Antisemitism, Islamophobia on rise in West

Advocacy groups are reporting a sharp rise in the number of antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents in the US and Europe since the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, escalating a trend that had taken root even before the war.
The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group, reported a total of 153 antisemitic incidents of harassment, vandalism and assault in the US from October 7 through Wednesday, an almost 55% increase from the 99 such incidents recorded over the same period last year.
The group has also tracked sharp spikes in anti-Israel rallies that threatened violence against Jewish people, and in antisemitic harassment on the Telegram messaging app. The threats are at a level that Oren Segal, the vice president of the group's Center on Extremism, said he had never seen before. "This has sort of rattled the Jewish community around the world to its core," he said. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based group, also said the number of reports of anti-Muslim incidents it had received had spiked in the past week. The group's advocacy team usually receives two or three incident reports a month; in the past week, it received 18. In Britain, Tell MAMA, an organisation that tracks anti-Muslim attacks across England, reported 291 incidents from October 7 through Thursday, a sixfold increase compared with the same period last year.
France has received hundreds of reports of antisemitic incidents since October 7, according to the country's interior ministry. And in Germany, 174 people were arrested in Berlin this past week after violent demonstrations over the war and a deadly blast at a hospital in the Gaza Strip.