[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
An Israeli strategic consultant, Srulik Einhorn, in mid-May made an anguished appeal to Mark Zuckerberg to rein in antisemitic messaging on Facebook, where it had been allowed to run riot, and continues to do so. Einhorn’s appeal is worth revisiting, and can be found here: “Mark Zuckerberg has a duty to do what he can to protect the Jewish people – opinion,” by Srulik Einhorn, Jerusalem Post, May 16, 2024:
Imagine you are Mark Zuckerberg. You get up in the morning, train in martial arts, grow a beard, get in the car, and drive to the Palo Alto office. Participate in investor, marketing, development, and technology meetings. Eat a healthy lunch. Sit in the office, looking at the graphs of users on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. You glimpse at the hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank account, feeling safe and secure.
And then you return home, and ask yourself: What did you do today for humanity? What have you done for the people you are a part of – the Jewish people?
Zuckerberg may be Jewish by birth and religion, but the platforms he runs are the world’s largest social media outlets for spreading hatred and antisemitism….
Last November, The New York Times revealed that hate speech against Jews had increased by 28% since the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on October 7. We are in an emergency situation. It cannot be passed over in silence. Hatred of Jews has a real meaning….
This is the time for decisive actions designed to reduce the possibility of spreading hatred. New activists need to be recruited and anti-hatred demonstrations have to be organized. But today, seven months after the October 7 attack, Facebook users are still allowed to write the repulsive phrase “From the river to the sea,” which means that there is no room left for the State of Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people.
It is no longer politically correct to say “murder Jews” as they did in Germany 80 years ago. Therefore, the platform’s users choose subtler, more sophisticated expressions to convey the same message.
What does that actually mean – “From the river to the sea”? It means the destruction of the Jewish state. Since October 7, it has become clear that “From the river to the sea” is neither a call for peace nor is it a call for equality, nor a call for a binational state. It is an explicit call to eliminate Jews. This is the ideology of Hamas. This is also the ideology of the PLO.
“From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” means only one thing: the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel, and its replacement by a 23rd Arab state. Yet Zuckerberg allows this genocidal call to appear everywhere on Facebook. Where are the company’s “content moderators”?
Despite many repeated reports, Facebook still allows this ugly phrase to spread. Seven months after Hamas’s attack, Facebook’s board will meet to discuss the phrase. There can be no justification for such inaction while so much hate speech is produced and spread in the meantime….
Two months later, there is no public indication of what Facebook’s board decided. What explains Zuckerberg’s seeming lack of interest in minimizing antisemitic content on Facebook? During World War II, the Sulzberger family, that owned, and still owns, the New York Times, made sure that their paper paid scant attention to the Holocaust that was unfolding in Europe. The Sulzbergers didn’t want to be seen to be engaged in special pleading for Jews in the reporting they allowed in the Times; they were afraid of appearing “too Jewish.” Laurel Leff tells that damning tale in Buried By The Times. Zuckerberg appears to be doing the same thing: not treating “antisemitism” on Facebook as the dangerous contagion it has once again become. Will Zuckerberg allow himself to do the decent thing, and ban from Facebook, and Instagram too, those who are spreading the deadly virus? Let us hope.