The ADL Is Reporting A ‘Surge’ In Anti-Semitism is FAKE NEWS

David Bernstein Debunks ADL Claim Of ‘60% Increase’ in Anti-Semitic Acts Since Trump

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
October 31, 2018

George Mason University School of Law professor David Bernstein of The Volokh Conspiracy writes at Reason:

Those who wish to blame Trump [for an alleged surge in anti-Semitism] have an ace in the hole, an Anti-Defamation League study that purports to show an almost 60 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents between 2016 and 2017, which is implicitly blamed on Trump. This study has been cited on over and over in response to Pittsburgh.

There are several problems with relying on this study for Trump-bashing, however. The first is that the study includes 193 incidents of bomb threats to Jewish institutions as anti-Semitic incidents, even though by the time the ADL published the study, it had been conclusively shown that the two perpetrators of the bomb threats were not motivated by anti-Semitism. One can only guess why the ADL chose to inflate its statistics in this way, but none of the explanations speak well of it.

Second, the ADL report itself acknowledges that some of the rise in incidents may simply be due to better reporting (“more people are reporting incidents to ADL than ever before”).

Third, “college campuses saw a total of 204 incidents in 2017, compared to 108 in 2016.” How many of those incidents emanating from traditional forms of anti-Semitism that one might associate with Trumpian populism, and how many from leftist/pro-Palestinian sources? The ADL doesn’t say.

Fourth, the ADL counts ambiguous incidents as anti-Semitic incidents, so long as they were reported as such. For example, the report states, “Jewish graves or cemeteries were desecrated seven times in 2017. The desecration of Jewish headstones is a classic anti-Semitic act employed for hundreds of years. The majority of the cemetery desecrations occurred in the first months of the year, at the same time as the bomb threats were called in to Jewish institutions, which contributed to a sense that the Jewish American community was under siege.” The problem is that desecrations of cemeteries of all faiths is not uncommon, and are often the product of either bored teenagers or vagrants. In fact, at least some of the cemetery incidents counted by the ADL were ultimately determined by police not to be anti-Semitic in origin. The desecraton of a cemetery in St. Louis got a particularly large amount of attention. The police eventually caught the perpetrator, and determined that he was just “mad and drunk,” not anti-Semitic. The ADL has not updated its study or press release to reflect such facts. Other questionable “anti-Semitic” incidents I’ve seen reported include graffitti with a swastika and “TRUMP.” Is the “author” supporting “Trump the Nazi” or attacking Trump by accusing him of being a Nazi? My inclination would in most cases be to suspect the latter, but surely it’s at least unclear.

None of which is to say that we can rule out a “surge,” or at least a significant increase in anti-Semitic incidents during and perhaps because of the Trump administration. But the ADL study everyone is relying on to prove this doesn’t show any such thing.

Read Bernstein’s full report.

As Bernstein notes, nearly all of the JCC bomb threats were carried out by 19-year-old Israeli-American Michael Kaydar and a few copycat threats were called in by Juan Thompson, who is African-American.

Reason 2017 · Sometimes contrarian · Often libertarian · Always independent

Has There Been a Surge of Anti-Semitism Under and Because of Trump?

In short, probably not. And about that ADL study everyone is citing...

David E. Bernstein|Oct. 28, 2018 7:14 pm

In the aftermath of the horrific murders at a synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday, a good part of the media, social and otherwise, wishes to blame Donald Trump. Surely, Trump's inflammatory rhetoric doesn't exactly calm societal waters, and his remarks on Charlottesville, though often exaggerated by hostile sources, did not exactly come across as a rousing denunciation of white supremacy. Nevertheless, there are some barriers to blaming Trump for anti-Semitic acts specifically.

First, Pittsburgh was hardly the first time an anti-Semitic gunman murdered people in a Jewish insitution in the U.S. Between the Clinton and Bush II years, there was a shooting at a Jewish Community Center in L.A., a shooting at an El Al counter at LAX, a shooting at the Jewish Federation in Seattle, a shooting at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, and a shooting at the Holocaust Museum. Lower levels of vandalism and violence have been even more common. It's true that the death toll in Pittsburgh was especially high, but that's just happenstance; any of the other shoooters would have been happy to kill as many or more. [UPDATE: It's worth noting that many commentators, such as Franklin Foer in The Atlantic, simply ignore these past crimes, and act as if the Pittsburgh murders were some unique event in recent American Jewish history.]

