{"id":4899,"date":"2008-11-21T08:40:37","date_gmt":"2008-11-21T07:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=4899"},"modified":"2008-11-21T08:40:37","modified_gmt":"2008-11-21T07:40:37","slug":"antisemitism-a-web-of-denial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/contributions\/antisemitism-a-web-of-denial\/","title":{"rendered":"Antisemitism: A Web of Denial"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via lancasteruaf.blogspot.com<\/a> |<\/p>\n

Let me start by thanking the ADL and Chris Wolf for making this into a great conference. I\u2019m pleased to be here in the United States, in fact I\u2019m always happy to come here but this time is doubly joyful since America has voted massively for hope. Hope for America and hope for the world. Now, step into my time machine, we\u2019re going back 2000 years.<\/p>\n

The first dissemination of antisemitism comes to us from the Alexandrian Apion, a Greek-Egyptian philosopher and writer. When the great library of Alexandria burned down, Apion\u2019s Egyptian History burned with it. We only know partly what was written in those books because the Roman historian Tacitus quotes some of the content. Another source for Apion\u2019s antisemitism is to be found in the work of the historian Titus Flavius Josephus, the former Jewish military leader Joseph ben Matthias. Josephus wrote a treatise called \u2018against Apion\u2019 in which he attacks and refutes Apions\u2019 ideas, which probably makes him the first advocate against antisemitism.<\/p>\n

Apion described Jews as sinister and revolting, barbaric because of the practice of circumcision. Apion was not unique, many popular believes about Jews during those days \u2014we\u2019re talking about the year 30- were extremely negative. Because of the Shabbat, Jews were thought to be lazy. Jews were thought to sacrifice humans during strange rites \u2014 the blood libel throwing its shadow backward – Jews were considered anti-social and worshipped only one god, which in those polytheistic times was considered to be foolish and alien, although some of the Greek intellectuals thought the idea as such was very stylish. Apion\u2019s antisemitism was quite popular with the Greek elite of Alexandria and his writings fuelled the flames of the first pogrom in history, in the year 38. That pogrom broke out when the Jews of Alexandria protested a decree by Roman Emperor Caligula in which they were ordered to pray to his statue. Apions\u2019 rabble-rousing resulted in the murder of thousands of Alexandrian Jews.<\/p>\n

Now, Apion was a charismatic individual, who did not have the use of Internet but rather his writings, copied by scribes and disseminated by \u2014and through his friends and admirers and he used public speeches to spread his hatred. Instead of Internet the Alexandrians of that age knew the bathhouse.net and the marketplace.net, where information, gossip, writings and speeches went from person to person.<\/p>\n

Jumping forward in time, we have to note that for every succeeding pogrom there was either a verbal or written slander campaign to incite the masses to attack Jews. Sometimes it was writings by religious leaders; sometimes it was word-of-mouth, often instigated by kings, emperors, religious or other leaders, creating myths like the blood libel, the poisoning of wells by Jews, the Christ-killers accusations, and many variations on those and other themes, culminating in what Lucy Davidowitz very aptly calls \u2018the war against the Jews\u2019, the Shoah.<\/p>\n

After the Shoah followed a period in which antisemitism in the western world was mainly spread underground, on paper \u2014 books and pamphlets. The protocols, Mein Kampf and other leftovers of Nazi ideology were disseminated both in Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East, where European-style antisemitism found an already fertile breeding ground. But, both in volume and in reach it was nothing compared to what we see these days on the Internet.<\/p>\n

From 1992 on, Neo-Nazis started to use the Internet to spread their rhetoric. Already in the in the pre-world wide web age German Neo-Nazis saw the potential of Information Technology, using Bulletin Board Systems and moving onto the web when it came available.<\/p>\n

In as sense, those German Neo-Nazi\u2019s did not have to go far from home. As the journalist and writer Edwin Black proved, the information age was not born in Silicon Valley but in 1933 in Berlin. IBM facilitated the administration of the Holocaust with census cards and punch card technology, even after 1941, through full IBM subsidiaries managed from Switzerland. The Nazi\u2019s had a problem and IBM had a solution for their final solution. It teaches us to be wary of those who say that they are only selling technology and don\u2019t care what it is used for. Or those who say that others should do no evil while they themselves engage in the large\u2014scale technological facilitation of oppression.<\/p>\n

