Jewish Intellectual Activism for Internet Control

Back in March, the sixth biennial meeting of the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism convened in Israel. Run by the Israeli government, hosted by Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed by former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, and staffed by a large cast of Jewish academics from around the world, the Global Forum makes a priority of “fighting cyber hate.” A modern day “Grand Sanhedrin,” the number of representatives from various Jewish organizations totaled just over one thousand, including leaders from the Anti-Defamation League; Simon Wiesenthal Center; American Jewish Committee; Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France; the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance; B’nai B’rith; World Jewish Congress; and the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy.

The Global Forum is essentially a central think tank for the campaign to introduce internet censorship throughout the West. It is also an internationally operational anti-White hate group that devises intellectual and political strategies styled as “recommendations” for Western governments to restrict the freedoms of their respective populations. The ‘recommendations’ of the Forum include a demand to adopt “a clear industry standard for defining hate speech and anti-Semitism.” This, of course, would be a definition of ‘hate speech’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ that would serve Jewish interests most effectively. It goes without saying that such a definition would be sufficiently wide-ranging that it would preclude, under threat of severe punishment, any criticism of Jews or Israel.

In 2015 the Global Forum called for the adoption of global terms of service prohibiting the posting of materials critical of Jews, and the introduction of an international legal ban on “Holocaust denial sites.” The Global Forum’s plan to eliminate anti-Semitism is comprehensive. Among the 2015 recommendations were proposals to:

• adopt a formal definition of anti-Semitism applicable throughout the European Union and its member states under law including reference to attacks on the legitimacy of the State of Israel and its right to exist, and Holocaust denial as forms of anti-Semitism;
• apply agreed standardized mechanisms for monitoring and recording incidents of anti-Semitism in all EU countries;
• take urgent and sustained steps to assure the physical security of Jewish communities, their members and institutions;
• direct education ministries to increase teacher training and adopt pedagogic curricula against anti-Semitism, and towards religious tolerance and Holocaust remembrance.

Further recommendations to governments include the establishment of national legal units responsible for combating ‘cyber hate’; making stronger use of existing laws to prosecute ‘cyber hate’ and ‘online anti-Semitism,’ and enhancing the legal basis for prosecution where such laws are absent.

It is quite telling that, despite the growth of anti-Jewish attitudes in Islamic countries, and among Islamic immigrant populations in Europe, the focus of the Global Forum continues to rest exclusively on the putative threat to Jews from White countries, White people, and the ‘Far Right.” As one attendee at the 2018 conference noted afterwards: “The issue of antisemitism in the Muslim world was largely ignored or minimized, even though it is the most pernicious form of antisemitism in the world today. … On the other hand, the antisemitism of the far Right was mentioned time and again.”

This is a group overwhelmingly preoccupied with the silencing of Whites, the end of freedom of speech in the West, and legal enforcement of multiculturalism.

Lecture titles from the three-day event are illustrative of the full kaleidoscope of Jewish paranoia and related tactical approaches:

• Web Antisemitism and Cyberhate: The Search for New Solutions and Proactive Policies
• Antisemitism and the Rise of Far Right Politics in Europe: Defining the Threat and Means of Societal and Political Response
• Antisemitism in the Far Left — Intersectionality as a Cover for Hate Speech in Current Progressive Activism
• Taming the Madding Crowd — The Persistence of Antisemitism in the Sports Arena
• The Persistence of Christian Theological Antisemitism in the Mainline Protestant Church — Coping with Bigotry and Hate in the Spiritual Realm
• Confronting Neo-Nazism and Antisemitism of the Extreme Right in the United States and Elsewhere
• The Faith Traditions as a Resource for Combating Antisemitism and Hate Crime: Muslim, Jewish and Christian Leadership on Tolerance as a Spiritual Imperative
• LGBTQ Expert Panel on Contemporary Antisemitism inside the Rainbow Coalition
• Revisionism and the Politics of Holocaust Remembrance: Antisemitism in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
• The Protection of Jewish and Muslim Religious Practice Against Legislative Assault in Europe

