Scapegoating (blaming minorities for widespread discontent and anxieties within the majority population) is wide spread in the USA, UK, and the EU so there are many different groups of people who are victims of hate crimes; which are not just directed against Muslims or Jews.

Attacks against LGBTQs, immigrants, blacks, and women have also increased.

A new report based on a survey of all students at Columbia University was conducted in the summer of 2024 about experiences in the preceding school year. Asking students of all backgrounds about their sense of belonging, experiences of discrimination and opinions about student protests, the survey unsurprising found that Jewish and Muslim students were the most affected.

So 53%  of Jewish students said they experienced discrimination over their religious identity, as did 43% of Muslim students and 10% of the total population.

Since both Jewish and Muslim students are minorities at Columbia Universe the majority of haters causing the discrimination probably hated both sides of the political aspect just using it for more public hating.

This is why the survey also found that 53% of Jewish students reported feeling personal danger for support of Jews or Israel while 62% of Muslim students reported feeling personal danger for supporting Muslims or Palestinians.

Jews have a very long history of being scapegoated for the ills of various European states, and are especially aware of the danger of scapegoating as an ill-conceived way of solving problems in the general society.

Millions of Muslims and Jews are shocked when they read or hear about some of the hateful things other people believe about them. People who hate Muslims or Jews are engaging in the psychology of scapegoating. The anxiety of three years of the world wide Covid-19 plague has turned millions of people into hate-filled Islamophobs and Anti-Semites.

COVID non-compliers in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada. are less open to new ideas, and more extroverted and driven by self-interests according to a study which found that people who purposefully breach COVID-19 regulations tend to share certain characteristics.

Roughly 10% of people in these four countries are noncompliant. Those individuals were mostly male, less agreeable (cooperative, considerate), less intellectual as a personality trait (less willing to try new experiences), and more extroverted.

People who purposefully breach COVID-19 regulations tended to prioritize their freedom and their own self-interest. They also perceived their own social culture as tolerant to variation in values and behavior, with greater tolerance for deviance. Contrary to the stereotype, most of them were not young.

"Alarmingly, the non-compliant group were more likely than the compliant group to leave their home to meet friends or family, for religious reasons, because they are bored, and to exercise their right to freedom," said lead author, Associate Professor Sabina Kleitman from the University of Sydney School of Psychology.

On May 5, 2023 the World Health Organization said that COVID-19 no longer qualified as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies worldwide and killed at least 7 million people worldwide with the real figure estimated to be at least 20 million.

However, the virus of fake news internet scapegoating due to fear and anxiety is spreading faster than Covid-19 itself. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for an “all-out effort” to end the “tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scaremongering,”. Guterres said: “Anti-foreigner sentiment has surged online and in the streets. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have spread and COVID-19-related anti-Muslim attacks have occurred.”

Scapegoating refers to the human tendency to blame someone else for one's own economic, social or personal problems, a process that often comes from already existing feelings of prejudice toward the group that one is blaming.

Scapegoating serves as an opportunity to publicly vent one’s own frustrations, rage and hate, while ignoring one’s own failures or misdeeds and maintaining one's positive self-image.

The media must expose all scapegoating where ever it occurs. As Prophet Muhammad said, “The best form of jihad is to speak a word of truth (haqq) in the face of an oppressor.”

What makes otherwise rational people buy into conspiracy theories and unfounded rumors about those they consider to be outsiders?

People with certain personality traits are much more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. For example. a Yahoo News You Gov poll, found that 44 percent of American Republicans believe Bill Gates is plotting to use the mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign as a pretext to implant microchips in billions of people and monitor their movements. This a widely debunked conspiracy theory with no basis at all in fact.

And although 55% of the Republicans polled on June 6 and 7, 2022 said they believed the January 6, 2021 riot was led by violent left-wing protesters, nearly all of the 840 people arrested following the attack have been Trump supporters, according to U.S. prosecutors, and FBI Director Christopher Wray has said there was no evidence leftist extremists disguised themselves as Trump supporters during the attack. People believe what they want to believe and the facts rarely change their minds.

A survey of 6,212 Americans by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution finds that 29% of Americans are Christian nationalists, and of those, two-thirds define themselves as white evangelicals. So,10% of Americans are avowed Christian nationalists, what the survey calls “adherents,” while an additional 19% are sympathetic to Christian nationalist ideals. More than half of Republicans now identify as Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers. Among white Evangelical Protestants, nearly two-thirds are either white Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers..

In the survey, supporters of Christian nationalism were identified by their responses to five statements, including: “The U.S. should be declared a Christian nation,” and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

Religious and political extremism is ultimately self-destructive to both itself and its supporters. In the words of the poet W. B. Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

The time has come for all the best of religious conviction —especially from within the Muslim and Jewish minorities— to denounce and denigrate the activities and beliefs of those who are filled with the worst of religious convictions, before they desecrate and diminish all believers in the one God of Prophet Abraham.

It is important for all members of minority groups to realize for themselves, and also teach others, that the victims of hate filled scape goaters are completely innocent of all responsibility for the actual problems that the scapegoater has. Do not ever let your children fall for the hate virus that claims the victims somehow brought this hatred upon themselves.

The idea that Jews are powerful and engaged in secret evil plots has historically emerged during times of societal stress, such as periods of pandemic or high unemployment because they allow people to consolidate blame for a complex set of societal and economic circumstances on a single scapegoat.

The Coronavirus pandemic may be novel, but Jews have had a long and tragic history of being accused of spreading deadly viruses. During the Black Death which started in 1348, dozens of Jewish communities in Western Europe were attacked, despite the intervention of Pope Clement VI, who pointed out that Jews were dying from the plague just like everyone else (although Jews were less likely to get the Black Death plague because their religion forbid eating or touching any animal like rats that died of natural causes).

The proof of this is that nothing like this happened in the Arab or Muslim world although the bubonic plague swept through it as well.

If someone hates Jews, they probably hate Black people and/or Muslims, and/or Latinos, and/or LGBTQ people. Few haters ever hate just one kind of people because the hatred comes from within the hater’s self, and not from the actual people that he or she hates because scapegoating is universal.