New British campus data show fewer recorded incidents than in the extraordinary academic year immediately after October 7, 2023. They also show a post-attack baseline far above the years before it. A new American civil-rights report explains why the measurement problem extends beyond one country.

Publication date: October 11, 2026

Dateline: PARIS

Abstract: A British study published for the 2024–2026 academic years recorded 178 university-related antisemitic incidents, far fewer than the exceptional 272 counted in 2023–2024 but 65 percent more than in the two comparable years before that peak. Its authors also identify a possible reporting effect: students who entered university after October 7 may regard the hostile environment as normal and be less likely to report it. In the United States, a federal civil-rights commission has separately found that incomplete public records and inconsistent campus data prevent a full assessment. This week’s other developments—including an alleged ISIS-inspired mass-shooting plan in Minnesota, a French ruling protecting a pro-Palestinian demonstration and a Dutch prosecution over Holocaust-related speech—show why legal categories and incident totals must be read precisely.

The arrest announced on October 7

On the third anniversary of the Hamas-led attack on Israel, the United States Justice Department announced a case that belongs first in the category of an allegation, not a completed attack or a conviction.

Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, 18, of Richfield, Minnesota, was arrested by the FBI on October 6 and charged by criminal complaint on October 7 with knowingly receiving a firearm and ammunition for use in a federal crime of terrorism. The Justice Department said an undercover employee had provided an inert AK-47, four magazines and approximately 200 rounds of ammunition. Mohamud allegedly reaffirmed that he intended to shoot people at the Mall of America on October 24.

The alleged motive was not exclusively anti-Jewish. According to the complaint as summarized by prosecutors, Mohamud expressed support for ISIS, spoke of killing non-Muslims and selected a date when a Hmong arts event was scheduled. But the Justice Department also said that in July he discussed attacking the mall because he claimed it was owned by Jews and wanted to kill 30 to 60 people. That alleged statement is relevant evidence of anti-Jewish animus; it does not turn the shopping center into a Jewish institution or establish every element of the government’s case. Mohamud has not been convicted, and the complaint remains an allegation.¹

The distinction matters. A disrupted alleged plot, a completed assault, a reported insult, a civil-rights complaint and a survey response are all evidence about the environment in which antisemitism operates. They are not interchangeable units.

Britain’s new campus figures expose the baseline problem

The Community Security Trust’s new report on British higher education provides an unusually clear example of how a true number can support a false conclusion when the wrong comparison is chosen.

CST recorded 272 university-related antisemitic incidents in 2023–2024, the academic year that began shortly before the October 7 attacks and the war that followed. That total was an extreme outlier. The organization subsequently recorded 83 incidents in 2024–2025 and 95 in 2025–2026—a combined 178 over two years.²

It is accurate to say that each of those annual totals was much lower than 272. It is not accurate to convert that observation into a claim that campus antisemitism has returned to its previous level. In 2022–2023, the last full academic year before October 7, CST recorded 53 incidents. The 83 recorded in 2024–2025 were 57 percent higher than that reference year; the 95 recorded in 2025–2026 were 79 percent higher. Comparing two-year periods, incidents rose from 108 in 2021–2023 to 178 in 2024–2026, an increase of 65 percent.

The direction within the latest period is also important. The count did not continue falling: it rose 14 percent between 2024–2025 and 2025–2026. The category composition adds further context. CST recorded 149 incidents of abusive behavior, six assaults, ten threats, eight cases of damage or desecration and, for the first time in its campus series, two incidents classified as extreme violence. The extreme-violence cases occurred in 2024–2025; none was recorded in 2025–2026. That category-specific fall is important, but two years of small numbers cannot establish a general trend in either direction.

CST also cautions that its totals can change when incidents are reported late. More significantly, it raises a plausible reporting problem. Students already at university in October 2023 experienced an abrupt change and may have been more likely to report it. Students arriving later, the report says, may have assumed that the post-October 7 atmosphere was normal and reported less often. This is an interpretation offered by CST, not a measured underreporting rate. It nevertheless identifies a methodological limit that raw totals cannot resolve.