Second, the Trump administration includes some very strong opponents of anti-Semitism. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has fought anti-Semitism in the world body, one of the world's primary purveyors of it, with a vigor and effectiveness not seen since at least Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Trump appointee Ken Marcus, head of the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, has devoted much of his career to fighting anti-Semitism (but was confirmed over the objections of Senate Democrats, some of whom thought he was too opposed to anti-Semitismtoo willing to identify certain types of Israel-bashing as a form of anti-Semitism).

(Some would add here that the Trump administration has been the most pro-Israel in history. While true, I'm not sure that this affects domestic American anti-Semitism one way or another, except perhaps to especially irritate anti-Semites.)

Those who wish to blame Trump have an ace in the hole, an Anti-Defamation League study that purports to show an almost 60 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents between 2016 and 2017, which is implicitly blamed on Trump. This study has been cited on over and over in response to Pittsburgh.

There are several problems with relying on this study for Trump-bashing, however. The first is that the study includes 193 incidents of bomb threats to Jewish institutions as anti-Semitic incidents, even though by the time the ADL published the study, it had been conclusively shown that the two perpetrators of the bomb threats were not motivated by anti-Semitism. One can only guess why the ADL chose to inflate its statistics in this way, but none of the explanations speak well of it.

Second, the ADL report itself acknowledges that some of the rise in incidents may simply be due to better reporting ("more people are reporting incidents to ADL than ever before").

Third, "college campuses saw a total of 204 incidents in 2017, compared to 108 in 2016." How many of those incidents emanating from traditional forms of anti-Semitism that one might associate with Trumpian populism, and how many from leftist/pro-Palestinian sources? The ADL doesn't say.

Fourth, the ADL counts ambiguous incidents as anti-Semitic incidents, so long as they were reported as such. For example, the report states, "Jewish graves or cemeteries were desecrated seven times in 2017. The desecration of Jewish headstones is a classic anti-Semitic act employed for hundreds of years. The majority of the cemetery desecrations occurred in the first months of the year, at the same time as the bomb threats were called in to Jewish institutions, which contributed to a sense that the Jewish American community was under siege." The problem is that desecrations of cemeteries of all faiths is not uncommon, and are often the product of either bored teenagers or vagrants. In fact, at least some of the cemetery incidents counted by the ADL were ultimately determined by police not to be anti-Semitic in origin. The desecraton of a cemetery in St. Louis got a particularly large amount of attention. The police eventually caught the perpetrator, and determined that he was just "mad and drunk," not anti-Semitic. The ADL has not updated its study or press release to reflect such facts. Other questionable "anti-Semitic" incidents I've seen reported include graffitti with a swastika and "TRUMP." Is the "author" supporting "Trump the Nazi" or attacking Trump by accusing him of being a Nazi? My inclination would in most cases be to suspect the latter, but surely it's at least unclear.

None of which is to say that we can rule out a "surge," or at least a significant increase in anti-Semitic incidents during and perhaps because of the Trump administration. But the ADL study everyone is relying on to prove this doesn't show any such thing.

UPDATE: The most-read article in the Washington Post this morning is this piece by Dana Milbank. To my lack of suprise, he both ignores all the previous shooting incidents at American Jewish institutions and backs up a rather hysterical tone with, you guessed it, the ADL study.

Some of my friends tell me that adding reasonable context to the Pittsburgh shooting "excuses" Trump, and thus makes future incidents more likely. On the contrary, I think that reasoned criticism of Trump is useful—for example, noting that Trump's conspiratorial mindset inadvertently feeds anti-Semitism because the latter is a product of the same mindset, or that Trump should have unequivocally rejected support from white nationalists during his campaign, or that Trump is too narcissistic to apologize when he retweeted from anti-Semitic websites, and so on, though I would draw the line at blaming Trump for the incident, unless one wants to also explain why there were similar shootings before Trump, and also talk about all the other currents of anti-Semitism on both left and right that contribute to Jews' being by far the most targeted religious group for hate crimes for many years running.

Meanwhile, Trump's hardcore supporters are ever-alert for "fake news." Exaggeration, double-standards, failure to provide context, and blatant falsehoods about Trump simply feed their narrative that all news is fake news. And citing the obviously flawed ADL study not only ultimately is counter-productive to legitimate criticism of Trump, it also ultimately will highlight the extent to which the ADL itself has dipped its toe into the fake news business (it's not the only example). The ADL should be taken to task for its malfeasance in spreading dubious statistics, not relied upon, if one wants to retain the ADL's credibility in the long-run.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Putting aside the question of an increase in "incidents," has there been an increase in anti-Semitic attitudes among Americans that correlates with Trump? Are Trump supporters disproportionately like to be anti-Semites? I've been asking those who insist that both those things are true to provide me with survey or other data backing these claims. Yes, data, not anecdotes, not feelings. I haven't had any responses.

