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Only 54 percent of the people surveyed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in a massive, global poll have ever heard of the Holocaust. Even more disturbing, 32 percent of these believe the event to have been greatly exaggerated or a myth. That's something worth worrying about.
The ADL published the results today as part of a report on the attitudes towards Jews in over 100 countries. The ADL asked more than 53,000 people across the globe to respond to eleven anti-Semitic stereotypes attributed to Jews, including "Jews have too much power in the business world," "People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave," "Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust," and others. Those questioned were asked to respond with either "probably true," or "probably false." Those who answered "probably true" to six out of the eleven statements were counted as anti-Semitic in the survey, which, among other things, looked at the global breakdown of such attitudes.
Overall, the ADL found that 26 percent of respondents harbor anti-Semitic attitudes. About nine percent of American respondents agreed with six of the eleven statements, and the two that were most often mentioned were "Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country/the countries they live in" and "Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust," suggesting that much of the ill-feelings are wrapped up in attitudes toward Israel. A number of European countries, like the UK (eight percent) Denmark (nine percent) the Netherlands (five percent) and Sweden (four percent) had low rates of anti-Semitism and also positively responded to these two statements most often.