ADL: Anti-Semitic Incidents Spiked Last Year, Trend Worse This Year

Northeast Philadelphia Police Dective Timothy McIntyre, center, dusts one of the many headstones that were knocked down, for fingerprints as Dectective Nick McReynolds, left, looks on on Sunday afternoon. Vandals strike the Jewish Mount Carmel Cemetery at Frankford and Cheltenham Avenues. Awaiting police details. 02/26/2017  MICHAEL BRYANT / Staff Photographer
Northeast Philadelphia Police Dective Timothy McIntyre, center, dusts one of the many headstones that were knocked down, for fingerprints as Dectective Nick McReynolds, left, looks on on Sunday afternoon. Vandals str... Northeast Philadelphia Police Dective Timothy McIntyre, center, dusts one of the many headstones that were knocked down, for fingerprints as Dectective Nick McReynolds, left, looks on on Sunday afternoon. Vandals strike the Jewish Mount Carmel Cemetery at Frankford and Cheltenham Avenues. Awaiting police details. 02/26/2017 MICHAEL BRYANT / Staff Photographer MORE LESS
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The Anti-Defamation League reported Monday that anti-Semitic incidents in the United States had increased 34 percent in 2016 and were on track for an even greater increase in 2017.

The ADL recorded a total of 1,266 anti-Semitic incidents in 2016 in its annual audit of anti-Semitic incidents, compared to 942 in 2015. During the first quarter of 2017, it recorded 541 incidents, a 127 percent increase over the same period in 2016. The organization noted that 369 incidents in 2016 occurred in November and December alone.

The audit includes incidents of vandalism, harassment and assault, both criminal and non-criminal, and is tallied from reports by victims, law enforcement and community leaders, the ADL said in a press release Monday.

Among the instances of harassment in 2017 were 161 bomb threats against Jewish institutions. An Israeli teen was arrested in late March as the primary suspect in the bulk of those threats. On Friday, the Justice Department announced that Michael Ron David Kadar, 18, a joint U.S.-Israeli citizen, had been charged with “making threatening calls to Jewish Community Centers in Florida, conveying false information to police dispatch regarding harm to private residents in Georgia, and cyberstalking.”

The DOJ noted in its press release that “the investigation into violent threats to Jewish Community Centers, schools and other institutions across this nation continues, including an ongoing investigation into potential hate crime charges.”

The ADL included three incidents of Jewish cemetery desecration among its count of vandalism incidents in 2017. After one of those incidents, in which hundreds of headstones were reportedly damaged at the Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Philadelphia in late February, White House press secretary Sean Spicer condemned the vandalism in his daily briefing.

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