Excellent analysis and terrifying. I never thought savage anti-Israel sentiments would be endorsed, and that an event as monstrous as Oct. 7th would be praised or seen as regretably necessary by so many students at our elite US universities. I feel discouraged to say the least. Thanks for the excellent background and panaromic view here. We are in trouble.
I find this line of argument not particularly plausible. Ignoring the right for the moment, western supporters of "anti-Zionism" range from Obama progressives to the tankie left. Given their premises, it is easy for them to arrive at this position without any prompting from the KGB then, or RT now.
There are reports that a Jewish woman in Lyon was stabbed by a terrorist and is clinging to life. After the attack, a swastica was drawn on her front door. Why is this happening in France but not Hungary?
I would argue that social media poses a much broader problem that simply "TikTok causes antisemitism". Thought I think Gallagher and Izabella are probably right on that score. Social media causes ignorance. I find that nobody is interested in truth any more. People trust what they read on social media, and social media reinforces pre-conceived notions. It doesn't challenge people to think differently.
I've been asking two questions lately of my sphere of influence (which is populated predominantly by conservative Christian Americans):
Why do you stand with Israel?
What is revolutionary about Christ's Gospel?
A few folks have good answers. Most have never been asked to think about it.
I agree with Wig Wag and David Eggleston who would argue the deliberate normalized teaching of soviet propaganda--which is amazing that after all these years our universities still don’t get it--is more alarming. Just imagine how much less effective Russia’s and Hamas’s and China’s propaganda would be if kids were not already wokeified. Imagine for example that people got a normal liberal education in college if not a pro-American pro-capitalism education. Do you think that social media alone would change people’s minds? Moreover why is it that young people are so demographically susceptible to this antizionist ideology? It’s because young people are fucking woke. Look also at how congruent is antizionism with antiracism, the vain paranoid Marxist belief in a superstructure of structural inequality and invisible and unconscious bias, and the doctrine of intersectionality. Antizionism surely began with the Soviets as that great essay magisterially explains. But what drives antizionism today? What is the vehicle of its dissemination and what aids its popularity abetted but NOT caused by social media? Wokeness. Woke influencers, woke celebrities, woke politicians who are celebrities too like AOC, a self-indulgent narcissistic materialistic culture colliding with deeply antiwestern ideas propagated from college on down to elementary school. With the stakes of the new global cold war, for which we are still underprepared and currently we are losing, isn’t the least we can do to rid our schools of this nonsense right now? As our enemies divide and conquer the world right now, must we be self-sabotaging at home by teaching younger generations to hate our country more than any other country on earth??
And they’re not just ignorant. How Claire, do you explain all these people who acknowledge that October 7th happened and then either excuse it by saying we just need “context” to interpret it, or they champion it as an act of revolutionary revenge? As I explained on my blog post about how the woke are proto-terrorists, these people are much more self-aware than it is convenient to give them credit for. These people hate America as much as the national conservative Tucker Carlson and Musk followers on the right, except its worse because on the left, it’s more mainstream, and they are also more conscious of their own postliberalism. It’s a badge of honor for them. They show support for Hamas and their hatred of Jews in a clout-chasing competition with each other to show how anti-West and antiAmerican they are. Their celebration of Hamas’s pogrom is a proxy of the violence they would also joyfully see inflicted on everyone down the intersectional hierarchy of identity groups. This ideology, like ideologies of old, Prussian militarism, national socialism, leninism, Maoism, is immeasurably more alarming than propaganda floating around on social media.-- With consequences not only for Jews but for every other racial group. These demonstrations make explicit that the most authentic realization of “racial justice” is racial violence, ethnic cleansing committed against identity groups considered “oppressors.”
We have a few hundred neo-Nazis, maybe a thousand Proud Boys, similar number of Boogaloos, and a few thousand Oath Keepers in this entire country. Only about 300 will show up at any one time. On any medium-sized campus or larger, you have hundreds of AntiFa and AntiFa-adjacent Leftwing fascists and hundreds more violence-tolerant activists of different identitarian stripes, looking for an excuse to destroy. It’s one of the reasons I just can’t embrace the other side. As a number of my Democratic friends have told me, I’d be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Like they’ve exaggerated the proportions of neo-Nazis to profit from you? I get a little tired of the constant ad hominems, Matt. I remember the hordes of affluent white kids wracked by liberal white guilt who tried to burn Richmond a second time to expiate their sins. And I still have to listen to their meretricious sanctimoniousness every time I go somewhere socially here. I don’t live in some Goddamn rightwing bubble like you seem to think.
I appreciate the shelter this article provides for the millions of innocent Israelis and Jews who would suffer at the hands of antisemitism. My concern is over the worst elements of Israeli society that would hide under this shelter among those innocents. Could Izabella go in to any detail about how she feels about the Jewish Power Party and the willful harm they cause to the peace process? I don't believe everyone shares in her charitable interpretation of the stories in the Old Testament.
Well, I think the point the author was making was that Soviet propaganda, as any propaganda to be honest, will take the sins of a vocal, vehement minority like the Kahanists and impute them to the entire side. Just as Democrats have imputed Trumpist extremism to ever conservative, and Republicans have imputed Woke extremism to all Democrats. Our current penchant for political platitudes and empty clichés has left America unprepared for reasonable political discourse and terribly susceptible to hostile international actors.
This is all the typical Soviet seed/harvest/disseminate propaganda method. Same thing they did with the Rockwell/Paulestinian segretarians. (Listen to any recording of Ron Paul from the ‘70’s or ‘80’s and tell me his talking points weren’t written in Moscow. The son continues his father’s work in the U.S. Senate. And this is Musk’s milieu of useful idiots.)
But I have to agree with Stuart here in opposition to a monocausal explanation, even if I don’t espouse his Muslim replacement theory. If we didn’t have education programs and public AND private schools completely ate up with hard Leftists who already believe this Marxist freedom fighter chic narrative, that opens them up to antisemitism, and actually educated our children, they wouldn’t be susceptible to CCP broadcasts on TikTok or Smolensk troll farms on Twitter. Our boy is 19 months old, and we’re struggling to find a decent school for him. Do we send him to a public or elite private school that will indoctrinate him in far Left ideology, and try to provide a traditional grounding for him at home? My moderate friends, many Democrats, are complaining about how they’re losing that battle now. Do I send him into the parochial school system that our last bishop gutted and is just as Leftist? Homeschool him and leave him socially stunted? Or do we send him to a conservative Christian school and raise him properly at home? Our schools are horribly broken here in the States, and I’m leaning towards it being easier to have him taught traditionally and moderated at home than brainwashed at schools run by the current education industrial complex.
While banning TokTok would be fairly easy, being a foreign company controlled by a hostile government, Twitter and Meta would be harder nuts to crack. And I just don’t trust our alternating unstable pendulum extremist Congresses to regulate sectors they understand properly, much less social media, cf. American schools above and are under much more local control.
K-12 homeschooler here. Many of my friends were also homeschooled all the way through. None are socially stunted, all have very successful careers or beautiful families. We don't know each other because we were homeschooled, but because we attended a prestigious honors college that actively recruited homeschooled. I'm sure stunted homeschoolers do exist, but once they reach adulthood they really tend to excel. (Carry on, I'll get off my soap box now!)
I don’t mean to impugn everyone. My experience through church, my bookstore, and now Teddy’s daycare suggest that you’re lucky to have a good circle to teach in. We had a great one at our old Novus Ordo parish, and then there was a concurrent influx of Rad Trads at the same time an almost social panic series of divorces swept the group, and the wheels really fell off the bus. So I’m a little gun shy on homeschooling, although I’m sure we could teach Teds better than anyone else.
