בס''ד

My original intent was to write a more positive article about something else entirely, but the events of the last few days have prompted me to write this relatively short and controversial blog instead!

I’m one of those ‘lucky’ few whose experienced an attack on Jewish society in the USA. I’d forgotten about the incident until I read a recent article in the Jerusalem Post about an event billed as, “Kill A Jew Day” on Facebook. I’ve written a couple of times and in many comments on MyShtetl about the dangers we tend to be naïve about on the Internet.

Three years ago while attending a conference in Seattle I was walking to my hotel downtown and got pulled to the ground by a policeman and literally shoved behind a police car. It seems a lone extremist had attacked a Jewish centre near my hotel, climbed up on the roof of the building and was shooting randomly into the road below. It took a few hours for the Seattle police to contain the situation and, of course, the incident made headlines for the next few days in the local edition of USA Today. I’m not sure if it even made headlines in South Africa because I was not here, but I brought home a copy of the newspaper simply to show my family the level of craziness I had been through. I can’t even begin to imagine what daily life in Israel must be like in comparison but that was probably one of the scariest moments in my life ever.

As I read the article about the Facebook event it dawned on me just how terribly prolific Internet incitement has become. Last year Facebook refused to take down the pages of Shoah denialists but, fortunately, in the case of this incident the Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF) managed to get them to remove Kill A Jew Day, which appeared on Sunday. In essence the fan page was inciting people to kill Jewish people they encounter anywhere in the world from 4 July to 22 July with a particular emphasis on 9 July. The site contained a swastika logo and a message stating, “you know the drill”. It prompted a lot of hate speech and the most horrific pictures to be uploaded and also a lot of people rushing to the defense of the Jewish nation. This was not the first incident of this nature in the past few weeks; in fact there were a few!

There have been attacks on Jewish people prompted on by the Internet before, most notably as the Jerusalem Post points out, an attack on a prominent Holocaust author in San Francisco and an attack on a Holocaust Center in Washington. They quote Facebook spokesperson Andrew Noyes as saying, “Unfortunately ignorant people exist and we absolutely feel a social responsibility to silence them on Facebook if their statements turn to direct hate. That’s why we have policies that prohibit hateful content and we have built a robust reporting infrastructure and an expansive team to review reports and remove content quickly. We take our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities very seriously and react quickly to remove reported content that violates our policies. Specifically, we’re sensitive to content that includes pornography, bullying, hate speech, and actionable threats of violence. The goal of these policies is to strike a very delicate balance between giving our more than 400 million users the freedom to express themselves and maintaining a safe and trusted environment. When groups or pages make real threats or statements of hate we remove them. We encourage people to report anything they feel violates our policies using the report links located throughout the site.”

It is with a great deal of sadness that I look upon a medium as incredible as the Internet that provides the ability for so much collaboration and communication between so many diverse people and see it torn to ruins by these hate-mongers. The reality is very little can be done about them. They sign up for free email accounts and in turn use those to sign up to social networking sites and wikis and then proceed to spread their hatred until they’re blocked. Then they rinse and repeat using more and more anonymous accounts. Other misguided people take up the cudgels and continue to spread the filth even more widely until eventually some complete moron decides to act upon these things. It a very sick and very dangerous cycle that is seemingly never-ending. While the Internet provides access to information and a means for so many to contribute information that has never been possible before it is of little surprise that bigots would make use of the capabilities it provides.

Consider that prior to the Internet people were essentially only consumers of information. Setting up a radio station and licensing a frequency to broadcast on were expensive exercises that became even more expensive with the advent of television. It was not within the means of average consumers to procure the type of equipment necessary to broadcast and even if they could they had government regulations to adhere to in order to obtain and hold onto their broadcast licenses. In effect the very term ‘consumer’ was synonymous with people who were spoon-fed news via newspapers, radio and television.