David Bernstein is a professor at the George Mason University School of Law. He is the author of Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform (University of Chicago Press) and Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (Duke University Press).

The ADL Is Reporting A ‘Surge’ In Anti-Semitism, But Do The Facts Bear Out The Headline?

The ADL report cites 163 bomb threats to Jewish organizations. Of these threats, 150 were perpetrated by a single Jewish man.

By Chad Felix Greene

MARCH 6, 2018

The Anti-Defamation League is reporting a “surge” of anti-Semitism swept the U.S. in 2017, based on their finding that anti-Semitic incidents rose 57 percent last year. But a closer look at the facts doesn’t quite bear out the headlines its generating.

“This is what happens when the President of the United States embraces white supremacists and does not decry racists,” Soledad O’Brien tweeted about the study.

“While the tragedy in Charlottesville highlighted this trend, it was not an aberration,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement on the study. “Every single day, white supremacists target members of the Jewish community — holding rallies in public, recruiting on college campuses, attacking journalists on social media, and even targeting young children.”

The available data are certainly far from comforting, but not so easy to interpret as the ADL and others would suggest. For instance, even though the number of incidents the ADL found did rise sharply, the total number of incidents could still be considered small — 1,986 in 2017. In another example, a vast majority of more than a hundred bomb threats were perpetrated by one Jewish man. While instances of anti-Semitism do appear to be on the rise, but the reality isn’t so bad as ADL suggests.

The ADL provides a selected list of 1,215 examples of the incidents on the report’s website. This chart is composed of police reports, media reports and individual reports to the ADL directly. The ADL also watches social media and interviews individuals who report anti-Semitic events on the various platforms, although it is unclear how well these reports are vetted. When sorted, roughly 73 percent of the incidents involved a form of vandalism, with about 60 percent of the incidents involving swastikas. The remaining examples are a wide range of Nazi and anti-Semitic graffiti, anti-Semitic fliers, stickers or literature and various harassment to Jewish organizations including emails, phone calls and social media posts.

Greenblatt addressed the report’s finding of a 94 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in K-12 schools. “Certainly, when it comes to kids, they repeat what they hear,” he said in an interview with NPR. “So as we see a decrease in civility and an increase in intolerance, no one should be surprised that that is infecting the environment where our children learn.”

The study states, “Although the largest number of incidents typically occur in public areas, in 2017 K-12 schools surpassed public areas as the locations with the most anti-Semitic incidents, at 457 incidents being reported in K-12 schools …”

About 20 percent of total incidents provided indicated a form of verbal harassment, with a little over half described as “bullying.” Several examples even describe teachers experiencing anti-Semitic attacks from students. About 50 examples describe Holocaust jokes and attacks, with nearly a dozen involving the Nazi salute by students. A half-dozen claim students threw coins or money at a Jewish peer. One Pro-Trump Jewish student was called a “Nazi” by fellow students.

Of the incidents beyond the schoolyard, the majority are anecdotal reports. There are instances of random drivers yelling at Jewish passersby with all manner of anti-Semitic insults. There are assorted crazy people shouting anti-Jewish conspiracy theories outside courthouses or harassing rabbis. A few standing outside holding signs or shouting anti-Semitic things at no one in particular. Multiple examples claim that various individuals in the customer service industry, from cashiers to airplane attendants to taxi drivers attacked Jewish customers with slurs or insults. Many overheard what they considered anti-Semitic conversation, or heard individuals use phrases or comments they felt were offensive but were not directed towards them.

Many examples are as vague as “Jewish woman harassed online” or “Anti-Semitic comment on YouTube” and the ADL reported they received a single rude phone call. One remarkable example states: “A Jewish lawyer was asked by a judge if he had horns under his kippah. The judge also made other anti-Semitic remarks.”

Swastikas have a deeply disturbing impact on Jewish people and therefore whenever one is discovered it sends ripples of panic, outrage and fear throughout Jewish communities. The difficulty is that the symbol is provocative, regardless of whether it’s malicious, a prank or a false report.