Ah, that makes sense. Rad trads scare me a little. We converted through the Ordinariate, and our parish had a very high-quality homeschool program when I was a homeschool mom. My kids have had it even better than I did.
My friend Father Charles Nalls was on the Anglican negotiating team with the Vatican for a full Sarum Rite when Cardinal Kasper pulled the rug out from under them and said they’d take the Ordinariate and like it.
I’m glad you’ve found a home there. As a Catholic convert who’d grown up high church Methodist and gone to Episcopalian school, I was kinda hoping there’d be a permanent Sarum Rite in the Roman Church. I think it’s a liturgical tradition that deserves preservation.
I graduated from a woke indoctrination complex or contemporary college, Hobart and William Smith, three years ago. Interestingly the wokeism was so extreme that it backfired. I went into college, an Obama Democrat, then I was a Chomskeyan half a socialist half an anarchist. But my anger with the woke movement which I could never abide for a moment was building up, it drove me nuts because of how insane it is, then about two years ago I went full tilt and became a conservative. Where I am now I never would have thought I could possibly end up, and my education, which ironically I’ll be paying for for the rest of my life, is a perpetual source of acute shame for me. I wonder how many more young people might end up like me. I’m an archetypal example of a conservative who was a liberal that was mugged by reality.
This is kind of my point. Granted the selection size of We CG Readers is small, but I feel like indoctrination is a stretch. It's probably emotionally satisfying to call it that... I don't know, is this click-bait language affecting our thinking? Causing a lack of precision?
No because wokeness flows from the universities but it has a grip everywhere in society. It is a disease of the mind like religion. Just as protestantism was once the law of the land in the Anglosphere wokeness threats to become the modern equivalent. Except the difference is protestantism was a pretty benign influence on the social fabric. If anything it was actually good. Similar to Judaism, protestantism is individualistic and it emphasizes thinking for yourself for example. But wokeness is a religion which is secular and collectivistic and a rationale for murder like Marxist Leninism. It’s unchecked propagation is obviously extremely dangerous. I was fortunate not to be indoctrinated in college but that’s more a testament to my natural independence that wokeness just disgusted me. Most people are given to popular passions and the emotions of mobs. And most people listen to what their teachers tell them, and most people look up to celebritites. Like the Nazis as Milgram’s experiments found, 7/10 people are born conformists. Here at CG we’re not conformists but don’t let that make you complacent about the rest of society. 7/10 people would be nazis and when the institutions supposed to keep that part of us in check fall apart, then the nazi impulse is permitted.
I would argue that the whole QAnon/Sex trafficking/White Slave Trade movement on the political right is actually a distant political cousin through protestantism of leftwing woke-ism.
The New York Times columnist Nick Kristof is a classic example of someone who can actually straddle from right wing QAnonism into left wing wokeism. Kristof in particular is a big promoter of the QAnon adjacent anti Sex Trafficking-NGO industrial complex which notwithstanding the fact that sex trafficking DOES occur and is a BAD thing has this NGO complex dedicated to fighting it which has resources far in excess of what is actually needed to combat the actually problems(with all of the usual NGO problems of bloat and clientism)
In the USA; 100 mayors and 25 governors “implemented” Racial Equity Alliance’s program into city and state gov in 2018/2019. Since implementation- the only time I saw the words “Jew” or “antisemitism” at work was when I was typing them. In 2021 July: the Equity Program at work promoted the film “Modern Racist Paradigm” to city-gov employees. The film was about “racism being a bad thing.” Twice in the documentary film, words on screen while no voices spoke, read “...global Zionist media..” as doing harm to non-White people. I telephoned directors after emailing photos of the words - to complain. I emailed HR twice. Total number of responses was zero.
18 months prior- I had warned directors about such a problem after the upstate New York machete attack at a rabbi’s house. No response, except I was threatened to shut up. The mayors’ and governors’ Equity program has been promoting leftist race grievance since 2019. They have contributed to the sentiment that “White people (including Jews and Israel), owe a debt to non-White; globally.” It is probably not all written in one sentence- but broken up into pieces that activist motivated readers could conceivably connect together.
Since big-tech politically aligns in the direction of Equity Program, it doesn’t surprise me that recent Google searches yielded pro-Palestinian results, (Since, corrected for now.)
It’s far less complicated than you’re making it Claire and it has almost nothing to do with Russia or social media sites. That diagnosis is not only wrong but like most cases of misdiagnoses, it will lead to useless or even harmful attempts at remediation.
The United States and the nations of the EU have welcomed tens of millions immigrants from Muslim nations that have been steeped in antisemitism for decades or longer. It’s true that the leaders of Arab nations in particular, deliberately fanned the the flames of this antisemitism for their own political reasons but it is also clear that antisemitism in the Muslim world has its genesis in the culture and maybe even the predominant religious practices of the region.
When Donald Trump criticized the policies that welcomed immigrants from what he indelicately called “shit-hole” countries the dainty sensibilities of the American left (which included large swaths of the secular Jewish-American community) were wounded almost beyond repair. The left in the United States and Europe was certain that immigrants from these countries would leave behind their cultural baggage such as plural marriage, female genital mutilation, honor killing and Jew-hatred. Par for the course, American and European leftists were tragically wrong.
Most of the Jew-hatred that we see manifested on European and American streets is perpetrated by Muslim immigrants who have refused to abandon their cultural heritage. Russian propaganda or social media may share some complicity but to assign primary blame to them is obtuse.
That the academic left should happily join as bed fellows the immigrant crowd that disdains female empowerment, is disgusted by homosexuality and hates Jews shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention to the insanity that’s become an epidemic on university campuses. In the United States, higher education is massively subsidized by the American taxpayer. The subsidies are so massive that virtually every college and university, including the ones with massive endowments would go bankrupt but for the taxpayer largess. This means that in the United States, at least, the ubiquitous Jew-hatred in institutions of higher education exists only because of taxpayer subsidies.
What’s to be done? It’s hard to know. Criticizing Twitter or Tic Toc won’t make a damn bit of difference. One thing we might try in Europe and the United States is acknowledging that maybe Trump was on to something when he suggested that it might not be a good idea to welcome immigrants from certain countries. Another thing we might try is attaching strings to the subsidies we provide to universities that make it less likely that they will serve as a well-spring of Jew-hatred.
We live in a remarkably Jewcentric moment. No one has commented more intelligently on this subject than Adam Garfinkle in his book entitled “Jewcentricity”. Anyone who wants to understand why it always seems to be about the Jews should read it. See,
I think a broader factor here would be the solidarity of that age group with diversity and globalism. Black lives matter, stand with Gaza, anti-racism, anti-imperialism. The attitudes of the 18-24 year-olds are in line with what you now see at the United Nations, or in the foreign policy of South America, South Africa, etc.
I don't know what the numbers are, but there's two places where acts of antisemitism have skyrocketed in Western countries. University campuses full of (mostly) white liberals, and anywhere with large populations of Muslims. London, England for example has seem a massive increase in hate directed towards Jews. Much of it appears to be perpetrated by the Muslim population.
I don't have a problem with Muslims immigrating to Western nations, but a significant percentage of them seem to have no interest in integration. At least a significant minority are actively anti-Western. Some aren't shy about saying so. Saw a video recently (from London, England I think), of a Muslim man basically saying how we (Muslims) are now colonizing you, and will replace you and your culture.
I think anyone who is even sympathetic to that should be immediately deported, with no chance to appeal. If they want to make our countries like the awful places they came from, they can go back, we don't want them.
