Those who wish to blame the slaughter of Jews in Pittsburgh on the president have cited a study recently released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that seems to support their contention. According to the study, reported anti-Semitic incidents increased by nearly 60 percent between 2016 and 2017. But, writes David Bernstein, this statistic is highly misleading, and those citing it ignore some basic recent history:
Pittsburgh was hardly the first time an anti-Semitic gunman murdered people in a Jewish institution in the U.S. During the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, there was a shooting at a Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles, a shooting at an El Al counter at the Los Angeles airport, a shooting at the Jewish Federation in Seattle, a shooting at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, and a shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. Lower levels of vandalism and violence have been even more common. It’s true that the death toll in Pittsburgh was especially high, but that’s just happenstance; any of the other shooters would have been happy to kill as many or more. (It’s worth noting that many commentators . . . simply ignore these past crimes, and act as if the Pittsburgh murders were some unique event in recent American Jewish history.) . . .
There are, [furthermore], several problems with relying on this study for Trump-bashing. . . . The first is that the study includes 193 incidents of bomb threats to Jewish institutions as anti-Semitic incidents, even though by the time the ADL published the study, it had been conclusively shown that the two perpetrators of the bomb threats were not motivated by anti-Semitism. . . .
Second, the ADL report itself acknowledges that some of the rise in incidents may simply be due to better reporting. . . . Third, “college campuses saw a total of 204 incidents in 2017, compared to 108 in 2016.” How many of those incidents emanating from traditional forms of anti-Semitism that one might associate with Trumpian populism, and how many from leftist/pro-Palestinian sources? The ADL doesn’t say. . . .
[That being said], I think that reasoned criticism of President Trump is useful—for example, noting that Trump’s conspiratorial mindset inadvertently feeds anti-Semitism because the latter is a product of the same mindset, or that Trump should have unequivocally rejected support from white nationalists during his campaign, . . . and so on, though I would draw the line at blaming Trump for the incident, unless one can also explain why there were similar shootings before Trump and wants to talk about all the other currents of anti-Semitism on both left and right that contribute to Jews’ being by far the most targeted religious group for hate crimes for many years running.
Read more on Volokh Conspiracy: https://reason.com/volokh/2018/10/28/has-there-been-a-surge-of-anti-semitism