An op-ed in a Canada paper cited swastika graffiti as the most common hate crime in Ontario, but quoted the head of the local hate crime unit saying most of them likely weren’t motivated by anti-semitism. “The majority of the 20 swastikas investigated by Hamilton police last year were probably made by young people who drew them because they were easy and provocative rather than because the culprits are anti-Semitic,” the piece reads, attributing the sentiment to Det. Paul Corrigan.

In College Park Maryland in 2017, an African-American man was charged with spray-painting a swastika inside a resident hall at the University of Maryland. Also in 2017, in Upstate New York, a Jewish man was charged after painting the symbol on his own home and reporting it as a hate crime. Another student at Beloit College in Wisconsinwas arrested after causing a panic involving the police due to multiple religious and racial slurs painted himself on his own dorm room door.

The ADL found that the majority of the incidents happened in states with large Jewish populations, with the biggest numbers in New York followed by California, Florida, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and on America’s most liberal college campuses, including Princeton University, Berkley, Georgetown University, and Rutgers University. The Daily Beast reported a shocking level of anti-Semitic hate at Berkley in 2015. Alongside swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti, they report, “…during the conflict in Gaza this summer, he also came across sidewalk graffiti on campus that exhorted “Death to Israel” and “Kill all the Jews.”

AMCHA, a Jewish organization stated that their 2015 study “…provided for the first time a quantitative account of the prevalence of antisemitic activity at schools most popular with Jewish students… [and] the presence of anti-Zionist student groups, faculty boycotters and anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) activity are each strong predictors of anti-Jewish hostility.” In the first half of 2016, “287 incidents involving either Targeting of Jewish Students for Harm, Antisemitic Expression, BDS Activity, or some combination of these… 64 (57%) of these schools had incidents involving one or more kinds of these activities.” The study also confirmed that anti-Semitic incidents were more common when faculty members engaged in anti-Israel boycotting.

In terms of the “rise of anti-Semitism” on college campuses, unfortunately the ADL only seems concerned with White Supremacy rather than the more common and academically condoned anti-Semitism from the Left.

The most popular schools for Jewish students also happen to coincide with the above mentioned states and schools with the largest number of anti-Semitic incidents. The BDS movement, the Anti-Zionist movement and pro-Palestinian activity are almost exclusively Left-leaning or Islamic driven efforts on college campuses as well. The co-founder of the Women’s March, Tamika D. Mallory attended a remarkably anti-Semitic event by Louis Farrakhan and praised him on social media. Linda Sarsour, another leader in the Women’s movement, openly embraces the above anti-Israel sentiment and has expressed anti-Semitic stereotypes on “Jews in the media.” Often the rhetoric from a White Nationalist or Pro-Palestinian advocate are indistinguishable. The ADL has addressed many anti-Semitic and anti-Israel positions taken by Black Lives Matter leaders and supporters and listed the Nation of Islam and multiple Imams perpetuating anti-Jewish hatred in their study.

The ADL report cites 163 bomb threats to Jewish organizations. Of these threats, 150 were perpetrated by a single Jewish man. An additional eight came from a known copy-cat with a history of violent and unpredictable behavior. The ADL justified including these examples, saying, “ADL included the bomb threats in the total count because, regardless of the motivation of any specific perpetrator, Jewish communities were repeatedly traumatized by these assaults on their institutions and threats to their safety. … These crimes meet the textbook definition of hate crimes: Jewish community institutions were intentionally-selected and targeted — and the bomb threats sparked widespread fear at these institutions, causing evacuations, significant service disruptions, program cancellations, and deep community anxiety.”

There were several disturbing incidents across the country of Jewish cemeteries being desecrated or tombstones knocked over. These appear to be of legitimate malicious intent or done as a cruel prank. Muslim and Christian groups came together with Jewish organizations to rebuild them, and Vice President Mike Pence’s visited the desecrated Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in University City, Missouri, in February.

Assaults decreased from 36 incidents in 2016 to 19 in 2017. Often these occurred to random Jewish citizens who were verbally and then physically attacked by strangers. People threw rocks at synagogue windows and a Jewish-themed children’s school bus was set on fire. A legally blind, 62-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman was attacked in Brooklyn, New York, by an unknown assailant who shouted obscenities to her and violently pulled off her wig.

There certainly seems to have been a rise in White Nationalism and racist worldviews. Paul Nehlen, a Republican running against House Speaker Paul Ryan, posted a hate list of Jews he accused of publicly attacking him (of which I was included). Nehlen has been a vocally anti-Semitic voice, gathering a disturbingly large following on social media, although he was recently banned from Twitter permanently. But pretending the issue is exclusively in this domain denies a great deal of evidence as to how anti-Jewish bigotry impacts our country.