As for all the white liberals, sadly we can't deport most of them. Not sure what the solution is there. But it isn't accepting even more people, whether immegrants or refugees, who actually hate our culture and everything we stand for. I guess they don't hate our money, which is why they want to come here in the first place.
48 percent of American young adults can’t name the three branches of the American Government. Around the same percent can’t name even one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Less than 50 percent of American youngsters can identify who our opponents were in World War II. Should we chalk all of that up to Tik Tok, Twitter and the rest of social media too? Are the Russians to blame for all of that ignorance?
According to USA Today, two thirds of the Gen Z cohort don’t know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Should we blame that on Elon Musk, Putin and ByteDance also?
We’ve raised a generation of morons. We have no one to blame for that but ourselves.
The huge demonstrations promoting Jew-hatred that we’ve seen in Great Britain, Germany and France as well as smaller demonstrations elsewhere in Europe aren’t dominated by kids who’s eyes are permanently attached to their smart phones. They are dominated by Muslim immigrants welcomed by Europeans either from their former colonies or welcomed more recently at the insistence of that globalist icon, Frau Merkel.
You’ve seen the demonstrations, Claire, and you’ve seen the ISIS, Al Qaeda and Hamas banners proudly being displayed. Can you suggest with a straight face that that it’s social media platforms that we should blame and not European immigration policy?
You’ve written passionately and eloquently about Hungary and it’s antisemitic past. What you seem unwilling to explain to us is why Viktor Orban’s Hungary is one of the only European nations that has not experienced a parade promoting Jew-hatred. Where do you suspect the Jewish population feels safer now, Budapest, London or Paris?
In the United States many of the antisemitic hatefests are attended primarily by first or second generation Muslim immigrants as well as university students brainwashed by their institutions of higher education into a rancid ideology of decolonization. I’m sure that you’re right in suggesting that their indoctrination is abetted by social media. I’m sure that you’re wrong if you think social media is the major factor that accounts for their ignorance.
It’s not Elon Musk’s or ByteDance’s job to explain that 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust or to teach today’s youngsters the parallels between the October pogrom by Hamas in Israel and the multitude of pogroms experienced by Jews all over the world throughout history.
Doing that was the job of society and culture. Chalk it up as just one more grotesque failure of Western elites.
I can't argue with you that we've raised a generation of morons. We're 100 percent in agreement about that. But precisely because we're raised a generation of morons, they are exceptionally vulnerable to foreign influence campaigns.
I agree with you that immigrants from majority-Muslim countries are much more vulnerable to this kind of antisemitism. (Certainly not all of them: Many immigrants from these countries are *fleeing* Islamists; they hate them far more than any of us ever will and are astonished by Western naïveté.) There's a good deal of low-grade antisemitism in the Islamic world even among those who aren't Islamists.
But I don't agree that the attendees of these hatefests are "primarily" first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants. We can establish this in a very crude way just by looking at the crowds: The ratio of the lily-white to the swarthy puts the lie to that idea.
The "rancid ideology" in our universities isn't coming from nowhere. That is the point of Tabarovsky's article. The USSR systematically invented a Neo-Marxist critique of Zionism--toward which Moscow was initially extremely warm, thinking that the prevalence of socialists among the early Zionists ensured the new state would be favorably disposed to Moscow. They envisioned replacing Britain in the Middle East by making Israel into their client state. This only changed when Israel handed Egypt its ass in the Six Day War. Egypt was at that point almost an extension of the Soviet Union, and Israel's victory proved a strategic calamity for Moscow, not least because Israelis captured weapon systems being used against Americans in Vietnam and promptly turned them over to the US. Before that, there was no US-Israel alliance to speak of beyond pleasant words. The US was actively hostile toward Israel in the Suez War. Only after '67 did the US-Israeli military alliance develop--and only then did American culture catch up. (Most Americans don't realize that widespread American sympathy for Israel dates only to '67, not '48.) The Soviets were panicked by this and embarked on a massive program to undermine this burgeoning American sympathy. It was quite effective. All of this rhetoric--Zionism equals racism, Zionism is apartheid, Zionism is colonialism--is of Soviet origin.
If you don't think Moscow remembers this institutionally and continues to work to promote this sentiment and this rhetoric in the West, I think that's exceptionally naive. It very clearly does. If you don't think it's much easier for them to do this now than it was then, don't know what to say: This seems to me so obvious that I don't know how to make the argument more plain. They no longer have to recruit human sources in the US to popularize these ideas and rhetoric. They no longer have to place editorials in reasonably skeptical venues like the New York Times. They need only buy a few dozen thousand bots and tell a bunch of flunkies in Leningrad to saturate the media channels where young Americans spend their days. It's trivially simple. Putin embarked upon a program to master this after the Arab Spring, when he saw the power of social media to spread radical ideas. He realized that if this could happen spontaneously, it could be *made* to happen if he put the full weight of the Russian state behind the effort. And since then, this is just what he's done, to devastating effect.
Surely you see how much the conflict in Gaza is helping Russia right now? I don't know if Russia was involved in planning Hamas's attacks or if they provided material assistance. I have my suspicions, but that's all they are. But I can't imagine that they didn't know of it in advance. They're extremely close to Hamas and to Iran. Whether or not they abetted the attack or knew of it beforehand, they have *certainly* welcomed it as a godsend. They are exploiting it in every dimension. The simple fact that it's a distraction to the West (and the US military, and Congress) is a godsend. And it is *obviously* in Russia's interest for the world to believe that Israel's brutality in Gaza exceeds Russia's in Ukraine. Russia's propaganda organs are now in overdrive to push this message in the US, Europe, and above all in the Global South: "The West is so hypocritical! Screaming about Russia committing 'genocide' in Ukraine when their own client is committing 'genocide' in Gaza!"
You see how advantageous this is for them, don't you? Do you agree with me up to this point?
Is the point of disagreement that you believe Russia incapable of using social media to foment these sentiments at scale? If so, why do you think so? Ask yourself: Why would people pay a fortune to advertise goods and services if advertising didn't work? Why are social-media influencers called "influencers?" Of course it's possible, if you have a determined effort--backed by almost unlimited manpower, in Russia's case, not to mention machine translation and AI--to shape the way a generation views this conflict, views Israel, and thinks about Jews. Of course it is! And of course that's what they're doing!
I don't understand why you're so reluctant to accept this. I wonder if you've just decided, in advance, that you refuse to accept criticism of Elon Musk? Let me create a ladder for you to climb down: I grant that yes, immigrants from Muslim-majority countries are more likely to hold antisemitic views than immigrants from, say, China. (Although this is quickly changing, because China is now promoting the same ideas. They serve China's interests, too. Soon the Chinese publish will be as antisemitic as Pakistan's, which is heartbreaking. At least India is going the opposite direction--again, because it serves India's geopolitical interests.)
So I'm meeting you halfway, here: Yes, the West needs to do a better job of vetting and assimilating Muslim immigrants. (France has just expelled about 50 immigrants for making antisemitic comments--that's one way to handle it.) So climb off the ladder with me. Tell me you understand my point and see why approach to regulating social media has to change. We can then argue about the details of this, but let's at least agree that freedom of speech for American citizens is one thing, but offering a media platform like this to American enemies? Giving them such exceptional reach? *Especially* because we've raised a generation of imbeciles? It's lunacy.
That our kids are imbeciles only makes it more imperative, not less, that we grasp this problem--and solve it.
It's fair to dismiss claims about a "generation of morons" as routine police-are-getting-younger nostalgia in the absence of substantial longitudinal data (not just snapshots as Wigwag offered). I explained in a very late comment here - https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/the-new-caesars-part-iv/comment/41112602?r=es5gw - why I don't think literacy data make this case.