On the Internet we see a completely new phenomenon. We continue to be consumers but many ordinary people have also shown a new level of participation on the Internet that sets them aside from consumers. It has become abundantly apparent that many people want to create and share ideas and information. We now have wikis and forums, bloggers and website designers who do so from the comfort of their own homes much like I do. I find writing a form of relaxation that extends far beyond mindlessly sitting in front of a television or reading the paper. And so it is we have bigots and criminals that manifest their own presence on the Internet. What a shame. It’s no different than buying the most expensive and beautiful car ever made and then using it to mow down pedestrians. I don’t think the founding fathers of the Internet could ever have envisaged such a blatant subversion of their creation despite the levels of depravity they must have witnessed in World War 2 and the Vietnam War. Criminals have guns and hide in dark alleys… what could they know about technology? Really?

And so crime on the Internet grows up! It’s no longer a just a fiefdom for spammers, conmen and pedophiles (all terrible enough). It has also ‘developed’ into a propaganda vehicle for all sorts of diabolical causes and acts. The recent incident with the Gaza flotilla should be evidence enough of how the incredible speed of the Internet can lead governments to jump to all sorts of instant conclusions that might not have occurred in times when diplomatic channels were their only means of getting information quickly, with the press merely a close second printing two or three newspapers a day.

Of course, the Internet’s speed is a force for good too. After all it’s a conduit; a medium. It is not inherently good or bad. It is in essence completely neutral. But just as the cliché, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” goes we have a similar situation on the Internet. The Internet is a little more than a gun. The Internet can be about as effective as a nuclear weapon in the wrong hands. When someone incites others to kill Jews and is able to reach a global audience the consequences of such an act can be of severe proportions. What worsens the impact is that these people are completely out of our control. Whether we access the Internet or not these people continue to exist and thrive and their messages only need to be out there a short amount of time before they deleted in order for them to make headlines and reach an even wider audience.

Today I got a special email in my Facebook Inbox that was a very disgusting pro-Palestinian rant about the sexual acts the author would like to perform on Israiel (sic) and with me. He is an Egyptian. I’m not the hardest person to find on Facebook, but if you’re not my friend you’re not going to see very much information about me. He must have subscribed to one of the Rabbi’s fan pages that I visit and occasionally comment on in order to have found me. I’m not the most negative person so I took it as a compliment that he chose to single me out for special attention. It made me feel Jewish and laugh a bit at the terrible grammar and sheer level of ignorance and arrogance it must have taken to write such a brazen thing to me. It is scary too but all I could think is that he was a complete moron! Of course I reported him and since he’s such an idiot to have picked on someone Internet savvy I have his full name, not just the “Omar Egypt” username he tried to hide behind. Of course he comes from Mitzrayim, a country that now revokes the citizenship of any Egyptian born person who dares to marry an Israeli (whether that Israeli is Arab or not) so the consequences for him will be pretty low. He can just get another Internet account and carry on with his drivel.

Perhaps the time for responsible and regulated Internet use has dawned. Just like we have to FICA and RICA in order to prevent crime and help our law enforcement identify criminals, we need to have some form of Internet access regulation that ties users to the content they create in a way that is legally useful in our courts. The days of opening anonymous bank accounts and using pre-paid phone cards with impunity are rapidly falling behind us. We need the same initiatives to surface on the Internet. Criminals may still be able to set-up their own websites, but maybe, just maybe, we can keep them off the globally popular websites we frequent.

Lastly, how many people automatically assumed Kill A Jew Day was created by an Islamic extremist. It appears that the perpetrator is not actually Muslim. He billed himself as Andrew Cookson, it seems like he is from Singapore and that he is a right-wing extremist. There are many types of prejudice out there, a lot of it aimed at our nation, but let’s not forget the offensive Everybody Draw Mohammed Day event that also did the rounds on Facebook. The lesson is to be careful and not to make wild assumptions. The people you don’t see, while the other lunatics out there misdirect you, are the people that will most likely find ways to harm you. Take the steps you feel are necessary to keep you and your families safe on the Internet before it is too late!