Web Analytics

Facebook's COO Responds After Nearly 130 NGOs Put Platform On Notice For Unchecked Jew-Hatred

Sheryl Sandberg COO.jpeg

Nearly 130 Nongovernmental organizations signed onto a letter sent Friday to chiding Facebook’s Board of Directors and requesting that the platform adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and include it in its hate speech policy.

The letter comes amid a rise in antisemitism in America and across the globe. It often rears its ugly head on social media, where users have the freedom and audience to spew hatred. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only made matters worse as antisemites seize a global crisis to promote conspiracies blaming Jews for a virus that emanated from Wuhan, China.

Friday’s letter, signed by prominent advocacy groups like StopAntisemitism.org, Students Supporting Israel, and Foundation for Defense of Democracies, pointed to Facebook’s Director of Content Policy Stakeholder Engagement Peter Stern, who recently “admitted that Facebook does not have a policy aimed at combatting online antisemitism”…. and “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.”

Facebook did not respond to this reporter’s request for comment. However, the platform did respond to the signatories of the letter who asked the platform, “Will Facebook join the ranks of the historians, advocates, activists, lawmakers, and leaders who compiled the IHRA working definition? Will Facebook take responsibility and move toward removing the scourge of antisemitism from today’s most important online public square?”

On Tuesday, the letter gained the attention of Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg who wrote a response to Liora Rez of StopAntisemitism.org ensuring that the platform recognizes the IHRA definition’s value and will “continue to refine our policy lines as speech and society evolve – and appreciate your help and expertise identifying how attacks change over time.”

Copied on the response were Facebook’s Monika Bickert, Vice President of Content Policy, and Peter Stern, Director of Public Policy. In a response letter that followed, Bickert wrote to the signatories of Friday’s letter that “we address the scourge of anti-semitism through our Community Standards.”

“The holistic view of battling anti-Semitism ensures that we don’t look a series of posts or individual actors, but that we understand online and offline trends to ensure that our teams are continually on top of new and evolving threats to Jews around the world,” she wrote.

“Jewish organizations are among the stakeholders we engage in writing an updated policy to remove more implicit hate speech, including stereotypes about Jewish people as a collective controlling the media, economy, or government. The decision to remove this content draws on the spirit – and the text – of the IHRA in ways we found helpful and appropriate to protect against hate and anti-Semitic content.”

It still remains unclear if Facebook will use the IHRA definition in its official content policy. “The policy reflects both our commitment to engage and learn from the best sources of knowledge and our readiness to update our policies in line with our values,” Bickert wrote.

Bickert added that the social media site will continue working with “experts and effected communities” to continue to better understand an ever-changing form of hate. Facebook, she said, has a broad hate speech policy that covers hate against “race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability.”

The United States, along with 30 other countries, adopted the working definition of antisemitism on May 26, 2016, while taking part in the IHRA’s bi-annual Plenary meeting in Bucharest, Romania. Since then, the number of countries to implement the definition has grown to nearly 40 countries.

Moreover, the Trump administration included IHRA’s definition in a December 2019 Executive Order on combatting antisemitism.

IHRA definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Met Corrects Online Entry for Jewish Tefillin Mislabeled as Egyptian ‘Amulet’

The Met’s old entry of a Jewish artifact incorrectly labeled as an “Egyptian Amulet”

The Met’s old entry of a Jewish artifact incorrectly labeled as an “Egyptian Amulet”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is fixing a mistake that went unnoticed for years — a label that described an ancient Jewish Tefillin as an an Egyptian amulet.

The box, dating from 500 to 1000 AD, came to the Met in 1962, although the museum insists the charm classification happened only “in recent years.”

The brouhaha began after Twitter sleuths noticed the mislabeled artifact, which was designed to hold verses from the Torah.

“Hey @metmuseum we have a slight problem … why are you calling #teffilin an ‘amulet’ and then categorizing it as #islamic art when it’s literally the most sacred religious item for men in Judaism?!,” tweeted the account for StopAntiSemitism.Org.

On Monday, the Met quietly updated the online entry — changing the word “amulet” to “phylactery,” the technical term for Tefillin. Right now, the object can’t be seen by the public because the museum is closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We always appreciate feedback on our collection entries – as it is a catalogue we continually update.  The Islamic department houses some objects from 6th century Egypt among its diverse holdings, and we have updated the object description to capture that it is a Jewish ritual object. We look forward to working on providing additional context,” a museum spokesman told The Post.

The Met's corrected entry version of the artifact.

The Met's corrected entry version of the artifact.

