The director of America's oldest security agency has said that the American Jewish community “desperately” needs more support in the face of a rising wave of antisemitism.
In testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee in Washington DC, FBI director Christopher Wray said that his agency would be making tackling antisemitism a "National Priority" after recent violent incidents.
He said: “Antisemitism and the violence that comes out of it is a persistent and present fact.
"63% of religious hate crimes were targeting Jews, and It's targeting a group that makes up about 2.4% of the American population.”
“It’s a community that deserves and desperately needs our support because it’s getting hit from all sides,”
This year, FBI agents have foiled plots against synagogues in Colorado and New Jersey, but attackers were successful in a small number of cases, including in the Chasididic Jewish community of Lakewood, where an attacker injured several Jews in a car rampage, stabbing one.
In 2019, the Jewish community of Jersey City, a suburb of New York faced one of the deadliest terror attacks in recent years, when three customers of the JC Kosher Supermarket were killed by a pair with a history of antisemitism online.
Earlier this year, a British man took several hostages in a Texas synagogue after travelling to the US and illegally purchasing a firearm. He was eventually shot by FBI agents after an hourslong siege in the Congregation Beth Israel building.
Antisemitism watchdog the ADL recorded nearly 3000 antisemitic incidents across America in 2021, the highest number since the group began recording crimes in the 1970s.
These figures echo the results published by the Home Office earlier this year which showed that between March 2021 and March 2022, there were 1,919 hate crimes targeting Jews, an increase of 49 per cent from the previous year.
In 2021, Antisemitic hate crimes accounted for 23 per cent of all religious hate crimes in the UK, despite being less than 1 per cent of the total religious population.
