This meme from Occupy Democrats says that anti-Semitic hate crimes rose by 60% last year, which brings visions of the Klan and neo-Nazis running amok In Trump’s America. This stat has been picked up by many mainstream media outlets as well, after a report from the ADL. However, after examining that report, this characterization seems quite misleading.

-The ADL reported 1,986 anti-Semitic hate crimes in 2017, up 57% from 1,267 in 2016. They break these hate crimes into 3 categories; vandalism, harassment and assault. Only the vandalism category had any meaningful increase.

-Most of these vandalism events occurred at schools and universities, and mainly involved swastikas being drawn. Vandalism events deemed hate crimes included things like windows broken at a Jewish school’s synagogue and nonsensical graffiti like “f*** you Nazi Jews”. These are despicable acts, but often it’s unclear who the perpetrators were, or their motivations. More likely they are immature teenagers than seasoned Klan members.

-Additionally, there have been several high profile cases where these sorts of graffiti were found to be hoaxes, like the incident at a Michigan university where a black man ended up being responsible for a series of KKK graffiti that caused much grief.

-As for the harassment category, the ADL decided to count bomb threats, which included over 150 incidents from a single person! This was committed by an Israeli-US teen, who was Jewish, that received international attention once he was caught.

-Another dozen bomb threats came from Juan Thompson, the deranged former journalist, who was harassing his ex-girlfriend. Ironically, he was trying to get her in trouble for framing him, by pretending she made the threats. These two incidents had nothing to do with being anti-Semitic, yet resulted in 163 of the total reported hate crimes, which puts into question the entire methodology. Without these bomb threats, harassment was roughly the same as 2016.

-What about assaults? This seems to be the most important category, and what most would envision when they hear “hate crimes”. Assaults actually DECREASED from 36 to 19, a 47% drop. Less than 1% of these hate crimes involved assault.

-A different meme could tout the plunge in anti-Semitic assaults in 2017 and claim the opposite narrative here, making it misleading.