An interesting aspect of these discussion topics, in addition to the minimal attention to Islamic attitudes, is the growing Jewish unease with the Left. I recently remarked that it is entirely possible for the Left to become a cold house for Jews without becoming authentically, systematically, or traditionally anti-Semitic. I added that one might therefore expect Jews to regroup away from the radical left, occupying a political space best described as staunchly centrist — a centrism that leans left only to pursue multiculturalism and other destructive ‘egalitarian’ social policies, and leans ‘right’ only in order to obtain foreign policy assurances as well as elite protections and privileges [domestically for the Jewish community, internationally for Israel]. It goes without saying that those gathered in Jerusalem were wholly in support of multiculturalism and the LGBT agenda in the West, but also wanted the “privilege and protection” of increasingly authoritarian control over the speech of the Western masses. In keeping with my argument that Jews will increasingly posture themselves as the ultimate centrists or liberals, many if not all of the Jewish intellectuals involved in the campaign to end free speech do so while shamelessly and hypocritically posing as the truest defenders of freedom and liberty. A classic example in this regard is Raphael Cohen-Almagor, a key figure in the Global Forum and perhaps the leading anti-free speech intellectual active today. In one 2015 speech at the Global Forum, Cohen-Almagor, who poses as a defender of liberty, called for increased interactive efforts between governments, law officers, and anti-terrorism units, alongside companies and NGOs. He wants Big Brother watching you.

Cohen-Almagor received his D. Phil. in political theory from Oxford University in 1991, and his B.A. and M.A. from Tel Aviv University. In 1992–1995 he lectured at the Hebrew University Law Faculty. He appears to have always had a keen interest in the use of communications — from 1995–2007 he taught at the University of Haifa Law School, Department of Communication, and Library and Information Studies University of Haifa. He is a very strongly-identified Jew, having acted as Chairperson of “The Second Generation to the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance” Organization in Israel. He also shamelessly but aggressively postures himself as a ‘defender of democracy,’ acting as Founder and Director of Center for Democratic Studies at the University of Haifa. He is currently Chair in Politics at the University of Hull, United Kingdom.

Cohen-Almagor’s most recent significant production, titled “Taking North American White Supremacist Groups Seriously: The Scope and the Challenge of Hate Speech on the Internet,” appeared last month in the International Journal of Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy.^[1] Along with an earlier piece from 2016,^[2] the article is an excellent sample and summary of Cohen-Almagor’s work to date, and also acts as a remarkable and important example of Jewish manipulation of discussions of free speech and the politics of White advocacy. It deserves to be excised from the broader tumorous mass of similar activity and placed under the microscope.

The article’s basic argument is that American so-called “White supremacist” websites are a hotbed of dangerous hate speech which can be conclusively linked to criminality. Since hate speech “can and does inspire crime,” it is incumbent upon governments to introduce legislation banning such speech under legal penalties. We will never know how Charlottesville might have been remembered without the incident involving James Fields and Heather Heyer, but there is little doubt that it was perhaps the greatest propaganda coup that Jewish organizations and other groups oppositional to our ideas could have hoped for. It therefore came as no surprise that Cohen-Almagor should open his article with this: “On 12 August 2017, James Alex Fields Jr rammed his car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters united against a white supremacist rally, Unite the Right, in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America (USA).” Despite the extreme rarity of violence from the Alt-Right, and the many singular aspects of this particular episode, Cohen-Almagor employs the most sweeping generalizations to assert (39) the incident “illustrates the danger that the white supremacist movement poses to American society, and the close connection between hate online and hate crimes.”

Cohen-Almagor, along with the 18 Jews from the ADL, SPLC, and similar organisations he interviewed for the paper, are aware of the objections of classical liberalism to restrictions on speech:

[C. Edwin] Baker (1992, 1997), for instance, argues that almost all of the harm inflicted by free speech is eventually mediated by the mental processes of the audience. The audience decides its reaction to speech. The listeners determine their own response. Any consequences of the listeners’ response to hate speech must be attributed, in the end, to the listeners. The result is the right of speakers to present their views even if assimilation by the listeners leads to or constitutes serious harm. Baker (1997, 2012), like many American liberal philosophers and First Amendment scholars, wishes to protect freedom of expression notwithstanding the harm that the speech might inflict on the audience. … Consequently, many of my interviewees argue that American liberals thus tend to underestimate the harm in hate speech.