The Internet gave Antisemitism a new common carrier, to use a technical term. Thanks to the Internet, there is more antisemitism and Holocaust denial available in the world than ever. Thanks to the Internet, there is more information on the Holocaust and antisemitism available than ever. But these positions hardly cancel-out each other, even if you believe that bad speech can be countered by good speech. No longer is it the grubby bookstores, which sold stenciled copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion under the counter. No longer is it the house-to-house delivered stenciled antisemitic pamphlets, a hundred here, a thousand there. Now it’s tens of thousands of websites and hundreds of thousands of expressions of antisemitism and Holocaust denial. Now it’s millions of hits here and hundred thousands of page views there.<\/p>\n

In 1995 who had heard of Stormfront? Yet there they were, in the forefront of the Internet age. As no other, Neo-nazi\u2019s, white supremacists and other extremists understood the potential of the Internet for the unbridled dissemination of their ideas. Antisemitism. Holocaust Denial. National Socialism. Racism.<\/p>\n

By now, the bulk of all antisemitism and Holocaust denial has firmly moved onto the Internet. Old media have become obsolete. You will still be able to find Mein Kampf or the Protocols or Hardwoods \u2018did six million really die\u2019 in the proverbial grubby bookstore \u2014 or get it by post order through the Internet. But ask yourself, who under 30 years old still reads books? Very few. In the 15 years since the Internet took off, antisemitism and holocaust denial have penetrated every nook and cranny. You can find it on web logs, web forums, Youtube, in online games, in chat boxes, on facebook, myspace, et cetera, and it is the largest category of online hate.<\/p>\n

The number of websites offering antisemitism or Holocaust denial runs in the tens of thousands. We\u2019re not only talking about \u2018dedicated\u2019 Neo-Nazi or other extremist sites here. A \u201cnormal\u201d popular web forum has 1000-plus postings per day, of which on average 50 are of a racist or antisemitic nature. There are thousands of web forums like that. If you add the thousands of extremist web forums that generate hundreds of hateful expressions per day, the total volume of hate on the net is mind-boggling. I understand that the latest CD Digital Terrorism and Hate 2007, published by our colleagues at Simon Wiesenthal Center identifies some 5000 \u201cproblematic\u201d websites. I think that is quite an underestimation. We\u2019re not even taking into account all the web logs, and the still existing Usenet newsgroups, historically known for a large hate content. It is impossible to really give exact figures on online hate. We only know that the volume is enormous, but registering and monitoring is a bit like trying to count fruit flies. There are lots of them, they die soon but since they breed fast new ones appear all the time.<\/p>\n

The current interactive web, web 2.0 as it\u2019s is called, with its blogs, forums, photo \u2014and video repositories like Youtube turns everybody into an instant publicist. Internet is the biggest soapbox in the world, and people who would not dare air their views offline find their outlet in posting them on the Internet, thinking they are totally anonymous. Internet is also the big recycler. Once something is online, it is quite hard to get rid of it for good. The boost the Internet gave to The Protocols is enormous. Twenty years ago, it had almost sunken into oblivion. The immensely popular Youtube is used on a large scale to share short video-clips with the world. Neo-Nazis use Youtube as another great tool, but you can also watch Holocaust deniers like David Irving walking in Birkenau, explaining why Jews were never gassed there. You can see Leuchter fans doing a so-called scientific experiment \u2018testing\u2019 Zyklon-B on each other, showing that \u2018the concentrations of Zyklon-B that were allegedly used to kill Jews are in fact harmless\u2019. Do a search on the Youtube site for \u2018gas chambers\u2019 and the second video that will be presented to you is footage of Fred Leuchter talking about his report which claims that the gas chambers at the death camps were never used to gas people.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the online games and games sold over the Internet, like Ethnic Cleansing and ZOG\u2019s nightmare, which add another level of nausea and last but not least there\u2019s the virtual \u2018Furry Nazi groups\u2019 in Second Life, who amused themselves by building gas chambers and \u2018playing\u2019 camp, trying to capture Jewish Second Life users in order to \u2018test their facilities\u2019. Good news is that just two weeks ago, after pressure brought by Jewish groups in Second Life, owner Linden Labs removed the Nazi\u2019s and their virtual \u2018Third Reich\u2019. A small victory.<\/p>\n

The Netcraft October 2008 web server survey tells us there are now almost 200 million websites online. A sea of data, which would be impossible to navigate without search engines. But here\u2019s the rub. Your average non-Jewish student who becomes curious about his Jewish classmate goes to Google and types in the word \u2018Jew\u2019. The third search result is the infamous hate site \u2018Jew Watch\u2019, which will teach the student that Jews control the world and every evil deed ever done in history was done by Jews. Oh yes, since recently you will see as a first search result a notice by Google saying that they do not endorse some of the disturbing search results and that it is better to search on Judaism then on Jews, in order to get informative and relevant results instead of \u2018unexpected ones\u2019. How easy it would be for the privately owned company Google to just omit sites like Jew Watch from their database. But I guess that would be \u2018doing evil\u2019.<\/p>\n

