this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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I respect thay you might have a different point of view based on your experiences. I also have family in the UK that so i'm there regularly and follow what is going on. But the fact is that of those that usually wear jewish symbols, 61% avoid wearing them on occasion for their safety and additionally according to this EU survey almost a third is considering emigrating (of the 12 countries surveyed the average was 38% so UK is slightly better than most countries for jews)
https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra-2019-2nd-survey-on-discrimination-and-hate-crime-against-jews-in-eu-ms-country-sheet-uk_en.pdf
Looking at hate crime rates since that survey, they have boomed since the october event.
It does not suprise me at all that it is difficult to acknowledge that people with other backgrounds are subject to hate because that is how we are built. We rather look away and instead of finding out how the situation is, we go by how we feel things are which is why it is good to have statistical resources that paints a picture for the group as a whole.
I acknowledge that jews probably have better chances with authorities than other minorities but that also is not the reason they don't feel safe wearing their religious symbols.
I hope you understand that i don't want to make this a "they have it worse" thing. I want to show that their safety is not great, as here a third of their synagogue budgets go to private security. You can't say that about any other group.
Well, my experience abroad really doesn't cover the time since the events in October (as I was back living in Portugal before that) and here in Portugal I have yet to observe or hear about any attacks on Jews or Jewish symbols even since then. Portugal doesn't treat "criticism of Israel" as anti-semitism - so the numbers are not artificially inflated by counting people demonstrating against the Genocide in Palestine as anti-semites - and as I pointed out in an earlier post the country is actually practicing racial discrimination in favour of Jews, though not quite to the level of the UK or Germany (which even have "Friends of Israel" groups in their Parliaments)
Unfortunately, several countries adopted the IHRA definition of anti-semitism which considers criticism of the State of Israel and its actions to be anti-semitism (leading to ridiculous instances such as that Jewish Holocaust Survivor being considered an anti-semite in the UK for the way he criticized the actions of Israel in Palestine) which muddied the waters considerably helping hid the real anti-semitism, and indirectly spreading a perception that there is a lot more anti-semitism than there is in reality, because when those artificially inflated numbers are reported in the media there is no separation between "criticism of Israel" and actual anti-semitic actions so it all sounds much worse than it is, in turn shifting the perceptions (both amongst Jews and gentiles) of the level of anti-semitism in a country, which is the while point of the IHRA definition and adopting it - it's a long standing propaganda technique of Zionism and the State of Israel to spread the notion that Jewish people are only safe in Israel (and the phrase you original used is literally out of it) and the IHRA definition was created and its use in various countries was pushed by their lobbying to boost that story.
That survey you linked is extremely interesting but for reasons you might not be aware of: It was taken right in the middle of a broad political coup in Britain to oust the first left-of-center politician elected as leader of a mainstream political party in Britain since the 80s - Jeremy Corbyn, who was elected Labour Party leader by a majority of its members - and the core of that campaign, which involved the Press, politicians of the opposing party, politicians of the neoliberal faction within his party, and Israel-linked Jewish groups in Britain (since Corbyn had always been against the Occupation Of Palestine) was to spread the idea that he himself and the Labour party under his leadership were deeply anti-semitic.
That's actually how a Jewish Holocaust Survivor ended up accused of making anti-semitic statements - as part of spreading the idea that Corbyn was anti-semitic, to taint him by association it was widely reported was that he had sat on a panel in a conference with a person who made anti-semitic statements when he compared the actions of Israel to those of the Nazis, never mentioning that said person was an actual Jewish Holocaust Survivor but eventually that small detail they forgot to mention in the Press did come out.
That UK survey you linked was both influenced by and later used as a tool in that campaign (I vaguely remember it being mentioned by politicians within Corbyn's party trying to oust him), so not only had some people in Britain for political purposes an incentive to lie about their feelings of safety in Britain as Jews on that survey, but others who responded to it were influenced by the massive, sudden and out of nowhere panic about anti-semitism in Britain that the Press and most of the Political Class created as part of a political coup.
(As I said, I lived there for over a decade, and information from the UK is generally highly manipulated invariably by indirect means, and I don't mean just this - don't get me started on how the ruling class there manipulate Economic and Crime figures)
I have no doubt that many Jewish people perceive themselves as threatened by anti-semitism, especially in countries which artificially inflated the anti-semitism numbers by counting "criticism of Israel" as anti-semitism, but objectively the idea that Jews are not safe anywhere outside Israel because of anti-semitism is wholly out of proportion to reality, especially when their treatment in most of the West is compared to how just about every other minority gets treated over there (whilst not making wild panicky statements that they cannot live there) - I guess that, as you say, "it is difficult to acknowledge that people with other backgrounds are subject to hate" hence many Jews in countries were they are not discriminated against will have difficulty acknowledging what's happening to those of other minorities and thus seeing their own situation in the broader context, leading to them spreading alarmist takes about their situation entirely out proportion to reality, which serves the goals of Zionist propaganda.