The Tefllin certainly could be found in Egypt, where Jews have a history in the country dating back to the days of Exodus, according to Rabbi Menachem Genack, a professor at Yeshiva University and a Met regular.

Though now correctly labeled, the Tefillin remains in the museum’s Department of Islamic art, which Genack calls absurd.

“It can’t be called Islamic art,” he told The Post. “There was a Jewish population in Egypt and this came for that time but it’s certainly not Islamic art. That’s just false.”

StopAntisemitism.org Issues Statement on Swastika Symbolism

Swastika.jpeg

Our statement on Swastika Symbolism

While the swastika is an ancient symbol cherished by Hindus and other faiths for its positive connotations in their traditions, in Western culture it’s widely interpreted as a racist icon implying a hatred of minorities, mainly of Jewish descent but also Blacks, members of the LGBTQ community, and others.

Displaying the image in its form synonymous with Nazi Germany or normalizing it in any way is particularly disturbing and dangerous with the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and globally. It sends a threatening message to the Jewish community and other minorities and undermines the memory of the Holocaust.

In the West, the swastika is widely understood to represent the systematic killing of six million Jews along with gypsies, homosexuals, and other minorities by Nazi Germany and their collaborators in WWII. That is precisely why it is used by hate groups today.

Jewish schools and houses of worship are commonly tagged with swastikas across the U.S. and around the world as acts of hate and hostility. Whether it is sprayed on synagogue walls, scribbled on gravestones, or celebrated in a tattoo or on a flag, the message is clear: Jews should fear for their lives. This is the only meaning of the swastika in Western civilization, from Pittsburgh to Paris to Warsaw.

Sanitizing the swastika in the West will lead to more hatred and violence and will signal to younger generations that the inhumane acts of the Nazis can be forgotten.

The latest online disputes about the meaning of the swastika symbol erupted over New York legislation (S.6648) aimed at compelling schools to teach students about hate symbols. StopAntisemitism.org supports the NY State Bill, as well as H.R. 943, the Never Again Education Act, which requires the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to develop and disseminate resources to improve awareness and understanding of the Holocaust and authorizes various Holocaust education program activities to engage prospective and current teachers and educational leaders.

StopAntisemitism.org has great respect for all faiths and their symbols. We maintain that whenever the swastika is displayed in the U.S. and the West unless, in the context of Asian beliefs and traditions, it unequivocally symbolizes hatred of Jews and minorities. The tsunami of support for acceptance of the swastika out of that setting is troubling. This hate symbol should never become a mainstream icon.

The NYC Met Museum Mislabeled a Sacred Jewish Artifact

A controversy involving the Metropolitan Museum of Art flared up over the weekend, when a Twitter account representing the website StopAntisemitism.org called out the museum for allegedly mislabeling a 6th century amulet from Egypt in its Islamic art department. According to the @StopAntisemites account and other commenters, the object in question is not an amulet, but rather a tefillin; these are cubic leather black boxes traditionally used in Jewish prayer and are considered extremely sacred. The accusation that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had mislabeled an item in its collection was also picked up on Twitter by Caitlin Hollander, a genealogist who works for Hollander-Waas Jewish Heritage Services.

Institutions must be rigorous in verifying that best practices are being used when identifying items from cultures across the world. In November 2019, an account unaffiliated with the Met that shares public-domain images from the museum’s Islamic collection posted the image on Twitter. One commenter pointed out the object appeared to be mislabeled. It’s unclear if, prior to this weekend, the issue had been raised with the museum directly. Tefillin objects in particular have been targeted in antisemitic attacks, so for a tefillin to be allegedly mislabeled in a museum understandably strikes a nerve.

However, Raphael Magarik, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago, also stepped in on Twitter to offer some context on why the object might currently bear that label. “There’s no reason not to call tefillin an amulet,” Magarik wrote on Twitter. “Lexically, the Greek term now commonly used to refer to them (“phylactery”) originally meant just that, and had a long history of usage in that sense before referring to the specific Jewish items.”

“Also, in this particular case, there’s the obvious point that a Met catalogue entry for a random, provenance-less object is going to be pretty unreliable—I’d bet some money this particular artifact is not from 6th Century Egypt, for instance,” Magarik added. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has not yet commented on the matter.

The Social Media Bigotry Pandemic Boils Over to TikTok

Schools are closed. Summer plans are canceled. Everyone must stay at home. So who is watching the kids? Or rather, what are the kids watching? Coronavirus shut-downs have led to increased social media use—and with it, increased hate speech on social media.

