Social media fuels rise in anti-Semitism

Jewish journalist Bari Weiss. Picture: Getty Images.

Social media has been corrupting journalism for more than a decade so it’s no surprise the media here is affected by rampant Jew hatred on X/Twitter and TikTok.

Two recent speeches should be compulsory viewing for all covering the war in Gaza. The first was a UN presentation on International Children’s Day on November 20 about kids being exploited by Hamas in Gaza. Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of one of Hamas’s co-founders, Sheik Hassan Yousef, defected to Israel in 1996 and became an agent for its domestic secret service, Shin Bet. He has since become a Christian and now lives in the US.

Jewish journalist Bari Weiss caused a stir when she quit The New York Times in 2020. In her resignation letter she told her publisher Twitter was not the editor of the Times. This after young journalists employed by the paper launched a Twitter campaign against the paper’s opinion pages.

At our ABC – in thrall to X/Twitter since then managing director Mark Scott introduced a Twitter comments feed to Q&A in 2010 – TikTok is now the editor. The ABC last week advertised four new six-month TikTok producer positions on salaries ranging from $93,000 to $114,000.

How appropriate only days after Weiss delivered a brilliant speech – an extract was published in The Weekend Australian – to the Federalist Society in Washington DC on November 10 about anti-Semitism and the need for the West to defend its values. The ABC’s job ads came a week after The Guardian was forced to take down the Letter to America by Osama Bin Laden that had been trending on TikTok.

A generation who learn their facts from social media and their activism in school discovered what many thought the “righteousness” of al-Qa’ida’s case against the US. Check the Twitter feeds of even many older journalists and you can see the effects of imagining power and victimhood are the most interesting things about any human. These seasoned professionals love the approval – via “likes” and retweets – of their children and grandchildren.

One of the ABC’s big bloopers this year, sacking political editor Andrew Probyn, was defended on grounds it needed his salary to expand its footprint on TikTok. The editorial mindset: never mind the quality, feel the youth audience width.

The ABC’s surrender to the Hamas victim narrative since the October 7 massacre of 1200 Israeli civilians is hurting it. The X/Twitter and TikTok left, many following Islamist influencers from the Middle East, have convinced themselves Israel is the aggressor.

Former RN Drive host Ramona Koval was correct last Thursday when she said the ABC seemed reluctant to believe information from the Israel Defence Forces but showed “no reluctance to broadcast Hamas claims”. Koval said reporters had to “decide whether they want to be journalists or activists”.

Ramona Koval.

This is why the ABC board should read Bari Weiss’s speech.

She says after October 7 “in lock-step, the social justice crowd – the crowd who has tried to convince us that words are violence – insisted that actual violence was an actual necessity. That rape was resistance. That it was liberation. Hip young people with pronouns in their bios are not just chanting the slogans of a genocidal death cult.

“They are tearing down the photographs of the women and children currently being held hostage” in Gaza. “They mock the nine-month-old baby stolen from his parents. In doing so they are tearing down … the essence of our humanity …”

Weiss links the October 7 massacre to 9/11 and the civilisational threat of Islamism.

The UN speech by Yousef is so compelling it’s almost unbearable to watch. He outlines the torture he saw inflicted in Hamas jails on Palestinians and says Hamas is prepared to risk the lives of thousands of Gazan children just to score political points against Israel. “We’re talking about a religious group that does not believe in borders and wants to annihilate an entire race in order to build an Islamic State.

“Hamas’s first crime against children in Palestinian societies is not arming them or encouraging them to carry out suicide bombing attacks – it’s the religious ideological indoctrination that I had to go through (as a child) with one intention in mind: to annihilate the state of Israel.”

Journalists who doubt Israel’s right to exist need to read 1947 UN Resolution 181. They need to look at the blue-and-white flag with the Star of David in the centre that was the flag of Palestine under the British mandate.

Jews are descendants of the original Canaanite inhabitants of what the political left now claims has always been Palestine.

Journalists need to see pictures of the coins used there before World War II. These British Mandate coins carry the words “eretz Yisrael” (land of Israel). They need to remember the word Judaism comes from the area of Judea. The word Palestine comes from the Hebrew word for philistine (plishtim), meaning “invaders”. They need to reflect on the rise of Islam 2000 years after Jews returned to Israel from Egypt.

Journalists and editors should understand legal definitions of “genocide”. The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as “an act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. This fits exactly within Article 7 of the Hamas Charter but is clearly outside the aims of the IDF in Gaza.

The clear goal of Israel’s campaign is the removal of Hamas. This is why the IDF has been urging civilians to leave target areas. Conversely, it is why Hamas is trying to prevent those same civilians from doing so.

Mosab Hassan Yousef.

Gerard Baker, former editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, has explained why activist journalists use the genocide allegation against Israel. Baker on November 6 wrote those using the allegation know “its resonance in the history of the Jewish people and they use it deliberately to equate what happened to the Jews at the hands of the Nazis with a military action today”. The argument is “explicitly reducing the Holocaust to the level of a regrettable by-product of a legitimate military campaign”. It is an attempt to deny Israel the right to defend itself.

ABC editorial management should check Palestinian polling to see if its reporters are right to claim ordinary Gazans are not Hamas supporters.

A poll published in the Jerusalem Post on November 17 and conducted by Palestinian-based Arab World for Research and Development asked what the Post called a leading question: “How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7?”

Palestinians on the West Bank who supported the attack to an “extreme” or “somewhat” extent totalled 83.1 per cent. Only 6.9 per cent were extremely or somewhat against. In Gaza 63.6 were supportive and 20.9 per cent opposed.

Asked about support for a two-state solution, 74.7 per cent supported a single Palestinian state “from the river to the sea”. Only 17.2 per cent supported a two-state solution.

Back to the core of Bari Weiss’s speech: “When anti-Semitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system – a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.

“It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis – one that explains how in the span of a little over 20 years since September 11 educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defence of civilisation, but with a defence of barbarism.”