Israel war: John Kirby says White House saw antisemitism ‘threat coming early on’ Oct. 7

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby revealed that a wave of antisemitism commenced after Israel was attacked by Hamas.

Kirby appeared on Friday’s episode of The View to give an update on the situation in Gaza when host Sarah Haines asked him what the federal government is doing about increasing tensions in the United States. Haines cited data that reported a 400% increase in antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7, when Hamas sent thousands of rockets into Israel.

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“There’s no question that there could be actors out there that want to take advantage of what’s going on between Israel and Hamas and spill it over here to the streets of America,” Kirby said. “And we — we sort of saw that threat coming early on right after, just a couple of days after, Hamas did their atrocious attacks on Oct. 7 and started working directly with state and local authorities and having a federal connection with them to help identify potential threats and be able to disrupt them before they actually can — anybody could take action.”

In May, the Biden administration published The U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, as Kirby pointed out. It contains over 50 pages of goals and how to achieve them in order to “improve safety and security of Jewish communities” and “build cross-community solidarity.”

“This is something that the president is laser-focused on and deeply concerned about, and he’s got the whole team here at the National Security Council making sure that we’re do everything we can at the local level,” Kirby said.

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Anti-Jewish hate crimes increased by 36% in 2022 compared to the previous year, according to FBI crime data. Meanwhile, the same dataset saw a 3% increase in anti-Islamic hate crimes.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, these 3,697 antisemitic incidents in 2022 were the highest number since the ADL began keeping data in 1979.