Sadly, it doesn\u2019t end with \u2018classic\u2019 antisemitism. Where before you could only find a limited amount of left-wing antisemitism, after the disastrous 2001 World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, which turned into an antisemitic hate-fest, the masks came off. Blatant antisemitism on left-wing sites is now quite acceptable, of course prudently called \u201canti-Zionism\u201d. Some left-wing sites even link to antisemitic content on neo-Nazi sites and since the rise of Islamism and Jihadism there is an increasing overlap between Islamist and neo-Nazi rethoric, uniting seemingly natural enemies in their joint struggle against the \u201cZionist world conspiracy\u201d. The common ground for online hate-mongers is called Jews.<\/p>\n

The Internet not only dramatically changed the scope of antisemitism, it also facilitates its mutation. The antisemitism-virus always seems to seek a new myth to piggyback on and if there\u2019s one thing the Internet is good in, it is the fast dissemination of urban legends and myths. The Jews are behind 9\/11. The Jews working at the World Trade center stayed home on 9\/11. The Jews are behind the financial crisis.<\/p>\n

Then there is the online trivialization of the Holocaust \u2014 which is maybe the biggest danger. The Holocaust depicted as a dance party in the infamous video \u2018Housewitz\u2019. A Belgian far-right politician singing a song about \u2018the little Jewess that is going to Dachau to be gassed\u2019. Or comparing the Holocaust to anything, from bad treatment of animals and abortion clinics to discrimination of smokers.<\/p>\n

Lastly, there is the encrypted antisemitism, a language of code words for Jews -like Zionists, or cabal, or the media elite, or those that control the banks. This language creates an environment that eases the path for openly antisemitic rhetoric.<\/p>\n

The results: Holocaust Denial is becoming fashionable, antisemitism quite normal, Zionism is deliberately depicted as racism and antisemitic violence is on the rise.<\/p>\n

Those who say \u2018sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me\u2019 need to do a reality check. Apion\u2019s words fuelled the flames of the first pogrom. Hitler\u2019s and Goebbels\u2019 and Streichers\u2019 words caused the Holocaust. Every genocide, pogrom, or act of antisemitic violence in history was built on words.
\nThere\u2019s a well-known quote from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. \u201cPublicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.\u201d He wrote this in 1914 in his publication Other People’s Money\u2013and How Bankers Use It, referring to the benefits of openness and transparency in financial issues. Many an advocate of freedom of speech takes this quote to mean that hate speech, once it is exposed and out in the open, will shrivel away and die. First of all, I think it is doubtful that Brandeis meant this. Justice Brandeis died in 1941 but had he lived to see the Holocaust, I don\u2019t think he would have agreed with the new meaning his quote was given. Secondly, in recent history, let\u2019s says since 1900, we\u2019ve had very little success countering genocides or atrocities only by publicity and sunlight. The sad thing is that the amount of people outside of Germany who were aware of the holocaust already in 1941 is quite large. But nothing happened while the sun kept on shining over Auschwitz.<\/p>\n

The Shoah itself illustrates the danger of the repetition of hate speech best. Nazi propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels loved to advise everybody to \u201cmake the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually people will believe it.\u201d Mass-murderer Rudolf H\u00c3\u00b6ss, commander of Auschwitz, illustrated this further during his interrogation shortly after his capture in 1945 when he said: \u201cI was absolutely convinced that the Jews were at the opposite pole from the German People, and sooner or later there would have to be a clash between National-Socialism and World Jewry\u2026but everybody was convinced of this; that was all you could hear or read.\u201d<\/p>\n

The role of antisemitic propaganda and language was significant in creating a mindset in Germany in the 1930s that predisposed acceptance of racial policy even in its most radical form. The constant repetition of antisemitic sentiment, whether fanatical Party propaganda or the casual racial aside, lodged in the collective psyche in ways that reduced the ability and willingness of a great many Germans to question race policy and encouraged them to endorse it.[1]<\/p>\n

So why should everybody work on countering antisemitism and Holocaust Denial? Many think that National Socialism and the Holocaust are things of the past, and antisemitism is not seen as a real problem.<\/p>\n

