about the extent of antisemitism in the UK, we need to look both at the number and seriousness of recorded cases and at professionally administered polling data about attitudes.
The number of antisemitic incidents reported to the Community Security Trust suggests the situation is considerably less grave than the fevered publicity has implied. There was a record spike in reported incidents at the time of the conflict in Gaza in July 2014. After the Israeli withdrawal, the numbers declined, though they remained higher than in the similar months in 2013.
But the position is different regarding physical assault or “extreme violence” (defined as involving a threat to life or grievous bodily harm). In the peak month of July 2014, there was not a single case involving extreme violence, nor had there been any such case since the first half of 2012. During the first six months of 2014, the number of recorded incidents involving assault was the lowest for any similar period since 2001.
These statistics do not diminish the all-too real terrorist threat against Jewish institutions and premises. But they should give a warning against overblown reporting about the extent of what Eylon Aslan-Levy has called “everyday anti-Semitism” among the British population at large.
So what explains CAA’s finding that “more than half of all British Jews feel that antisemitism now echoes the 1930s”? The answer lies in what the JPR has condemned as basic flaws in the methodology of CAA’s so-called “antisemitism barometer”.
It was completely predicable that its questionnaire would produce the conclusion that one in four British Jews had considered leaving the UK and 45 per cent were concerned that Jews had no long-term future here. This was because the questions were so slanted and tendentious and because anyone
The defiance displayed at the Campaign Against Antisemitism rally last summer i