What the British figures include—and exclude

The report does not classify criticism of Israel or Zionism as antisemitic merely because it is harsh. CST says 62 percent of the incidents contained references to Israel, Gaza, Hamas, October 7 or subsequent conflicts alongside anti-Jewish language, motivation or targeting. It explicitly states that criticism of Israel and Zionism is not inherently antisemitic.²

This qualification prevents concept substitution. A count of demonstrations about Gaza is not a count of antisemitic incidents. Nor does the existence of an Israel-related political element automatically remove an incident from the antisemitism category when Jews or Jewish organizations are targeted as Jews. The classification turns on the conduct, language, target and context described in each case.

The report’s 178 incidents include events on campus, online and off campus when the student or academic connection was material. Sixty-seven occurred online and 111 offline. Fourteen incidents were located in student accommodation; eight of those involved abuse by flatmates or other residents, and seven involved intimidation or damage. Those location details do not increase the headline total, but they describe a burden that a flat incident count cannot express.

The United States has a data problem before it has a trend line

A 220-page statutory report released on September 28 by the United States Commission on Civil Rights reached a separate but related conclusion. After examining the federal response to reported campus antisemitism, the bipartisan commission said it could not fully assess that response because important public information was missing. Federal websites were outdated, and the Departments of Education, Justice and Health and Human Services did not provide all documents requested by the commission despite repeated follow-up.³

The commission also found inconsistent reporting systems among the nine universities it examined. Campuses struggled to distinguish potentially unlawful discrimination under Title VI from political expression protected by the First Amendment. The report noted that 97 percent of campus protests tracked from October 7, 2023, through May 2024 were peaceful. That finding is a necessary guardrail: a protest about Israel, including one that is offensive or deeply contested, is not automatically an antisemitic incident or a civil-rights violation.

At the same time, “peaceful” describes whether a protest involved violence; it does not answer every question about harassment, exclusion, targeting or equal access. One category cannot substitute for another. The federal commission’s central measurement finding was that incomplete, differently structured records make confident national trend claims difficult.

Another American dataset illustrates the same distinction. ADL’s 2026 Campus Antisemitism Report Card found that 58 percent of the 150 assessed institutions received A or B grades, compared with 41 percent in 2025. Those grades assess institutional policies, Jewish campus life, conduct and responses; they are not a direct prevalence measure. ADL’s separate survey of 1,007 non-Jewish undergraduates found that 48.3 percent reported witnessing or experiencing anti-Jewish behavior during the previous year and 47.6 percent endorsed at least one anti-Jewish attitude. The survey did not determine the institutional grades.⁴

Better administrative grades may therefore document stronger procedures without establishing that antisemitic attitudes or experiences have declined. Both findings can be true because they measure different things.

France: a protected demonstration is not an antisemitism finding

On October 7, the Paris Administrative Court suspended a police order that had prohibited a demonstration titled “Against the genocide in Gaza and for respect for the ceasefire.” The prefect had cited the anniversary date, anti-Zionist slogans heard at a similar 2025 event and the wider security context. The court found that the evidence did not establish a sufficiently imminent public-order threat and held that the earlier slogans, though pointed and sometimes polemical, remained within the limits of freedom of expression.⁵

The ruling did not find that antisemitism had declined in France. It did not decide the national meaning of anti-Zionism, and it did not classify every possible statement at an Israel-related protest. It decided whether the specific prohibition was necessary and proportionate on the evidence before the judges.

The latest French national antisemitism total remains the Interior Ministry’s 2025 count of 1,320 acts. That was 16 percent below the exceptional 2024 figure, but the ministry itself described the level as historically high: the three years since October 7 have been the highest of the past quarter-century. Antisemitic acts accounted for 53 percent of all anti-religious acts recorded, and physical or verbal attacks and online hatred represented 67 percent of the antisemitic total.⁶

The ministry also warns that this administrative count is not an institutional statistical series, although it can indicate a general tendency. Compared with the 436 acts recorded in 2022, the 2025 total was still more than three times higher. The 16 percent peak-to-current reduction is real; the conclusion that antisemitism broadly fell is not established by that comparison.

