JNS: Exchange of Letters Between ADL and Dr. Bostom & ZOA’s Klein On ADL’s Deletion of Some Muslim Antisemitism Data

(April 23, 2025 / JNS) To the editor:

Dr. Andrew Bostom and Morton Klein, the national president of the Zionist Organization of America, conflate facts and distort findings in their attempt to reach their preconceived conclusion that ADL is “hiding” data about antisemitism among Muslim communities (“ADL quietly purged data on European Muslim antisemitism,” April 18).

Nothing could be further from the truth. Our surveys have always tracked this data, and our aim has always been to be fully transparent with the findings, including those on antisemitism among Muslim communities. In fact, there’s a new feature on the updated Global 100 website to compare the findings specifically for Organization of Islamic Cooperation countries.

As our most recent Global 100 data made clear, Muslim majority countries and territories had the highest antisemitism index scores, with the West Bank and Gaza at 97%, Kuwait at 97% and Indonesia at 96%. These findings have all been made public on our website and are highlighted in our press release.

Since about 500 people were surveyed in most Western countries, the number of Muslims and other smaller religious groups, like Buddhists or Hindus, was too small to allow meaningful comparisons between countries.

ADL continues to track antisemitism worldwide, and we will make more findings available as they are validated. We are committed to addressing antisemitism wherever it is evident, based on the data. Bottom line: It is disingenuous of the authors to assert that ADL is covering up the very real issue of antisemitism in Muslim-majority countries or in countries with large Muslim populations.

Ambassador Marina Rosenberg

Senior vice president, international affairs

Anti-Defamation League

Dr. Andrew Bostom and Mort Klein respond:

Poet Ogden Nash referred to the “sin of omission,” deemed “by all right-thinking people, from Billy Sunday to Buddha,” as “not having done something you shuddha.” ADL’s response embodies that sin by totally ignoring the explicit point and concern of our analysis.

As the ADL confirmed in an email, the data on Western European Muslim antisemitism—specifically, from 2015, 2019 and 2023, available as recently as early March 2025—have been purged from the ADL’s Global 100 website. The ADL also fails to address our discussion of how it never even mentioned the Muslim sample in its 2004 Western European survey, which only came to light in a 2006 peer-reviewed report by Yale investigators, given the ADL dataset.

That analysis, statistically adjusted for a range of potential biases, found that Western European Muslims were eightfold more likely to be extremely antisemitic relative to Christians. Many independent studies have confirmed the data ADL has now scrubbed, revealing disproportionate Western European Muslim vs. non-Muslim antisemitism. Moreover, we just discovered that ADL similarly concealed 2017 data from 805 Muslim Americans—a very adequate oversample—demonstrating they had a more than 6-fold rate of antisemitism (38%) vs. a random sample of 3,600 non-Muslim Americans (6%).

There is nothing “disingenuous” about our factual revelations. Indeed, we would like to settle the matter about what the ADL’s own data on Western European and U.S. antisemitism actually reveals. Accordingly, we are requesting ADL’s raw Western European data from 2015, 2019, and 2023, as well as its 2017 U.S. data, which we will analyze by methods identical to those used in the 2006 Yale report.

View On Our Website