The key Jewish counter-argument is to assert that speech itself can be harmful and that “the audience” can be harmed merely by exposure to it. In practical terms, Cohen-Almagor contends that James Fields drove his car into a crowd at Charlottesville solely because he was exposed to hate speech — not because of his mental health, situational factors that day and immediately prior to his conduct in the vehicle, or because of catastrophic policing failures. Why everyone else “exposed” to “White supremacist hate speech” didn’t engage in similar conduct is left unexplained. Instead, we are to agree with Cohen-Almagor and his Jewish colleagues that “hate speech should not be dismissed as ‘mere speech.’ … The preferred American liberal approach of fighting ideas with ideas, speech with speech, is insufficient. Hate speech needs to be taken more seriously by the legal authorities than it currently is.”

The essential tactic the Jewish anti-free speech campaign is extremely simple. Just as the James Fields episode is extrapolated exponentially to define an entire movement, so the issue of “hate speech” and censorship is based on an extremely small number of exceptional cases. Cohen-Almagor claims that “internet hate can be found on thousands of websites, file archives, chat rooms, newsgroups and mailing lists,” so one might assume that his methodology and argument would involve a wide range of examples where these thousands of sources are linked to thousands of instances of violence and criminality — particularly since Cohen-Almagor argues (40) that “White supremacist” websites are “like terrorist groups.” The problem, however, is that he does no such thing, because there are no such examples. In order to present even the most tenuously relevant research, Cohen-Almagor relies purely on unsophisticated comments from a handful of the most extreme and obscure racialist sites on the internet, and even here the author fails to provide a single instance where a White racialist website has suggested any acts of violence. So inconsequential and amateurish were such sites that by the time of writing his article Cohen-Almagor has to concede (41) “quite a few sites discussed here are now defunct.” Having initially made a small directory of such sites, he admits the “vast majority of the web pages in that directory are no longer operative.”

It is surely a damning indictment of the state of modern peer-reviewed academic journals that someone could publish an argument against the principle of free speech solely on the basis of the putative content of obscure and minuscule internet sources which are no longer even in existence.

In fact, Cohen-Almagor can’t even come to a fixed and satisfactory definition of “hate speech” or “hate sites.” This is presumably by design, with the intention that the topic is plagued by so many gray areas that any future legislation in the area is, like all existing examples of hate speech legislation, destined to be rhetorically capacious enough to ensure easy arbitrary interpretation by those in control. Early in his essay (40) he asserts that “Hate speech is intended to injure, dehumanize, harass, intimidate, debase, degrade, and victimize the targeted groups, and to foment insensitivity and brutality against them.” But he also later endorses a definition of the Alt-Right (48), which is routinely portrayed by Cohen-Almagor and his Jewish allies as a body of “hate groups,” as merely “critical” of “multiculturalism, feminists, Jews, Muslims, gays, immigrants and other minorities.”

Criticism thus becomes conflated with hate. It goes without saying that there is a crucial difference between the two definitions, and it is in the gulf between these two definitions that these activists seek to assassinate our freedom of speech. Mere criticism may not “injure, dehumanize, harass, intimidate, debase, degrade, and victimize” anyone, but the existence of a legislative framework privileging minority interpretations of such criticism will surely consign it to hate speech categorization.

Cohen-Almagor and his co-ethnic fellow activists are equally vague in explaining exactly how “White supremacist” websites are morally or legally wrong. Despite its initial claims and promises, much of the article is in fact taken up with banal observations. White racialist websites, Cohen-Almagor informs us (42), often have “forums, discussion groups, photos and videos.” They offer “eye-catching teasers such as symbols and pictures.” Readers of such websites “talk to each other, thereby reinforcing their commonly held views, empowering people who share their beliefs.” A key strategy involves “encouraging interpersonal socialization in the offline world.” Members “use cyberspace as a free space to create and sustain movement culture and coordinate collective action.” Website proprietors can also “make appeals for funding.”

Perhaps this is quite terrifying to Jews, but as a philosophical argument for the annihilation of free speech it is catastrophically lacking.