I have some skin in this game, with two graduate sons in their twenties, neither of whom is descernibly more idiotic than I was at their age, and both *much more informationally sceptical & technologically aware* just because of the generation they are in - they understand social media dynamics and how to spot orchestrated BS better than me I suspect (and as it happens are much less tolerant of casual misogyny than were me & my peers). Each generation has its faults, and a tendency to golden ageism as we get older is oft noted.
"Ask yourself: Why would people pay a fortune to advertise goods and services if advertising didn't work?" - logically, there has to be at least one group of mugs here - the retailers or the audience. Why are you so convinced it's the audience? Advertisers' profits show they are definitely good at manipulating *someone*...
Tom, if you don’t mind me asking, what in God’s name is happening to your country? Things on my side of the pond are bleak and getting bleaker but if the press is to be believed, things in your country are as bad or worse. Our next Presidential election will be offering a choice that most Americans find unpalatable. It seems from afar that the choice in your next parliamentary election will be just as bad.
And if your inclined to respond, how do British citizens tolerate the absurdity of BBC “journalists?”
I don't mind at all. Short answer: the fabulous logic of Brexit is what is happening. The next election can't come soon enough, Starmer is a reasonable candidate (suspect you may not agree), but not a whole lot will change as long as all major parties cling to the (electorally necessary for now) fantasy that a hard Brexit was sound and we just need to iron out a few teething prroblems, then it's off to the races! (It wasn't, we don't, it won't be...)
Within that political constraint and financial straits he and his Chancellor (finance minister) will inherit, there's not much room for manoeuvre,
Bluntly, "for all its faults" I'm happy we have a BBC - the broadcast media landscape most other places seems worse on balance. Some very senior journalists have made some very bad calls over Gaza, but at least they admit their mistakes. One thing I'm not at all bothered by is the fuss over the non-attribution of "terrorist" to Hamas. I've never seen it as any kind of superlative in terms of outrage; what's important is to report the outrageous events frankly. But to your actual question, BBC news still commands big audiences and it's my left-wing friends who are most critical of it for failing to call out government lies and cynicism in plain terms, especially during the Johnson epoch.
Is there a broad-coverage news channel you think generally does a better job? (Probably not NPR...)
One more question for you. If it's impossible (or even very difficult) for hostile foreign governments to spread ideas like this on social media, why do you think China created its own, closed Internet? Why does it maintain the Great Firewall? Why has Russia banned TikTok and Facebook?
This one surely easier to answer - authoritarian countries want control of spread of information - period. Stark punishments for "rumour mongers" etc. That closed internet is at least as much about policing freedom of expression in general as foreign mind control; and foreign-domiciled services are much harder to police for very practical reasons.
There’s one more thing you should think about, Claire. I get it that you preferred Pre-Musk Twitter when comments were highly curated. Your preference isn’t without some merit.
Since Musk took over free speech has reigned and mostly anyone can say anything as long as it’s legally permitted.
You wish that Musk hadn’t eliminated his “Trust and Safety” Department aka Twitter’s censors.
Are you familiar with who worked as Twitter’s censors? It was primarily the youngster cohort who you have admitted are generally moronic.
This is the cohort that has been propagandized by their professors into believing that Israeli Jews are detestable colonists.
If Musk hadn’t fired them all, it is highly likely that Twitter would now be little more than a mouthpiece for Hamas with pro-Israel content banned as hate speech.
I agree with some of what you say. Of course our adversaries, especially Russia and China are accomplished at using social media to spread hate and disinformation. This is especially dangerous because their audience is so misinformed to begin with that they are especially vulnerable to to these campaigns.
You’re also right that China and Russia either ban social media sites or have created there own which they regulate to within an inch of their lives.
As I indicated in my original comment, social media sites share complicity for the problems that we are currently confronting. But I think their role is minor compared to immigration policy and the perverse ideology that has captured universities in the United States.
I disagree that Russia has anything of consequence to do with the cultural Marxism that is ascendent in the American left, especially amongst the hypereducated crowd that run our universities. Their noxious ideology is almost entirely homegrown. American universities are far more steeped in Marxism (or pseudo Marxism) than Russia and Putin currently are.
I also disagree that the antisemitic demonstrations in the United States are populated mostly by young Jew-hating Americans. In New York, where I spend half the year, there have been many such demonstrations including one that marched over the Brooklyn Bridge last week. These hatefests are primarily led by first or second generation Muslim immigrants. The Muslim population in New York is approximately 9 percent which isn’t that far off from the Muslim population of France.
Certainly, the hatefests are enthusiastically endorsed by American born youngsters who have been brainwashed into a noxious ideology. I simply don’t know how many of these youngsters have digested their Jew-hatred from Twitter or Tic Toc and how many have had their hatred spoon fed to them by their professors. I suspect that the professors are far more culpable.
In fairness, I don’t want to suggest that Jew-hatred in the Muslim world is unique or uniquely noxious. Anyone with a passing familiarity with European history over the past two millennia knows that’s not true. As you know, the Ottoman Sultans were far more tolerant of their Jewish subjects than European potentates were. Up until the time if Nasser, Jews lived reasonably tolerant lives in Egypt.
I also believe that a generation or two from now, the children and grandchildren of those Muslim immigrants parading across the Brooklyn Bridge will be loyal Americans with no more attachment to the ideology of their ancestors than the descendants of German, Irish or Italian Americans have.
So now that I’ve answered your question, Claire, maybe you can answer mine. Has Hungary been free from massive demonstrations promoting Hamas because Orban has banned them or because Orban refused to be intimidated by Merkel and Macron into accepting Muslim migrants?
My other question to you also begs for an answer. Do you think the Jewish community currently feels safer in Budapest, London or France?
I think the answer is the Jewish community feels safer in London, Paris, and Berlin by definition because there is not much of a Jewish community in Budapest.
Shortly after becoming President, Trump banned immigration from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Which of these countries has a wholesome relationship with its Jewish citizens? Other than Iran, they expelled all of their Jewish citizens 70 years ago. Most of these expelled people found refuge in Israel.
When Trump banned immigration from these nations, the outrage from Democrats and Trump-hating Republicans was deafening. He was accused of bigotry and religious intolerance; surely immigrants from these countries would be as tolerant and steeped in pluralism as, let’s say, Norwegians.
Angela Merkel had a different point of view than Trump. Merkel famously said "Wir schaffen das" (We can do it) at the height of the European refugee crisis. She was referring to Germany's ability to absorb the large number of refugees who were arriving in the country at the time. Not only did Frau Merkel welcome these immigrants to Germany, she insisted that the rest of the EU extend the welcome mat as well.
Who was right; Donald Trump or Angela Merkel? Which of the two is more responsible for the wave of Jew-hatred that we’ve seen in North America and Europe?
Excellent analysis and terrifying. I never thought savage anti-Israel sentiments would be endorsed, and that an event as monstrous as Oct. 7th would be praised or seen as regretably necessary by so many students at our elite US universities. I feel discouraged to say the least. Thanks for the excellent background and panaromic view here. We are in trouble.
I find this line of argument not particularly plausible. Ignoring the right for the moment, western supporters of "anti-Zionism" range from Obama progressives to the tankie left. Given their premises, it is easy for them to arrive at this position without any prompting from the KGB then, or RT now.
There are reports that a Jewish woman in Lyon was stabbed by a terrorist and is clinging to life. After the attack, a swastica was drawn on her front door. Why is this happening in France but not Hungary?
Enquiring minds want to know.
Most jews don't want to live in Hungary?
