From the Community Security Trust, yesterday:
‘CST and the Antisemitism Policy Trust has published a new report, called Hidden Hate: What Google searches tell us about antisemitism today, that uses Google search data from 2004 to 2018 to show what people in the UK are searching for in relation to Jews, Zionism and the Holocaust, and what this tells us about antisemitic attitudes in Britain today.’
In February 2018, we had been able to see evidence from another CST report, contrary to Scottish media coverage, that anti-Semitic acts were much less common in Scotland:
‘There had been 1 382 incidents in the UK in 2017 up 3% from 1 346 in 2016. Of these, only 16 had occurred in Scotland, up 1 from 15 in 2016. With 8% of the population, only 1.15% of all anti-Semitic incidents took place in Scotland. ‘Incidents’ included tweets and shouts from passing cars. In the report, no cases of physical assault in Scotland were reported. Only two examples were offered, one was a tweet and the other was an insult from a shopkeeper angered by Israeli attacks in Gaza.’
https://cst.org.uk/public/data/file/a/b/IR17.pdf
A year later, this Google-search based survey tells a similar story. See the map above.
How useful is this kind of research? Here’s what the researchers say:
‘What can the internet tell us about antisemitism in the United Kingdom? It has been shown that people are remarkably honest when they search for information online. Their Google searches and queries reveal interests, prejudices and hatreds that they might keep hidden from friends, family members, neighbours, surveys and even from themselves. They have been shown to share their health secrets, sexual preferences, and hostility towards other groups.’
For more detail see:
https://cst.org.uk/public/data/file/a/b/APT%20Google%20Report%202019.pdf
For related evidence and media distortion of it, see
Herald fakes it with SNP Government failing to protect Scotland’s Jews shock
Abuse of women and the disabled far higher in England than in Scotland
Glasgow Herald’s nauseating attempt to distort truth about Scotland and racist violence
*Term used by UCAS
Talking-up Scotland 
Not too surprised about this. As far as I am aware in Scotland what counts is “who you are” rather than “what you are” – the quality of your soul rather than which temple you go to or how much you earn.
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Hi John, thanks for the link to the anti-Semitism Policy Trust Report. I found it absolutely fascinating and was pleased to find that, apparently, proportionately there is less of a problem with anti-Semitism in Scotland than in some of the other non-Scottish parts of the UK. That is not to diminish the fact that there is still a problem in Scotland, but as a minimum, it might be considered that it could be worse, as shown elsewhere.
Amongst some of the information I found most interesting, or maybe that’s just me, is that, though Google claim they do not collect information on the political alignment of individual “customers”, anti-Semitic searches can be defined geographically, allowing search data to be compared between predominately Labour-voting areas and predominately Tory-voting areas, and that there seems to be no correlation between these.
Also, “Jews are the fourth most frequent subject of searches for offensive jokes online in the United Kingdom, behind fat people, black people and gay people.
Victims of joke searches in the United Kingdom according to search terms used:
1. Fat
2. Black People
3. Gays
4. Jews
5. Blondes
6. Mexicans”
As a gay man, I’m not surprised that we’re well up the list, but Blondes and Mexicans? How?
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It is no surprise to see that Scotland is less anti-Semitic than England, but research that equates attitudes to the political philosophy of Zionism with the racism that is anti-Semitism is always going to be misleading. For example we are seeing Haredi Orthodox Jews who are anti-Zionist being included in anti-Semitism figures in some research which, to be fair, like something out of 1984.
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