The following article has been published in The Jerusalem Post by Julie Nathan.

Why does an article defending the right to boycott Max Brenner elicit a call for gassing Jews? And why does an article on Israel’s security barrier elicit a call for the drowning of all Jews in Australia?

Posting a comment under an online article about Foreign Minister Bob Carr and abori­gin­al affairs, a certain David G wrote: “Lets call a spade a spade here forget about Zionists they are Jews! there are 125,000 of them in Australia and our Gov­ern­ment feel a need to keep them happy because of their money and power. We should run the Jew Bastards [sic] out of the country just like what they do to non-Jewish [sic] in Israel the quicker the world is rid of these Jew bastards the better for peace in the world. Any one got a spare Gas chamber [sic] but this time lets do it for real.”

This is but one example of the vile and often genocidal anti-Jewish responses to online articles that are critical of Israel.

Two factors are involved.

With the Internet, racism and vili­fic­a­tion are easily and widely propag­ated, often with few restraints. The Internet media and the print media operate under different editorial oversight, pub­lish­ing guidelines and civil law, with the former acting with almost unfettered freedom, and the latter acting within pre­scribed para­met­ers. The problem is that the law has yet to catch up with tech­no­lo­gic­al devel­op­ments. This is espe­cially true for matters of bigotry, hatred and vili­fic­a­tion on the Internet. Even websites ostens­ibly espousing an anti-racist agenda often fail to uphold those prin­ciples when it comes to Jews and the State of Israel.

The second factor is the growing social accept­ab­il­ity of antisemitism when it is cloaked as anti-Zionism. Support for the Palestini­ans and oppos­i­tion to Israel has become a part of the orthodoxy of the con­tem­por­ary political Left. The Left prides itself on its pro­gress­ive, anti-racist beliefs and policies, yet when it comes to Israel, left-wing media articles and posted comments fre­quently cross the line into outright anti-Jewish racism.

Indymedia Australia provides a valuable study on how anti-Israel articles often end up producing anti-Jewish com­ment­ary.

Indymedia hosts articles about current events and upcoming protests, and each article provides the oppor­tun­ity for comments by readers. Some examples of anti- Semitic comments that have appeared in Indymedia follow:

In Defending the Right to Boycott Max Brenner, “Anonymous” wrote: “I can organize a train ride and instead of saying it is a shower I will tell them it is where the Gentiles keep their money then they will run into the gas chamber to rip off the Gentile and I will slam the door shut behind them. Or if they have not built a gas Chamber [sic] yet we can Bulldoze down [sic] their houses with them in side [sic] and give them a taste of their own medicine!”

In Don’t be Another Brick in Israel’s Wall, “Psycho Bill” wrote:

“We need to wipe Israel off the map we should cut the heads off all the people that have stolen land from the Palestini­an people and celebrate by drinking their blood we will eat their children and rape their wives [only the good looking ones] then feed the left overs to the Pigs, If [sic] you think this approach is a bit excessive we can gas the bastards or build walls around every synagogue in Australia then fill it with water and drown the scourge of the earth that go there. Lets face it and be honest it’s the f***ing Jews that are the problem and until we have the guts to admit it we are wasting our time. Line all the f***ers up and shoot the Jewish pigs. It’s no wonder Hitler took to the Bastards [sic].”

Other comments, all in articles sup­port­ing calls for a boycott of Max Brenner chocolate shops, included murderous incite­ment with the comment: “we [sic] need to pick up a machine gun and when these Zionist scum are all gone we will be free!” to charges of decide with “Zionists are the pigs that bombed Israel into existence through Terrorism [sic]. Israelis are the pigs that live there today. And Jews were the pigs that killed Jesus.”

There were also comments with fab­ric­a­tions about the Talmud, falsely claiming that it states that “Gentiles were made by god to serve the Jew and it is not a sin to kill a Gentile” and also claims that “Yes it is true Jews run the world.”

Some of these and other antisemitic comments remained on the website for weeks, with appar­ently no objec­tions raised, no internal mon­it­or­ing of comments, and no concern for the propaga­tion of vili­fic­a­tion, racism and genocide.

It was only when the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry (ECAJ) contacted Indymedia about the antisemitic posts that Indymedia removed some of them. Indymedia acknow­ledged the problem of anti- Semitism on its website and was cooper­at­ive in removing some of the material once it was pointed out.

However, other comments, those critical of Israel but couched in anti-Jewish terms, were con­sidered a gray area, not anti- Semitic per se, and were not removed.

ECAJ then provided Indymedia with inform­a­tion on what con­sti­tutes antisemitism and antisemitic criticism of Israel, including the document Working Defin­i­tion of Antisemitism sourced from the European Union Agency for Fun­da­ment­al Rights.

After an increas­ingly heavy stream of anti-Jewish comments, Indymedia insti­tuted a new regime to block the racists whereby all comments had to be checked by a moderator before pub­lic­a­tion. This enabled Indymedia to weed out racist comments from pub­lic­a­tion on its website.

The case study high­lighted four aspects of the issue of antisemitic comments in response to articles critical of Israel.

First, that articles critical of Israel are a magnet for anti­semites and are used as a vehicle to express their Jew-hatred.

Second, that those critical of Israel who may not think of them­selves as anti-Jewish often fall into using anti-Jewish rhetoric and ste­reo­typ­ing.

Third, that website owners often have little knowledge about the nature of anti- Jewish racism and how it manifests, as shown in their dif­fi­culty in identi­fy­ing antisemitic criticism of Israel as racist, even when tra­di­tion­al anti-Jewish ste­reo­types are used.

And fourth, there is a laxity by website owners in mon­it­or­ing their websites for racist com­ment­ary and removing it.

Unfor­tu­nately, in too many cases, it is often only because of com­plaints of racism that owners are forced to clean up their websites. Indi­vidu­als and organ­iz­a­tions, espe­cially those on the Left, who wish to criticize Israel should exercise respons­ib­il­ity, uphold their anti-racist prin­ciples, and monitor their own websites effect­ively to ensure no racist comments are published in the first place.

They also need to learn how to identify antisemitic content within anti-Zionist material, and to dis­tin­guish between anti- Semitism and legit­im­ate criticism of Israel.

Mon­it­or­ing of and com­plaints about anti- Semitism on websites should not be the job of Jewish indi­vidu­als or organ­iz­a­tions, or others, but should rest with the website owners. They have the same respons­ib­il­it­ies and should operate with the same level of care as owners of print media.

There are many in the inde­pend­ent and online media who would do well to heed the obser­va­tion of Prof. Irwin Cotler, former Canadian justice minister, that “the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – it began with words.”

The writer is the research officer for the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry (ECAJ), the offi­cially elected rep­res­ent­at­ive organ­iz­a­tion of the Aus­trali­an Jewish Community.