The leading Jewish communal security organization in the UK is sounding the alarm in the wake of data released by the government revealing a historic high in anti-Semitic hate crimes.
According to statistics from the Home Office, Jews are now the victims of one out of every five religious-based hate crimes in the UK, the highest level ever recorded, the Jewish Chronicle reported.
“It is alarming that religious hate crime disproportionately affects the Jewish community to this extent, and especially that anti-Jewish hate crime has gone up at a time when most religious hate crime has fallen,” said the Community Service Trust (CST), the organization tasked with providing security to the UK Jewish community. “These figures do not even cover the period in May this year when anti-Jewish incidents reported to CST hit record levels.”
The CST stressed that the upward trend “needs to be reversed” and called for “the people committing these crimes to be brought to justice.”
The statistics show a continual pattern of increasing anti-Semitism in recent years.
From March 2020 to March 2021, there were 1,288 anti-Jewish incidents in England and Wales, a 22 percent increase from the previous 12-month period. The jump in numbers makes Jews the second most targeted group.
The release of the data comes during a period of increased anti-Semitic attacks that have shocked the Jewish community, including five violent assaults on members of the community in heavily Jewish London borough Hackney, all believed to have been committed by the same man.
The community also faced verbal and physical assaults during pro-Palestinian protests in May when the conflict between Israel and Hamas took place.
In September, four men were charged for shouting anti-Semitic abuse through a megaphone as part of a pro-Palestinian convoy that participated in a protest in north London in May.
A video of the alleged incident contains a voice screaming “F**k the Jews, rape their daughters” while cars flying Palestinian flags drive toward an intersection in the London district of St John’s Wood, where a sizeable Jewish community lives.
Statistics show a worrying increasing trend of Jews being the target of religious-motivated hate crime offenses.
In the previous period, from March 2019 to March 2020, Jews were the victims of 1,205 offenses, or 19 percent of religious-based hate crimes, amounting to an increase of one percent over the previous period.
However, several years earlier, during the 2017 to 2018 period, Jews were the victims of approximately half that number or 672 recorded hate crimes, amounting to only 12 percent of total religious-based attacks.