Cohen-Almagor provides no evidence suggesting a link between even the most incendiary racial commentary on the internet and acts of violence. The only two examples he attempts to provide are almost two decades old, and concern individuals with clearly unsound mental health — spree-shooter Benjamin Nathaniel Smith having exhibited all the signs of conduct disorder and psychopathy in adolescence prior to his 1999 rampage, and Buford O. Furrow having been hospitalized a number of times due to psychiatric instability and suicidal tendencies prior to his shooting spree at a Jewish community center, also in 1999. Even the most basic critique of such a proposed link would ask why, given the proliferation of the internet and social media between 1999 and 2018, there has been a decrease in violence from the far right. Indeed, if one can excuse the continued use of the “racist” and “hate” buzzwords, it’s difficult to disagree with one University of California, Berkeley study that pointed out: “Although White racist groups have proliferated on the Internet in recent years, there appears to have been no corresponding increase in membership in these groups or in hate crime rates. In fact, one might argue that the prevalence of racist groups on the Internet works to reduce hate crime, perhaps by providing less physical, more rhetorical outlets for hate.”^[3] The entire foundation of Cohen-Almagor’s argument — that there is a link between internet activity and White racialist violence — is a total fabrication.

Let me repeat: The entire foundation of Cohen-Almagor’s argument — that there is a link between internet activity and White racialist violence — is a total fabrication. It is a fabrication that is being used in conjunction with some of the biggest international Jewish organizations and, via the Global Forum, the State of Israel, to blackmail and deceive Western populations via a specious sense of morality (i.e., a “morality” that denies the legitimate interests of White populations in maintaining political, cultural, and demographic control) coupled with activism in the media and financial pressure on politicians.  Christopher Wolf, Chair of the Internet Task Force of the Anti-Defamation League, argues shamelessly in an interview with Cohen-Almagor: ‘The evidence is clear that hate online inspires hate crimes.’ Cohen-Almagor writes (47):

Overly permissive and tolerant attitudes towards hate speech is a form of akrasia, whereby people act against their better judgment. Not just those who post but also those who allow such postings on their servers are culpable for their akratic conduct. Whether through ignorance, indifference or insistence on clinging to freedom of speech without caring about dangerous consequences, these are unjustifiable. Internet service providers are expected to abide by a basic code of conduct, one that objects to rather than celebrates violence and its promotion. When it comes to hate speech on the Internet, society and its regulators cannot continue to remain akratic and avoid responsibility for the harm that is inflicted.

Our opponents appear only too well aware that the Achilles Heel of our love of freedom is the primacy we place on moral order. They are playing to our weakness. A statement issued in 2015 by the Global Forum very cleverly presented the issue of restricting internet freedom as a moral imperative:

Given the pervasive, expansive and transnational nature of the internet and the viral nature of hate materials, counter-speech alone is not a sufficient response to cyber hate. The right to free expression does not require or obligate the internet industry to disseminate hate materials. They too are moral actors, free to pursue internet commerce in line with ethics, social responsibility, and a mutually agreed code of conduct.

If this moral posturing blackmail isn’t egregious enough, consider that Cohen-Almagor has called (47) for White advocacy sites to be treated like “other anti-social groups such as pedophiles and terrorists.”

It would be difficult to overstate how dangerous the activities of Cohen-Almagor and the wider Global Forum are to our freedom. These groups have developed a system of relatively sophisticated and manipulative legal and philosophical arguments based on blatant fabrications. The “recommendations” resulting from the deliberations of the Global Forum will receive disproportionate attention and influence in government due to top-level networking and co-operation with hostile elements of native elites. What we are seeing, hiding in plain sight, is the devising of a series of ‘protocols’ that will disenfranchise and gag us into submission. Internet freedom really is a last stand, and we will have to produce and disseminate appropriate counter-narratives before it’s too late. We could start by questioning the morality of a situation wherein restrictions on European freedoms are being dictated from Jerusalem.

^[1] R. Cohen-Almagor, ‘Taking North American White Supremacist Groups Seriously: The Scope and the Challenge of Hate Speech on the Internet,’ International Journal of Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2018), pp.38-57.

^[2] R. Cohen-Almagor, ‘Hate and Racist Speech in the United States: A critique,’ Philosophy and Public Issues, Vol. 6, No.1, pp.77-123.

^[3] J. Glaser, J. Dixit & D. Green, ’Studying Hate Crime with the Internet: What Makes Racists Advocate Racial Violence?’ Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2002, pp. 177–193 (p.189)