Such eye-popping ADL findings as that 26 percent of the world’s population qualifies as “anti-Semitic” (i.e., harbors at least 6 of 11 core anti-Semitic attitudes) and that 35 percent has never heard of the Holocaust are receiving blanket media coverage. They are available in detailed strokes—but with a Methodology section that I suspect will leave statisticians wanting more—at: http://global100.adl.org/public/ADL-Global-100-Executive-Summary.pdf I merely want to indicate a few findings that I find hard to believe: 1. Sweden’s comes in essentially at the bottom globally at 4 percent anti-Semitic. This runs counter to virtually every empirical account of what’s been happening at the grass-roots in Swedish society for over a decade. Bear in mind that Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city—which will soon have (if it doesn’t already) a Muslim plurality population—is rife with diverse forms hatred and intimidation of Jews of which anti-Israel animus is only the most vicious. If we accept the 4 percent figure, the only explanation would seem to be that virtually all Swedish anti-Semites are members of Sweden’s fast-growing Muslim minority, while pretty close to 100 percent of the rest of the Swedish population is immune to anti-Semitism. Thus Raoul Wallenberg wasn’t an exceptional figure in history’s honor roll. Because apparently Sweden is now, and may always have been, a nation of Wallenbergs! 2. Spain is 29 percent anti-Semitic, while France is 37 percent anti-Semitic. France is indeed becoming a European enfant terrible in terms of anti-Jewish prejudice, but this is the first and only poll I have ever seen indicating that the French are significantly more anti-Semitic than the Spaniards. 3. The U.S. comes in at 9 percent anti-Semitic. This is 3 percent lower than the ADL’s poll of a couple of years ago, and even less than ADL polls since 2000 that have come in stubbornly at 15 percent or higher. It’s hard to reconcile this new finding with the cautionary vibes we’ve been getting in recent years from the retiring Abe Foxman about the seriousness of America’s continuing anti-Semitism problem. Or is that, by the time Barack Obama completes his second term, American anti-Semitism will have gone the way of the dodo? If so, we may be able to sing along with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—except that Cohen’s lyrics about the coming millennium are not so sanguine as the new ADL poll. 4. Younger age cohorts are less anti-Semitic than older age cohorts, yet younger people are more ignorant that the Holocaust occurred and (among those who know it did occur) more inclined to believe that the number of Jews who died has been “greatly exaggerated.” Hard to make sense of these findings except on the twin assumptions that younger people are less bigoted than older people but at the same time are more incredulous about authoritative genocide statistics. To sum up my visceral reaction: the ADL pollsters may need to reconfigure their methodology to capture a new era when more weight must be given to how increasingly threatened Jews especially in Europe feel and when anti-Israelism is no longer the hellhound’s tail but is now the rabid bite of “the new anti-Semitism.” Frank (Faryar) Nikbakht, founder of CRMRI , Committee for Religious Minority Rights in Iran (Equal Rights for All), has focused his criticisms of the ADL poll primarily at its treatment of the interaction of religion and nationality in shaping anti-Semitism in the Middle East.