> From the same article you cited, it was 9.5% in Poland, 3.4% in the USSR (which had a larger population than Germany), 4% in Romania, 4.9% in Latvia, 7.6% in Lithuania, 5% in Hungary.
Yes, I was mistakenly going from numbers presented for Western Europe.
> The fraction of Jews in Poland, or the other countries I menioned, did nothing to prevent them being seen as "the other" there, if you read some contemporary accounts.
As I covered elsewhere, I was (because of my own misinterpretation) approaching this more from a Nazi Germany standpoint, and trying to highlight differences from that. I think there's a reason why Jews were able to be scapegoated to the degree they were in Germany, and why it wasn't as bad elsewhere, and I think a lot of that is to do with relative population sizes. At ~1%, you can force your will on a people. At 15-25%, that's a civil war if you try, and there's enough people of that population that it's very hard to not have exposure to a degree that deflates some of that "the other" rhetoric. It's like if the same were applied to latino and hispanic people in the United States, which account for just over 16% of the population in the 2010 census. Not illegal aliens, but all people of that race. That's a really hard sell, because almost everyone knows someone personally that falls into that category that helps go against that narrative just by existing and having contact. I'm willing to bet it's easier in some areas of the world with similar percentages because the influx of Muslims is more recent and less established, but I'm not immediately convinced it's enough to get to what we saw in Germany.
If you want to restrict the discussion to a very vague "the other" that's less extreme, then I'm not really in disagreement. I do believe there are attempts to use Muslims as convenient scapegoats. I'm just not sure to what degree it works in a lot of places, given how many Muslims there are there (and to the degree it works, I think the number of Muslims means there will be a very different response from them if some group attempts to ramp it up).