I would argue that social media poses a much broader problem that simply "TikTok causes antisemitism". Thought I think Gallagher and Izabella are probably right on that score. Social media causes ignorance. I find that nobody is interested in truth any more. People trust what they read on social media, and social media reinforces pre-conceived notions. It doesn't challenge people to think differently.
I've been asking two questions lately of my sphere of influence (which is populated predominantly by conservative Christian Americans):
Why do you stand with Israel?
What is revolutionary about Christ's Gospel?
A few folks have good answers. Most have never been asked to think about it.
I agree with Wig Wag and David Eggleston who would argue the deliberate normalized teaching of soviet propaganda--which is amazing that after all these years our universities still don’t get it--is more alarming. Just imagine how much less effective Russia’s and Hamas’s and China’s propaganda would be if kids were not already wokeified. Imagine for example that people got a normal liberal education in college if not a pro-American pro-capitalism education. Do you think that social media alone would change people’s minds? Moreover why is it that young people are so demographically susceptible to this antizionist ideology? It’s because young people are fucking woke. Look also at how congruent is antizionism with antiracism, the vain paranoid Marxist belief in a superstructure of structural inequality and invisible and unconscious bias, and the doctrine of intersectionality. Antizionism surely began with the Soviets as that great essay magisterially explains. But what drives antizionism today? What is the vehicle of its dissemination and what aids its popularity abetted but NOT caused by social media? Wokeness. Woke influencers, woke celebrities, woke politicians who are celebrities too like AOC, a self-indulgent narcissistic materialistic culture colliding with deeply antiwestern ideas propagated from college on down to elementary school. With the stakes of the new global cold war, for which we are still underprepared and currently we are losing, isn’t the least we can do to rid our schools of this nonsense right now? As our enemies divide and conquer the world right now, must we be self-sabotaging at home by teaching younger generations to hate our country more than any other country on earth??
And they’re not just ignorant. How Claire, do you explain all these people who acknowledge that October 7th happened and then either excuse it by saying we just need “context” to interpret it, or they champion it as an act of revolutionary revenge? As I explained on my blog post about how the woke are proto-terrorists, these people are much more self-aware than it is convenient to give them credit for. These people hate America as much as the national conservative Tucker Carlson and Musk followers on the right, except its worse because on the left, it’s more mainstream, and they are also more conscious of their own postliberalism. It’s a badge of honor for them. They show support for Hamas and their hatred of Jews in a clout-chasing competition with each other to show how anti-West and antiAmerican they are. Their celebration of Hamas’s pogrom is a proxy of the violence they would also joyfully see inflicted on everyone down the intersectional hierarchy of identity groups. This ideology, like ideologies of old, Prussian militarism, national socialism, leninism, Maoism, is immeasurably more alarming than propaganda floating around on social media.-- With consequences not only for Jews but for every other racial group. These demonstrations make explicit that the most authentic realization of “racial justice” is racial violence, ethnic cleansing committed against identity groups considered “oppressors.”
We have a few hundred neo-Nazis, maybe a thousand Proud Boys, similar number of Boogaloos, and a few thousand Oath Keepers in this entire country. Only about 300 will show up at any one time. On any medium-sized campus or larger, you have hundreds of AntiFa and AntiFa-adjacent Leftwing fascists and hundreds more violence-tolerant activists of different identitarian stripes, looking for an excuse to destroy. It’s one of the reasons I just can’t embrace the other side. As a number of my Democratic friends have told me, I’d be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Yeah i’m on the same page
Would anyone exaggerate those proportions in order to generate revenue off the two of you?
Like they’ve exaggerated the proportions of neo-Nazis to profit from you? I get a little tired of the constant ad hominems, Matt. I remember the hordes of affluent white kids wracked by liberal white guilt who tried to burn Richmond a second time to expiate their sins. And I still have to listen to their meretricious sanctimoniousness every time I go somewhere socially here. I don’t live in some Goddamn rightwing bubble like you seem to think.
Sorry, man. I'm trying to dissect our diets. That was never my intent to attack you.
edit - I'll try and be a bit more careful with my phrasing
I appreciate the shelter this article provides for the millions of innocent Israelis and Jews who would suffer at the hands of antisemitism. My concern is over the worst elements of Israeli society that would hide under this shelter among those innocents. Could Izabella go in to any detail about how she feels about the Jewish Power Party and the willful harm they cause to the peace process? I don't believe everyone shares in her charitable interpretation of the stories in the Old Testament.
Well, I think the point the author was making was that Soviet propaganda, as any propaganda to be honest, will take the sins of a vocal, vehement minority like the Kahanists and impute them to the entire side. Just as Democrats have imputed Trumpist extremism to ever conservative, and Republicans have imputed Woke extremism to all Democrats. Our current penchant for political platitudes and empty clichés has left America unprepared for reasonable political discourse and terribly susceptible to hostile international actors.
This is all the typical Soviet seed/harvest/disseminate propaganda method. Same thing they did with the Rockwell/Paulestinian segretarians. (Listen to any recording of Ron Paul from the ‘70’s or ‘80’s and tell me his talking points weren’t written in Moscow. The son continues his father’s work in the U.S. Senate. And this is Musk’s milieu of useful idiots.)
But I have to agree with Stuart here in opposition to a monocausal explanation, even if I don’t espouse his Muslim replacement theory. If we didn’t have education programs and public AND private schools completely ate up with hard Leftists who already believe this Marxist freedom fighter chic narrative, that opens them up to antisemitism, and actually educated our children, they wouldn’t be susceptible to CCP broadcasts on TikTok or Smolensk troll farms on Twitter. Our boy is 19 months old, and we’re struggling to find a decent school for him. Do we send him to a public or elite private school that will indoctrinate him in far Left ideology, and try to provide a traditional grounding for him at home? My moderate friends, many Democrats, are complaining about how they’re losing that battle now. Do I send him into the parochial school system that our last bishop gutted and is just as Leftist? Homeschool him and leave him socially stunted? Or do we send him to a conservative Christian school and raise him properly at home? Our schools are horribly broken here in the States, and I’m leaning towards it being easier to have him taught traditionally and moderated at home than brainwashed at schools run by the current education industrial complex.
While banning TokTok would be fairly easy, being a foreign company controlled by a hostile government, Twitter and Meta would be harder nuts to crack. And I just don’t trust our alternating unstable pendulum extremist Congresses to regulate sectors they understand properly, much less social media, cf. American schools above and are under much more local control.
K-12 homeschooler here. Many of my friends were also homeschooled all the way through. None are socially stunted, all have very successful careers or beautiful families. We don't know each other because we were homeschooled, but because we attended a prestigious honors college that actively recruited homeschooled. I'm sure stunted homeschoolers do exist, but once they reach adulthood they really tend to excel. (Carry on, I'll get off my soap box now!)
I don’t mean to impugn everyone. My experience through church, my bookstore, and now Teddy’s daycare suggest that you’re lucky to have a good circle to teach in. We had a great one at our old Novus Ordo parish, and then there was a concurrent influx of Rad Trads at the same time an almost social panic series of divorces swept the group, and the wheels really fell off the bus. So I’m a little gun shy on homeschooling, although I’m sure we could teach Teds better than anyone else.
Ah, that makes sense. Rad trads scare me a little. We converted through the Ordinariate, and our parish had a very high-quality homeschool program when I was a homeschool mom. My kids have had it even better than I did.
My friend Father Charles Nalls was on the Anglican negotiating team with the Vatican for a full Sarum Rite when Cardinal Kasper pulled the rug out from under them and said they’d take the Ordinariate and like it.
I’m glad you’ve found a home there. As a Catholic convert who’d grown up high church Methodist and gone to Episcopalian school, I was kinda hoping there’d be a permanent Sarum Rite in the Roman Church. I think it’s a liturgical tradition that deserves preservation.
