ACT.IL
is de Israëlische trollenfabriek die elk commentaar op Israël zou
‘aanvallen’ met positieve uitingen t.a.v. Israël, uiteraard met
medeneming van kritiek op het geuite negatieve commentaar op Israël,
dit gecombineerd met meldingen van antisemitisme aan platforms als
Facebook. Echter ACT.IL kan het werk niet aan vanwege de vele publicaties op
het internet. Daarom zetten rechtse zionistische organisaties* Facebook (en YouTube) onder druk om elke kritiek
op Israël als antisemitisch en haatzaaierij te bestempelen en daarom
te verwijderen van haar platform……
Hier
de definitie van antisemitisme zoals die in 2016 en werd goedgekeurd
door de 31 landen die lid zijn van de International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance (IHRA):
“Antisemitisme
is een bepaalde perceptie van Joden die tot uiting kan komen als een
gevoel van haat jegens Joden. Retorische en fysieke uitingen van
antisemitisme zijn gericht tegen Joodse of niet-Joodse personen en/of
hun eigendom en tegen instellingen en religieuze voorzieningen van de
Joodse gemeenschap.”
In
die definitie staat te lezen: retorische en fysieke uitingen van
antisemitisme zijn gericht tegen Joodse en niet-Joodse
personen en/of hun
eigendom en tegen
instellingen en religieuze voorzieningen van
de Joodse gemeenschap…… Ofwel ook kritiek
op Israëlische nederzettingen of op de Israëlische staat, het leger
en zelfs Israëlische bedrijven die hun boek ver te buitengaan,
kunnen worden aangemerkt als antisemitisme, immers de genoemde
organisaties worden geleid door Joden…….. Sterker nog, als zo’n bedrijf in handen van een Jood, maar wordt geleid door een niet-Jood, is kritiek op zo’n bedrijf ook antisemitisch!!
Facebook
stelt nu nog dat het kritiek op Israël niet ziet als antisemitisme,
echter het is maar de vraag hoe lang Facebook haar rug recht zal
houden na het pleidooi van IHRA, zeker als je ziet, dat Palestijnen massaal van Facebook
werden uitgesloten, daar ze kritiek leverden op de vreselijke
behandeling die zij hebben te verduren van de fascistische
apartheidsstaat Israël….. Tel dat op bij de aanstelling van Emi Palmor voor de censuurafdeling van Facebook (zij was eerder hooggeplaatst bij Israëlische ministerie
van justitie**) en je begrijpt dat het niet lang zal duren
voor Facebook om zal gaan……………
Het
volgende artikel over deze zaak werd geschreven door Neve Gordon,
eerder gepubliceerd op Al Jazeera en door mij overgenomen van
Information Clearing House (Gordon gebruikt het woord Jood vaak
in zijn schrijven en dat gecombineerd met kritiek zou reden kunnen
zijn dat Facebook elke link naar dat artikel zal verwijderen van haar
platform….):
Redefining
anti-Semitism on Facebook
If
Facebook were to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, this
would be detrimental to freedom of speech.
By
Neve Gordon
![Pro-Israel organisations have lobbied Facebook to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism [File: Reuters/Dado Ruvic]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/26ea669661b847c18347053c8eb79410_18.jpeg?resize=770%2C513)
Pro-Israel
organisations have lobbied Facebook to adopt the IHRA definition of
anti-Semitism [File: Reuters/Dado Ruvic]
September 24, 2020
“Information
Clearing House”
– With its 2.7 billion users, Facebook is the world’s largest
and arguably most influential social media platform. Therefore, it
comes as no surprise that right-wing Zionist organisations have
identified it as a key platform to promote their agenda.
Several years ago, for
example, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs alongside students
from IDC, an Israeli university in Herzliya, helped
create ACT.IL, an “online community that will act to promote a
positive influence on the international public opinion towards the
state of Israel via social media platforms”. ACT.IL established
an army of trolls and then developed an app to make their
work more effective by coordinating mass reporting of Facebook posts
critical of Israel.
Soon, it became clear
that no army of trolls can cope with monitoring the massive amount of
content on Facebook. That is why, right-wing Zionist organisations
have recently begun pressuring Facebook to include criticism of
Israel as part of its own definition of hate speech. Their objective,
in other words, is to force Facebook to alter the algorithms it uses
to detect hate speech so the company’s own algorithms will
automatically remove any criticism of Israel from the platform.
Algorithms, they realised, are more efficient than trolls.
The
campaign
Working closely with
the Israeli government this past summer, the pro-Israel lobbying
group StopAntisemitism.org launched the new campaign after
receiving funding from right-wing philanthropist Adam Milstein.
In July, Orit
Farkash-Hacohen, Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, published
an op-ed in Newsweek urging social media companies to root
out the anti-Semitic “virus” by fully adopting the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of
antisemitism.
A few weeks later, on
August 7, 120 organisations representing the “who’s who” of
Zionist right-wing groups sent a letter to Facebook’s
Board of Directors, calling upon them to fully adopt the IHRA
definition as the “cornerstone of Facebook’s hate speech policy
regarding antisemitism”.
This definition, which
has been endorsed or adopted in some official capacity by more than
30 countries, includes 11 examples of anti-Semitism, several of which
involve criticism of Israel. This is just the latest concrete
manifestation of how any critique of the Israeli government and its
politics now assumes the taint of anti-Semitism.