A Dutch prosecution defines a line without criminalizing Israel criticism

The Netherlands supplied another precise legal distinction on October 1. Dutch prosecutors sought an 80-hour community-service sentence, half suspended, for a 50-year-old Amsterdam man accused of insulting police officers, group insult against Jews and condoning international crimes during two demonstrations.⁷

The public prosecutor emphasized that strong criticism of governments, including Israel, is permitted and that authorities must avoid chilling lawful protest. The alleged statement at issue went further: prosecutors said the defendant implied that the Nazis should have killed all Jews so that Israel would not have been created. That is the expression the prosecution characterized as Holocaust condonation and an insulting attack on Jews—not criticism of an Israeli government decision. A judgment was expected two weeks after the October 1 hearing and remained pending as of this edition.

Canada and Australia: official records point to continuing institutional strain

Canada’s foreign minister, Anita Anand, marked the October 7 anniversary by stating that Jewish communities had faced an “unprecedented surge” in antisemitism since the attacks. The October 7 government statement cited shootings directed at Jewish schools and synagogues, assaults, campus harassment and vandalism, as well as the September attack outside the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ontario.⁸

A ministerial statement is an official position, not a new statistical release. It is consistent, however, with the federal government’s 2026 Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences study. That project retained 900 survey responses gathered through Jewish student organizations and community networks between November and December 2025. Because the sample was recruited through those channels and was not weighted, its percentages should not be treated as population estimates for all Canadian students. The study’s evidence is strongest as a structured account of participating Jewish students’ experiences, including decisions about disclosing identity, speaking in class and reporting incidents.⁹

In Australia, the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has concluded its public hearings. Amended Victorian letters patent issued on October 1 confirmed that the final report is now due on December 18, 2026.¹⁰ That forthcoming report should provide a more complete official record than isolated hearing excerpts. New Zealand issued no comparable national statistical update during the period reviewed for this edition.

How an accurate number becomes misleading

No public evidence reviewed for this article establishes a deliberate scheme to manipulate antisemitism statistics. The misleading effect can nevertheless be demonstrated when a presentation uses one or more of the following moves:

• Peak selection: comparing only with the extraordinary 2023–2024 spike while omitting the pre-October 7 baseline.
• Category flattening: treating abuse, property damage, threats, assault and extreme violence as equivalent units without showing their composition.
• Reporting substitution: describing fewer reports as less antisemitism when reporting behavior and institutional confidence may have changed.
• Concept substitution: using counts of protests, policy grades or legal complaints as if they directly measured antisemitic attitudes and conduct.
• Legal overstatement: converting an allegation into a finding, or a protected-speech ruling into a judgment about the prevalence of antisemitism.

The figures can be numerically correct while the conclusion attached to them remains unsupported. Motive is a separate question. Without internal instructions, documented omissions repeated after correction, or other evidence of intent, the record supports a finding of potentially misleading framing—not an accusation of intentional manipulation.

Conclusion: the available evidence does not show a return to normal

The strongest new comparative series this week comes from British universities. It shows a steep retreat from an exceptional one-year peak, followed by annual levels 57 percent and 79 percent above the last pre-October 7 academic year. The latest year rose rather than fell. Alongside first-ever cases in CST’s extreme-violence campus category, survey evidence, possible normalization of underreporting and continuing institutional security demands, the data do not demonstrate a broad decline in antisemitism.

Important evidence is still pending: the Dutch judgment expected in mid-October, subsequent proceedings in the Minnesota and Manchester terrorism cases, full-year 2026 incident reports from major monitoring bodies, France’s next annual breakdown and the Australian Royal Commission’s final report on December 18. Until those records appear, the defensible conclusion is narrower but firm: reported totals have moved differently across datasets, while the post-October 7 baseline remains elevated and incompletely measured.

