Special Envoy Elan Carr Discusses How to Fight Rising Anti-Semitism in AJC Webinar

United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism Elan Carr discussed the fight against rising anti-Semitism in an Aug. 3 American Jewish Committee (AJC) Zoom webinar.

Carr said his office has assistant envoys assigned to different aspects of anti-Semitism. For instance, one envoy focuses solely on the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement while others concentrate on the Middle East and online anti-Semitism.

“My office is three times larger than my predecessors’ and it’s because there really is a focus on this on the part of the [Trump] administration,” Carr said. “They are determined to give anti-Semitism no quarter.”

He then discussed how his family fled from Iraq to escape anti-Semitism in 1950, saying, “My mother as a young girl saw her father be arrested and go to prison for no reason other than being a Jew, and the rest of my family fled across the border to Iran, a very different Iran, the Iran of the Shah that was helping Jews escape and giving Jews asylum… the Iran of today, the Islamic Republic, is the world’s chief state sponsor of not only terrorism but anti-Semitism.”

Carr spoke about three sources of anti-Semitism: ethnic supremacism, commonly seen in far-right neo-Nazis, which resulted in the Tree of Life synagogue and Chabad of Poway shootings; far-left anti-Semitism expressing hostility toward Zionism, which Carr said has resulted in harassment of Jewish students on college campuses; and militant Islam, which he said was the main source of violence against Jews on the streets of Western Europe.

“Jew-hatred is Jew-hatred, and it doesn’t matter what ideological clothing it wears,” Carr said, noting that the main way people are radicalized into becoming anti-Semites is through the internet.

“Jew-hatred is Jew-hatred, and it doesn’t matter what ideological clothing it wears.” — Elan Carr

“The process of radicalizing a young man on the internet is one-third the time that it takes to radicalize someone by traditional means — meetings and movements and offline stuff,” he said.

Carr acknowledged that while the First Amendment protects hate speech, illegal hate speech such as incitement can be prosecuted. He said he has had discussions with prosecutors worldwide about implementing tolerance programs for those convicted of minor crimes, such as a skinhead shoplifting a beer. He said he had personally seen such programs change the lives of people during his 13 years as a deputy district attorney for Los Angeles.

“I think the law enforcement community has a real role to play here in not only enforcing our laws but in intervening in the lives of young people who are getting radicalized and cutting that process of radicalization off,” he said.

Carr argued that the best way to go on the offensive against anti-Semitism is to highlight the Jewish community’s contributions to humanity. “You can’t tell the story of the United States of America without talking about the Jewish values that informed our founding and our mission to this day,” he said. “You can’t tell the history of England or France or Germany or Poland or Hungary without talking about the profound and indelible contributions that the Jewish communities have made to these countries. Why don’t we teach that? Why don’t we drive into every classroom and every city an understanding of what that history is?”

He continued, “If we’re serious about making our world a better a place, if we’re serious about elevating the Jewish condition … fighting this great evil has to be step one.”