I recently came across this tweeted infographic, which is used to draw a conclusion I have also come across several times.
The conclusion is that in the UK a Jewish individual is nine times more likely to experience a religious hate incident than is a Muslim. This is despite there being more hate incidents targeting Muslims.
The argument for this conclusion is that there are around 15x more Muslims than Jews, and so, when we do the math, it turns out there are 9x more anti-Jewish incidents per capita than anti-Muslim incidents per capita.
There are two big problems with this argument.
First problem: Dubious Stats
First, the statistics on antisemitic incidents are compiled by CST, and what CST classes as antisemitic is controversial. CST’s figures include many incidents in which it is Israel, rather than Jews, that is explicitly targeted, and will, for example, record as an antisemitic incident someone expressing the view that Israel, as an ethno-state ‘between the river and the sea’, should not exist. Clearly it’s debatable and debated whether expressing that view constitutes any sort of anti-Jewish hate crime. More generally:
the CST records incidents as antisemitic, which many Jews and experts on antisemitism would not. The CST report rarely quotes individual incidents (when it does, these are usually the most obviously antisemitic ones) but there have been so many controversies in recent years in which borderline or even wholly justifiable points have been treated as examples of definite antisemitism. To state just a few types of these: comments about Israel killing children being treated as a “blood libel”; allegations of Israeli power viewed necessarily as a conspiracy; any comparison, whether nuanced or not, between Israel and Nazism ruled immediately out of court; political criticism of Jewish figures automatically assumed to be on account of their Jewishness. There are inevitably examples of such politicisation in the [CST] report, not least because 43% of the incidents reported related explicitly to Israel/Palestine and the current crisis. Source.
Also note that hate crime targeting Muslims as such may be recorded not as religious hate crime but rather as race hate crime. The religious hate crime figures will therefore under-report anti-Muslim hate crime. Notice that because the number of racial crimes far exceeds the number of religious crimes, so even a small proportion of mischaracterisation of anti-Muslim hate as race hate will have a disproportionate effect on the Islamophobia/antisemitism balance.
Second Problem: Faulty Reasoning
Second, even if the CST’s per capita figures are wholly accurate, the conclusion that a Jewish individual is 9x more likely to be a victim of a religious hate crime than is a Muslim doesn’t follow. Here’s why…
Consider, say, 100 graffitis or social media posts targeting Jews generally (‘Jews are xxxx’), and 100 targeting Muslims generally ('Muslims are xxxx’). There are 15x as many Muslims as Jews. So the number of anti-jewish incidents per capita is 15x the number of anti-Muslim incidents per capita. But now ask yourself: can we conclude from this that an individual Jew is 15x more likely to be a victim of one of these incidents than is a Muslim?
Obviously not. Like many hate crime incidents, these posts are not aimed at specific individuals at all, but rather at populations. So the probability of any individual jew or Muslim being a individual target is exactly the same - 0%.
But what if we insist on understanding such posts as targeting individuals - i.e. all individual Muslims and all individual Jews. Then the probability of any individual Jew or Muslim being a victim is also exactly the same -100%!
In short it just doesn't make sense to conclude from the per capita rate that an individual Jew is more likely to be a victim of these posts than is a Muslim.
(In fact, if all Jews and Muslims are targets, then, because there are 15x as many Muslims, so there are actually 15x as many Muslim victims of these posts as Jewish victims.)
In short, for very many religious hate incidents - those aimed at populations rather than individuals - it makes no sense to conclude from the differing per capita rates that the individual members of one religious group are more likely to be victims than individual members of the other.
In order to obtain the probability of you as an individual Jew or Muslim being the target of a religious hate crime we need different stats - about the number of incidents targeting individuals. The proportion of these targeting individual Jews vs those targeting individual Muslims may be very different to the proportions targeting Jews and Muslims generally, for all sorts of reasons. One obvious reason is that CST’s figures include a very large proportion of incidents in which it is Israel (and thus, allegedly, the Jewish people) that is the explicit target, not any individual Jew.
Given these two problems, we can’t use CST’s statistics on the infographic to draw any reliable conclusions about the relative rates of religious hate incidents targeting individual Jews and Muslims.
Antisemitism is undoubtedly rising and a serious concern. However, the conclusion that an individual Jew is nine times more likely to experience a religious hate incident than is a Muslim is clearly unjustified.
This infographic is highly misleading and likely to make individual Jews feel far more fearful of being a victim of a hate crime incident than is justified.
The infographic’s title ‘The Disparity of Hate: Antisemitism vs Islamophobia’ is also clearly designed to lead people to conclude that anti-Muslim bigotry is a less serious problem than is antisemitism. Again, that conclusion is not remotely justified.
Now take a look at this from Jewish News...
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