By Amy Zewe
To follow up on last week’s report on Twitter: The social media platform removed Stars of David and locked out users claiming use of the image, and the user, were violating community standards. Couple that with the revelation from The Washington Post about Twitter’s response to Israeli ministers requesting Iran’s leaderships’ posts be taken down: Twitter refused.
The cumulative effects of these types of incidents make the tide of antisemitism grow into a flood that becomes increasingly more acceptable to the general public. Thus, the drip of hate can accumulate into an overflowing bucket of hostility and eventually, violence.
Some updates via the Associated Press here:
For years Iranian leaders have been tweeting their desire for the destruction of Israel, with one Iranian commander saying the goal of Iran’s military is “the total annihilation of Israel.”
“Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated,” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said, among other statements about his aim for the elimination of the Jewish state.
Despite repeated requests from Israeli officials, Twitter has ignored calls to remove the tweets, calling them “comments on current affairs.”
Eradicating and removing a nation (and its people) is a clear request for genocide. And, it not a comment on foreign policy or current affairs.
Meanwhile, on the Facebook front, just two weeks ago, a group of Holocaust survivors launched a campaign calling on Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg to take immediate action to remove Holocaust denial posts from the social media site.
Coordinated by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which “represents the world’s Jews in negotiating for compensation and restitution for victims of Nazi persecution,” the #NoDenyingIt campaign spotlights Holocaust survivors urging Zuckerberg via recorded messages to remove Holocaust-denying groups, pages and posts, which should be considered hate speech, according to a report by the Associated Press.
The campaign aims to promote a single message: “Publications that deny the Holocaust on Facebook is hate speech which must be stopped!”
In 2018, Zuckerberg created a controversy when he said that posts denying the Holocaust would not be removed since he believes “the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech.”
Facebook also issued press releases since noting that it does remove Holocaust denial from its site as it does violate their standards of use. Yet, despite the latest Facebook claims that such posts are removed, why do we still see them?
And let’s not leave our beloved host here, YouTube, out of the spotlight.
The anti-Israel organization American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) took a graphic photo of Holocaust victims and said they were the victims of the “Deir Yassin Massacre.”
In a video posted to YouTube, this AMP group took a graphic photo of Jewish victims (piled up) during the Holocaust and laid it at the feet of Israelis claiming the image was of bodies of Palestinians (which Arabs were not even called at that point in history).
Where are the fact checkers now? The “this content was removed” or “Fact Checked” stamped all over it?
In fact, the fierce battle in Deir Yassin occurred during the War of Independence, when Israel was defending itself against Arab aggression. The Israelis warned residents to leave the area. But that’s beside the point.
Let’s set the record straight about AMP’s anti-Semitism! They used a horrible image of true tragedy and criminal activity, whose victims were Jews, and tried to pass it off as Israeli or Jewish aggression against Arabs.
People think that these slow drips of drivel leaking out on social media are isolated kooks and we needn’t take them seriously. They will not lead to any type accumulation. But unchecked, they do. You can fill a bucket of hate, if you are consistent, one drop at a time. And in the dark, each drop just adds up and eventually, your bucket is full and overflows!
But if those drips were exposed to the bright light of truth and revelation, then they may well evaporate leaving the bucket never quite filling up.
Hence, our exposure of each drip we can catch. We can try dry up this flow and better yet, perhaps stop it at is source—and I don’t mean by turning off technology or outlets, I mean by turning people’s hearts.
Many of us know the verse from Genesis about how “I will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel.”
But let us also remember Jeremiah 18:8:
“…and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned.”
Shavua Tov. Have a great week.