We know hatred and bigotry is a problem on Facebook. We know it's a hot topic on Instagram, on Twitter and on YouTube. But what about the most popular app for children and teenagers, TikTok? The app's popularity has skyrocketed recently, especially among Gen Z.

With this comes a frightening rise in online anti-Semitism among youth; children as young as 12 seem to think mocking the Holocaust and Jews is "edgy." This isn't radical hate spreading on the fringes of the internet, but hatred on a rapidly growing platform that has billions of users. StopAntisemitism.org, which I direct, has been at the forefront of monitoring, investigating and reporting on this trend. Since the global pandemic outbreak in mid-March, reports of anti-Semitic TikTok videos have increased ten-fold.

To understand this phenomenon, we need to understand one of the reasons TikTok is popular. The platform has a simple interface that makes it easy to record, edit and post complex videos. These tools allow anyone to create videos that have a higher production value from their cell phone.

While this has unleashed creative content, it has also provided users a platform to spread hateful messages in a more "trendy" fashion. For example, a video last month from a since-deleted account shows a teenager standing with a Nazi salute, a finger over his mouth to imitate Hitler's moustache, and the text "4/20 is Hitler's birthday." He then mimes smoking a joint with the text, "So who's smoking that gas in honor of 4/20."

The visible praise of Hitler on the platform is alarming. One video showed two teenagers asking, "who is the most famous Jewish chef?" They then answer "Hitler" with a meme of Hitler as KFC's Colonel Sanders. Another video—a duet response to a young Hasidic Jew rapping about being Jewish—showed a young boy cringing with the text, "Where's Hitler when you need him?!?!?" In yet another video, one boy started his clip with, "how to escape a concentration camp." He continued, "now that I have the Jews attention," and climbed into an oven.

To make matter worse, these anti-Semitic "jokes" are becoming so normalized that they're trending. TikTok's explore page has featured anti-Semitic content, which goes against TikTok's own community standards. To the platform's credit, nearly 20% of reported videos are removed. Anecdotally, this is better than on other social media platforms. However, the volume of content on TikTok is growing faster and the consequences are the same—if not worse—because many users are impressionable children and teenagers.

Children need to face consequences for their offensive and hateful actions. Kids must be taught that any form of bigotry and violence is not a joking matter. Last month, a student at Marlborough High School in Western Massachusetts posted a Snapchat of himself in a Nazi salute. Once the school was alerted, they revoked the teenager's sports privileges and required him to volunteer at a local synagogue. In Georgia, two high school seniors were expelled after posting a racist video that denigrated black people on TikTok.

The original article can be viewed here.

Cybersecurity Expert: How To Protect Yourself From ‘Zoombombers’

“Zoombombers”, a term used to describe someone who hacks into an online group, are exploiting the coronavirus social distancing directives by infiltrating a growing number of online meetings with hateful messages.

A group of Yeshiva University students, a Jewish institution in New York, were “Zoombombed” on Tuesday night by individuals who posted antisemitic comments in their group that included, “SHUT THE F*** UP JEWS” and “IMMA GAS YALL.”

Zoom-Bombing.png

“We are horrified to see this new trend ‘Zoombombing’ gaining traction; for antisemites to disrupt online learning sessions, city meetings, even funerals with their bigotry is shameful. Would the police tolerate a neo-Nazi running into a classroom at Yeshiva University screaming ‘Heil Hitler’? Of course not; the individual would most likely be arrested and charged,” StopAntisemitism.org’s Liora Rez said in a statement to SaraACarter.com.

“We would like to have the authorities treat those participating in ‘Zoombombing’ the same way,” Rez added. “Real consequences are the only way to combat antisemitism and hatred online.”

zoom.png

In a similar attack, hijackers recently infiltrated a London synagogue’s Zoom session with antisemitic messages after the group shared the meeting link on public accounts to ensure the community could join, including many families and children.

“One of the founding ideals of our community is that we should welcome those who wish to join us for prayer, ” the synagogue’s rabbi said in a statement. “We recognize that many Jewish households are not members of synagogues, or are members of communities that are not able to offer online services. We want to assure them that they are still welcome to pray and study with us.

He continued, “It is deeply upsetting that at such a difficult period we are faced with additional challenges like these. We will be keeping the security of our online provision under review through the weeks ahead.”

Last month, a “Zoombomber” entered a city council meeting in New Canaan, Connecticut to post “references to male genitalia,” according to a report from the New Canaan Advertiser. The town Council Chairman John Engel muted the hackers but they kept “popping up with new names,” he told the new site.

