Anti-Semitic incidents were on the rise even before shooting

NEW YORK (AP):

Swastikas scrawled into Jewish students' notebooks. Headstones toppled and desecrated by vandals at Jewish cemeteries. Jews falsely blamed for challenges facing the nation.

The shooting rampage that killed 11 people at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday is being decried as the deadliest attack on Jews in US history, allegedly carried out by a virulently anti-Semitic gunman. The carnage, however unprecedented, is not an aberration.

Year after year, decade after decade, anti-Semitism proves to be among the most entrenched and pervasive forms of hatred and bigotry in the United States.

Jews make up only about two per cent of the US population, but in annual FBI data, they repeatedly account for more than half of the Americans targeted by hate crimes committed due to religious bias. The Anti-Defamation League identified 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents in the US in 2017, up from 1,267 in 2016, and also reported a major increase in anti-Semitic online harassment.

Anti-Semitism surfaces often in the research conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks various US hate groups, including neo-Nazis, white nationalists, skinheads and others.

"They're all anti-Semites - that's the tie that binds them," said Heidi Beirich, director of the centre's Intelligence Project. "They believe Jews are pulling the strings behind bad things happening in this country."

After hearing news of the Pittsburgh shooting, President Donald Trump speculated that the death toll would have been smaller if an armed guard had been in the building.

Stephen Cohen, a co-president of one of the congregations that used the Tree of Life Synagogue, said leaders of the facility had conducted active-shooter drills in the past and considered themselves well-trained in how to handle security crises. However, a rabbi emeritus at the synagogue, Alvin Berkun, said guards - while used during the major Jewish holy days - were not on duty Saturday.

Many US synagogues do employ armed guards; others have taken alternative measures to tighten security.

"I doubt there's a synagogue in the US that doesn't think seriously about security," said Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "It's really sad that you can't go to a house of worship without thinking you're taking your life in your hands."

Anti-Semitism has deep roots in many places far from the US, including Western Europe.

In Germany, which recorded 1,453 anti-Semitic incidents in 2017, police officers are often stationed outside synagogues and other Jewish institutions. Similarly in France, where anti-Semitic violence increased by 25 per cent last year, police and military patrols are deployed to help protect synagogues.