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December 7, 2023
6 min read
Far-right extremists shifted their online hate from Muslims to Jews in 2017, and offline hate followed the same trends
By Will Hobbs & Nazita Lajevardi
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.
Hate speech then flowed freely. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, candidates (including, but not limited to, then-candidate Donald Trump) openly engaged in inflammatory rhetoric, often targeting Muslim communities. Extremist white nationalist rhetoric also became more explicit and commonplace. Contemporaneously, offline hate crimes soared against minority communities, particularly against Jews and Muslims. This was never more apparent than following the start of the Trump presidency, when in 2017, antisemitic incidents saw their largest single-year increase on record, at nearly 60 percent higher than in 2016, and Islamophobic abuse rose 91 percent in the first half of 2017. All of this appeared to come to a head in August 2017 at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., which marked a significant escalation in public, organized, far-right extremist activity in the U.S.
Our research triangulated across multiple databases to examine hate against Muslims and Jews on fringe platforms online and in its real-world manifestations. We included discussions held on 4chan, Gab and Reddit, both fringe and mainstream, as well as hate crime databases maintained by the Anti-Defamation League, Council on American Islamic Relations and the FBI, in the analysis.
Our findings revealed surprising insights. Overall, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate crimes might appear to be more disconnected than they are in reality. That’s because increases in hate crimes against the two groups often (though not always) occur at different times.