Who is deserving of “safety” and who isn’t? Which violent threats—real or perceived—are given 22-point-font headlines, breathless coverage, and elevated from a mere news item or box checking exercise to a moral emergency in urgent need of government spending, countless media hits, grilling of candidates and politicians, sympathetic profiles of victims, and crackdowns on Free Speech?
In the context of the past three years, where “Jewish safety” has been used as a blunt instrument to silence criticism of Israel and criminalize speech, clearly one group, that of Jewish-Americans, has systematically been given priority over Muslim and Arab-Americans. Or at least, the alleged safety of Jewish-Americans, given that this narrative has little bearing on the real threats facing Jews in the United States.
A survey of the 10 most popular media outlets in the United States (New York Times, Washington Post, USAToday, Politico, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, CNN.com and CNN cable news and MSNBC/MSNOW) shows that “Jewish safety” and its variants have been mentioned roughly 42 times more than “Muslim/Arab safety” and its variants—at 254 mentions versus 6, over the past three years. And of the 6 mentions of “Muslim/Arab safety,” four of them were in a clause that also mentioned or referenced “Jewish safety.” As such, in the past three years, there have been only two stand-alone mentions of “Muslim/Arab safety” and related terms in the ten most popular media outlets.
(Note: This is obviously not the only way one can quantify the broader coverage of “safety,” but it is a statistically significant, apples-to-apples way to do so. Results of the survey can be found here.)
The New York Times was, predictably, the worst offender, with 61 mentions of “Jewish safety” and related phrases and zero mentions of “Muslim/Arab safety” and related phrases. CNN.com had 52 mentions versus 2, and the Big Three TV news sites, NBC News, ABC News, and CBS News, had 44 mentions of Jewish safety to 0 mentions for Muslim/Arab safety. Cable news network CNN was 32 mentions of “Jewish safety” versus “Muslim/Arab safety” while MSNBC/MSNOW was 30 versus zero.
Why the discrepancy? It’s not, of course, because bigotry and violence against Jews is 42 times greater than that leveled against Muslims. There is no evidence that Jewish Americans are at meaningfully greater risk of bigotry, either interpersonal or systemic, than Muslim Americans. Indeed, this narrative’s largest focus—that of US college campuses, where “Jewish safety” has been used as the pretext for an unprecedented crackdown on free speech and academic freedom—shows roughly equal incidents. The mandated studies from colleges detailing antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus consistently show either comparable levels of “fearing for their safety,” or Muslims felt greater fear, as was the case at Harvard. High-profile examples of anti-Muslim bigotry include: a Muslim Stanford student hospitalized in a suspected hate crime hit-and-run in November 2023; the shooting of three visibly Palestinian students in Vermont in December 2023; right-wing vigilantes attacking peaceful Gaza protesters with sticks, tear gas, and physical assaults on the UCLA campus in April and May 2024; and the stabbing of a Palestinian-American on the University of Texas campus as the assailant yelled out racial slurs in February 2024. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)’s annual Civil Rights Report documented 8,061 incidents of anti-Muslim bias in the first 6 months after Oct 7 2023 alone.
So if Jewish Americans are not under 42 times more of a threat than their Arab and Muslim counterparts, then why is their “safety” mentioned 4,200 percent more? The answer is that the US and Israel cynically use concerns about antisemitism—some valid, and some based on the false conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-zionism—to drum up support for the US and Israeli security state. (Meanwhile, those forms of antisemitism that are inconvenient to this narrative, for example, antisemitism rampant in Christian zionist movements and on the America First right get a free pass.) In contrast, the violence and bigotry facing Muslims are Arab complicates these interests. Thus, antisemitism—as defined by the US national security state and its attendant Israel Lobby—is a moral crisis in urgent need of nonstop coverage, while the latter is either a box to be checked or a matter ignored altogether.
These findings are consistent with coverage of antisemitism and Islamophobia detailed in my recent book, How To Sell A Genocide, that found a gap in coverage of these two bigotries, as they pertain to US college campuses, to be 63-to-1 in favor of antisemitism. As I noted in my data findings recap at The Intercept earlier this year, in the first 6 months of the genocide, there were 1,385 stand alone mentions of antisemitism in major US media and only 22 stand alone mentions of Islamophobia.
Zionist advocacy groups like the so-called Anti-Defamation League (ADL) make their living conflating opposition to zionism and Israel with hatred of Jewish people as such, something they repeatedly argue as being interchangeable—despite neutral scholarship showing this position being both obviously false and unworkable. This cynical weaponization of anti-racist politics not only inflates the rates of antisemitism by definition, it cheapens the real threat from the emerging America First right, and creates the groundwork for the criminalization of political speech currently unfolding in American universities. This dynamic has been aided by a compliant and credulous media that, in addition to systematically conflating Jewish identity with zionist political activism, has paid virtually no attention to the widespread bigotry aimed at Arab and Muslim Americans in the United States.
All this, of course, ignores the primary and most numerous victims of the past three years: the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, and Yemenis, whose hundreds of thousands of corpses and lost limbs provide the foundation of the stage for this zionist victim theater. It is these populations that have been starved, sieged, bombed, maimed, and slaughtered en masse since Israel unleashed its “military response” on October 7, 2023. Even discussions of parity between bigotry stateside targeting Jews and Muslim misses this primary point: that the entire charged media and campus environments are all in service of a project of displacement, apartheid, and extermination. This dynamic, this callous erasure of Palestinian victims in particular, who bear the ultimate brunt of this dishonest “Jewish safety” narrative, is the real journalistic malpractice in this asymmetrical narrative. This ignoring of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim bigotry is an obscene byproduct of this narrative, but it’s not its goal. Its goal is the indemnification of the state that is attempting to erase their relatives and co-religionists from the face of the earth. And that, of course, is the whole point of the inverted “safety” rhetoric that has come to define US coverage of Gaza over the past three years.