The Same Extremists Target Both Muslims and Jews

[Nevilledog]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-same-extremists-target-both-muslims-and-jews/


Both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate is on the rise in the U.S. Just two weeks after the start of the conflict in Israel and Palestine, hate incidents grew by 400 percent against Jews, and increased by 216 percent over a four-week period against Muslims, compared to the previous year.

Antisemitic and Islamophobic hate is surging most dramatically online. A recent New York Times article reported that online hate has spiked on mainstream social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Instagram, with most of the hateful antisemitic and Islamophobic content appearing on X. Far-right users of Telegram and 4chan have been leveraging the current conflict, the report noted, as an opportunity to spread antisemitic and Islamophobic rhetoric.

This is not for the first time. Muslims and Jews face enormously high rates of online and physical-world hate, and a deep connection links that hate in the U.S. We only have to look at the last decade to see it.

In a recent paper published in Political Behavior, we looked at anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish online and offline hate—both before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election—evaluating their relationship from 2015 to 2018.

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