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Dear Friends,
U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief Dr. Ahmed Shaheed published an eight-point action plan for governments to combat rising antisemitism. Shaheed noted, “antisemitic attitudes have seemingly grown more prevalent among people who do not hold extremist views, and antisemitic discourse of several varieties has become increasingly normalized.”
Alongside the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, President of Colombia Iván Duque announced his country’s endorsement of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, becoming the third Latin American country to do so. Meanwhile, 28 U.S. senators called for a 50% increase in the budget for the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, citing spiking rates of antisemitism globally.
The office of the IKAR synagogue in Los Angeles was defaced with swastikas, and an arson in Brooklyn appears to have been motivated by antisemitism after firefighters found swastikas spray-painted inside the building.
Toronto police arrested a man with a weapon who threatened a Jewish school while yelling “kill Jews,” and a California man was arrested for threatening to kill, with antisemitic invective, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. German police meanwhile, arrested a man for running a publishing house that distributed Nazi propaganda.
After discovering multiple derogatory references to “sayanim,” the Arabic word for Zionists, on social media, French prosecutors are now considering an antisemitic motive in the murder of an elderly Jewish man in Lyon. Rene Hadjaj, 89, was killed after being pushed from the 17th floor of his apartment building by his neighbor, a crime eerily similar to the 2017 murder of French Jewish grandmother Sarah Halimi.
The Press Council of South Africa expelled a South African Jewish outlet after it refused to apologize for describing a pro-BDS caricature as antisemitic, and in alarming modern use of the age-old antisemitic blood libel, the extreme anti-Zionist group JVP published a cartoon depicting Israeli soldiers drinking the blood of Palestinians.
This week’s global antisemitism report highlights 21 new media reports of antisemitic incidents. The total includes 12 (57.1%) from the far-right, 4 (19.1%) from the far-left, 3 (14.3%) with Islamist motivations, and 2 (9.5%) unidentifiable in nature.
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