Did I ever tell you I came out of college more conservative / libertarian than I went in?
Yes. How long ago was that?
I graduated from a woke indoctrination complex or contemporary college, Hobart and William Smith, three years ago. Interestingly the wokeism was so extreme that it backfired. I went into college, an Obama Democrat, then I was a Chomskeyan half a socialist half an anarchist. But my anger with the woke movement which I could never abide for a moment was building up, it drove me nuts because of how insane it is, then about two years ago I went full tilt and became a conservative. Where I am now I never would have thought I could possibly end up, and my education, which ironically I’ll be paying for for the rest of my life, is a perpetual source of acute shame for me. I wonder how many more young people might end up like me. I’m an archetypal example of a conservative who was a liberal that was mugged by reality.
This is kind of my point. Granted the selection size of We CG Readers is small, but I feel like indoctrination is a stretch. It's probably emotionally satisfying to call it that... I don't know, is this click-bait language affecting our thinking? Causing a lack of precision?
No because wokeness flows from the universities but it has a grip everywhere in society. It is a disease of the mind like religion. Just as protestantism was once the law of the land in the Anglosphere wokeness threats to become the modern equivalent. Except the difference is protestantism was a pretty benign influence on the social fabric. If anything it was actually good. Similar to Judaism, protestantism is individualistic and it emphasizes thinking for yourself for example. But wokeness is a religion which is secular and collectivistic and a rationale for murder like Marxist Leninism. It’s unchecked propagation is obviously extremely dangerous. I was fortunate not to be indoctrinated in college but that’s more a testament to my natural independence that wokeness just disgusted me. Most people are given to popular passions and the emotions of mobs. And most people listen to what their teachers tell them, and most people look up to celebritites. Like the Nazis as Milgram’s experiments found, 7/10 people are born conformists. Here at CG we’re not conformists but don’t let that make you complacent about the rest of society. 7/10 people would be nazis and when the institutions supposed to keep that part of us in check fall apart, then the nazi impulse is permitted.
I would argue that the whole QAnon/Sex trafficking/White Slave Trade movement on the political right is actually a distant political cousin through protestantism of leftwing woke-ism.
The New York Times columnist Nick Kristof is a classic example of someone who can actually straddle from right wing QAnonism into left wing wokeism. Kristof in particular is a big promoter of the QAnon adjacent anti Sex Trafficking-NGO industrial complex which notwithstanding the fact that sex trafficking DOES occur and is a BAD thing has this NGO complex dedicated to fighting it which has resources far in excess of what is actually needed to combat the actually problems(with all of the usual NGO problems of bloat and clientism)
Do you have kids in school or know people who do?
None of my own, but most of my age group have a few.
Ah, yes! PCU was a classic. I graduated in 2000 from Virginia Commonwealth University after two years at William & Mary.
Graduated in the People's Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 2004. The movie P.C.U. was a solid 10 years old at that point.
In the USA; 100 mayors and 25 governors “implemented” Racial Equity Alliance’s program into city and state gov in 2018/2019. Since implementation- the only time I saw the words “Jew” or “antisemitism” at work was when I was typing them. In 2021 July: the Equity Program at work promoted the film “Modern Racist Paradigm” to city-gov employees. The film was about “racism being a bad thing.” Twice in the documentary film, words on screen while no voices spoke, read “...global Zionist media..” as doing harm to non-White people. I telephoned directors after emailing photos of the words - to complain. I emailed HR twice. Total number of responses was zero.
18 months prior- I had warned directors about such a problem after the upstate New York machete attack at a rabbi’s house. No response, except I was threatened to shut up. The mayors’ and governors’ Equity program has been promoting leftist race grievance since 2019. They have contributed to the sentiment that “White people (including Jews and Israel), owe a debt to non-White; globally.” It is probably not all written in one sentence- but broken up into pieces that activist motivated readers could conceivably connect together.
Since big-tech politically aligns in the direction of Equity Program, it doesn’t surprise me that recent Google searches yielded pro-Palestinian results, (Since, corrected for now.)
It’s far less complicated than you’re making it Claire and it has almost nothing to do with Russia or social media sites. That diagnosis is not only wrong but like most cases of misdiagnoses, it will lead to useless or even harmful attempts at remediation.
The United States and the nations of the EU have welcomed tens of millions immigrants from Muslim nations that have been steeped in antisemitism for decades or longer. It’s true that the leaders of Arab nations in particular, deliberately fanned the the flames of this antisemitism for their own political reasons but it is also clear that antisemitism in the Muslim world has its genesis in the culture and maybe even the predominant religious practices of the region.
When Donald Trump criticized the policies that welcomed immigrants from what he indelicately called “shit-hole” countries the dainty sensibilities of the American left (which included large swaths of the secular Jewish-American community) were wounded almost beyond repair. The left in the United States and Europe was certain that immigrants from these countries would leave behind their cultural baggage such as plural marriage, female genital mutilation, honor killing and Jew-hatred. Par for the course, American and European leftists were tragically wrong.
Most of the Jew-hatred that we see manifested on European and American streets is perpetrated by Muslim immigrants who have refused to abandon their cultural heritage. Russian propaganda or social media may share some complicity but to assign primary blame to them is obtuse.
That the academic left should happily join as bed fellows the immigrant crowd that disdains female empowerment, is disgusted by homosexuality and hates Jews shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention to the insanity that’s become an epidemic on university campuses. In the United States, higher education is massively subsidized by the American taxpayer. The subsidies are so massive that virtually every college and university, including the ones with massive endowments would go bankrupt but for the taxpayer largess. This means that in the United States, at least, the ubiquitous Jew-hatred in institutions of higher education exists only because of taxpayer subsidies.
What’s to be done? It’s hard to know. Criticizing Twitter or Tic Toc won’t make a damn bit of difference. One thing we might try in Europe and the United States is acknowledging that maybe Trump was on to something when he suggested that it might not be a good idea to welcome immigrants from certain countries. Another thing we might try is attaching strings to the subsidies we provide to universities that make it less likely that they will serve as a well-spring of Jew-hatred.
We live in a remarkably Jewcentric moment. No one has commented more intelligently on this subject than Adam Garfinkle in his book entitled “Jewcentricity”. Anyone who wants to understand why it always seems to be about the Jews should read it. See,
https://www.amazon.com/Jewcentricity-Praised-Blamed-Explain-Everything/dp/0470198567
Your theory is that 51 percent of our 18–24-year-olds are immigrants from Muslim nations?
Like, say, Patrick Dai, who threatened to kill his Jewish classmates at Cornell? https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/01/us/cornell-university-antisemitic-threat-suspect-wednesday/index.html
Muslims make up 1.1 percent of the US population. (See: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/07/26/demographic-portrait-of-muslim-americans/#:~:text=Based%20on%20these%20calculations%2C%20Pew,adults%20and%201.35%20million%20children.) I'm afraid this makes no mathematical sense. No, most of the Jew-hatred we're seeing manifested on the streets is *not* being perpetrated by Muslim immigrants. Some of it is. But to get "50 percent" from "1.1 percent" is impossible.
I think a broader factor here would be the solidarity of that age group with diversity and globalism. Black lives matter, stand with Gaza, anti-racism, anti-imperialism. The attitudes of the 18-24 year-olds are in line with what you now see at the United Nations, or in the foreign policy of South America, South Africa, etc.
I don't know what the numbers are, but there's two places where acts of antisemitism have skyrocketed in Western countries. University campuses full of (mostly) white liberals, and anywhere with large populations of Muslims. London, England for example has seem a massive increase in hate directed towards Jews. Much of it appears to be perpetrated by the Muslim population.