While the efforts to collect reports of attacks are important, it is equally important that these examples represent real concerns. There is no doubt that in a country of 350 million people there will be crazy, violent, bigoted and irrational individuals. Jews seem particularly easy to target whenever social tensions rise across the country and anti-Semitism has taken on an edgy appeal to those wishing to simply rebel and shock society. The problem however, is when the leading voice in reporting these threats include petty, trivial, absurd and even false or misrepresented claims alongside real instances of hate, it destroys the credibility of all who report.

There are plenty of anti-Semitic experiences throughout the country, from both the Right and the Left, to provide us a clear understanding of the issue without padding the numbers. It is vital that when reporting on student bullying or harassment of Jewish citizens, we dedicate time to understanding and detailing the attacks rather than taking them at face value.

There are important questions to ask.

Are any individuals who report discovering anti-Semitic graffiti vetted before included in the report? Anyone working at any business in the country found to be harassing Jews or using anti-Semitic language is likely to be fired immediately, so where are these instances occurring? How is anti-Semitism occurring at such high levels in public schools without intervention or media reporting? Why are reports of significant events like cemetery desecration held in equal concern with abusive online comments?

Just as anti-Semitic graffiti, literature, posts or fliers can represent a real threat, a prank, or a self-imposed hoax for attention, so too can incidents of harassment or discrimination. But we need real numbers of substantiated events without political bias or selective inclusion of offenders to fully understand the problem. The ADL has a responsibility to give us a true and accurate portrayal of what’s going on. But unfortunately, they appear to only be more interested in perpetuating a political narrative.

Chad Felix Greene is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of the "Reasonably Gay: Essays and Arguments" series and is a social writer focusing on truth in media, conservative ideas and goals, and true equality under the law. You can follow him on Twitter @chadfelixg.

About Those Misleading ADL Statistics On Anti-Semitism (And Right-Wing Violence)

JOHN SEXTONPosted at 1:01 pm on October 31, 2018

After GQ reporter Julia Ioffe appeared on CNN and claimed Donald Trump had radicalized more people than ISIS, she quickly backtracked and apologized for exaggerating. She then offered what she thought was a more solid, factual basis for blaming President Trump for the shooting in Pittsburgh: “According to the ADL, the number of anti-Semitic attacks has jumped by nearly 60% in the first year that Donald Trump was in office.” But that’s not any more accurate than her claim about ISIS, as Robby Soave at Reason pointed out yesterday.

SEE ALSO: Documents: Gillum stuck taxpayers with travel costs for fundraising

The ADL statistic captures anti-Semitic “incidents,” which is a much broader category of behavior than “hate crimes” or “attacks.” Incidents include things like bullying in schools—which is bad, but usually not indicative of criminal conduct…

The ADL report came up with three subcategories of anti-Semitic incidents: vandalism, harassment, and assault. An increase in vandalism accounts for much of the overall increase, but Bernstein doubts that all of the included incidents were actually examples of anti-Semitism. The harassment category also saw an increase, largely due to a series of bomb threats against Jewish institutions in the U.S. made by a disturbed Israeli teen. It’s not at all clear that these threats were motivated by anti-Semitism.

Finally, the assault category saw a 47 percent decrease.

Soave also refers to this article at the Volokh Conspiracy by David Bernstein which suggests the ADL report is intentionally misleading, at least with regard to the bomb threats against Jewish Centers (something I wrote about extensively when it was happening):

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There are several problems with relying on this study for Trump-bashing, however. The first is that the study includes 193 incidents of bomb threats to Jewish institutions as anti-Semitic incidents, even though by the time the ADL published the study, it had been conclusively shown that the two perpetrators of the bomb threats were not motivated by anti-Semitism. One can only guess why the ADL chose to inflate its statistics in this way, but none of the explanations speak well of it…

Third, “college campuses saw a total of 204 incidents in 2017, compared to 108 in 2016.” How many of those incidents emanating from traditional forms of anti-Semitism that one might associate with Trumpian populism, and how many from leftist/pro-Palestinian sources? The ADL doesn’t say.

