Thousands of
incidents of antisemitism and Holocaust denial are registered each day on the
internet, according to the co-founder of a leading international network of
organizations engaged in combating cyberspace bigotry. “It is very difficult to
make exact calculations because the internet is much bigger than most of us
think,” said Ronald Eissens, who serves as a board member of the Dutch-based
International Network Against Cyber Hate (INACH), which encompasses 16
organizations spanning the globe. “A thousand a day would certainly be true,
and 5,000 to 10,000 a day worldwide could also be true.” In an interview with
Haaretz, Eissens said the number of complaints about antisemitism and Holocaust
denial submitted to his network of organizations tends to rise when Israel is
the focus of international media attention. “During the last Gaza War, we saw a
big fat spike in online antisemitism, and I’m talking about pure antisemitism –
not anti-Zionism,” he said.
Eissens, who
also serves as director-general of the Magenta Foundation – the Dutch
complaints bureau for discrimination on the internet – was a keynote speaker
Tuesday at an international conference on online antisemitism held in
Jerusalem. The conference, the first of its kind, was co-sponsored by INACH and
Israeli Students Combating Antisemitism, a local organization. Antisemitism,
said Eissens, is the single most common form of bigotry on the internet,
accounting for about one-third of all complaints registered with his
organization, followed by Islamophobia. In 2015, though, for the first time, he
said, Islamophobia surpassed antisemitism as the most common complaint in two
countries: The Netherlands and Germany. Eissens attributed the rising number of
complaints about Islamophobia to the refugee crisis in Europe.
Since its
establishment in 2002, said Eissens, INACH succeeded in removing somewhere
between 60,000 and 70,000 hateful posts on the internet, about 25,000 of them antisemitic
in nature. In past years, noted Eissens, antisemitic posts were found mainly in
dedicated neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites and forums. “Nowadays, most
of the stuff has shifted to social media. It’s much more scattered, but also
much more mainstream. You still find it on those traditional antisemitic sites,
but more and more on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google.” Although his
organization does not monitor anti-Zionist posts on the internet, Eissens said
he believed there was often a blurring of lines. “Nowadays, anti-Zionism has
become part and parcel of Jew hatred, and often when people say they are just
anti-Zionist but not antisemitic, that is a cop out,” he said. “I’m not sure
all those who identify as anti-Zionists are really antisemitic, but I think
it’s heading in that direction, and that is dangerous.”
Asked whether
he considered supporters of the international Boycott, Divest and Sanctions
(BDS) movement against Israel to be anti-Jewish, Eissens said: “My problem with
BDS activists is that almost all of them are of the opinion that Israel should
not really exist. They’re talking about a one-state solution. They’re talking
about giving Palestine back to the Palestinians, and they’re talking about all
of traditional Palestine. When they say things like that, I often find BDS
activists to be antisemites because what’s supposed to happen to Jews who are
living in Israel if that happens? “But if they say they’re in favor of a
two-state solution, with Jews and Palestinians living side by side, that’s a
whole other stance. But I don’t hear that nuance a lot among BDS activists.”