I don't have a problem with Muslims immigrating to Western nations, but a significant percentage of them seem to have no interest in integration. At least a significant minority are actively anti-Western. Some aren't shy about saying so. Saw a video recently (from London, England I think), of a Muslim man basically saying how we (Muslims) are now colonizing you, and will replace you and your culture.
I think anyone who is even sympathetic to that should be immediately deported, with no chance to appeal. If they want to make our countries like the awful places they came from, they can go back, we don't want them.
As for all the white liberals, sadly we can't deport most of them. Not sure what the solution is there. But it isn't accepting even more people, whether immegrants or refugees, who actually hate our culture and everything we stand for. I guess they don't hate our money, which is why they want to come here in the first place.
48 percent of American young adults can’t name the three branches of the American Government. Around the same percent can’t name even one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Less than 50 percent of American youngsters can identify who our opponents were in World War II. Should we chalk all of that up to Tik Tok, Twitter and the rest of social media too? Are the Russians to blame for all of that ignorance?
According to USA Today, two thirds of the Gen Z cohort don’t know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Should we blame that on Elon Musk, Putin and ByteDance also?
We’ve raised a generation of morons. We have no one to blame for that but ourselves.
The huge demonstrations promoting Jew-hatred that we’ve seen in Great Britain, Germany and France as well as smaller demonstrations elsewhere in Europe aren’t dominated by kids who’s eyes are permanently attached to their smart phones. They are dominated by Muslim immigrants welcomed by Europeans either from their former colonies or welcomed more recently at the insistence of that globalist icon, Frau Merkel.
You’ve seen the demonstrations, Claire, and you’ve seen the ISIS, Al Qaeda and Hamas banners proudly being displayed. Can you suggest with a straight face that that it’s social media platforms that we should blame and not European immigration policy?
You’ve written passionately and eloquently about Hungary and it’s antisemitic past. What you seem unwilling to explain to us is why Viktor Orban’s Hungary is one of the only European nations that has not experienced a parade promoting Jew-hatred. Where do you suspect the Jewish population feels safer now, Budapest, London or Paris?
In the United States many of the antisemitic hatefests are attended primarily by first or second generation Muslim immigrants as well as university students brainwashed by their institutions of higher education into a rancid ideology of decolonization. I’m sure that you’re right in suggesting that their indoctrination is abetted by social media. I’m sure that you’re wrong if you think social media is the major factor that accounts for their ignorance.
It’s not Elon Musk’s or ByteDance’s job to explain that 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust or to teach today’s youngsters the parallels between the October pogrom by Hamas in Israel and the multitude of pogroms experienced by Jews all over the world throughout history.
Doing that was the job of society and culture. Chalk it up as just one more grotesque failure of Western elites.
"We’ve raised a generation of morons. We have no one to blame for that but ourselves."
It is nice to agree with you from time to time.
Thank you, Matt. But I have a confession to make. When I was the age that Gen Z currently is, I was a moron too.
I can't argue with you that we've raised a generation of morons. We're 100 percent in agreement about that. But precisely because we're raised a generation of morons, they are exceptionally vulnerable to foreign influence campaigns.
I agree with you that immigrants from majority-Muslim countries are much more vulnerable to this kind of antisemitism. (Certainly not all of them: Many immigrants from these countries are *fleeing* Islamists; they hate them far more than any of us ever will and are astonished by Western naïveté.) There's a good deal of low-grade antisemitism in the Islamic world even among those who aren't Islamists.
But I don't agree that the attendees of these hatefests are "primarily" first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants. We can establish this in a very crude way just by looking at the crowds: The ratio of the lily-white to the swarthy puts the lie to that idea.
The "rancid ideology" in our universities isn't coming from nowhere. That is the point of Tabarovsky's article. The USSR systematically invented a Neo-Marxist critique of Zionism--toward which Moscow was initially extremely warm, thinking that the prevalence of socialists among the early Zionists ensured the new state would be favorably disposed to Moscow. They envisioned replacing Britain in the Middle East by making Israel into their client state. This only changed when Israel handed Egypt its ass in the Six Day War. Egypt was at that point almost an extension of the Soviet Union, and Israel's victory proved a strategic calamity for Moscow, not least because Israelis captured weapon systems being used against Americans in Vietnam and promptly turned them over to the US. Before that, there was no US-Israel alliance to speak of beyond pleasant words. The US was actively hostile toward Israel in the Suez War. Only after '67 did the US-Israeli military alliance develop--and only then did American culture catch up. (Most Americans don't realize that widespread American sympathy for Israel dates only to '67, not '48.) The Soviets were panicked by this and embarked on a massive program to undermine this burgeoning American sympathy. It was quite effective. All of this rhetoric--Zionism equals racism, Zionism is apartheid, Zionism is colonialism--is of Soviet origin.
If you don't think Moscow remembers this institutionally and continues to work to promote this sentiment and this rhetoric in the West, I think that's exceptionally naive. It very clearly does. If you don't think it's much easier for them to do this now than it was then, don't know what to say: This seems to me so obvious that I don't know how to make the argument more plain. They no longer have to recruit human sources in the US to popularize these ideas and rhetoric. They no longer have to place editorials in reasonably skeptical venues like the New York Times. They need only buy a few dozen thousand bots and tell a bunch of flunkies in Leningrad to saturate the media channels where young Americans spend their days. It's trivially simple. Putin embarked upon a program to master this after the Arab Spring, when he saw the power of social media to spread radical ideas. He realized that if this could happen spontaneously, it could be *made* to happen if he put the full weight of the Russian state behind the effort. And since then, this is just what he's done, to devastating effect.
Surely you see how much the conflict in Gaza is helping Russia right now? I don't know if Russia was involved in planning Hamas's attacks or if they provided material assistance. I have my suspicions, but that's all they are. But I can't imagine that they didn't know of it in advance. They're extremely close to Hamas and to Iran. Whether or not they abetted the attack or knew of it beforehand, they have *certainly* welcomed it as a godsend. They are exploiting it in every dimension. The simple fact that it's a distraction to the West (and the US military, and Congress) is a godsend. And it is *obviously* in Russia's interest for the world to believe that Israel's brutality in Gaza exceeds Russia's in Ukraine. Russia's propaganda organs are now in overdrive to push this message in the US, Europe, and above all in the Global South: "The West is so hypocritical! Screaming about Russia committing 'genocide' in Ukraine when their own client is committing 'genocide' in Gaza!"
You see how advantageous this is for them, don't you? Do you agree with me up to this point?
Is the point of disagreement that you believe Russia incapable of using social media to foment these sentiments at scale? If so, why do you think so? Ask yourself: Why would people pay a fortune to advertise goods and services if advertising didn't work? Why are social-media influencers called "influencers?" Of course it's possible, if you have a determined effort--backed by almost unlimited manpower, in Russia's case, not to mention machine translation and AI--to shape the way a generation views this conflict, views Israel, and thinks about Jews. Of course it is! And of course that's what they're doing!
I don't understand why you're so reluctant to accept this. I wonder if you've just decided, in advance, that you refuse to accept criticism of Elon Musk? Let me create a ladder for you to climb down: I grant that yes, immigrants from Muslim-majority countries are more likely to hold antisemitic views than immigrants from, say, China. (Although this is quickly changing, because China is now promoting the same ideas. They serve China's interests, too. Soon the Chinese publish will be as antisemitic as Pakistan's, which is heartbreaking. At least India is going the opposite direction--again, because it serves India's geopolitical interests.)