With Zoom being one of the only ways to meet during the coronavirus pandemic, many are questioning how to stay safe in the online chat rooms. Dr. Eric Cole, a cybersecurity expert, former CIA analyst and Founder and CEO of Secure Anchor Consulting, told this reporter that reports of “Zoombombing” that were once a “one-off” event have “increased exponentially” during the coronavirus outbreak.

“The corona and everybody working from home and doing virtual meetings took these small, little problems that we knew about and basically just shined a really big light on it,” he said.

Here’s Dr. Cole’s advice for staying safe on Zoom

For churches, synagogues, and other gatherings advertising Zoom links publicly, Cole recommends for group administrators to put participants in “listen only mode”, meaning users can’t post, appear on video, or turn on their microphone.

“Even if people join in, they can’t post anything, they can’t say anything, they can’t do anything, they can only listen and receive content.” said Cole, “That’s probably one of the easiest, simplest mechanisms that’s built into Zoom, but, like I said, because so many people are looking at the functionality, they’re just not aware of how to configure it correctly.”

If you’re a community leader setting up a Zoom session, there are three configurations that you can control to prevent “Zoombombers,” Cole explained. The first is “whether people are on mute or not, you can override their settings so you can actually lock people on mute.”

The second way is to “lock out video so they can’t turn on their video”, and, finally, administrators can block posts and comments to stop participants “from posting any comments, any pictures, or any content at all during the call.”

For small groups, which would be around ten people, Cole advises leaders to “set a password on the meeting and then only give that out to those attendees.” Even if someone had the link to the group, not having the password would prevent an outsider from entering the session.

Notably, there is a feature called “locking a meeting” that completely closes the meeting completely to anyone, regardless of if they have a link or password.

When using Zoom, Cole added, users should assume that “by default” it’s not secure, but there are mechanisms that you can implement in less than five minutes to increase security and prevent a “Zoombombing.”

Haters Seethe Over Ilhan Omar Being Voted ‘Antisemite of the Year.’ Maybe They Are Jealous.

The group StopAntisemitism.org is “part of a non-profit foundation that works to hold antisemites accountable and to create consequences for their bigoted actions by exposing the threat that they present to all Americans and showing how their ideologies conflict with American values, morals, and principles.”

As part of this effort, they just announced Ilhan Omar as 2019’s Antisemite of the Year.

Ilhan_Omar_Antisemite_of_the_Year

No word yet from Ilhan Omar herself, but a number of (Jewish) pathological Israel haters have jumped in.

Like “cartoonist” Eli Valley

Eli_Valley_Antisemite

DouchebloggerTM Richard Silverstein

Richard_Silverstein_Antisemitic

and “activist” Daniel Sieradski

Daniel_Sieradski_Antisemite

My first reaction was “Typical! Of course these haters would go against any pro-Israel organization, especially when fighting antisemitism from the far Left and radical Islam, not just the far Right.”

And then another thought came to my mind: perhaps they are jealous they did not win!

Each of these scumbags share a few things in common, besides a pathological hatred of Israel:

  • They love attention

  • They have a history of using antisemitic smears

Eli Valley is known for attacking pro-Israel people – Jewish and non-Jewish alike – in the most antisemitic and vile ways.

Eli_Valley_Antisemitic_Cartoon
Eli_Valley_Antisemitic_Cartoon

He’s been praised by David Duke (https://davidduke.com/jews-can-say-to-jewish-audiences-what-gentiles-would-not-dare/).

Silverstein is not just a buffoon, liar and terror supporter, but also uses antisemitic slurs like “Judeo-fascist” and “Zio”

Silverstein_Antismite

He also has been praised by David Duke.

Sieradski is another nasty character who not only hates Israel, cyberbullies people, and has wished for violent death on others, he has also been known to use antisemitic smears.

Sieradski was forced to cut his trip short because his father in law had passed away and he naturally wanted to be with his wife to offer her solace and comfort. His tweets however reflected the frustration he had in getting his ticket with ELAL rescheduled for an earlier
departure. His first tweet on Saturday read as follows:

my wife’s father jst died & i’m trapped in israel until sunday because
kike airlines is beholden to haredi fascists & won’t answer the phone

Then after getting in touch with the haredi fascist beholden ELAL on
Saturday afternoon, he noted:

kike airlines wants $720 to change my flight to 10:40am tomorrow —
$200 less if i can fax them a death certificate. wtf?!

Although David Duke has not praised him, I am sure he approves of this.

So there you have it – while Ilhan may have taken home the chocolates, there seem to be plenty of other candidates.

Unfortunately, some of them happen to be Jewish.