BSS :
Anti-Semitism has grown during the corona virus pandemic, particularly online, a new EU report said on Tuesday, but gaps in data make it difficult to measure how bad the problem really is. As well as old lies being revived, “new anti-Semitic myths and conspiracy theories that blame Jews for the pandemic have come to the fore”, said the report.
“Anti-Semitism, especially online, grew during the pandemic,” said the report, by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. At the same time, the agency’s own research showed that anti-Semitic acts were consistently under-reported.
The lack of data on the issue made it harder to tackle the problem, said the report. The report based its findings on a review of official data compiled by EU member states, and what it called unofficial data collected by civil society organisations.
There was no official data available from two member states, Hungary and Portugal. Rights groups in Germany noted the link between the surge in anti-Semitism and the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the first months of the pandemic, the RIAS a federation of groups monitoring anti-Semitism thee, said that 44 percent of the incidents they had recorded were linked to the corona virus. A federation of Jewish communities in the Czech Republic recorded 874 incidents in 2020, up from 694 the previous year.
Almost all of them were published in the media or online and many concerned anti-Semitic conspiracy theories specifically related to the pandemic, said the report.