The Nizkor Project\u2014 whose director, Ken McVay, to my great pleasure, is present here today, gives us the answer. In 1996, a small Neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist White Peoples Party, wrote in their electronic magazine “The real purpose of Holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again.” Nizkor published this profound quote on its main page \u2014 and it is still there today.<\/p>\n

This is why we need to counter antisemitism and Holocaust denial. We want to do it because we need to remember those who were murdered, lest they be forgotten, but we need to do it to make sure National Socialism never again becomes an acceptable political option. Now to make the world understand that. A tough challenge.<\/p>\n

Of course we need good speech. Of course we need truth. So are we doing that? In the physical world I think we can\u2019t complain. Lots of great work is done by scholars, Non-Governmental Organizations, Jewish Communities and Community organizations. Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial are illegal in a number of European countries. Thanks to the effort of a number of Jewish NGOs and individuals, some present here, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency now has a Working Definition of Antisemitism. We have Holocaust museums. We have a wealth of online information on the Holocaust, available through the Nizkor Project, the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem and many others. We commemorate. We warn. We give testimony. We educate. We take young people to see the camps. We try to prevent.<\/p>\n

On and through the Internet, NGOs like mine, the INACH Network, the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and others work on countering hate. Since 2002, the INACH network has gotten thousands of instances of antisemitism and Holocaust Denial removed. That sounds like a lot, but looking at the vast hate-scape that has unfolded on the Internet, it seems almost futile. I fear we are not able to stem the tide in this way.<\/p>\n

The memory of the holocaust is fading, the first and second generation of Holocaust survivors are passing away, and antisemitism is moving into the electronic mainstream.<\/p>\n

What we should do is put all our efforts in education, not only anti-hate education and education about the Holocaust but also Media literacy; how to assess information on the Internet, how to check for credibility, how to check sources and how to think critical. But we should also advocate for anti-discrimination lessons and for Holocaust education and prejudice reduction modules to be included in all school curricula. That is in my view the only way to \u2014in time- effectively counter hate.<\/p>\n

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new library of Alexandria, opened 5 years ago and is built next to the location of the antique library. It contains millions of books. It aims to be \u2018a center of excellence in the production and dissemination of knowledge and a place of dialogue, learning and understanding between cultures and peoples\u2019.<\/p>\n

It has Tacitus\u2019 Histories, quoting Apion\u2019s antisemitism. It has The Protocols of the elders of Zion in many translations. The online catalog proudly describes \u2018The protocols\u2019 as a \u2018Complete plan for world destruction\u2019. This august new institution for knowledge in the Middle East, partly financed by UNESCO, also has the Leuchter report in Arabic, Mein Kampf, and other antisemitic material. Of course it has a complete copy of the Internet Archive containing most hate sites on the Internet. From Alexandria in the year 30 to Alexandria in 2008 – it seems that Apion has come full circle and not only that \u2014 antisemitism is now part of the largest library in the world \u2014 unquestioned, uncommented antisemitism.<\/p>\n

During the 2007 annual INACH conference in Berlin a resolution was adopted which calls upon countries and international bodies like the OSCE and the EU to coordinate measures against cyber hate and to start working on media education. That\u2019s excellent, but we need to do more. When I did one of my usual gloomy speeches last February during the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, people asked me \u2018but what can we do?\u2019 Well, we need to engage our schools and our politicians, to make it clear to them that we have to take action now.<\/p>\n

After Lunch, some of you will be visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Right after the main entrance, on your left, you will see the flags of the U.S. Army units that liberated the concentration camps. One of those is the flag of the 4th armored division of General Patton\u2019s 3rd army. I have an interest in that since the 4th armored was the division that liberated my father-in-law from Buchenwald.<\/p>\n

The motto of the 4th armored was \u201cThey shall be known by their deeds alone\u201d and I think that is a fitting message to all of us. Let\u2019s stop talking, and be known by our deeds.<\/p>\n

Keynote speech by Ronald Eissens during the INACH\/ADL Global Summit on Internet Hate, 17 & 18 November 2008, Washington D.C.<\/span><\/p>\n

[1] Richard Overy, Interrogations \u2014 the Nazi elite in allied hands, 1945. P.196, The Penguin Press, 2001<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via lancasteruaf.blogspot.com | Let me start by thanking the ADL and Chris Wolf for making this into a great conference. I\u2019m pleased to be here in the United States, in fact I\u2019m always happy to come here but this time is doubly joyful since America has voted massively for hope. Hope for America and hope […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4899","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-contributions"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}