There is, to be sure,
some irony here. Historically, the fight against anti-Semitism has
sought to advance the equal rights and emancipation of Jews. Yet, in
the IHRA definition those who speak out against the subjugation of
Palestinians are called anti-Semites.
Thus, instead of
enabling the struggle against those wish to oppress, dominate and
exterminate Jews, this new definition of anti-Semitism comes after
those who wish to take part in the struggle for liberation from
colonial rule. In this way – as Judith Butler has observed – “a
passion for justice [is] renamed as anti-Semitism”.
Yet, the people behind
this campaign are neither interested in irony nor in justice, and
certainly not in justice for Palestinians. As Lara Friedman, the
president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace who wrote an expose
on the Facebook campaign for Jewish Currents, has pointed
out, their letter to the Board of Directors “represents the latest
front in the battle to use the IHRA definition to officially exclude
criticism of Israel from the bounds of acceptable discourse”.
Facebook
responds
The campaign seems to
have had an immense impact. Four days after receiving the letter from
the Zionist organisations, Guy Rosen, Facebook vice president for
Integrity, announced the organisation had updated its hate
speech policy to take into account certain kinds of implicit hate
speech, such as “stereotypes about Jewish people controlling the
world”.
Monika Bickert,
Facebook’s vice president of content policy, sent a letter to
the signatories, noting the company “draws on the spirit – and
the text – of the IHRA”, and that under Facebook’s policy,
“Jews and Israelis are treated as ‘protected characteristics’”.
Sheryl Sandberg,
Facebook’s chief operating officer, even wrote a personal
note to Milstein, who financed the campaign. She assured him that the
IHRA definition has been “invaluable – both in informing our own
approach, and as a point of entry for candid policy discussions with
organizations like yours”.
Yet, the company still
seems to be reluctant to adopt the parts of the definition that
relate to Israel, and it is not coincidental that in Facebook’s
responses they mention only hate speech towards Jews.
Friedman from the
Foundation for Middle East Peace cites senior Facebook official Peter
Stern who three months before the campaign was
launched asserted that: “We don’t allow people to make
certain types of hateful statements against individuals. If the focus
turns to a country, an institution, a philosophy, then we allow
people to express themselves more freely, because we think that’s
an important part of political dialogue … and that there’s an
important legitimate component to that. So we allow people to
criticize the state of Israel, as well as the United States and other
countries.”
The
battle continues
Unsurprisingly,
Facebook’s new hate speech policy has not satisfied the pro-Israel
lobby, and in the August 7 letter, part of the ire was directed
towards Stern, claiming that he had “admitted that Facebook does
not embrace the full adoption of the IHRA working definition because
the definition recognizes that modern manifestations of antisemitism
relate to Israel”.
In a tweet responding
to Sandberg’s letter, Milstein made it clear the campaign will
continue: “We look forward to working with @Facebook to ensure
#antisemitism is eradicated from the platform and the #IHRA working
definition of antisemitism is fully adopted by your organization.”
On the other side of
the political spectrum, a group of scholars (myself included)
specialising in anti-Semitism, Jewish and Holocaust history, and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict wrote to Facebook about the
dangers of adopting the IHRA definition.
While urging Mark
Zuckerberg to “fight all forms of hate speech on Facebook”, we
called on him to refrain from “adopting and applying a politicized
definition of antisemitism, which has been weaponized to undermine
free speech, in order to shield the Israeli government and to silence
Palestinian voices and their supporters”.
If Facebook does
eventually bow down and include the full IHRA definition in its
algorithms, free speech on Israel/Palestine, which is already under
immense pressure, will receive a lethal blow. It is up to Facebook
users to voice their concern by notifying Zuckerberg and Sandberg
that they will abandon the platform the moment the media giant
decides to adopt the IHRA definition. Ultimately, we, the users, do
hold the power.
Neve Gordon is a
Marie & Curie Fellow and Professor of International Law at Queen
Mary University of London. He is also the author of Israel &
Occupation and co-author of The Human Right to Dominate.–
“Source“
–
See
also
Zoom
cancels Palestinian icon Leila Khaled’s webinar at California
University:Facebook
and YouTube have also chosen to censor the event.
Finkelstein:
How Gulf monarchies, PLO leaders, and US neoliberals sold out
Palestine:
Click
for
Spanish,
German,
Dutch,
Danish,
French,
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=================================
* Wist
niet dat er ook linkse zionistische organisaties waren, ‘maar
goed, tegenwoordig kan je alles verwachten wat eerder ondenkbaar was, zie het handelen van de PvdA en GroenLinks tijdens de afgelopen 10 jaar…’
Zie ook:
‘Zwangere vrouw in Australië gearresteerd voor het op Facebook posten van protest tegen de COVID-19 maatregelen‘ (zie ook de links in dat bericht naar artikelen over het Coronavirus en het misbruik van deze ziekte om burgerrechten in te perken)
‘Facebook dat zo hoog van de toren blaast over fake news, staat keiharde leugens van Trump toe‘
‘Robert Epstein: Google en Facebook corrumperen de politiek en manipuleren de presidentsverkiezingen‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht over Facebook, censuur en de manipulatie van de verkiezingen in de VS)
