Facebook und Google Earth: Anti-semitism on the Web 2.0
The “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” has asked me to remove the following Article since it’s not an official Translation.
Anti-semitism on the web 2.0
It was the massacre killing seven youths and one adult that turned David into an internet fighter. In March a radical Palestinian shot eight students of a Yeshiva, a Jewish religious school. Just a little later Ahmad from Saudi-Arabia founded a group on the Internet platform Facebook that praised the murderer Alaa Abu Dhaim as a martyr – and soon had 300 members. For David who had been a member of Facebook for years already this was the “key moment” that motivated him to go public to a greater extent and attempt to give a similarly clear response in turn. Together with some colleagues he founded the internet site “Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF)”, as a reminder of the Israeli armed forces IDF, the “Israeli Defense Force”. The logo of the JIDF is as bold as the name: a fighter jet in front of a blue-white Israeli flag with a Magen David.
It’s the aim of the site to counteract online anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli tirades of hatred on Web 2.0– on popular social networks like Facebook, Wikipedia or YouTube. The price of his job : after several threats on his life David does not wish to expose more of himself than his first name. For years he and his colleagues have observed the “increasing anti-Semitism” and have started different political campaigns – now they are planning to gather them under the publicity effective umbrella of the JIDF.
The usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
Supposedly they have five thousand supporters and they’re looking for anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic propaganda, notify the provider, animate other users to do the same and exert pressure through the public. Because this doesn’t always work, the JIDF has “other means”, as David puts it in obscure terms. In any case “the infiltration and desctruction of dozens of Facebook groups was a success.” The biggest one had 118.000 members and promoted the Shiite Hizbullah. Today their old homepage can still be found, but it proudly displays the JIDF logo – and the former contents aren’t available anymore.
The political and ideological Middle East conflict is continued on the popular Internet platforms of Web 2.0. This poses a huge problem for social networks with basically no political concept since they are being misused as propaganda platforms. Thus one can easily find pictures of Hamas fighters, killed Palestinian babies or children posing with strapped-on fake bombs. Users from all over the world corroborate in their comments that “we all hate Israel”, that this country is “a terrorist state”, “a cancer in the Middle East, a disease that has to be exterminated”. Siet from Egypt asks, “where will you go, Israel?? In front of you the sea, the Arabs behind you”. Of course the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are not missing either: The Jews control the media, the world, American foreign policy – and the Holocaust did NOT take place as history tells it. Who doesn’t believe that, praises Adolf Hitler (“this man has burned your people to death!”) or points
out Hitler groups on Facebook. One of the largest is called “We respect Hitler” and currently numbers 357 members. There’s even one group with 151 members dedicated to denying the Holocaust.
Snowball effect
Of course there are counter movements, the JIDF alone has twelve groups. There are also highly aggressive comments from Jewish or Israeli users. “All Palestinians are murderers who kill small children”, one Israeli lady claims. And Johnny from London sees two originally “Jewish cities” in Mekka and Medina and places the whole Muslim world that “only contributes to war and hatred” back into the Dark Ages where culture is concerned. “You animals, what have you given the world except for oil?”
Facebook is the largest network of friends in the world, according to them they have more than one hundred million active users and are number four in the most often visited sites worldwide. Messages are passed on via the snowball effect. As soon as someone joins one of the hate groups all his friends are notified. “If Facebook had already existed during the times of Hitlers rise to power, the Nazis would have made use of it”, claims the Australian computer scientist Andre Oboler who is working on a book about “anti-Semitism 2.0”. “The top sites on the web are search engines or Web 2.0 sites. Here hatred can be spread.”
Facebook was silent – for one and a half years
Oboler who sees himself as a modern orthodox Jew is concerned that the social networks on the Internet could trigger a “new global wave of anti-Semitism” and “raise the social acceptance of anti-Semitism”. One new aspect is the speed with which classic anti-Semitism spreads through YouTube clips, social networks or Wikipedia articles. Most providers currently lack “competence for an appropriate response”.
According to Oboler, Facebook needs to “show more initiative”. Over 48.000 members joined a group called “Israel is not a country!” which cynically demanded that Facebook strike Israel from the menu of countries in its system and preached hatred in its forum. In spite of several complaints Facebook did nothing for one and a half years. But objections continued to be raised from inside. A huge counter-group was founded, decisively supported by the JIDF, numbering 67.000 members today. It strongly requested that Facebook delete the “Israel is not a country!” group – at the beginning of September Facebook finally gave in.
Sermons of hatred are ok as long as no one is harmed
In the transience of the web this was a victory for the JIDF that lasted only a few mouse clicks. “The Zionists have taken over the old group, so we founded another with the same name. When they destroy this one, we will create yet another and another.” But as a precaution the people in charge of the new “Israel is not a country” group state that “this group condemns racism decisively”. In the meantime quite a few groups sharing this name exist, with thousands of members and counter-groups that are bothered by the fact that Facebook users cannot list “Palestine” as their home country “even though there is no state called Palestine”.
The groups are recreated faster than Facebook can – or wants to - delete them. Their own guidelines forbid the distribution of contents that Facebook considers “threatening, illegal, factious, vulgar” or “racist”. But when the anti-Israel groups are mentioned the media representative reacts with a tightrope-walk. Facebook takes its guidelines “very seriously” and reacts “quickly” when misuse becomes evident. Groups that threaten to become violent or are supported by terrorist groups are closed. “However, we do not close groups that speak out against countries, political units or ideas”. The target is a “very sensitive balance” between the freedom of speech and the users’ need for security. I.e., preaching hatred is ok as long as no one is threatened. Facebook does not stick to that too exactly all the time though, not even in clear-cut cases such as the group “Hamas Fan” (1300 members) that has existed since May already. Also, what Facebook is going
to do about the group of Holocaust deniers that has existed since July 2007, the media representative discreetly left out in her written response.
From fighting against online hatred to anti-islam
Google Earth followed a much more definite policy. Anyone who flew over Israel with Google Earth, recently still found themselves over a tangle of red dots: indications of Arab villages that Israel supposedly or really destroyed in the war of 1948 – with no way of verification for the layman. Every red dot had been linked to the site palestineremembered.com. In the meantime Google Earth has deleted the links.
Even the JIDF has a political agenda. Many of its current members protested against the evacuation of Israeli settlements in the Gaza strip in 2005 – the policy to trade land for peace, was wrong. In the end, the JIDF wants to “spread Jewish values on the Internet”. Thus the self-defined fighters against online hatred have linked their homepage to the dubious site of thereligionofpeace. The name is pure saracasm. The site portrays Mohammed as an advocate of murder and paedophilia, draws a picture of Islam as a religion of hatred and compares it to the Ku-Klux-Klan or to the Spanish Inquisition – with the clear result: Islam is much worse.
Sometimes even David loses his composure in his fight against the windmills of propaganda: “You’re completely sick”, he writes on Facebook to Ahmad from Saudi-Arabia who boasts about dedicating a group to the murderer of the Yeshiva students – who also later joined a counter-group in a highly provocative move. “Get out of here”, wrote an enraged David, “you’re a disgusting pig who celebrates terrorists!”
From theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
by Christoph Gunkel
October 14th, 2008
Unofficial Translation kindly submitted by Rina Rosen
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Tags: Anti-Semitism, Facebook, Google Earth, web 2.0