Published: 8 May 2024
Last updated: 9 May 2024
Online antisemitism increases five-fold
The most recent Australian research released in March 2024 shows that antisemitism on social media increased five-fold following the October 7 Hamas terror attack, compared to the 11 months before, according to a study conducted by the Online Hate Prevention Institute and Online Hate Taskforce and released exclusively by The Jewish Independent.
Antisemitism increased on all 10 platforms examined but was significantly more visible on some social media sites compared with others. Professional platform LinkedIn, where many users typically avoid politics and controversy, experienced the most dramatic increase in antisemitism, most of it Israel-related.
Traditional antisemitism was the most dominant form, including tropes familiar since the Middle Ages: conspiracy theories alleging that Jews control governments, banks, media, and other institutions; blood libels; holding Jews responsible for killing Jesus; depicting Jews as devils; and claiming Jews are “not human”.
The researchers observed that general hostility towards Israel and Jews arising from the Israel-Hamas war has made antisemitism more acceptable and that social media influencers have jumped on the bandwagon of popular perception.
Racist Anti-Zionism: the newest antisemitism
Researchers Andre Oboler and Jasmine Beinart identified a new form of antisemitism which they call ‘Racist Anti-Zionism’. It is a line of thought that defines Zionism as evil and justifies harming anyone identified with Israel on the grounds that they are supporting oppression.
Comments2
Dr Michael Liffman, AM9 May at 07:08 am
I welcome this discussion, and would like to add a slightly different perspective:
Anti-semitism: should I be alarmed – or just alert?
I have been re-reading the unbearably heart-rending letters sent from my parents in Germany and Austria to their more fortunate family members in Australia in the years leading to the implementation of the Nazi’s Final Solution. The events they describe should be well-known to anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of recent history (and I fervently hope this is true of the current generation of young people). Indeed the Holocaust is so often recounted in novels and film that I worry that, paradoxically, many are numbed to its horrors.
Yet reading the letters brings to life events that I cannot imagine ordinary people, like my parents or indeed myself, living through: educated and sheltered middle class families on a catastrophic journey from a comfortable respectable life, to being expelled from universities, losing their rights, their livelihoods, their accommodation and finally being transported to concentration camps and mass extermination.
This Holocaust inheritance therefore cannot but make me, and most Jews, alarmed and dismayed at what we see occurring around us in community responses to the dreadful events in the Middle East.
But in another way I am actually heartened. Disturbing as the tensions we see are, I take some comfort in what I believe is a vital, and often overlooked, difference between the anti-semitism of the 1930s and other comparable times and places, and the passions given expression in the present, and I do not see Australia at risk of that horror.
It seems clear that comparisons with Germany in the ’30s, and other times when anti-semitism has been made a key platform of political parties – and indeed governments – or promoted, encouraged, sanctioned or ignored at almost every level of society are misleading, unhistoric, and unhelpful.
That deranged and poisonous era is, thankfully, quite different from the present, where, almost without exception, our political and civic leaders, churches, the media, and our cultural institutions, expressly repudiate anti-semitism (even if some do so less forcefully than they might). Their calls are for the cooling of the temperature and the preservation of cohesion. Extremists are seen for what they are, violence is very rare, and anti-semitic policies or programs are on no agendas.
Arguably, too, the anti-semitism which concerns us is less clear cut and sinister than in the past, conflated as it frequently now is with legitimate (if often unbalanced and ill-informed) debate about the rights and wrongs of the Gaza conflagration.
This is not to deny that there is an enduring historic bedrock of conscious and sub-conscious hostility to Jews, often expressed as a low-grade social prejudice, and not infrequently, in other times, as a fierce and truly frightening full-blown anti-semitism. Gaza, and the sewer that is social media, have now ignited this in some quarters in its most excitable manifestation since the Holocaust.
But while those who forget the past are condemned to relive it, those who remember it may be misled by it.
The current outburst of emotion about the horror of October 7 and beyond, while it has troubling aspects, in the way all such moments of mass excitement usually do, should not blind us to the difference between the past and now, nor inflame an already volatile environment. Anti-semitism is, at the moment, a discredited idea; therein lies some comfort to be found in the difficult moment we are going through.
Dr Michael Liffman, AM
Larry Stillman9 May at 04:01 am
I have a lot of respect for Andre Oberler’s work about online extremism.
However, there is a consistent problem of collapsing social media concerned with Palestine/Israel into the antisemitic category.
Likewise, the surveys conducted by Jewish communal bodies all have serious methodological problems. Only much more rigorous and nuanced research, not conducted by community bodies can provide a more accurate sense of what is actually happening out off-line, so to speak.
I was in fact unaware that the Blueprint survey was affiliated with the Liberal party which explains its extraordinarily exaggerated claims about Australian schools – 75,000 antisemitic events, extrapolated from a relatively small sample and a collapsing of categories used. This is scare tactics. Why TJI has even used it in reporting has to be questioned. I also question any Holocaust education in schools that is separated from learning about genocides that have affected other communities — this is a country that has people coming from many violent situations, some ongoing.
As for campus issues, not so discussed in this article –we must distinguish between what is going on in the US, which is of a vastly different quality and quantity, for a variety of historical reasons that can’t be outline here.
The protests here appear to be largely confined to traditional campus left groups and academics appropriating the cause for broader anti-colonial imperialist and whatever agendas, aligned with some antizionist Jews, but there will be natural empathy from many Muslim students or people from the global south. Some of the language / signage used in anger at Israel’s actions is clearly stupid and offensive, and is best dealt with by universities under their campus behaviour regulations.
It also should be remembered that the vast majority of students have nothing to do with what is going on. Of course, physical harassment and so on is totally unacceptable. But in the same way that a Jewish student might be disturbed or distressed by a Palestinian flag, a Palestinian Australian can be disturbed by an Israeli flag. This sense of offence and challenge goes both ways. This is the price of living in a free society and campuses historically, have been a privileged space for challenging ideas through an open civic space. Unfortunately this idea has come under challenge with attempts to close down discussion and claim absolute truths about controversial issues. I actually ask, where are the grand teach-ins as were in the past where both cases were put? (others have been asking this abroad).
But as well, there has been provocative behaviour by pro-Israel zealots coming onto campus – there is film of this — only making the situation worse. This should be denounced. However, there are also a small number of extremist pro-Palestine individuals such as a woman in Adelaide who has already had a brush with the law and I am sure she is on the radar with authorities. In the long run, strategies to politically isolated such people might be more useful.
And of course, there is continuing neo-Nazi activity that should be countered.