Fourth, the ADL counts ambiguous incidents as anti-Semitic incidents, so long as they were reported as such. For example, the report states, “Jewish graves or cemeteries were desecrated seven times in 2017…The problem is that desecrations of cemeteries of all faiths is not uncommon, and are often the product of either bored teenagers or vagrants. In fact, at least some of the cemetery incidents counted by the ADL were ultimately determined by police not to be anti-Semitic in origin. The desecraton of a cemetery in St. Louis got a particularly large amount of attention. The police eventually caught the perpetrator, and determined that he was just “mad and drunk,” not anti-Semitic. The ADL has not updated its study or press release to reflect such facts.

I think that should put to rest the claim that there was a major spike of anti-Semitic attacks in 2017. That’s not true if you’re talking about assaults and if you’re talking about the other categories the increase may not be anti-Semitic or may not be coming from the right.

I could wrap this up here but I’d like to point out that the ADL also publishes an annual report titled “Murder and Extremism in the United States in 20xx.” In 2016, the ADL published this striking claimwhich got quoted quite a few times by people on the left: “Over the past 10 years (2007-2016), domestic extremists of all kinds have killed at least 372 people in the United States. Of those deaths, approximately 74% were at the hands of right-wing extremists, about 24% of the victims were killed by domestic Islamic extremists, and the remainder were killed by left-wing extremists.”

Last year I asked ADL if they could provide the information to back up that claim because the actual data is not available on their website and wasn’t included in the 2016 report itself. Initially, they responded and agreed they would pull together some information for me. But it never arrived. I sent 2 or 3 follow-up emails over a period of months and they never responded to those at all.

The information in the annual extremism reports published by the ADL is based on a database of extremist murders which the ADL keeps to itself. Its definition of extremist murders includes murders that, by the ADL’s own admission, were not ideological in nature. The 2017 report includes an actual list of incidents cited in the report and here’s one that gets counted as a right-wing extremist murder:

Greeley, Colorado, August 16, 2017. Kelly Raisley, believed to be a member or associate of the 211 Crew white supremacist gang, was arrested on first-degree murder charges for the murder of his uncle, Randy Gene Baker. Baker’s wife and sister were similarly arrested. The motive was apparently personal.

Here’s another example where the violence seems to be personal rather than ideological:

North Judson, Indiana, March 3, 2017. Aryan Circle member Edward Blackburn allegedly shot and killed another man who was reportedly dating his ex-girlfriend.

This one also seems to take a lot of liberties with the truth:

Lafayette, Indiana, January 16, 2017. Wesley Andrew Hampton, a self-declared white supremacist, and another defendant allegedly robbed and murdered a man in a home invasion.

Here’s a Journal & Courier story about the robbery and murder in question:

Several people wearing masks pushed their way into the apartment where John Byler was killed about 6 a.m. Jan. 16, according to witnesses cited in a probable cause affidavit.

Witnesses told police the men demanded drugs and money, according to the affidavit.

Police believe Wesley Andrew Hampton, 39, and Aarron Christopher Vance, 35, were two of the people wearing masks.

What the ADL doesn’t tell you is that Aaron Christopher Vance, Hampton’s accomplice in the crime, is black. None of the reporting on this suggests it was a hate crime or even mentions the race of the victim. This appears to have been a drug robbery gone wrong. The shooter may, in fact, be a white supremacist but it’s not clear that mattered here.

These are a few examples but there are several more like this including prison murders which may or may not have a racial motive and other domestic disputes turned violent. All of these are included in the ADL report as “non-ideological murders” but still count as murders by white supremacists/right-wing extremists. Here’s an explanation of that from the ADL’s 2015 report [emphasis added]:

Ideology played a primary or substantial role in 10 of the 17 incidents in 2015, accounting for 34 of the 52 victims. The other seven incidents involved murders in which the perpetrator’s ideology seems to have played little to no role in the violence. Typically, white supremacists make up the vast majority of non‐ideological perpetrators, as white supremacists engage in a large amount of gang‐related and traditional criminal violent activity in addition to their hate‐ or ideologically‐motivated violence. In this sense, they are doubly dangerous.

That’s one way to look at it. I guess it’s fair to say white supremacists are doubly dangerous to their immediate family, but I don’t think that’s what most people have in mind when they skim a report titled “Murder and Extremism in the United States in 20xx.”

Similar to what it is doing with its handling of anti-Semitic incidents, the ADL appears to be padding the numbers. In the case of the extremism reports, the ADL never hid the fact it was including these non-ideological murders, but I suspect most people reading a quote second hand, like the one I started this with above, aren’t fully aware what is included in the bottom line.