EXTREMISMWhat Do Anti-Jewish Hate, Anti-Muslim Hate Have in Common?
Researchers scrutinize various facets of these types of bias, and note sometimes they both reside within the same person.
Anti-Jewish hate is often connected to anti-Muslim hate, said political scientist Nazita Lajevardi, and she has the data to prove it.
“Our research … finds that there is a group of people who not only agree that Muslims contribute to all problems in American society, but who also agree that Jews contribute to all problems in American society,” she said.
Lajevardi laid out the evidence during the “Pernicious Prejudice: Scholarly Approaches to Antisemitism and Islamophobia” panel last week at Tsai Auditorium. Part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences initiative on civil discourse, the conversation featured four experts on these forms of animus. The event was hosted by Melani Cammett, Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the Department of Government and director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, which co-sponsored the event.
Lajevardi, an associate professor at Michigan State University and author of “Outsiders at Home: The Politics of American Islamophobia” (2020), drew from her 2023 paper concerning the shifting patterns of hate speech and hate crimes following the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where antisemitic rhetoric was prominently featured.
She and her co-authors analyzed information on hate incidents reported by the FBI, Anti-Defamation League, and Council on American-Islamic Relations. They also drew data from the mainstream social media site Reddit as well as more fringe platforms 4Chan and Gab.
Slurs against Muslims and Arabs decreased both on- and offline starting about one month before the rally, Lajevardi said. “What becomes incredibly important to know is that slurs against Jews increased right after the Unite the Right rally. In fact, slurs against Jews increased to 225 percent of their prior levels on Gab.”
Perhaps most revelatory were the researchers’ one-by-one scrapes of user feeds on the same platform. “What we found here is that people stopped mentioning Muslims and replaced those slurs with mentions toward Jews,” Lajevardi said. “We found a target substitution effect at the individual level.”
Kassra A.R. Oskooii, an associate professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware, spoke to the particularities of Islamophobia.
“Our research … finds that attitudes toward Muslims are distinct insofar as they’re closely associated with tropes of terrorism, violence, and existential threat on the one hand — and perceived cultural incompatibility with the American way of life on the other,” he said.