Notes and references

1. U.S. Department of Justice, “Man Arrested and Charged for Role in Plotting to Conduct a Mass-Shooting Event in Support of ISIS at the Mall of America,” October 7, 2026.
2. Community Security Trust, Campus Antisemitism in Britain 2024–2026, 2026.
3. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, The Federal Response to Antisemitism on American College and University Campuses, September 28, 2026.
4. Anti-Defamation League, “2026 Campus Antisemitism Report Card,” March 10, 2026.
5. Paris Administrative Court, decision suspending the prohibition of an October 7 demonstration, October 7, 2026.
6. French Ministry of the Interior, “Actes antireligieux — Tendances 2025,” February 12, 2026.
7. Netherlands Public Prosecution Service, “OM eist 80 uur werkstraf wegens vergoelijken Holocaust tijdens demonstratie op de Dam,” October 1, 2026.
8. Global Affairs Canada, statement marking three years since the Hamas attacks on Israel, October 7, 2026.
9. Canadian Heritage, Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences, 2026.
10. Australian Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Amended Victorian Letters Patent, October 1, 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Did British campus antisemitism decline after the 2023–2024 peak?
Fewer incidents were recorded in each of the next two academic years than in the exceptional 2023–2024 year. However, the 2024–2026 two-year total was 65 percent higher than in the comparable two years before that peak, and the annual count rose 14 percent in 2025–2026.

Why does a fall from 272 incidents not prove a broad decline?
The figure of 272 was an extreme one-year outlier. The later totals of 83 and 95 remained substantially above the last pre-October 7 year, while reporting behavior, incident severity and category composition also changed.

Does the CST report count criticism of Israel as antisemitism?
No. CST states that criticism of Israel and Zionism is not inherently antisemitic. Israel-related references were included when they appeared alongside anti-Jewish language, motivation or targeting.

What did the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights find?
It found significant gaps in public federal information and inconsistent campus reporting systems. It also emphasized the legal distinction between protected political expression and unlawful discrimination.

Was the Minnesota suspect convicted of an antisemitic terrorist plot?
No. He was charged by complaint with receiving a firearm and ammunition for a federal terrorism offense. Prosecutors allege anti-Jewish and broader extremist motives, but the allegations have not been proven in court.

Did the Paris court classify the October 7 demonstration as non-antisemitic?
No. It ruled that the evidence did not justify prohibiting that specific demonstration on public-order grounds. The decision protected expression within legal limits; it was not a national finding about the prevalence of antisemitism.

Key facts

• CST recorded 178 British university-related antisemitic incidents across 2024–2026.
• The two-year total was 65 percent above the comparable 2021–2023 period.
• The annual British campus count increased from 83 to 95 in the latest two academic years.
• CST recorded its first two campus incidents classified as extreme violence in 2024–2025.
• The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found insufficient and inconsistent public data for a full federal assessment.
• France’s 1,320 recorded antisemitic acts in 2025 remained more than three times the 2022 total.
• The Minnesota terrorism case remains at the allegation stage.
• Australia’s Royal Commission final report is due on December 18, 2026.

Important entities, countries, institutions and dates

Entities and institutions: Community Security Trust; United States Commission on Civil Rights; U.S. Department of Justice; FBI; Anti-Defamation League; Paris Administrative Court; French Ministry of the Interior; Netherlands Public Prosecution Service; Global Affairs Canada; Canadian Heritage; Australian Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

Countries: United States; United Kingdom; France; Netherlands; Canada; Australia; New Zealand; Israel.

Important dates: October 7, 2023; September 28, 2026; October 1, 2026; October 6–7, 2026; October 11, 2026; December 18, 2026.

Internal-link suggestions

• The Antisemitism Observatory series archive
• Previous analysis of post-October 7 incident baselines
• Explainer on reported incidents, hate crimes and criminal convictions
• Coverage of university governance and free-expression disputes
• Analysis of Jewish institutional security in Europe and North America
• Responsible Public Affairs coverage of Israel and international law