27% of religious hate crimes in Sweden are directed at its small Jewish community
(JTA) – Anti-Semitic incidents accounted for 27% of all religious hate crimes by 2020 in Sweden, where Jews make up 0.1% of the population.
Hate crimes against Muslims, who make up at least 8% of the population, accounted for 51% of the hate crimes against religious groups that the police documented in 2020, according to the Crime Prevention Council. report published last month. Anti-Christian hate crimes accounted for 11% of hate crimes against religious groups.
In absolute numbers, 170 anti-Semitic hate crimes and 328 anti-Muslim crimes were documented in 2020.
The remaining 12% of hate crimes involving religion were either against members of other religions or within the same religion, according to the report.
The Crime Prevention Council issues a hate crime report every two years. Although the figures for anti-Semitism in the 2020 report are significantly lower than the 280 incidents reported in 2018, the Council warned of structural changes in the latest report and warned that there may be no reduction in the actual incidence of anti-Semitic crimes.
Crimes related to religion accounted for 638, or 18%, of the total number of incidents that are assessed as hate crimes in Sweden in 2020.
Racist incidents against blacks accounted for 15%, or 3,398 hate crimes. The attacks on the LGBT population were 8% of the total number.
Incidents that were included in the 2020 report included a gathering of right-wing extremist activists outside a synagogue in Norrköping on Yom Kippur. The men waved the Nordic Resistance Movement’s flags outside the synagogue, which was then empty. In recent years, Jewish leaders in Sweden have warned that their society is threatened both by the far right and by Muslim extremists.
Sweden, a nation with about 10 million people, has about 14,900 people who identify themselves as Jews, according to a 2020 demographic study of European Jewry.