So I'm meeting you halfway, here: Yes, the West needs to do a better job of vetting and assimilating Muslim immigrants. (France has just expelled about 50 immigrants for making antisemitic comments--that's one way to handle it.) So climb off the ladder with me. Tell me you understand my point and see why approach to regulating social media has to change. We can then argue about the details of this, but let's at least agree that freedom of speech for American citizens is one thing, but offering a media platform like this to American enemies? Giving them such exceptional reach? *Especially* because we've raised a generation of imbeciles? It's lunacy.
That our kids are imbeciles only makes it more imperative, not less, that we grasp this problem--and solve it.
It's fair to dismiss claims about a "generation of morons" as routine police-are-getting-younger nostalgia in the absence of substantial longitudinal data (not just snapshots as Wigwag offered). I explained in a very late comment here - https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/the-new-caesars-part-iv/comment/41112602?r=es5gw - why I don't think literacy data make this case.
I have some skin in this game, with two graduate sons in their twenties, neither of whom is descernibly more idiotic than I was at their age, and both *much more informationally sceptical & technologically aware* just because of the generation they are in - they understand social media dynamics and how to spot orchestrated BS better than me I suspect (and as it happens are much less tolerant of casual misogyny than were me & my peers). Each generation has its faults, and a tendency to golden ageism as we get older is oft noted.
"Ask yourself: Why would people pay a fortune to advertise goods and services if advertising didn't work?" - logically, there has to be at least one group of mugs here - the retailers or the audience. Why are you so convinced it's the audience? Advertisers' profits show they are definitely good at manipulating *someone*...
Tom, if you don’t mind me asking, what in God’s name is happening to your country? Things on my side of the pond are bleak and getting bleaker but if the press is to be believed, things in your country are as bad or worse. Our next Presidential election will be offering a choice that most Americans find unpalatable. It seems from afar that the choice in your next parliamentary election will be just as bad.
And if your inclined to respond, how do British citizens tolerate the absurdity of BBC “journalists?”
I don't mind at all. Short answer: the fabulous logic of Brexit is what is happening. The next election can't come soon enough, Starmer is a reasonable candidate (suspect you may not agree), but not a whole lot will change as long as all major parties cling to the (electorally necessary for now) fantasy that a hard Brexit was sound and we just need to iron out a few teething prroblems, then it's off to the races! (It wasn't, we don't, it won't be...)
Within that political constraint and financial straits he and his Chancellor (finance minister) will inherit, there's not much room for manoeuvre,
Bluntly, "for all its faults" I'm happy we have a BBC - the broadcast media landscape most other places seems worse on balance. Some very senior journalists have made some very bad calls over Gaza, but at least they admit their mistakes. One thing I'm not at all bothered by is the fuss over the non-attribution of "terrorist" to Hamas. I've never seen it as any kind of superlative in terms of outrage; what's important is to report the outrageous events frankly. But to your actual question, BBC news still commands big audiences and it's my left-wing friends who are most critical of it for failing to call out government lies and cynicism in plain terms, especially during the Johnson epoch.
Is there a broad-coverage news channel you think generally does a better job? (Probably not NPR...)
One more question for you. If it's impossible (or even very difficult) for hostile foreign governments to spread ideas like this on social media, why do you think China created its own, closed Internet? Why does it maintain the Great Firewall? Why has Russia banned TikTok and Facebook?
This one surely easier to answer - authoritarian countries want control of spread of information - period. Stark punishments for "rumour mongers" etc. That closed internet is at least as much about policing freedom of expression in general as foreign mind control; and foreign-domiciled services are much harder to police for very practical reasons.
There’s one more thing you should think about, Claire. I get it that you preferred Pre-Musk Twitter when comments were highly curated. Your preference isn’t without some merit.
Since Musk took over free speech has reigned and mostly anyone can say anything as long as it’s legally permitted.
You wish that Musk hadn’t eliminated his “Trust and Safety” Department aka Twitter’s censors.
Are you familiar with who worked as Twitter’s censors? It was primarily the youngster cohort who you have admitted are generally moronic.
This is the cohort that has been propagandized by their professors into believing that Israeli Jews are detestable colonists.
If Musk hadn’t fired them all, it is highly likely that Twitter would now be little more than a mouthpiece for Hamas with pro-Israel content banned as hate speech.
I agree with some of what you say. Of course our adversaries, especially Russia and China are accomplished at using social media to spread hate and disinformation. This is especially dangerous because their audience is so misinformed to begin with that they are especially vulnerable to to these campaigns.
You’re also right that China and Russia either ban social media sites or have created there own which they regulate to within an inch of their lives.
As I indicated in my original comment, social media sites share complicity for the problems that we are currently confronting. But I think their role is minor compared to immigration policy and the perverse ideology that has captured universities in the United States.
I disagree that Russia has anything of consequence to do with the cultural Marxism that is ascendent in the American left, especially amongst the hypereducated crowd that run our universities. Their noxious ideology is almost entirely homegrown. American universities are far more steeped in Marxism (or pseudo Marxism) than Russia and Putin currently are.
I also disagree that the antisemitic demonstrations in the United States are populated mostly by young Jew-hating Americans. In New York, where I spend half the year, there have been many such demonstrations including one that marched over the Brooklyn Bridge last week. These hatefests are primarily led by first or second generation Muslim immigrants. The Muslim population in New York is approximately 9 percent which isn’t that far off from the Muslim population of France.
Certainly, the hatefests are enthusiastically endorsed by American born youngsters who have been brainwashed into a noxious ideology. I simply don’t know how many of these youngsters have digested their Jew-hatred from Twitter or Tic Toc and how many have had their hatred spoon fed to them by their professors. I suspect that the professors are far more culpable.
In fairness, I don’t want to suggest that Jew-hatred in the Muslim world is unique or uniquely noxious. Anyone with a passing familiarity with European history over the past two millennia knows that’s not true. As you know, the Ottoman Sultans were far more tolerant of their Jewish subjects than European potentates were. Up until the time if Nasser, Jews lived reasonably tolerant lives in Egypt.
I also believe that a generation or two from now, the children and grandchildren of those Muslim immigrants parading across the Brooklyn Bridge will be loyal Americans with no more attachment to the ideology of their ancestors than the descendants of German, Irish or Italian Americans have.
So now that I’ve answered your question, Claire, maybe you can answer mine. Has Hungary been free from massive demonstrations promoting Hamas because Orban has banned them or because Orban refused to be intimidated by Merkel and Macron into accepting Muslim migrants?
My other question to you also begs for an answer. Do you think the Jewish community currently feels safer in Budapest, London or France?
I think the answer is the Jewish community feels safer in London, Paris, and Berlin by definition because there is not much of a Jewish community in Budapest.
Shortly after becoming President, Trump banned immigration from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Which of these countries has a wholesome relationship with its Jewish citizens? Other than Iran, they expelled all of their Jewish citizens 70 years ago. Most of these expelled people found refuge in Israel.
When Trump banned immigration from these nations, the outrage from Democrats and Trump-hating Republicans was deafening. He was accused of bigotry and religious intolerance; surely immigrants from these countries would be as tolerant and steeped in pluralism as, let’s say, Norwegians.
Angela Merkel had a different point of view than Trump. Merkel famously said "Wir schaffen das" (We can do it) at the height of the European refugee crisis. She was referring to Germany's ability to absorb the large number of refugees who were arriving in the country at the time. Not only did Frau Merkel welcome these immigrants to Germany, she insisted that the rest of the EU extend the welcome mat as well.
Who was right; Donald Trump or Angela Merkel? Which of the two is more responsible for the wave of Jew-hatred that we’ve seen in North America and Europe?