This week the Anti-Defamation League – an organization with a long history of trying to silence and intimidate those who don't share their unwavering support for Israel and its policies – published a survey ringing the alarm about anti-Semitism. Rather than advance our understanding of this serious issue, the survey seems predictably designed to stir up fear that Jew-hatred is a growing global phenomenon that puts the world's Jews universally at risk, and that the biggest culprits are Muslims and Arabs, particularly Palestinians.

While some responses to the survey may well be of legitimate concern, many of its questions are pointedly designed to skew the results because they have little to do with revealing actual anti-Semitism, as defined, for example, by the US Holocaust Museum. For example, one question asked whether Jews think more highly of themselves than of other groups, and answering yes tallies points in the anti-Semitic column. But common sense suggests that almost anyone in the world would likely answer affirmatively about any other ethnic or religious community.

The most striking example of a leading question undergirds the ADL's claim that the highest percentage of anti-Semitism is among Palestinians who live in the occupied territories. The ADL asked a group of people for whom the movement of goods, money and labor is controlled by Israel, "Do Jews have too much power in the business world?". Were they really to be expected to answer anything but "yes"?

The survey also labels as anti-Semitic any belief, including by Palestinians in the occupied territories, that Jews talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust – despite other responses that indicate that too many people in the world don't know about the Holocaust at all. But Palestinians commonly hear the Holocaust used to justify the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948, and as justification for the continued occupation under which Palestinians are subjected to daily denial of their basic human rights.

Man questions in the ADL survey are designed to gin up paranoia.

The ADL report comes out on the heels of a Pew research study showing that, for instance, bias against Roma and Muslim people exceeds that against Jews in Europe. We believe the goals of a group that calls itself the Anti-Defamation League would be better served if it allied itself with other targeted groups to combat all dangerous prejudices – instead of just using anti-Semitism as a propaganda tool to advance a decidedly political agenda.

• This article was amended on 16 May 2014 to remove a paragraph that made a reference to "loyalty to Israel" that was inconsistent with Guardian editorial guidelines.

