What the UK media won't report: Poll reveals Palestinians are most antisemitic people in the world (UPDATE)

How would you characterize someone who believes that Jews have too much power over the global media and global political affairs, that Jews are responsible for most of the world wars and that people only hate Jews because of the way Jews behave? 
Wouldn’t it be fair to label such a person an extreme anti-Semite? 
Ok, now let’s suppose that 93% of this person’s fellow citizens feel the same way?
Wouldn’t it be fair to say that such a place is plagued by endemic Jew hatred?
Well, no doubt the mainstream media would agree with these characterizations – if, of course, the country which holds such repulsive views were European.  But, as we have documented repeatedly, even the most extreme and often violent manifestations of such Judeophobia within the Arab world rarely pique the interest of putatively anti-racist news editors. 
The tendency of the UK media to bury news which paints an unflattering picture of groups deemed a priori to be ‘victims’ – not possessing “privilege‘ – will be illustrated by the dearth of MSM stories on the results from a new international survey commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League which gauged antisemitism in over 100 countries. As with previous polls conducted by ADL, respondents who believe that at least 6 out of the 11 antisemitic statements (below) are “probably true” are considered to hold antisemitic views. The Index Score for each country represents the percentage of citizens in that country who answered “probably true” to a majority of the statements.
Here are the statements:
statements
So, how antisemitic are the Palestinians?
Well, 93% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza surveyed answered “probably true” to a majority of these statements, the largest percentage of any country in the world which was surveyed.
new graph
Remarkably, Palestinians are not only dramatically more antisemitic than the citizens in every Western country surveyed (for instance only 8% of UK citizens, and 9% of Americans, are antisemitic) but are even more antisemitic than citizens in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Iran.
Here are some highlights:

  • 88% of Palestinians believe Jews have too much control over global affairs.
  • 89% believe Jews have too much power over international financial markets
  • 88% of Palestinians believe that Jews have too much control over the global media
  • 78% of Palestinians believe that Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.
  • 87% of Palestinians believe that people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.

We decided to highlight these statements (and not the results of the other statements), because these especially represent antisemitic tropes which overlap perfectly with the ideas laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and can’t be fairly characterized as anything other than the historical, conspiracy-driven racism which fueled pogroms, massacres, and even genocide throughout the long history of antisemitism.
Palestinian antisemitism is arguably one of the more under reported political pathologies of our day, and the failure of presumably sophisticated Middle East commentators to grapple and deal honestly with the injurious impact of this enduring hatred contributes to the public’s egregious misunderstanding of both the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the endemic backwardness and underdevelopment within Palestinian society.
The failure of the Guardian and other UK media sites to report on Palestinian antisemitism not only harms Jews – the object of their hatred – but, as Walter Russell Mead explained, such crippling irrational antipathies also do grave harm to Palestinians themselves.  “Attributing global events to the machinations of an all-conquering Jewish conspiracy”, argued Mead, “is the sign of profound mental and social failure—and a harbinger of more failures and errors to come”.  “Societies”, he continued, that are “in thrall to this kind of darkness…and whose intellectual leaders cannot understand how power works in the modern world…are unlikely to develop the vigorous, forward-looking and competent civil societies that can promote true democracy”. 
Even in the event a Palestinian state is created, it is difficult to imagine how such political sovereignty will result in the diminution of such medieval thinking about Jews and their alleged toxic impact on the world.
Those who advocate on behalf of Palestinian rights and yet don’t confront this crippling pathos occupying their collective consciousness are creating an environment whereby Palestinians have no incentive to embark on a path to real progress, and thus will almost certainly be consigned to generation after generation of political, social and economic failure.

UPDATE: The Guardian did in fact publish a datablog report on the ADL’s findings, here.

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