Antisemitism on the Internet
By Deborah Stone, Australian Jewish News, 29 August 2008
The internet has become, among all its other activities, the most effective purveyor of antisemitic canards since the Nazi publication Der Sturmer went out of business with the end of World War II.
It contains every myth and defamation that has dogged the Jewish people: that Jews control the world financial system; that the Holocaust never happened; that the Jews killed Christ; that Israel creates terrorist attacks against its own citizens to win sympathy.
Our legal system has long recognized that free speech has its limits. Obscenity, defamation and race hate are all limited by law. You cannot publish detailed pictures of lurid sexual acts on a billboard. You can't stand outside Flinders Street Station and yell that Kevin Rudd is married to the mob. You can't leaflet people's homes and claim black people have lower IQs. But you can do all those things on the web because so far the law hasn't worked out a way to stop you.
Law exists, in part, to protect the vulnerable. The victims of a free-speech-at-any-cost system will be those who are most vulnerable to being damaged or defamed including children and the members of minority groups. Jews are historically vulnerable in changing social conditions. That, at least, has not changed.
The motivations and ideological perspectives of the web sites that post antisemitic material vary. They can be loosely classified as:
- Traditional far-right conspiracy theorists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Familiar players include the Australian League of Rights and The National Front, based in the UK, and the Ku Klux Klan, based in the US.
- Far left activists whose attacks on Israel move beyond political criticism to include Holocaust references or traditional antisemitic tropes such as secret Jewish control. Green Left is an Australian site which has contained such views.
- Extremist Muslim, such as Australian- based Mission Islam which includes links to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
- Extremist Christian, such as Australian-based Bible Believers which contains material about the shape of Jewish skulls and the length of noses which would not have been out of place in a Nazi eugenics text.
- Holocaust denial, such as Australian-based Adelaide Institute, run by Frederick Toben.
- "New age" spiritualism, a small subset of new age sites such as the site of American spiritualist Allen Aslan Heart who moves from how to weave a dream catcher to how Jews run the banks, pornography and prostitution.
- Traditional antisemitism: rare single focus sites such as Jew Watch.
Web pages represent the declared end of internet antisemitism. They are dangerous because they have a deceptive sense of authority. But there are all sorts of ways people communicate on the internet other than by posting web pages. Social networking sites, groups and blogs are an increasing concern. New technology allows easy access and multiple linkages in a range of forms nicknamed "Web 2.0".
As internet researcher Dr Andre Oboler observes, "In a Web 2.0 world, information is not usually imparted directly from authority. It either arrives through social networks or is sought out directly by individuals. The search methods in Web 2.0 favour the volume of supporters of a narrative and have little relationship to the degree of truth in the narrative."
These vehicles contain some of the most virulent hate material on the web. Sometimes these attacks come in the form of vicious political opinions directed at Jews or Israel. Sometimes individuals are harassed on the strength of a Jewish name or affiliation. In some cases discussion in groups dedicated to issues of politics or history deteriorates into hate speech. In moderated forums an offensive posting may receive an appropriate response from the moderator or other group members but more often it goes unchecked.
There are other groups where the forum's raison d'etre is antisemitic. Alt.revisionism is a group dedicated to Holocaust denial. But more insidious is the way in which antisemitic libels are scattered throughout the web on social sites that have nothing to do with Jews or Israel. The offensive claim that "Zionism is racism" appears not only in discussions devoted to politics or the Middle East but on groups that are supposedly about tennis, astronomy or the music of Mariah Carey.
There are multiple conditions which make it difficult, arguably impossible, to control defamatory material on the net including a complex chain of responsibility, difficulty in identifying perpetrators, geographical limitations on jurisdiction which in no way reflects the reality of a global technology and the ease and speed of changing and moving material in marked contrast to the plodding pace of enforcement. In effect, disseminators are like criminals driving very fast cars chased by police on donkeys.
But we can slow and challenge the spread of hate through a combination of regulatory and social mechanisms. On the law side, we need to both apply racial vilification law to web cases and push for specific regulation.
In response to a request from the Anti-defamation Commission, the Federal and State Attorneys-General are currently considering extending the authority of the Australian Communications Media Authority (ACMA) to include racial and religious vilification. Australian-based sites could then be served take-down notices, while overseas sites could at least be brought into filtering provisions. ACMA is a far from complete solution but it is a good start.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry continues to pursue the Holocaust- denying Adelaide Institute site through prosecution of Frederick Toben under racial vilification law. This has proved a painfully slow route and the Federal Court is about to rule on contempt of court for Toben’s failure to remove offensive material. A streamlined process for dealing with breaches of racial vilification law on the internet is sorely needed.
Web-based strategies for education and anti-defamation are just as essential. These include:
- Developing web-based resources on Jewish issues, Israel and antisemitism.
- Using search engines to advantage to ensure web-surfers finds positive resources and anti-defamation as easily as they find antisemitism.
- Working with internet-service providers, content providers and web developers to promote content-driven applications, tools capable of making more refined discriminations, codes of practice, registers of offensive sites and filters.
- Participating in web-based communities and social sites both proactively and responsively.
- Developing resources to support critical thinking, values education and defensive behaviours as a defence against the anarchy of information access on the internet.
New communications technologies change the way people understand their worlds. Cultural critic Neil Postman, whose work was done in the television age, described technological change as a Faustian bargain, "Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided."
Our challenge is to be conscious of the price we are being asked to pay for this new technology and to do what we can to ensure that it does not become more than we can afford.
© Deborah Stone and Australian Jewish News 2008
Other articles on antisemitism
For related articles, visit the antisemitism section of Durban Review or select from the articles below. Other anti-racism themes, conference details, and news are available from the Durban Review home page.
- Questions and Answers
A series of questions and answers on the topic of antisemitism - Jewish Resources on Durban
The World Zionist Organization is maintaining a page of resources on the Durban Review Conference where Iran has made antisemitic statements attacking Jews and Zionism - Deborah Stone, Antisemitism on the Internet, Australian Jewish News,
29 August 2008
The internet has become, among all its other activities, the most effective purveyor of antisemitic canards since the Nazi publication Der Sturmer went out of business with the end of World War II. - The Hoax of Hate: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, ADC Special Reports
In a rational world, a paranoid forgery, written by a little-known public servant in a country far away a century ago, would arouse little interest, except perhaps amongst students of political and psychological deviance. Unfortunately, all the people of the world are not equally rational. We are again living at a time when insane and dangerous ideologies are once more threatening the lives of ordinary people. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are perhaps the clearest example in history of extreme antisemitic propaganda designed to incite people to evil actions.
