“Do you want it darker?” Leonard Cohen asks in his haunting song.
Anyone scrolling through social media exactly a week ago, on Sept. 11, could have felt that darkness. On the 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, countless posts and comments revived antisemitic conspiracy theories falsely claiming that Jews or Israel were behind the attacks carried out by al-Qaida.
Such theories have circulated online for years, but they increasingly appear beyond the internet’s fringes. Where Jews were once falsely accused of poisoning wells or using children’s blood to make matzah, modern antisemitic conspiracy theories often recast major disasters as covert operations by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.
Some of the material circulating online uses imagery reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer, depicting Orthodox Jews with sidelocks and exaggerated noses, drawing on longstanding antisemitic stereotypes. Other posts use a juice-box emoji as coded shorthand for Jews, exploiting the similarity in English between the words “juice” and “Jews” in an apparent effort to evade automated moderation.
“It's a massive problem,” said Liora Rez, executive director of StopAntisemitism, a U.S.-based organization that campaigns against antisemitism. “So sadly, it's been happening year over year, more and more. Antisemitic theories circulating on social media at 100 miles an hour every day, day in and day out, specifically post-October 7.”
Rez said younger...
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi recently took his bogus ‘Vote Chori‘ claims to a new level and accused the BJP and the Election Commission of India (ECI) of “Party Chori” (Party theft). In a post mad...