UK anti-Semitic incidents at near-record high despite decrease, watchdog says

British Jewry’s main watchdog on anti-Semitism recorded 727 hate incidents in the first half of 2018, the second-highest six-monthly total on record.

The report by the Community Security Trust, or CST, for this year’s first six months constitutes an 8 percent drop from the corresponding period last year, CST says in the document published Thursday.

In the first half of 2017, CST recorded 786 incidents, constituting the highest total CST has ever recorded during any six months since the organization began monitoring incidents in 2984. During that entire year, a total of 1,414 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded — the highest tally so far.

British media have devoted unprecedented attention to anti-Semitism since 2015, following the election of Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labour party. A hard left-wing politician, he has called Hezbollah and Hamas his friends and has defended an anti-Semitic mural in 2013, among other scandals involving his party’s policies on anti-Semitism.

— JTA