A murderous anti-Semitic theme appeared on Facebook Sunday, when a user named
“Alex Cookson” launched an open invitation to an “event” called “Kill a Jew
Day.”
The page on the popular social networking Web site urged users to
violence “anywhere you see a Jew” between July 4 and July 22. A large image of a
swastika was placed at the top of the page. Under the heading “description,”
Cookson wrote, “You know the drill guys.”
It was the fourth time that a
call to murder Jews had been put on Facebook within recent days.
The site
attracted a torrent of anti-Semitic responses.
“Can’t wait to rape the
dead baby Jews,” one user wrote.
Another user posted images of corpses
piled on one another. A third user posted quotes by Adolf Hitler.
Within
hours, however, a large number of Israeli users converged on the site
and posted
comments on the page, with some expressing their disgust, and others
mocking
Cookson and his supporters.
Others still expressed their anger at the
page by sending profanities and threatening to track down anti-Semitic
users.
According to the Jewish Internet Defense Web site (JIDF), the page
is one of a number “kill a Jew” Facebook pages that have been launched
and
subsequently removed following complaints in recent days.
David
Appletree, founder of JIDF, told
The
Jerusalem Post that incitement to
anti-Semitic murder was a prevalent phenomenon on Facebook, and that not
enough
was being done to stop it.
“I feel it’s very dangerous.
This is
part of a long-running campaign that we’ve fighting for well over two
years,”
Appletree said.
“They’re taken down but they come back and they’re
determined to keep them up.
It’s very dangerous,” he
added.
Appletree said online anti- Semitism has already helped spur
violent incidents, such as the 2007 assault on Holocaust author Elie
Wiesel in
San Francisco by a Holocaust denier, and the gun attack on the Holocaust
Museum
in Washington by a white supremacist armed with a rifle, which claimed
the life
of a security guard.
“This incitement has been the precursor to violence
against Jews,” he said.
On his Web site, Appletree wrote, “This is
precisely why Facebook needs to take more proactive measures (ie.
deactivating
accounts responsible for, and taking part, in, this material).
Facebook
must implement IP bans on people involved in such material. Finally, law
enforcement should get involved, Facebook should be subpoenaed, the IP’s
of the
people threatening and inciting violence should be obtained, and legal
action
should be immediately pursued.”
Appletree told
The Post that
Facebook
could implement technologies that are sensitive to keywords which could
prevent
such pages from being loaded.
“Facebook is not proactive enough,” he
said.
Facebook said it would review the event page in question after
being alerted to it by
the Post.
Facebook removed the page from its site on Sunday evening for
violating its terms of use.
Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes added, “Unfortunately ignorant
people exist and we absolutely feel a social responsibility to silence
them on
Facebook if their statements turn to direct hate. That’s why we have
policies
that prohibit hateful content and we have built a robust reporting
infrastructure and an expansive team to review reports and remove content
quickly.”
Noyes added, “We take our Statement of Rights and
Responsibilities very seriously and react quickly to remove reported
content
that violates our policies. Specifically, we’re sensitive to content
that
includes pornography, bullying, hate speech, and actionable threats of
violence.
“The goal of these policies is to strike a very delicate
balance between giving our more than 400 million users the freedom to
express
themselves and maintaining a safe and trusted environment. When groups
or pages
make real threats or statements of hate we remove them. We encourage
people to
report anything they feel violates our policies using the report links
located
throughout the site.”
In 2009, Facebook came under fire for refusing to
remove groups that promoted Holocaust denial on the social networking
site.